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.
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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.