Menna Gallie

Menna Patricia Humphreys Gallie (18 March 1919 – 17 June 1990) was a Welsh-speaking Welsh novelist, translator and public speaker. She was a life-long Labour Party activist. But she rejected feminism because she felt that it was ideologically hidebound. And she was cool towards what she perceived as "the more insistent parts" of its second-wave. Gallie is best known for her novels in the English language and as the first translator into English of the Welsh language novel Un Nos Ola Leuad by Caradog Prichard, the Welsh poet and novelist, as Full Moon (1973).

Early life and education

Menna Patricia Humphreys was born in the mining village of Ystradgynlais, which was then in the historic county of Breconshire (now Powys), Wales. She was the youngest of the three daughters of William Thomas Humpherys, a carpenter from North Wales and his wife Elizabeth. She came from a Welsh-speaking family, which on her mother's side was socialist. Her mother was the secretary of the local women's section of the Labour Party. Her maternal grandfather had helped to found the Labour Representative Committee, which was launched at a conference that was held in London in 1900. And her uncle attended Ruskin College in Oxford before becoming a Labour Party County Councillor. Gallie was a life-long Labour Party activist. She rejected feminism because she felt that it was ideologically hidebound. And she was cool towards what she perceived as "the more insistent parts" of its second-wave.

Gallie's family moved to nearby Creunant in the County Borough of Nealth Port Talbot. Shortly afterwards she won a place at Neath Grammar School. From there she gained a place to study English at University College of Swansea. While there she met Walter Bryce Gallie, a Scottish philosophy lecturer, who she married. From 1940 to 1990, while Gallie lived in Wales, she gave numerous talks and lectures, outside academia, in the community.

Married life

Gallie and her husband were married in July 1940, a month after she had taken her finals and five days before her husband left to serve in the Army during the Second World War, after which he left with the rank of Major and having been awarded the Croix de Guerre. During the war Gallie worked for the Inland Revenue in Llandudno and London. After the war her husband resumed his post as a philosophy lecturer in University College, Swansea and they moved, in her case returned to Ystradgynlais, where they had a son and a daughter, Charles and Edyth. Gallie and her husband were committed to democratic socialism and were politically active.

In the autumn of 1949 A.D. Lindsay, the Master of Balliol College, Oxford, visited the Gallies in Swansea to tell them of his idea for a new university in Keele in North Staffordshire, the "University College of North Staffordshire" (the forerunner of Keele University) and his wish for Bryce to be its professor of philosophy. Bryce Gallie recalled that Lindsay met Menna:

and they had at once got on extremely well together. He had put out a great effort to paint Keele in glowing colours to her and had expressed the hope that, if we came, she would find in the lakes and woods of the estate consolation for the lost beauties of Wales.

The Gallies moved to Keele in the end of September for Bryce to take up the post as the "Professor of Philosophy" in the College. He recalled that when he arrived his relations with Lindsay, by now the Principal of the College "were far from easy", the result of a combination of reasons, one of which comprised he husband described as the "political storms in the college grew more violent." He continued: "... Lindsay came to recognize that I was one of the handful of people he could trust .... This tardy recognition on his part helped our relationship, and during his last months he talked with me more and more. Quite as important, however, for the improvement in our relations was the part played by my wife." He explained:

Like many other women (I imagine) she had from the first regarded Lindsay with a mixture of love and awe, and as a source of authority on all moral and political matters. Her political loyalties, both because of family tradition and her experience of life, corresponded with his; and his defence and justification of these loyalties seemed to her all that could be asked for in the way of philosophical wisdom.

Gallie continued, on a lighter note:

Her response to him, however, was certainly not one of mere reverence or adulation. On the contrary, she risked saying the most extravagant things to him - which he would amusingly carve down to a reasonable shape; she drew him out, she made him laugh, she produced her best cooking for him, she explained about her own - and retailed the glories of her grandmother's - home-made wines. Lindsay would shuffle through our kitchen, bend into our larder, sniff and peer at the huge vat filled with the red brew that was beginning "to work", then turn and solemnly assure my wife that in Scotland she would have been burnt as a witch had she lived there a century or so ago. On his last Christmas day we gave him a bottle of the best wine my wife had ever made, and at four in the afternoon he phoned to tell us that he and Bruce Williams had been drinking it after Christmas lunch and were finding it excellent.

The Gallies stayed in Keele four years, after which in 1954 they then moved to Northern Ireland, where Bryce took up the post of Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Queen's University Belfast. While there they lived in the estate of Castle Ward, an historic property outside Belfast. During their stay, Gallie and her husband stayed in New York for the academic year 1962-63, while he was the visiting Professor of Philosophy at New York University during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1965, Gallie gave a speech to the PEN society, the worldwide association of writers, in Bled, Slovenia (the former Yugoslavia) in her capacity as a delegate for Northern Ireland.

The Gallies left Northern Ireland in 1967 upon Bryce's appointment as Professor of Political Science in Peterhouse, Cambridge. In his history of British intellectuals from World War II to Thatcherism, Scottish historian Colin Kidd referred to the 'suppressed cold war' which existed in Oxbridge after World War II 'between spouse and don, or between spouse and an different and demanding college' and that occasionally 'matters would erupt into the open.' He continued:

Shortly afterwards, Gallie also wrote a critical review of Germaine Greer's 1970 book, The Female Eunuch, which was published in the Cambridge Review. In it she took issue with her summation of Greer's conclusion that "Man is the enemy; so is the family and so is marriage" by citing "For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love", the first line of the poem The Canonization, by John Donne, the 17th century metaphysical poet.

In 1976, Bryce retired and the Gallies settled in Newport, a village in Pembrokeshire, on the coast of Cardigan Bay.

Literary career

While in Northern Ireland, and at the age of 40, Gallie began her literary career with the publication of her first novel, Strike for a Kingdom (1959). Soon afterwards she wrote two novels in quick succession, Man's Desiring (1960), a campus novel, and The Small Mine(1962), an industrial novel.

Gallie wrote two novels about Northern Ireland. Travels with a Duchess (1968) was partly inspired by her visit to Dubrovnik in the former Yugoslavia (now Croatia) as the Northern Ireland representative at a Pen (Poets, Essayists, Novelists) International conference. You're Welcome to Ulster (1970) drew upon Gallie's experience there as an active member of its Labour Party.

Gallie found Cambridge "pretentious and hostile to women." Consequently, she was not inspired to write a novel about it. Instead, she wrote her 1986 novel These Promiscuous Parts about South West Wales. And she produced the first English translation of the Welsh-language novel Un Nos Ola Leuad, Full moon, by Caradog Prichard.

Reviews, dramatizations and reprints

Strike for a Kingdom was shortlisted for a Gold Dagger Award. Australian academic Steven Knight (2019) observed that it was:

In his review, Welsh historian Dai Smith described it as "both an engrossing detective novel and a social panorama of Cilhendre, a small Welsh village during the 1926 General Strike." In 2012 the novel was dramatized by BBC Radio 4 by Welsh author and dramatist Diana Griffiths. In 2020 it was reviewed by John Perrott Jenkins. In 2024 four Cardiff University Research Opportunities Placement Scheme (CUROP) students drew upon Strike for a Kingdom to create their artwork Motive and Opportunity. A reviewer described Man's Desiring (1960) as a novel with "warm and winning ways", a gentle comedy of contrasts about a Welsh man and an English woman at a Midlands university. The Small Mine (1962) tells the tale of a young collier's death in an industrial accident in Cilhendre, which featured in Strike for a Kingdom. Knight (2019) commented:

In 2004 it was dramatised for BBC Radio 4 by Diana Griffiths. Travels with a Duchess (1968) documents the holiday of a menopausal wife from Cardiff in former Yugoslavia which the narrator retrospectively described as "a terrible chronicle of debauchery."

Tributes

Gallie died in 1990 at her home in Newport. In 2005 Welsh historian Professor Angela John gave the Annual Lecture of the Women's Archive of Wales on the subject of "Place, Politics, and History: the life and novels of Menna Gallie" at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. In 2006 Llafur hosted a day school in Ystradgynlais to examine the life and work of Gallie. In 2011 Dai Smith included Gallie's Strike for a Kingdom in his 2011 Dai Smith's top 10 Welsh alternatives to Dylan Thomas.

Notes

Arnot, Robert Page (1979). The miners One union One industry A history of the National Union of Mineworkers, 1939-46. London: Allen & Unwin.
Gallie, Menna (1960a). Man's desiring. London: Gollancz.
Gallie, Menna (1968). "Quietly following the don". Cambridge Review (24 May): 495-498.
Gallie, Menna (1970). "For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love". Cambridge Review. 92 (2199): 49-50.
Gallie, Menna (1986). In these promiscuous parts. New York: St Martin's Press.
Gallie, Menna (2000) [originally 1962]. The small mine. Dinas Powys: Honno. ISBN 187020638X.
Gallie, Menna (2010) [originally 1970]. You're welcome to Ulster. Dinas Powys: Honno. ISBN 978-1906784195.
Gallie, Menna (2011a) [originally 1959]. . Dinas, Powys: Honno. ISBN 978-1-906784-20-1.
Gallie, Menna (2011b) [originally 1968]. . Dinas Powys, South Glamorgan, Wales: Honno. ISBN 978-1-906-784-22-5.
Gallie, W.B. (1960b). A new university: A. D. Lindsay and the Keele experiment. London: Chatto & Windus.
Gallie, W.B. (1984). "The military and political background of the nuclear age". In Prins, Gwyn (ed.). . New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 0-394-72768-1.
Jenkins, John P. (2016). "Gallie, Menna Patricia (1919-1990), writer". In Johnston, Dafydd; Gruffydd Jones, Elin Haf (eds.). . Aberystwyth: The National Library of Wales..
Jenkins, John Perrott (2020). . International Journal of Welsh Writing in English. 7 (1).
Jenkins, John Perrott (2021) [originally 2017]. . Cardiff: University of Wales Press. ISBN 9781786837783.
John, Angela V. (2011). Introduction. . By Gallie, Menna. Dinas Powys, South Glamorgan, Wales: Honno. ISBN 978-1-906784-22-5.
John, Angela V. (2019). "Place, politics and history: The life and novels of Menna Gallie". . Cardigan, Wales: Parthian Books. ISBN 978-1912109227.
Kidd, Colin (2026). . New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691188768.
King, Elspeth (1985). The Scottish women's suffrage movement. Glasgow: People's Palace Museum.
Knight, Steven (2019). "Industrial fiction". In Evans, Geraint; Fulton, Helen (eds.). The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 1107106761.
Myers, Christine D. (1 December 2001). . Historian. 63 (2): 357–371.
Prichard, Caradog (1973) [originally 1971 in Welsh]. Full Moon. Translated by Gallie, Menna. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Sharpe, R.a. (4 September 1998). . Independent.
Smith, Dai (2011). . The Guardian.
Ward, Stephanie (2007). . History Workshop Journal. 63 (1): 369–371.