Evan Richards (billed in contest records as E. J. Richards) was a brass band conductor and bandmaster whose career is documented across four decades in the heart of the South Wales coalfield. Independent brass band contest archives show him conducting a succession of Rhondda Valley colliery and works bands — Upper Rhondda Workmen's Band, Aber-Blaengwynfi Workmen's Silver Band, Treherbert & District Silver Band, and later the British Steel Corporation (Port Talbot) band — in Welsh Area, National Mineworkers, Welsh Miners' Gala, and National Championship of Great Britain contests from at least 1953 through to 1992.
This is a genuine, sustained record of service to Welsh brass banding in one of its historic heartlands: the Rhondda and Port Talbot works-band scene that, for much of the twentieth century, drew its players directly from the local collieries and steelworks. Richards's bands moved between the third and fourth sections over the years, picking up placings and wins at Welsh Area, Weston-super-Mare and Oxford contests along the way.
Beyond the bare contest record, detailed biographical information about Evan Richards — his birth, death, or personal life — could not be independently verified, and we have chosen not to invent it. The site's own legacy listing credits him with training the young Leighton Rich (see our profile of Leighton Rich, musician ID 539), but that claim rests on our own prior text rather than an independent source, so it is presented here as a claim rather than an established fact.