Library of Wales: Jampot Smith

Jeremy Brooks was born in Southampton in 1926. He was educated at The County School in Llandudno, after being evacuated to north Wales in 1941. He enlisted in the Navy and spent time at Magdalen College, Oxford before seeing active service in the Mediterranean. After the war he studied Stage Design at the Camberwell School of Art. He moved back to north Wales in 1952 with his wife, the painter Eleanor Brooks, where they rented a cottage on the estate of Clough Williams Ellis at Llanfrothen. They would have four children. He was an occasional wine waiter at the restaurant at the Portmeirion hotel and was later to write a novel, The Water Carnival (1957), satirising the mock-Italiante village. Jampot Smith was published in 1960 and Smith as Hero in 1962.He later embarked on a theatrical career which included periods as the Literary manager of the Royal Skakespeare Company with Peter Hall from 1962 to 1969 where he was responsible with Kitty Hunter-Blair for a number of ground breaking adaptions plays from Russian dramatists including Gorky and Gogol. An adaption of The Government Inspector in which Paul Scofield starred was particularly well-received. He worked extensively for theatre, televison and radio including many original works and adaptions including with Adrian Mitchell a version of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. He also wrote poetry, children’s books and worked with Theatr Clywd at Mold producing a notable adaption of Medea. He was reknowned for helping the careers and devlopment of younger writers and was a founder member of the Theatre Writers Union. His last published work was a collection of short stories set in north Wales, entitled Doing the Voices (1985).He died in 1994.

Foreword by Mervin JonesJampot Smith is story of a group of friends as they edge towards adulthood in the sunshine and shadow of Llandudno during the years of the Second World War. It is a time which will shape their lives against a war which will define it. For Bernard, the eponoymous Jampot Smith, Kathy, Epsom and Dewi it is all held in an exquisite balance of emotion and restraint that promises both love and danger."His fiction aspired to, and often achieved, a Chekhovian mixture of comic concision and pathos. Jampot Smith is a small classic about the delight and pain of sexual awakening; it will outlast its period and provincial setting."Michael Kustow"Brooks explores ephemeral relationships with delicacy and charm."The New York Times"A novel to be savoured…it is hard to suggest the originality, the illumination of this novel about adolescent emotions in years of World War II in simmering Llandudno." The Times"Jeremy Brooks has come to considerable stature in Jampot Smith."Anthony Burgess***************************************Tim Baker, Clwyd Theatr Cymru's Associate Director, has announced that Eleanor Brooks has given the theatre the rights to adapt her late husband's novel Jampot Smith for a stage production in Mold. Professor Dai Smith has been particularly pleased by the reception of the series, with several books reaching the bestseller lists in Wales. He hopes Jampot Smith will similarly become a reborn classic. He commented, “Jeremy Brooks was a fine writer who deserves to be more widely read. In his comic but touching tale of young love in wartime Llandudno he really captures a moment of time and place in a captivating way. I'm sure people will enjoy this book which is why we are adding it to the Library of Wales.” Jeremy Brooks worked at Clwyd Theatr Cymru as a dramaturg and translator on a number of prestigious productions, including translations of Maxim Gorky and an adaptation of Medea. He was also Literary Manager of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1962-69 and his Stratford contemporary, Clwyd Theatr Cymru director Terry Hands, who joined the RSC in the mid ‘60s, welcomed Eleanor Brooks and the re-issue of the novel, which has become the first in the Library of Wales series to be adapted for the theatre.