Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

OBITUARY WILLIAM KEITH WILLIAMS-JONES (1926-1979) THE death of Mr. William Keith Williams-Jones on 6 August 1979 at the age of 53 was a most grievous loss. He had been senior lecturer in the department of Welsh History at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, since 1974. A native of Blaenau Ffestiniog, and always profoundly aware of his roots, Mr. Williams-Jones went to the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 1943. His career was interrupted by army service from 1944-48, and after his return to Aberystwyth, where he graduated in History, he went on to Liverpool to prepare for the Diploma in the Study of Records and Archives Administration. At Liverpool he so distinguished himself that he was appointed personal assistant to Professor, now Sir, Geoffrey Barraclough, then Professor of Medieval History, who held him in high esteem. From 1952-59 he was county archivist of Merioneth, and subsequently of Caernarvon- shire until 1963, when he was appointed lecturer in the department of Welsh History at Bangor. He also took a prominent part in the preparation of students for the Diploma in Archives Administration and after Gwilym Usher's death he was in charge of the Diploma course. His years as archivist brought him into daily contact with the raw materials of history and he always remained suspicious of wide- ranging generalisations which were not founded upon well-attested facts. But if he did not greatly care for broad sweeps, he was himself no bald chronicler of events. He constantly stressed that the past held the answers to many questions (though by no means all), but that it would remain forever silent unless historians asked of it illuminating questions. The study of history was never for him a matter of scissors and paste, but a high, intellectual and imaginative enterprise grounded in sound scholarship. These qualities he amply revealed in a long, penetrating introduction to A Calendar of the Merioneth Quarter Sessions Records, Vol. 1, 1733-65 (1964), which won for him the Prince Llywelyn ap Gruffydd prize of the University of Wales. This most illuminating study in depth of local government in a Welsh county in the eighteenth century has not yet received the recognition it undoubtedly deserves. The editor appreciated more than most that, whilst we know a fair amount concerning the religious and economic life of the century, and something of its surface political manoeuvres,