[1] Berry undertook several roles in his younger days, including amateur boxing and also played association football for Swansea Town, reportedly scoring a vital goal in a cup match.

[3] His written works were never successful enough to allow Berry to be financially secure and in the 1970s he relied on several friends, and the support of Sir Wyn Roberts in obtaining for him a Civil list pension.

[3] Over the next ten years he published a further four novels, Travelling Loaded (1963), The Full-Time Amateur (1966), Flame and Slag (1968) and So Long, Hector Bebb (1970).

[9] Berry wrote with a strong sense of responsibility, as he was driven to write the testimony of the experience of working underground on behalf of his colleagues who were unable to do so.

[1] His later novels however, in particular Flame and Slag, see the closure of mines, and the shift in the labour market as women started to work in factories as men lost their jobs underground.

[11] Regarded as one of the Wales' more significant post-war authors, along with the likes of Glyn Jones and Emyr Humphreys, some critics have shown preference to his short stories, believing that the shorter text constrained his writing away from the sometimes over-lush prose style of his novels.

[12] The Glamorgan County History series describes Berry as "...unjustly neglected... ...whose fiction thrives on those very aspects of Rhondda life that broke the spirit of Gwyn Thomas's imagination.

Niall Griffiths cites Berry as one of the most important influences on his writing style, being struck by the vernacular language after discovering a copy of So Long, Hector Bebb at the age of nine.