Welsh Journals

'WE'LL KEEP A WELCOME IN THE HILLSIDES' A NOTE by ELWYN EVANS, M.A. No one can tell how long popular music will remain popular, but it looks at present as if Well Keep a Welcome might become a sort of auxiliary Welsh national anthem. It was sung when the Pope arrived in Wales; it is heard at Twickenham and Cardiff Arms Park; a cabinet minister recently asked for it on Desert Island Discs. Already there are conflicting accounts of how it came to be written and composed by Lyn Joshua and Mai Jones, so the facts may be worth putting on record. Mai and Lyn were two of the most active free-lances in Broad- casting House, Cardiff in the middle and late thirties. They often worked for the Children's Hour, which then enjoyed a large audience and a tradition of supplying radio entertainment 'for the whole family', and it was in the capacity of Children's Hour Organiser, a post allotted to me when the Welsh Region was set up, that I first got to know them. Mai (she pronounced it May) had been trained as a serious musician I believe she had taken a Mus. Bac. degree at Cardiff but one thought of her chiefly as a performer in the field of light music. She was a highly accomplished and sympathetic pianist. Composition came just as easily to her and she did a great deal of it for various programmes in both languages, for although she lived in Newport, Gwent, she had been brought up in a Welsh-speaking family. When Sam Jones was laying the foundations of broadcasting in Welsh, Mai's help had been invaluable to him. Later on, during World War Two, she was to join the BBC staff and become an outstanding producer. Lyn was the son of 'Seth Joshua the evangelist', who had been a co-worker with Evan Roberts in the Welsh Revival of 1904. Lyn himself, I believe, had volunteered for the army during the first World War, overstating his age in order to be accepted, and had been gassed in France: his service had left him with damaged lungs