Welsh Journals

OBITUARY WILLIAM REES (1887-1978) WILLIAM Rees, professor of Welsh History at University College, Cardiff 1930-53, the first to occupy a chair of that designation in the University of Wales, also acting head of the department of History, 1936-53, died peacefully at his home in Penarth on 9 September 1978. He was the last survivor of the first generation of major twentieth-century Welsh historians. Had he lived for another three months he would have attained his ninety-first birthday. Unlike many of his contemporaries who were graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, where his formal education was concerned he was entirely a product of those Welsh institutions which had become established by the time of his youth. Born of farming stock at Aberysgir, near Brecon, the youngest of eight children, he received his early education in the village school at Llanfrynach, where his parents had moved to keep a small mill and farm when he was five years old, and then at Brecon County School where he was taught during his last year by R. T. Jenkins. In 1906 he entered the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, as it was then known, and graduated from the honours school of History in 1909. His future was by no means mapped out for him at this stage. In common with a large number of arts graduates at the time whose choice of career was not unlimited, he spent another year pursuing a course of study for a teaching diploma. Armed with this qualification he spent a further three years teaching in two schools in London, but during the same period, having been motivated by the training he had received during his third-year special honours course in working at available printed sources of Welsh history-an activity then confined to such students, and a tradition inaugurated by the real founder of the Department of History at Cardiff, Andrew George Little-he completed a scheme of research which culminated in the award of a Master's degree for a study of The Medieval Lordship of Brecon in 1913. London, with its ample facilities for consulting original manu- script sources, was to be his centre of operations for another seven years, the formative period of his life, during which he was to lay in the vast store of material on which he built his subsequent pre- eminence in the comparatively undeveloped field of medieval Welsh