The family moved from Salford back to Treherbert in 1954. Emlyn taught in the Rhondda and ran the Castle Hotel; in what every family account suggests meant as much to him as anything he had done on a rugby field, he also became leader of the Treherbert Boys' Club, coaching youth rugby and refereeing informal football matches on a scrubby pitch by the Blaenrhondda working men's club, with his daughter Wendy pressed into service as touch judge, waving an old rugby shirt for a flag.
He was back among his own people, and it did not take long for the valleys to put him on a platform. In April 1954 the Pontypridd YMCA held a public sports forum, and Emlyn sat on the panel alongside Alf Sherwood, the Welsh soccer international and Cardiff City captain, his club colleague Colin Gale, and Jimmy Wilde, the Rhondda flyweight who had been champion of the world and who, as the paper drily noted, needed no introduction. Emlyn was introduced as being of Treherbert, a rugby league international and one of the 1936 tourists to Australia. It is the earliest independent confirmation that the family were home in the valley by the spring of that year.
Asked whether Cardiff should bring their rugby club up the valleys, he was in no doubt. Cardiff toured parts of England and took fixtures there, he said, while doing too little at home, and they ought to come up to the valleys. Nor would he keep the visits to the Rhondda: let them go to Aberdare and Merthyr too. His reasoning was the argument of a man who had come down that road himself twenty-five years earlier. Cardiff took their players from the valleys, and the bulk of their support came from there as well.
Source: Pontypridd and Llantrisant Observer, 17 April 1954, in the Archive. On the Cardiff years, see Bread and Butter.