Bryntirion, Rhayader: From Country House to Model School

On the eastern side of Rhayader, in the old parish of Nantmel, stood Bryntirion, a house whose history became entwined with some of the largest changes to affect the district during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was never one of the great houses of Wales, nor one of the largest Radnorshire estates, but its occupants belonged to a world of county government, scholarship, Parliament, the professions and landed society. Through them the story of Bryntirion reaches from Oxford intellectual life and Victorian Liberal politics to the upheaval caused by Birmingham Corporation in the Elan Valley, the losses of the First World War and, eventually, the expansion of public education in rural Radnorshire.

The surviving evidence is unusually rich. Census returns allow the household itself to be reconstructed, newspapers record weddings, deaths and estate sales, while archival collections preserve legal papers, estate plans, valuations and the drawings prepared when the mansion was converted to educational use. There are even references to an early photograph of the house and surrounding land. Bryntirion was therefore far more than a building. For much of its existence it stood at a meeting point between Rhayader and a much wider social world.

The Williams family and the beginnings of Bryntirion

Bryntirion was built around 1860 by the Rev. John Williams, a clergyman and Oxford scholar with longstanding family connections to Rhayader and Cwmdauddwr. A later account published by the Western Mail in 1928 specifically remembered Williams as the builder of the house, while Radnorshire, from The Archive Photographs Series and compiled by Powys County Record Office, dates its construction to about 1860. Bryntirion therefore emerged during a period of considerable social and economic change in the district, but before the later transformation associated with the Elan Valley water undertaking.

Williams came from a family with longstanding connections to Rhayader and Cwmdauddwr. Educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, he had a distinguished academic background, serving at Christ Church as a tutor and censor and later holding clerical appointments elsewhere. His relationship with Rhayader continued through the endowed lectureship attached to the church. Later newspapers sometimes described him simply as a former vicar of Rhayader, but the surviving institutional evidence suggests that this was a loose description of a somewhat different ecclesiastical office.

Something of John Williams’s intellectual life survives through his books. Volumes carrying the inscription “Rev. J. Williams M.A. Bryntirion” have found their way into important collections, including fifteenth-century printed works. The library subsequently passed, at least in part, to his son Samuel Charles Evans-Williams. One such volume later belonged to William Morris before eventually entering the Morgan Library in New York. Bryntirion was therefore not simply a comfortable provincial residence, but a house in which books, scholarship and the culture of Oxford formed part of family life.

Samuel Charles Evans-Williams became the figure most closely associated with Bryntirion during the later Victorian period. He served as High Sheriff of Radnorshire in 1880 and represented the Radnor Boroughs in Parliament between 1880 and 1884. The House of Commons formally ordered a new writ for the constituency in October 1884 after he accepted the Manor of Northstead, the conventional means of resigning his seat.

His public interests extended well beyond Westminster. He was involved in the Rhayader Highway Board and Nantmel School Board, while a retrospective account published in 1928 described him as chairman of the original committee connected with the establishment of the National Liberal Club and as the last surviving member of that early group. He also showed an interest in Radnorshire’s cultural history. Speaking at Knighton in 1891, he discussed the decline of Welsh in the county and drew attention to the comparatively recent survival of the language in communities where it had largely disappeared within living memory.

A Victorian country-house household

The 1891 census provides one of the clearest surviving pictures of life at Bryntirion during the Evans-Williams period. Samuel lived there with his wife, Mary Caroline, and their six daughters, Florence, Mary, Caroline, Elizabeth, Clara and Gwladys. Five servants were also resident.

It was a substantial household, although not on the scale of the largest Welsh estates. Its social position was nevertheless unmistakable. Florence attended Girton College, Cambridge, and the daughters moved within networks extending far beyond Radnorshire. Later marriages connected the family with landed, professional and military society.

Mary Caroline is unusually visible for the mistress of a Victorian Radnorshire house. Her diaries survive in the National Library of Wales, together with those of her daughter Elizabeth Alice. Mary’s diaries extend from 1861 to 1906, while Elizabeth’s cover the years 1889 to 1903. Most entries are brief, although there are fuller accounts of continental travel. Their survival nevertheless gives the women of Bryntirion a documentary presence often absent from country-house histories.

The family’s connections reached into London society. In February 1899 Clara Joan Evans-Williams married Lieutenant-Colonel John Adye of the Royal Artillery, eldest son of General Sir John Miller Adye. The ceremony was held at St Peter’s, Eaton Square, followed by a reception in Buckingham Palace Gardens. Samuel was prevented from attending through illness, but the setting demonstrates how far the social world of Bryntirion extended beyond Rhayader.

The great sale of 1893

The decisive change in the ownership of Bryntirion came in September 1893.

On Wednesday 13 September the estate was offered by public auction at Rhayader by Messrs Dalton and Lee. The South Wales Daily News reported that Robert Lewis Lloyd of Nantgwyllt purchased the mansion with three adjoining farms, comprising 856 acres, for £13,500. Other lots sold brought the amount realised to about £29,000, although several remained unsold.

The surviving sale material shows that Bryntirion was much more extensive than the mansion and its immediate grounds. The wider property was divided into some twenty-two lots and included farms and holdings such as Lower Cefn-faes, Gelli-las and Ffos-mascel, together with additional land, cottages and property around Rhayader. The archival papers also refer to estate plans and to a photograph of the house and surrounding land, potentially one of the most important surviving visual records of old Bryntirion.

The sale also marked the approaching end of the scholarly library assembled by the Williams family. On 1 November 1894 Samuel Charles Evans-Williams’s books were offered at Sotheby’s. The proximity of the library sale to the disposal of Bryntirion is striking, although there is no evidence at present that one directly caused the other. Taken together, however, they give a sense of a long-established household being gradually dispersed.

Nantgwyllt, Birmingham and a new Bryntirion

The timing of Robert Lewis Lloyd’s purchase gives the transaction a much wider significance.

On 11 August 1893 Robert Lewis Lloyd, his son Robert Wharton Lewis Lloyd and the family trustees completed major conveyances of Nantgwyllt and associated property to Birmingham Corporation. The principal transaction was for £134,057, with a further conveyance of £15,343 on the same day. These were enormous sums, reflecting the scale of the land required for the Elan Valley water undertaking.

Barely a month later, on 13 September, Robert Lewis Lloyd spent £13,500 on Bryntirion and its 856 acres.

The sequence is too close to be historically incidental. Bryntirion formed part of the almost immediate reorganisation of the Lewis Lloyd family’s landed position after Birmingham Corporation acquired the old heart of their estate. Nantgwyllt was passing into a new existence, while Bryntirion offered the family a substantial property close to Rhayader.

Robert Lewis Lloyd himself deserves more than a passing place in the story. Educated at Eton and Cambridge and called to the Bar in 1865, he succeeded to the family estates in 1870. He served as a Deputy Lieutenant and magistrate and chaired the Rhayader Board of Guardians for about twenty years. His interests also extended to rowing. He had captained boats at Eton, became President of the Magdalene College Boat Club and rowed for Cambridge against Oxford on four occasions between 1856 and 1859.

He therefore represented the established county society from which both Nantgwyllt and Bryntirion emerged, but his life also straddled the enormous changes which overtook that society at the end of the century.

A marriage which joined two estates

Only ten weeks after the sale of Bryntirion, the two families were joined by marriage.

On 23 November 1893 Elizabeth Alice Evans-Williams, fourth daughter of Samuel Charles Evans-Williams, married Robert Wharton Lewis-Lloyd, eldest son of Robert Lewis Lloyd. The ceremony took place at St Clement’s Church, Rhayader, amid celebrations which involved much of the town and surrounding countryside.

The route between Bryntirion and the church was decorated with flags, bunting, mottoes and arches. Salutes were fired after the service. The bride and groom returned to Bryntirion for the wedding breakfast and reception, while later in the day tenants of the Bryntirion, Nantgwyllt and Cwmelan estates joined townspeople and inhabitants of neighbouring parishes in a procession through Rhayader behind the Llandrindod brass band.

Two four-horse wagons carried slaughtered and dressed oxen for distribution among the poor of Rhayader and neighbouring parishes. Tenants and their wives and children were entertained to tea at Bryntirion. That evening there was a ball at the house and a bonfire burned on the hill above the town.

The celebrations belonged to an older pattern of country-estate society, in which major family events became public occasions involving landlords, tenants, tradespeople and the poor. Hospitality and charity formed part of the public display of social position, although they also reflected the complicated web of dependence and obligation which bound estate communities together.

The timing gave this particular wedding an additional significance. Within little more than three months the Lewis Lloyd family had disposed of the greater part of their old Nantgwyllt property, acquired Bryntirion, and been joined by marriage to the family from whom the house had been purchased.

Elizabeth Alice provides the continuity between the two worlds. She had grown up at Bryntirion as an Evans-Williams daughter and later lived there as Mrs Robert Wharton Lewis Lloyd. Ownership changed, but one of the people most intimately connected with the old house remained.

The November wedding also shows that the September sale did not bring an immediate end to Evans-Williams occupation or family identity. Samuel continued to be described as of Bryntirion, and the mansion remained at the centre of his daughter’s wedding celebrations. The change from one family to another was therefore gradual and personal, rather than a clean break made on the day of the auction.

The Lewis Lloyd household

By the closing years of the nineteenth century Robert Wharton Lewis Lloyd was firmly established at Bryntirion. Legal papers identify him there and show substantial interests in Lewis Lloyd property being settled upon him. In August 1899, while described as of Bryntirion, he was granted a life interest in property valued for the purpose of the transaction at £15,456, followed by further legal arrangements concerning the family estates.

His father did not remain permanently at Bryntirion. Robert Lewis Lloyd also acquired Otterhead in Devon and later settled at Bath. From 1904 he, his wife and three daughters were living there. It was Robert Wharton and Elizabeth Alice who became the resident generation at Bryntirion.

Their life there ended suddenly in February 1905.

A tragedy at Bryntirion

On the morning of 2 February 1905 Robert Wharton Lewis Lloyd was found outside the house after falling from an upstairs bedroom window during the night. The detailed inquest reported in the Radnorshire Standard allows the events to be reconstructed with unusual clarity.

Robert was thirty-eight. His wife had last seen him at about ten or half past ten the previous evening. He had a bad cold but was otherwise in his normal state of health. He occupied a bedroom by himself.

The night was exceptionally rough. At about a quarter past seven the following morning Ellen Edger, the cook, opened the dining-room shutters and saw somebody lying outside. She alerted Elizabeth, who went immediately to her husband’s bedroom and found the door locked. Looking outside, she realised that the figure on the lawn was probably Robert.

Elizabeth went down without waiting to dress fully, wrapping herself in a cloak. Rugs and other warm coverings were placed over him and attempts were made to revive him. David Vaughan, the gardener living at Bryntirion Lodge, was summoned, together with the doctor.

The inquest evidence also provides a partial reconstruction of the house. Robert’s bedroom was directly above the front entrance, approximately seventeen feet above the ground. The window was low in relation to the bedroom floor and had only a narrow sill outside. Rose trees grew against the wall. The bed did not appear to have been slept in and a candle had burned partly down.

Dr Gordon Richardson found severe injuries, including a compound fracture of the wrist and what he believed to have been a fractured spine. Marks on the ground suggested that Robert had survived the initial fall and attempted to drag himself towards the house before dying from his injuries, shock and exposure.

The jury returned a verdict of accidental death.

Some newspapers subsequently suggested that Robert had been sleepwalking. The local inquest did not reach that conclusion. Another contemporary report claimed that a French governess had previously fallen from a Bryntirion window from approximately the same height and survived. It is an intriguing detail, but one which should remain clearly identified as a newspaper story rather than an established finding of the inquiry.

The death was widely felt in the district. At the conclusion of the inquest the jury formally expressed sympathy with the family, and the deputy coroner remarked that the feeling extended beyond Rhayader throughout the county.

After the tragedy

Elizabeth Alice did not remain indefinitely at Bryntirion after her husband’s death.

By April 1907 Sarah Lilian Nicholls, a widow, was already being described as of Bryntirion. A year later legal papers place Elizabeth Alice at 12 Burton Court in London. The dates are useful because they demonstrate that a new household had taken over the physical occupation of the mansion within little more than two years of Robert Wharton’s death.

The 1911 census provides a remarkable picture of Sarah Nicholls’s household. She lived at Bryntirion with her three daughters, Florence Mary, Lilian Kathleen and Edith Crystal, together with a resident governess and five domestic servants, a cook, children’s maid, parlourmaid, housemaid and kitchen maid.

Ten women were living beneath the same roof.

Bryntirion was therefore still functioning very much as a country house. It retained the staff, domestic hierarchy and social expectations of a substantial private residence, the wider social world explored in Beyond the Country House.

Sarah Nicholls also participated in the wider county social world. At the Brecon Hunt Ball held on New Year’s Eve 1913, she appeared with members of her family and a party of guests among a gathering of landed families, hunting people and military officers from across Breconshire and Radnorshire.

The mansion had changed occupants, but not yet its character.

The passing of the Evans-Williams generation

Mary Caroline Evans-Williams died suddenly at Bath in June 1908 while visiting members of the Lewis Lloyd family. The Radnorshire Standard described her as “formerly of Bryntirion”, an apparently small phrase which neatly marked the change that had taken place.

Yet the old association remained powerful. Her memorial continued to identify her through Samuel Charles Evans-Williams “of Bryntirion”. The house had passed into different ownership, but it remained part of the family’s social identity.

That distinction is important in understanding late nineteenth-century country houses. Ownership, residence and family association did not always change simultaneously. A house could remain attached to a name and memory long after its legal title had moved elsewhere.

The First World War and Robert Evan Lewis Lloyd

Robert Wharton and Elizabeth Alice had one son, Robert Evan Lewis Lloyd. Still a child when his father died, he entered the Royal Navy and served during the First World War.

In January 1918 he was lost while serving aboard HMS Opal, which was wrecked in severe weather off Orkney. Contemporary probate notices continued to describe the twenty-two-year-old officer as “of Bryntirion, Rhayader”, although the mansion had for years been occupied by other people. His estate was substantial, with net personalty reported at £27,660.

Robert Evan had made his will on 21 July 1916. After his death the legal position of Bryntirion became clearer. Probate was granted on 3 June 1921 and, on 2 July that year, his executor formally assented to the devise of the “Bryntirion Estates” to the Public Trustee.

This explains much about the otherwise confusing history of the mansion after 1905. Bryntirion could have successive residents while still remaining part of a Lewis Lloyd estate settlement. Ownership, beneficial interests and actual occupation had become separate matters.

The trust continued for years. By 1931 extended members of the Lewis Lloyd family appeared as landlords in transactions concerning estate property, while a vesting deed of 1935 still recorded interests under the settlement created by Robert Evan’s will. The old family connection with Bryntirion therefore survived legally almost to the eve of its transformation into a school.

Inter-war occupants

The succession of residents did not end with Sarah Nicholls.

In April 1920 Edward Aubrey Thomas, a barrister-at-law, was described in legal papers as being of Bryntirion. He later appears elsewhere in Radnorshire public life and seems to have occupied the house for a comparatively brief period.

By April 1921 Brigadier-General Horatio James Evans was associated with Bryntirion. Evans had served in the Afghan and South African wars and during the First World War, eventually commanding the 115th Infantry Brigade of the 38th Welsh Division. His residence at Bryntirion may have been temporary, apparently connected with work being carried out at his own home at Penralley.

These successive occupants underline the changed nature of the estate. Bryntirion was still sufficiently prestigious to attract members of the professional, military and county classes, but it was no longer the enduring family centre it had been under the Evans-Williams household.

By the 1930s that entire world was under pressure. Large houses were expensive to maintain, domestic service was changing, and throughout Britain properties built for nineteenth-century gentry families were being sold, subdivided, demolished or adapted to new purposes. The same pressures can be seen elsewhere in Radnorshire, notably in the history of Penybont Hall.

Bryntirion was about to find one.

A mansion for public education

In August 1938 Radnorshire County Council sought authority to borrow £1,670 for the purchase of Bryntirion and the associated legal and other expenses. The purpose was explicitly stated, the property was to become a senior school for the Rhayader district.

The figure should not be mistaken for the purchase price alone, since contemporary reporting included legal and associated expenses within it. Nevertheless, the contrast with 1893 is striking. Robert Lewis Lloyd had then paid £13,500 for the mansion, three farms and 856 acres. Forty-five years later the economic and social circumstances surrounding the country house had changed almost beyond recognition.

In January 1939 the Western Mail carried the memorable headline, “Mansion to be a Model School for Wales”. Radnorshire Education Committee approved plans, subject to amendment, for converting Bryntirion into a senior school. Captain Harri Williams described what was envisaged as an “ideal rural school” and even a “model school for Wales”.

The language reveals something of the ambition behind the proposal. Bryntirion was not being acquired merely because an obsolete mansion happened to be available. The county authority was looking for ways to improve opportunities for children in rural Radnorshire. At the same period it was debating rural depopulation, agricultural education and ways of encouraging young people to remain within countryside communities.

The transformation of Bryntirion should therefore be understood within the wider history of rural reform.

War, delay and a new beginning

The outbreak of the Second World War interrupted the scheme.

Architectural proposals survive from 1939, including work connected with the lodge and accommodation associated with the intended school. Further drawings from 1946 and 1947 are especially important because they explicitly describe the “Bryntirion original house” and show its proposed or actual layout as a school.

The old mansion therefore survived the war.

John Williams’s nineteenth-century house was not simply swept away before the educational phase began. It was incorporated into the new institution and adapted to purposes its builder could scarcely have imagined.

School log books and admission registers survive from 1947, establishing that Bryntirion was functioning educationally by that year. A separate administrative file concerning the establishment and official opening of the school extends through the following years.

Rooms which had once accommodated MPs, landowners, daughters, governesses and servants were now being used for the education of children from Rhayader and the surrounding countryside.

That was perhaps the most profound change in Bryntirion’s entire history.

What remains of the old estate

Parts of the old Bryntirion landscape survived long after the end of the mansion’s private life.

Bryntirion Lodge continued as a separate residence. The coach house also survived and remained in local authority ownership into the twenty-first century. Estate plans, school drawings and legal papers preserve further evidence of the arrangement of the grounds.

Most tantalising is the archival description of a photograph showing the house and surrounding land amongst the Bryntirion sale papers. The exact date of the photograph has not yet been established because the surviving bundle contains material from more than one period, but it appears to offer the prospect of seeing the mansion before its later educational alterations.

Plans prepared in 1946–47 confirm that the original house itself was then still standing. Later school plans may eventually allow its subsequent alteration or disappearance to be traced more precisely. At present, the precise date at which John Williams’s mansion ceased to survive recognisably remains one of the few substantial unanswered questions.

The construction date can now be placed at about 1860. The evidence that the Rev. John Williams built Bryntirion is reinforced by the dating given in Radnorshire, compiled by Powys County Record Office for The Archive Photographs Series. The original mansion was still standing in 1946–47, when plans were prepared for its adaptation to school use, giving the house a private and institutional history extending across nearly ninety years.

A house shaped by a changing Radnorshire

Bryntirion matters because its history is not confined to architecture.

It began as the home of a scholarly clerical family whose library reflected the education and intellectual interests of its owner. Under Samuel Charles Evans-Williams it became associated with Parliament, Liberal politics, county government and the changing cultural life of Radnorshire. Its women left behind diaries, entered higher education and married into wider military and landed networks.

Then came 1893, the pivotal year.

On 11 August the Lewis Lloyd family completed the great Nantgwyllt transactions with Birmingham Corporation. On 13 September Robert Lewis Lloyd purchased Bryntirion, three farms and 856 acres. On 23 November his eldest son married Elizabeth Alice Evans-Williams, daughter of the house, amid celebrations which brought together the tenants of Bryntirion, Nantgwyllt and Cwmelan.

Within little more than three months land, marriage and family had been rearranged around the transformation of the Elan Valley.

The twentieth century gradually dismantled that world. Robert Wharton died after his fall from the house in 1905. The Evans-Williams generation passed away. Robert Evan Lewis Lloyd was lost on naval service in 1918. Trusts replaced direct family occupation, while successive widows, barristers and military men used the mansion as a residence.

Finally, the old country house entered public life in an entirely different form.

A building created for one prosperous family became a school serving the children of an entire district. Bedrooms, drawing rooms and service spaces were adapted to classrooms and educational use. A property which had once represented the social hierarchy of Victorian Radnorshire was absorbed into the growth of twentieth-century public provision.

That transformation is what makes Bryntirion particularly revealing.

Its history follows the changing history of Radnorshire itself, from landed society and Victorian public life, through the upheaval of the Elan Valley water scheme and the losses of war, to the expansion of education and local government.

Bryntirion endured because its purpose changed.

Sources and Further Reading

South Wales Daily News, 15 September 1893, sale of the Bryntirion estate; South Wales Daily News, 25 November 1893, marriage of Robert Wharton Lewis-Lloyd and Elizabeth Alice Evans-Williams; Naval & Military Record and Royal Dockyards Gazette, 17 November 1898 and 2 February 1899, marriage notices concerning Clara Joan Evans-Williams and John Adye; Radnorshire Standard, 8 February 1905, inquest into the death of Robert Wharton Lewis Lloyd; Aberystwyth Observer, February 1905, additional reporting of the death; Radnorshire Standard, 4 July 1908, death of Mary Caroline Evans-Williams; Census of England and Wales, 1891 and 1911; Brecon County Times, 8 January 1914, Mrs Nicholls of Bryntirion at the Brecon Hunt Ball; Clifton Society and North Wilts Guardian, September 1915, obituary and funeral reports for Robert Lewis Lloyd; Daily News, 23 July 1918, and Cambrian News, 2 August 1918, probate notices relating to Robert Evan Lewis Lloyd; Western Mail, 7 April 1928, retrospective account of John Williams and Samuel Charles Evans-Williams; Western Mail, 31 August 1938, proposed acquisition of Bryntirion for educational use; Western Mail, 28 January 1939, “Mansion to be a Model School for Wales”; Radnorshire, The Archive Photographs Series, compiled by Powys County Record Office, including the dating of Bryntirion to c.1860; Powys Archives, Lewis of Y Neuadd, Welsh Water Authority, Radnorshire County Council Education and Architects’ collections; National Library of Wales, Evans Williams (Bryntirion Hall) Family Diaries, 1861–1906, Stephen W. Williams papers and Horatio James Evans papers; Westminster School archives; Morgan Library and Folger Shakespeare Library provenance records relating to books formerly belonging to the Williams and Evans-Williams family. The feature image is a digitally straightened and cleaned version of the historic Bryntirion photograph reproduced in Radnorshire, The Archive Photographs Series, compiled by Powys County Record Office.