David Brunt, 1886-1965

David Brunt was born on 17 June 1886 at Staylittle, Montgomeryshire, a small village in the heart of the Welsh countryside. He was the youngest of the five sons and four daughters of John Brunt, a farmworker, and his wife Mary ( née Jones). Both his parents were of Welsh farming stock and there is no record of any of his forebears having been in any way connected with or even interested in science. As a child Brunt spoke little but Welsh and until the age of ten was taught in the village school by one master mainly in that language. In 1896 John Brunt moved his family to the mining town of Llanhilleth, in the densely populated Western Valley of Monmouthshire, where he worked as a collier. By then the language of that part of the South Wales coalfield had become almost entirely English. For the next three years David attended the local elementary school, and it must have been a considerable effort for a boy accustomed to being taught mainly in Welsh by one man in a tiny rural school to follow lessons in English in a school of large classes and many teachers. It is clear that he quickly overcame these difficulties for in 1899 he secured first place in the list of entrance scholarships (value £2 5s. 0d. a term) for the Intermediate School at Abertillery, a larger mining town a few miles up the valley. Although he never forgot his mother tongue his facility in Welsh naturally declined as opportunities for speaking it became fewer, and in later years, except for a characteristic use of emphasis in argument, there was little in his speech to reveal that, as he often said, he was born ‘west of Offa’s Dyke’. As a part of his education he had to commit to memory long passages from the Authorised Version of the Bible, which no doubt did much to shape the taut prose of his scientific writings.