Monumental Welsh Women: Elaine Morgan OBE

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We’re in Mountain Ash, visiting the statue and exploring the life of Elaine Morgan. She was the second woman to be immortalised by a statue in her honour in Wales as part of the Monumental Welsh Women series and lived a remarkable life spanning from TV writing all the way into evolutionary theory. Let’s take a look at her unique career.

Transcript

00:00Elaine Morgan, born Elaine Floyd in 1920 near Pontypridd, spent much of her childhood and

00:07adult life here in Mountain Ash near Aberdare. She earned an English degree from Oxford University,

00:12married Spanish Civil War veteran Morian Morgan, and had three sons. She began her career as

00:17a TV writer after winning a competition in the New Statesman magazine, and had a fairly

00:22prolific career across a number of hit TV shows in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Earlier in

00:28her career the BBC produced a number of her plays for television, she wrote the TV adaptations

00:33of How Green Was My Valley and Off to Philadelphia in the Morning, as well as a number of episodes

00:38for different TV shows like Campion and Dr. Finlay's Casebook. She won two BAFTA awards,

00:44two Writers Guild awards and a pre-italia. Her work spanned TV dramas, documentary scripts

00:49and was awarded Writer of the Year by the Royal Television Society back in 1979. But

00:55it's her work in evolutionary theory that perhaps seems the most influential, and experts

01:00still discuss her work to this day. She was an advocate for the aquatic ape theory, which

01:05posits that apes spent some time in more of an aquatic lifestyle at some point during

01:10human evolution, which she says explains her hairlessness and different features. It's

01:15often referred to as a pseudoscience, and paleoanthropologists don't all get behind

01:20her theories, but many say that there is little evidence to say that she's wrong. Her work

01:24focuses on sexist rhetoric in evolutionary theory, and says that women played a much

01:28bigger role in human evolution than is often discussed by experts. She published a number

01:33of works, and in 2000 was awarded the Latin F. Saugstad Prize for her contribution to

01:38scientific knowledge. Then, 2008, five years before her death, she was admitted as a Fellow

01:43of the Linnean Society, following in the footsteps of none other than Charles Darwin. Her impact

01:49on Mountain Ash, Welsh and British TV, the scientific community and Welsh culture is

01:54immeasurable, and she has certainly earned the title of Monumental Welsh Woman.

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