Off the Track Traces of Memory

From a working-class Rhondda childhood through to the glamour of Barry Grammar and onto a coveted Balliol College scholarship and study in New York, David Smith was the rising intellectual star of a generation. In this beautifully written memoir Dai Smith engages and entertains with a personal life and times with the characteristic verve of a writer who has illuminated the modern history of the people of South Wales.

Dai Smith was born in the Rhondda in 1945. He studied History at Balliol College, Oxford, and Literature at Columbia University, New York City. He was awarded a Ph.D. at Swansea University for a thesis on the South Wales Miners’ Federation, subsequently the subject of his book, with Hywel Francis, The Fed. He was the contributing editor to the series of essays A People and A Proletariat and published, with Gareth Williams, the prize-winning Official History of the Welsh Rugby Union, Fields of Praise.