THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Ann Romney's Welsh cakes on the US election campaign trail in Iowa offered a glimpse into her family's Celtic working class roots.
Amid the bleak concrete strip malls of the first stop on this year's US presidential election campaign trail, they were a delicious reminder of the green grass of home.
Welsh cakes, baked by Mitt Romney's wife Ann, were the talk of freezing Iowa last week among the campaign staff, supporters and journalists lucky enough to catch her eye.
As well as taming the hungry travelling circus around the Republican front-runner's campaign, they also offered a glimpse of the working-class British ancestry of the would-be First Lady of America.
She may now be one half of a glamorous multi-millionaire power couple, but Mrs Romney’s roots stretch back to the tiny mining village of Caerau, near Bridgend.
“I am a coal miner’s granddaughter,” Mrs Romney, 62, said at a campaign stop.
“I feel I am just one foot away from where that mine was and how close we all are, all of us, to the sacrifices of our parents and grandparents who tried to make a better life for us.”
That grandfather, David Davies, emigrated to the US in the 1920s after being crushed in a mining accident. He did whatever work he could find to pay for his family to join him.
His wife, daughter and three sons – one of them 15-year-old Edward Roderick “Rod” Davies, future father of Mrs Romney – arrived in 1929, just as Wall Street crashed and the Great Depression struck. » | Raf Sanchez, Washington and Jon Swaine | Friday, January 06, 2012
