National Library Wales – Radio Times: P H Burton and the BBC

Philip Henry Burton is best known as the Port Talbot schoolmaster responsible for training and transforming his pupil Richard Jenkins into the world-famous actor Richard Burton. Yet his life – in Wales, England and America – was also remarkable in many other respects as Angela V. John’s brand-new biography Behind the Scenes: The Dramatic Lives of Philip Burton (Parthian, 2025) demonstrates.

This talk will focus on P.H. Burton’s pioneering work in Cardiff and London as a radio scriptwriter, actor, producer and presenter from the late 1930s to the early 1950s when radio was at its height.

Angela V. John is a historian and biographer who has, inter alia, published extensively on women’s and gender history in Wales and England. She held the chair in History at the University of Greenwich for many years and has been an Honorary Professor at Aberystwyth University, a position she now holds at Swansea University. She is president of Llafur, the Welsh People’s History Society.

An English language event.