Welsh Journals

OBITUARY GLYN ROBERTS (1904-62) THE appallingly sudden death of Professor Glyn Roberts last August, almost on the eve of his fifty-eighth birthday, leaves a mournful gap in the ranks of Welsh historians. With the exception of a decade when the competing claims of administration drew him away, he devoted himself to Welsh History for the whole of his adult life, and in a variety of fruitful ways of which his published work gives only a partial indication. When Glyn Roberts came to College at Bangor in 1922, it was still usual for candidates for Honours to be selected at the end of their first term. I then had charge of the Intermediate class, and I recall with pleasure that he was one of the first batch of my picking; selection, however, was made easier by a letter I had previously received from his History master at Friars, the late W. J. Lewis, who had already discovered his quality. Entry to the Honours class meant going direct to the fountain head for his Welsh History-and, indeed, for his introduction to historical method; for Professor Lloyd (as we then knew him) saw to it that his Honours pupils were all on terms with the sources from which he had constructed his History of Wales a dozen years earlier, and with the canons of evidence he had applied to them. Among other courses of which Glyn Roberts used to speak with enthusiasm, as helping to form his historical judgement during these years, were those by A. S. Turberville on European History and by E. V. Arnold on Roman Imperial Institutions-the latter involving, he recalled with gratitude, a sound drilling in the Latin historians. After he had sailed into a First, I had the privilege of trying my 'prentice hand at directing his research; but his natural flair made the 'direction' purely nominal after the initial stages. His bent at this time was towards modem history, and he fell in with my suggestion that he should apply to the period after the Acts of Union some of the lines of enquiry into Welsh borough structure and history so successfully followed by E. A. Lewis in his Mediaeval Boroughs of Snowdonia. This determined the main direction of his scholarship for the ten years after he completed his M.A. (with distinction and the award of the Llywelyn ap Gruffydd medal) in 1929. For the study of the boroughs brought him face to face with parliamentary representation and the county families, and led to a succession of articles on these lines in the Transactions of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society, the Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, and the Journal of the Welsh Bibliographical Society, a pamphlet in the Social and Economic Survey of Swansea, and finally, the outstanding chapter on Carmarthenshire politics after the Union which he contributed to the history of the county, under Lloyd's editorship, just before the war.