Welsh Fargo

Former Goon Show legend Harry Secombe (1921-2001) wrote two novels in his career - Twice Brightly (1974) and Welsh Fargo (1981). I've not yet read the former, but the latter was a mainstay of my teenage reading. 

My paperback copy probably came via my grandmother because she lived in Rotorua at the time and the book was a remainder copy from the Rotorua Public Library (price 30 cents). Most likely she will have sent it my way due to the Goon Show pedigree of its author. As it happens, I didn't really know about the Goons at the time, apart from an odd visit to a primary school classmate's house where he played me his dad's record of The Ying Tong Song, which I found completely mystifying. 

I ended up reading Welsh Fargo so many times because it was a) short, b) funny, and c) my go-to insomnia read for my entire teenage years.

It was probably my first exposure to anything by a Goon, perhaps excluding Michael Bentine's Potty Time, and wouldn't really hear their material properly until many years later. But this sliver of Goon offshoot literature I certainly devoured, wholeheartedly. It also provided me my first exposure to Welshness, which was in relatively short supply in New Zealand in the 1970s and 1980s: 

Now, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and thirty three, there was a surplus of coal and the Depression bit as deeply into the lives of the people of Panteg as the drills which had carved up their valley. Old young men stricken with coal dust in their lungs walked slowly up the shabby streets, stopping for breath every few yards, whilst others lay coughing their lives away in front parlours on beds brought down from upstairs to save them the impossible climb, Mothers prepared meals they were ashamed to serve, pretending to their families that they had already eaten.

And yet there was love in abundance; a clinging together in adversity, and always humour - the sly Welsh humour - and, of course, there was the singing. In Ebenezer Chapel the walls shook with the sheer volume of sound produced by choir and congregation, and there was power in the plainsong at St. Peter's. (Welsh Fargo, p.8-9)

The nature of Welsh Fargo was admittedly not complex. It was aimed squarely at being a knockabout farce, in the style of a Hollywood or Ealing caper, with a wide and varied cast of Welsh oddballs set during the Depression. The main character was the much-put-upon, and rather down on his luck, bus-driver Dai Fargo, who ran the only bus service to the isolated, but thoroughly ungrateful, village of Panteg in the hills north of Swansea. Dai's nephew James Henry, a callow youth of twelve, was clearly a proxy for the author, who was roughly the same age in 1933. The village of Panteg is richly populated with a large cast of busy-bodies, gossips, and trenchant critics of public transport service disruptions, of which Dai's ancient and decrepit bus generally generated many.

With Dai's bus service struggling to make ends meet, the main engine of the plot is the one job he has that attracts any reliable money, which is transporting the wages of the nearby colliery once a fortnight. As Welsh Fargo is by design a madcap caper novel, the two-and-a-half thousand pounds are both destined to be the subject of a heist attempt, that heist attempt will be perpetrated by a singularly incompetent gang of Welsh criminals, and the entire process will be finely-tuned to result in a big finale of a nature as ludicrous as is singularly possible. A finale that would be virtually impossible to film on a UK film studio budget of the 1980s, sadly - HandMade Films' Beatles money included.

The large cast is given plenty of double-crossing, vindictive back-biting, rampant moral hypocrisy, general carping, and a multitude of varieties of incompetence to deal with. In the spirit of 'everything including the kitchen sink' there's a would-be Chicago gangster, a philandering manager, a punch-drunk boxer, an actual Welsh Zulu, and a sympathetically-written character that in contemporary 1930s terminology was known as a 'nancy-boy' and at the time the book was published was referred to as a transvestite. It's not a work of gifted literary prowess, but it's big-hearted, has a nostalgic affection for the Wales of its author's childhood, and it's genuinely entertaining writing in the way comedy professionals with decades of experience are able to offer.     

See also:
Wales: Dylan Thomas' Laugharne, 4 February 2022
Wales: The Bug Club, 23 September 2021
Wales: Aberystwyth, 12 September 2008