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Available: 25 October 2009

The Songbird is Singing

Alun Trevor

It's the 1920s. Airships, prohibition, Al Capone, talkies, gramophones, the Empire State building: the world across the pond is bursting with excitement and the future wide open for two small boys at home on their North Wales farm.

Eagerly they follow the progress of their father, famous Welsh tenor Jabez Trevor, as he tours North America season after season, the Welsh Imperial Singers packing concert halls coast to coast and their dad sending home postcards, letters and presents from Chicago, Winnipeg, New York....

Despite talk of bulls, bears and stock-market crashes, the Depression meant little to young brothers Alun and Arthur as they carved their initials into the sycamore tree below Hope Mountain; read Mark Twain and longed to see the great ships that would bring their father home.

  Eight-year-old Arthur hated to read and write, sang like a songbird and wished only for a real leather case football like Dixie Dean. The future was wide open, but tragically for Arthur it never came any closer than the makeshift football pitch on the flat field at Pen-y-Wern farm.

Now, eighty years on, his brother Alun recalls those early days with a joyful immediacy in this haunting, music-filled memoir of a time long gone, but still glowing with life.

ISBN: 978-1-906998-06-6

Author Biography

Alun Trevor had a Welsh country up-bringing during the 1920s in Treuddyn, a coal-mining and farming village south of Mold, Flintshire. He was educated at the Coed Talon Elementary school and at the Alun Grammar School in Mold. After matriculation he began work with the Flintshire Education Department in 1938.

He volunteered for the RAF in 1940 and began five and half years of military service. Initially based at Jesus College Cambridge within the RAF education core he was posted to Shaibah in what is now Iraq . His service in the Middle East included spells in Baghdad and Tehran . He also used his leave to tour the Holy Land . He completed his RAF service with Bomber Command’s Pathfinder force and also completed his teacher training.

After World War II he developed a career in education including employment with Flintshire Schools before moving to Kent where he met his wife Mary Addison. They married in 1952. At this time he also took part in an international exchange with Island Trees High School , Levittown on Long Island in the United States . He traveled widely in the Eastern United States and addressed the Utica New York Eisteddfod. On returning to the UK he moved to Malvern while continuing to study. He completed a BSc in Economics with the University of London which enabled him to broaden his teaching to economic history in secondary education.

Since retiring in 1980 his main interests have been with the Clwyd Family History Society and the Chester Welsh Society. His bilingual publication Cofio Cantorion The Welsh Imperial Singers the story of their tour of Britain and North America was published in 1991 at the time of the Mold National Eisteddfod. He has written widely on historical matters for a magazines and journals including Y Faner and Ninnau.

His father, Jabez Trevor, was a miner who became a professional singer with the Welsh Imperial Singers.