Tag: Social history
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Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones (1834–1920)
The Welsh Entrepreneur Who Engineered Distance from Newtown In the standard story of modern retail, innovation belongs to cities. Manchester industrialises production, London refines display, Liverpool masters distribution. Yet one of the most consequential changes in consumer life began not in a metropolis, but in Newtown, Montgomeryshire. From this small mid-Wales market town, Sir Pryce…
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Trevor Owen Davies (1895–1966)
A Farm Boy at Christ Church, Oxford, A Welsh Scholar in Public Life In 1920s Oxford, the halls of Christ Church were filled with the sons of the English landed elite. Among them sat an unlikely figure: a farm labourer from the Dyfi Valley who had traded his plough for Augustine. Trevor Owen Davies was…
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Voices from the Uplands, why I wrote it, and why it matters now
Voices from the Uplands: The Davies Family and the Soul of Rural Wales is, in the simplest sense, a book about my own ancestors, the Davies family of Caeadda, Llanwrin. But I did not write it to produce another neatly ordered pedigree, nor to add one more family tree to the growing pile of genealogical summaries…
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Off the Rails: Why This Book Matters
Off the Rails: The Story of Crewe Steam Train Driver Alfred Jenkins began not as a publishing project but as an act of recovery, an attempt to give structure and permanence to a life that had been lived with discipline, endurance, and quiet dignity, and then almost lost to time. Alfred Jenkins (1882–1956) was my…
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Richard Emmett, and the Value of an Ordinary Life
In the 1880s, a retired soldier sat down to write a short book for his children. He did not imagine an audience beyond his family, nor did he attempt to shape his life into a story of heroism or distinction. He wrote, instead, to explain himself. To account for absence. To leave behind a record…
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Teenage Years on the Doldowlod Hall Estate
The mid-1990s were years of transition in rural Wales. Farming incomes were under strain, country houses were redefining their purpose, and politics in Britain seemed poised between the certainties of Thatcherism and the coming landslide of New Labour. For me, those years were marked most vividly by the Doldowlod Hall estate on the upper reaches…
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Tea and Waterfalls: John and Jane Waters of the Llyfnant Valley
In the remote folds of the Llyfnant Valley in north-west Montgomeryshire—where waterfalls crash through ancient woodland and time seems to move at the pace of a farm horse—a remarkable couple forged a life of quiet industry, community service, and understated innovation. Jane and John Waters, my grandmother’s aunt and uncle, were not landed gentry or…
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Saving the soul of Wales: why we must act now to preserve our family and chapel records
It is hard to overstate just how close we are to losing the living memory of rural Wales. Across our hills and valleys — from the sheep farms of Montgomeryshire to the slate towns of Gwynedd and the quiet chapels of Ceredigion — traces of family and community life are disappearing at an alarming rate.…
