Welsh Journals

OBITUARY ROBERT THOMAS JENKINS (1881-1969) WELSH history in the twentieth century lost one of its greatest and best-loved figures on 11 November 1969 with the death in his eighty- eighth year of Emeritus Professor R. T. Jenkins. He was born in Liverpool in 1881, but after a very brief period in Bangor, where his father held a clerical post in the newly-opened University College of North Wales, he was, on the latter's death, entrusted to the care of his maternal grandparents at Bala. And Bala, with its religious and cultural associations, as is apparent to all readers of his fascinating autobiography, Edrych yn 01, exercised a lasting influence on his life. It was from its notable grammar school, Ysgol Ty-tan-domeny well primed in the Classics, that he went to the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, and thence to Trinity College, Cambridge, taking there the Ll.B. and M.A. degrees. There followed a period of schoolmastering at Llandysul and Brecon, culminating in 1917 in his appointment as Senior History Master at the Cardiff High School for Boys, where he is remembered with affection if not, indeed, with something approaching hero-worship. 'He was the best teacher of History I have ever known' is the testimony of one distinguished former pupil of his. These are words which will be enthusiastically echoed by all of us who had the good fortune to be his students at Bangor, where in 1930 he became independent lecturer in Welsh History and in 1945 Professor. It was a recurring joy to attend his lectures, assured as we invariably were of a lucidity of presentation capable of sparking the most torpid imagination, and illuminated throughout by a wit that was uniquely his. Already before coming to Bangor he had assured himself of a permanent niche in the pantheon of Welsh history by the publication in 1928 of Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif, now long regarded as one of our national classics, popular in style but affording withal a penetrating insight into the thoughts and motives of the leading personalities of the period. And this same deep awareness of the mainsprings of human behaviour characterises all R. T. Jenkins's historical writing, and notably so his studies of the Methodist revivalists, of the Independents at Llanuwchllyn and of the Moravians in north Wales. Dullness and verbosity were entirely alien from his prose, which with its flashes of playful humour or quiet irony added sparkle even to that most lively of quarterlies, Y Lienor, during the 1930s and '40s. But it was so easy for the reader, enchanted as he invariably was by the author's simple,