Welsh Journals

OBITUARY DAVID J.V.JONES, 1941-1994 PROFESSOR DAVID JONES died of cancer on 30 October 1994 after a short illness, bravely borne. It is sad to record the death of a talented historian: it is tragic when such a death occurs unexpectedly at the age of fifty-three. Readers of the WELSH HISTORY REVIEW have particular cause to mourn David Jones's passing. His first scholarly paper appeared in this journal in 1965 and he subsequently published in its pages seminal articles which prefigured more than one of his six major books: Before Rebecca: Popular Protest in Wales, 1793-1835 (1973); Chartism and the Chartists, 1836-60 (1975); Crime, Protest, Community and Police in Nineteenth-century Britain (1982); The Last Rising: The Newport Insurrection of 1839 (1985); Rebecca's Children:A Study of Rural Society, Crime and Protest (1989); and Crime in Nineteenth-century Wiles (1992). David Jones's writings are concerned with the nature ofWelsh society since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, and in an appropriately broad, British context. He explored, in particular, new approaches to popular protest, violence and crime which two of his admired teachers had inaugurated, David Williams and Gwyn A. Williams. He once described the former as 'the most thorough and elegant of scholars', qualities which the younger David took to heart and which marked his own researches and writings. With the characteristically modest instincts of a historian embarking on a long and ambitious quest, he said of his own first book, Before Rebecca (1973), that 'in a sense the book has no ending; for me it is the beginning of a comprehensive survey of popular protest in modern Wales'. In a literal sense, he was still engaged in this quest during his last illness, as he put the finishing touches to yet another important book, Crime and Policing in the Twentieth Century: The South Wales Experience. With customary understatement, he described what proved