Cricket Witness No 3 - The Daffodil Blooms

17 Fairytale or nightmare? of the Great War. Before the conflict, Dyson had been a jolly-go- lucky amateur for Swansea and Glamorgan, besides appearing in the country house matches organised by his family in the grounds of Killay House, where the great and the good of West Walian society revelled in the summer sun. L ife after the War was very different for the Swansea-based solicitor, who whilst serving with the 14 th (Swansea) Battalion of the Welch Regiment had witnessed the horrors of Mametz Wood with the loss of thousands of brave Welshmen. Dyson was severely wounded advancing up the slope leading to the wood and, for several days afterwards, it was feared that he would die in the ambulance train. He survived and, during the peace negotiations in 1918, Williams – by now a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Regiment – was chosen to act as a guide to Prime Minister Lloyd George over the Somme battlefield. A month later, he took command of the Swansea Battalion, and in June 1919 marched through Swansea at the head of his men to present their colours to the Mayor when they returned to home soil. But the DB Williams of 1919 was a very different fellow to the happy and carefree soul who had marched off to War five years earlier. Several business ventures soon failed as cricket became his rock whilst his professional career took a downward spiral. He agreed to help out his old friend Tom Whittington as the club’s Treasurer and even donned the whites himself, at the ripe old age of 44, when the Club found themselves a man short for the closing match of the 1921 season against Hampshire at Cardiff. The following winter, Dyson’s private life nosedived further with a gambling addiction seeing him playing the casinos in Belgium with little success. To try to keep his head above water he took out a series of loans, each with hefty interest rates, but all to no avail, as soon afterwards, he was declared bankrupt. With his personal and business affairs in ruins, this troubled man took his life during mid-April, the coroner duly recording a verdict of “suicide while of unsound mind”. 9 Dyson was not alone in facing financial ruin. As Glamorgan continued to lurch from defeat to defeat, they ended the 1922 season with a deficit of £2,800. It would have been higher had a number of money-saving measures not been implemented during the second half of the season, including asking the amateurs to cover the costs of hosting their opposite numbers in hotels or pubs adjacent to the Cardiff or Swansea ground, whilst their