Emlyn Jenkins was born on 1 December 1910 in Treherbert, deep in the Rhondda Valley, one of the great coal-mining valleys of South Wales. His father Daniel was a miner, remembered by the family as a kind and gentle man. His mother Bessie, born a Perkins, was house-proud, strict, and devout; the home she kept also sheltered her own mother, a formidable, Welsh-speaking woman the family called Gu, from mamgu, who read her Bible every day without fail. Four generations lived under one roof, on one small street.

61 Miskin Street, Treherbert, photographed by Matthew in 2026.

His infant sister May, who the family believes died of diphtheria, died on 7 January 1911, aged one year and seven months, a little over five weeks after Emlyn was born. She was buried at Treorchy Cemetery. He grew up after that with a younger sister, Gwenny, and a younger brother, Danny, in the shadow of the pit and the chapel alike.

May's memorial card, in Welsh, kept by the family. It also confirms the earlier address: 73 Miskin Street.

The 1911 census, taken three months after Emlyn's birth, signed by Daniel himself: household of four at 73 Miskin Street. Daniel, Bessie, four-month-old Emlyn, and Bessie's widowed mother Elizabeth Perkins, 62, living with them, born in Llandybie, Carmarthenshire. The marriage is recorded as four years old, with two children born and one already died, matching May exactly.

At Dunraven School he learned the game that would define his life, and with no ball of his own, he and the other boys got a pig's bladder from the local butcher, blew it up, and played their matches on the old coal tips above the town. When the makeshift ball inevitably burst, they simply went back for another.

His speed and elusiveness started here too, long before anyone had a word for it. In the early mornings he would side-step the sheep on the hillsides, and running home from school he would jump the dustbins set out along the street. For a long stretch of his boyhood he played barefoot, since there was no spare money in the house for boots, until one of his schoolteachers quietly bought him a second-hand pair. The family believes he never forgot it.