Dai Francis

Dai Francis was one of the most significant Welsh trade unionists of the twentieth century. David "Dai" Francis was born on 5 February 1911 at Seven Sisters in the Dulais Valley, near Neath, South Wales, the son of a coal hewer, and followed his father down the pit at Onllwyn colliery in 1926, aged just fifteen.

Francis rose through the ranks of the South Wales Miners' Federation, becoming chief administrative officer of the new National Union of Mineworkers' south Wales area in 1959 and its General Secretary in 1963, a post he held through some of the most turbulent years in the coalfield's history, including the Aberfan disaster of 1966 and the national miners' strikes of 1972 and 1974. A lifelong Communist Party member from 1938 and a passionate advocate for Welsh devolution, the Welsh language and the Anti-Apartheid Movement, he became the first president of the Wales TUC on its formation in 1974.

Francis retired in 1976 after fifty years' service to the coalfield and its communities, and remained active in Welsh cultural and political life until his death in Cardiff on 30 March 1981. He was admitted to the Gorsedd of Bards at the 1974 National Eisteddfod under the bardic name "Dai o'r Onllwyn", and Michael Foot remembered him as "warm-hearted, passionate, dedicated to his cause and his people, and Welsh to the fingertips."