Fulbright Commission Summer Institute in Wales for Freshmen and Sophomore Undergraduates.

A message from the Fulbright Commission:-

After an extremely successful pilot year the US-UK Fulbright Commission is once again running a Summer Institute in Wales for freshmen and sophomore undergraduates.

The Institute provides an immersive academic, cultural and social experience for freshman or sophomore American students who wish to deepen their knowledge of the United Kingdom and Wales and its diverse population whilst developing their communication, research and presentation skills. The programme will last for six weeks from 23^rd June until 3^rd August 2012 and will be held at Cardiff, Bangor and Aberystwyth universities.

The programme covers participant costs including academic programme fees, travel, housing, subsistence an cultural visits.

I would be very grateful if you could pass this information to any relevant or potentially interested parties. I apologise for the short notice of this message given the upcoming deadline.

The application deadline for all Summer Institutes is Friday 16 March 2012. For more information on each Institute and details on how to apply visit the Institute webpages: http://www.fulbright.co.uk/fulbright-awards/for-us-citizens/summer-...

For more information contact the UK Awards Team: programmes@fulbright.co.uk

Aberystwyth Sex Scandal and Language Protests - Setting for new Novel

Love Child

Love Child by Herbert Williams

Aberystwyth in the 1960s. A sex scandal involving a college principal. Vigorous Welsh-language protests. Welcome to the world of Herbert Williams’s latest novel.

When Fleet Street reporter Steve Lewis goes to cover a sex scandal involving a university principal and a film star, his world turns upside down. Back in his native Glanaber (a fictionalised Aberystwyth), his past comes back to haunt him in the shape of his former girlfriend Annette, by whom he sired a baby that died in infancy – the ‘love child’ of the title. How will his wife Jocelyn react when his secrets are laid bare? And how can his career survive the decision by his bosses to locate him permanently in this ‘journalistic backwater’? Set against a background of the spirited Welsh language campaigns of the Sixties, this fast-moving novel provides an unforgettable picture of small-town life, with all its intrigues and jealousies.

Aberystwyth born Herbert Williams explains why he wrote the novel, “I wanted to know what had happened to Steve and Annette. They were central figures in an earlier novel The Woman in the Back Row. So the only way to find out was to write this new story about them. Love Child stands as a self-sufficient novel in its own right or as a sequel.”

The youngest of six children, Herbert Willimas went to Ardwyn Grammar School, Aberystwyth but had his education disrupted by the onset of TB – then still a major killer disease in Wales – in his teens. After two years in an old-style sanatorium – ‘windows open day and night, come rain or shine’ he recalls – he joined the Cambrian News as a reporter. He worked for a succession of papers before becoming a BBC radio producer, leaving the staff after seven years to concentrate on his own writing. An established poet since the 1960s, he is an author of unusual range, writing fiction and nonfiction as well as TV and radio plays and documentaries.

Proving that age is no barrier to creativity, Herbert Williams – now in his 70s –  has brought out seven books in the last decade, including the prize-winning novella The Marionettes.  He is also the subject of a biography by Phil Carradice in the prestigious Writers of Wales series.

           

A founder member and fellow of the Welsh Academy, Herbert Williams lives in Cardiff with his wife Dorothy.

Love Child is published by Y Lolfa in May, priced £8.95. Herbert will be signing copies of the book in Waterstone’s Aberystwyth on Saturday 25 June, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

www.ylolfa.com

Tales of an Aber Lad

A top television producer has described how he looked on in horror as a trapeze artist plunged helplessly to her death in the big top at an Aberystwyth circus. The tragedy is one of a collection of memories of David Lloyd’s childhood in the 1940s and ’50s in his autobiography Tales of an Aber Lad. David was a teenager in the Bertram Mills audience in May 1958 when 31-year-old Frances Duncan fell 25 feet, head first, after a defective rope became loose around her ankle. David says, “In my young life, I had never felt so frozen with shock and horror. I had seen her plummet and hit the ground and it was terrible. She lay there in the sawdust, her body shaking violently but the band struck up a tune and the clowns came on and distracted us as Frances was taken away to the North Road Hospital.”

Other recollections include a quack German ‘doctor’ who made patients bathe naked beneath Constitution Hill and an outbreak of typhoid fever, caused by local ice cream, which threatened to wreck the resort’s post-war tourist trade. The author, now living in semi-retirement in Aberystwyth, remembers the glory days of the old Coliseum Cinema, presided over by its formidable owner Mrs Gale, the “Grand Dame of picture palaces.” David says, “If there was romance on the Coliseum screen it was nothing compared to the passion in the back row of the stalls.” The ‘activities’ there are said to have been “so intense that the entire row from Seat 1 to Seat 25 had developed a treacherous lean.”

Reminiscences include news of the first television signal, picked up from a Midlands transmitter in 1950. The reception was said to have been better at night, “when there was less traffic on Trefechan Bridge.” Similarly early wireless (radio) signals were believed to have been affected by “bad weather around Pen Dinas.” A world that has long since disappeared was enlivened by the (Air Raid) Wardens Dramatic Society with producer Wilf Jones, the popular seasonal pantomimes of Peggy Royston and Shirley Twiddy, and “dainty teas” at DW Teviotdale in North Parade. David turns back the clock to remember the ‘big freeze’ of 1947, sweets becoming ration coupon free in 1953 and the terrors of the gas machine at the Portland Street dentists’. He remembers the November Fair with Ronnie Taylor’s Boxing Booth and the town girls who were “thrown around on the waltzer, hiding their stockings and suspenders from blasts of cold air.” Milk poured into jugs from churns carried by horse and cart was supplemented by doorstep deliveries from the likes of Mister Lister the green grocer and the eagerly awaited Corona man. Bread, coal, meat and fish were also delivered direct in those days, while itinerants brought candles and clothes pegs. Then there were visits to the traditional shops of Hodges, Bradleys, Daniel Thomas and Albert Davies. The Gwalia Motor Company boasted that it provided “a reliable motor car that could cover any distance.”

David recalls the launch of the Eagle comic, the wonders of the first radiograms, rides on Crosville buses, houses with no central heating, beatings in school and being ordered to inhale fumes from the Gas Works as a cure for whooping cough. Aber is said to have been “awash with tea rooms, coal merchants, iron mongers, dressmakers and tailors.” Personalities abounded, including businessman John Potts who wore his trilby like an American gangster. Seilo Chapel’s organist Charles Clements was described by no less than Sir Henry Wood as “the finest accompanist in Europe.”

Born in the Caradoc Road maternity home in 1940, David Lloyd is the son of the late Gilbert Lloyd, manager of the old David Roberts Brewery in Trefechan. For many years David was producer/director of award-winning programmes for HTV Wales in Cardiff, where he became Head of Features and Head of Community Programmes. Another distinguished ‘Aber Lad’, the acclaimed author Herbert Williams, says in his foreword that David’s tales are “told with humour, dexterity and lightness of touch that makes for easy and rewarding reading. They are accompanied by a diversity of photographs which will surprise and even astonish readers.”