Tag: Welsh education history
-
Arthur Charles Humphreys-Owen (1836–1905): A Liberal Landowner in a Changing Wales
In the political and civic history of Montgomeryshire during the late nineteenth century, Arthur Charles Humphreys‑Owen stands as a representative figure of a transitional generation. Born into the professional middle ranks of Victorian society but elevated through inheritance into the ranks of the county gentry, Humphreys-Owen embodied the gradual adaptation of the traditional landowning class…
-
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…
-
The Treachery of 1847: How the “Blue Books” Colonised the Welsh Mind
In 1847 three substantial parliamentary reports were laid before Westminster under the unromantic title Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales. Their blue covers gave them their enduring popular name, the “Blue Books”, and their conclusions, or at least the spirit in which those conclusions were delivered, detonated across…
