My People. Stories of the Peasantry of West Wales: 'Simon and Beca are waiting for Death''

David Caradoc Evans was born on the 31st December 1878 in Rhydlewis, Cardiganshire.

He left school at only 14 and worked in a series of menial jobs before moving to London to become a draper's apprentice. After attending classes at St Pancras Working Men's College he became a journalist and worked at The Daily Mirror from 1917 and then edited T P's Weekly from 1923 until it closed 6 years later.

His first and most famous work was a series of short stories called ‘My People: Stories of the Peasantry of West Wales’ in 1915. His intention was to shock with his personally experienced stories of poverty, meanness and hypocrisy. The Welsh critics were brutally savage and for a time he was called ‘the best hated man in Wales’.

As well as collections of short stories he wrote novels and plays but nothing was to achieve either the success, or the howls of rage, that his short stories ever did.

He married for the first time on Christmas Day 1907 but, after divorcing, he married the Countess Helene Marguerite Barcynska, a writer of romantic novels under the pseudonym Oliver Sandys. The couple lived at Ruislip, Middlesex for a time before, with the outbreak of war in 1939, they returned to Aberystwyth.

David Caradoc Evans died of heart failure at the Aberystwyth and Cardiganshire General Hospital, Aberystwyth on the 11th January 1945. He was 66.

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