Ron Berry

So Long Hector Bebb and Flame and Slag were both reprinted by the Library of Wales series in 2006 and 2012.

The autobiographical History is What you Live was published by Gomer in 1998) and an edited collection of short stories, Collected Stories (2000) were both released posthumously.

His written works were never successful enough to allow Berry to be financially secure and in the 1970s he relied on several friends, and the support of Sir Wyn Roberts in obtaining for him a Civil list pension. In his later life he was plagued with arthritis and poor health and he died in Pontypridd in 1997.

Berry's first work was Hunters and Hunted (1960), which followed the sexual adventures of three men over three seasons in a Welsh valley. It received good reviews. Over the next ten years he published a further four novels, Travelling Loaded (1963), The Full-Time Amateur (1966), Flame and Slag (1968) and So Long, Hector Bebb (1970). After So Long, Hector Bebb, Berry's published output waned. He wrote an account of watching peregrine falcons in the upper Rhondda 1987, entitled Peregrine Watching. Berry's final novel This Bygone was published in 1996.

His work is set during the process of the de-industrialisation of the south Wales coalfield; the early novels consider the more prosperous days of the early 1960s, The Full-Time Amateur sees a more affluent working class allowing the workers to purchase televisions, cars and even go abroad on holidays. His later novels however, in particular Flame and Slag, see the closure of mines, and the shift in the labour market as women started to work in factories as men lost their jobs underground. Flame and Slag is also a post-Aberfan novel, featuring a fatal tip slide which engulfs a row of houses.

Berry undertook several roles in his younger days, including amateur boxing and also played association football for Swansea Town, reportedly scoring a vital goal in a cup match. Though a knee injury in 1943 ended his sporting career. He later became a carpenter, working around Wales and in London. He married Rene Jones in 1948, with whom he had five children, two sons and three daughters. He took up various jobs, and wrote some early essays and poetry for which he was unable to find a publisher. In the 1950s, Berry studied at Coleg Harlech, a further education college in Gwynedd. There he became an avid reader and honed his left-wing political views. A failed attempt to enter teacher training college saw he and Rene return to the Rhondda, taking up residence in Treherbert. It was in Treherbert, where he took on a job as the assistant manager of the local swimming baths, that he first began writing his first published novels.

Ronald Anthony Berry (23 February 1920 – 16 July 1997) was a Welsh author of novels and short stories. Born in the Rhondda Valleys where he remained for most his life, his books reflect the working class of the industrial valleys though his vision is more optimistic and there is less concern for politics and religion which was expressed by many of his contemporaries.

Berry was born in 1920 in Blaencwm, a small village at the head of the Rhondda Fawr. The son of a coal miner, Berry left school at the age of 14, and he too took employment at a local colliery. He remained a coal miner until the outbreak of World War II where he served in the British Army and later in the Merchant Navy.