RETIRED journalist Glyn Mathias has launched his autobiography that also examines how his father, the son of an Army chaplain, was jailed as a conscientious objector. The former ITN and BBC Wales political editor, who lives in Brecon, said he pieced together the tension at the heart of his family from his father's letters. Headteacher Roland Mathias, who was also a distinguished poet, refused to take any part in the war effort and was jailed twice during the Second World War. His father, Evan, a non conformist chaplain, had signed up at the outset of World War I and remained in the Army until he retired to Brecon shortly before the outbreak of World War II. Glyn, who moved to Brecon in 2001 after leaving BBC Wales, launched the autobiography, 'Raising an Echo' at Brecon's Guildhall at an event attended by 140 people where he discussed the memoir with his former colleague, the BBC's Welsh affairs editor Vaughan Roderick. Though raised in Pembrokeshire former Llandovery College pupil Glyn has a long family association with Brecon. His father's mother Muriel was born in the Glyn Valley, now underneath the Talybont Reservoir, and his grandfather, who hailed from Carmarthenshire, trained at the Memorial College, the former Congregationalist training college for chapel ministers on Camden Road. Glyn's father, who is remembered with a plaque at the Plough Chapel in Lion Street, was born in Brecon and also retired to the town, where he lived until he died aged 91 in 2007. "I touch on how Brecon has changed over the years," said Glyn of his nominated hometown's reoccurrence throughout the book and says he, like his father and grandfather before him retired to Brecon for 'different reasons but not entirely different reasons'. "My grandfather moved back, because he'd retired from the Army and he was too old to serve in the Second World War and so in 1939 or 1940 he came back to live in Brecon and because his brother lived down in Sennybridge. "He also knew Brecon because he'd been at the Memorial College as a student and my grandmother also came from the area. "My father came back, I think really, when he retired from being a headmaster, because his mother was still alive and I came back, partly, because my father was still alive and I'd stopped full time working." For the full interview read this week's Brecon & Radnor Express - on sale now