Grace Williams

For long neglected outside her own nation, the Welsh composer is starting to enjoy her time in the sun again, explains Geraint Lewis

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Grace Williams loved the sea. In later life, BBC television cameras captured one of her daily morning walks in Barry on the coast of Glamorgan – she strides purposefully along, looking out over the Bristol Channel to Somerset. She wasn’t heading for the popular sandy beach at Barry Island, so beloved of Gavin & Stacey TV fans, but to the isolated lonely seascape of Cold Knapp, a world away from ice creams and day-trippers and closer to the chilly North Sea in atmosphere. With its forbidding shelves of grey pebbles and the constant keening of gulls, this is where the composer came every day to measure her music and to ponder its proportions against the regular splash of waves.

Essentially a loner, Williams had a touch of steel in her soul to match her singing spirit

Essentially a loner, Grace Williams had a touch of steel in the soul to match her singing spirit. As a composer, she certainly needed it.

Born in Barry in 1906, she grew up in a household where music was part of daily discourse. Her father conducted the celebrated Romilly Boys’ Choir, her mother sang and her brother played the violin. So it was natural that the young Grace quickly became a highly practical musician but, more unusually, she also developed an interest in composing. Barry was host in 1920 to the National Eisteddfod of Wales and, for an ambitious teenager, hearing the London Symphony Orchestra in Stravinsky’s The Firebird and encountering Dr Vaughan Williams as an adjudicator and composer were formative experiences. Winning a scholarship to nearby Cardiff University in 1923, Williams assumed the musical mantle of the supremely talented but ill-fated Morfydd Owen, who had tragically died aged 26 in 1918 – her loss was keenly felt throughout Wales and her example as a groundbreaking female composer provided both precedent and challenge.