Welsh Journals

DAVID WILLIAMS I WRITE of David Williams, scholar, teacher, historian and author, whose long career as Professor of Welsh History in Aberystwyth comes to an end this year. Yet I shall say little of his academic achievements or the multitude of his essays, pamphlets and re-prints; nor of John Frost, the Rebecca Riots, and the History of Modern Wales. These are known to all readers of the WELSH HISTORY REVIEW; and years ago I had the pleasure of reviewing two of them in the Economic Journal. We first met in the dark, dreary Men's Common Room of the New College in Cathays Park, Cardiff. I was a 'fresher' straight from school, he an 'ex-Service man'. During the previous year, I had achieved renown in my school cadet corps by never once hitting the target on the rifle range: David, in the real army, had achieved a fifty per cent rise in pay (from a shilling to one-and-sixpence a day) for marksmanship! This propensity for accuracy, as every historian and hundreds of former pupils in Wales can testify, David has maintained ever since. Time and again, the quiet, courteous voice has questioned some rash generalization of mine and restored the facts and figures to their correct dates and occasions. It was I who plunged into College politics and strife-the Debating Society, the S.R.C., the Political Union, the 'Rags', the rows with the Meds. and, outside College, the exciting general elections of 1922, 1923, and 1924. David, the diligent reader of newspapers and dedicated historian, was well aware of the significance of the treaty of Versailles, the building of a communist republic on the ruins of tsardom, the disappearance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; but none of these events, not even the achievement of Sinn Fein so near at hand, could divert him from scholarship. David arrived in Cardiff College in 1919, a year before I did, and embarked on an undergraduate course which eventually brought him a 'First' in History, a teacher's certificate (first class) and a 'two- one' in English. That was characteristic of our University in the 'twenties: we were inhibited in our range of academic choice because we believed that our only chance of a job lay in secondary school teaching. Indeed, David himself went straight from Cardiff to three years of teaching in Towyn Intermediate School. Later he was to spend a further two years in the grammar school at Barry.