Welsh Journals

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OBITUARY GWYN A. WILLIAMS (1925-1995) In the very first issue of History Workshop (Spring 1976), Gwyn was alphabetically last in the list of contributors. The note read: 'Gwyn Williams comes from a family composed almost equally of miners, steelworkers and schoolteachers. Brought up in Dowlais, educated at school, chapel, the communist movement and sundry deviations there- from and those monuments to the democratic intellect, the colleges at Aberystwyth, University College, London and Manchester. Books on the Commune of Medieval London, Artisans and Sans-culottes in England and France, 1790-1830, Gramsci and the origins of Italian communism, and (forthcoming) Goya. In Welsh history has written articles on thirteenth-century Wales, Welsh Jacobins and the Merthyr rising of 1831. Professor of History at Cardiff.' And in the journal he could be read on 'Welsh Indians: the Madoc legend and the first Welsh radicalism', confessing how after 'some years' immersion of a Baptist totality in the journals of Gramsci and the drawings of Goya, I clutched at archives (in the National Library of Wales) like an artisan of the London Corresponding Society clutching at the latest instalment of Volney's Ruins'. It was an accurate snapshot of him at 50: accurate for its framing of the educational path and wide-ranging scholarship in the surrounds of a commonly-held Welsh upbringing, and accurate, too, in the hints of light and shade at the extremities. Gwyn was deeply committed to the historians' 'craft or sullen art' (to quote that other son of a Welsh schoolmaster, Dylan Thomas, as Gwyn often did) and felt that, for all their filigree flash, his work on Gramsci and Goya had not called on his tremendous gifts of archive-grubbing, honed for his Ph.D. on medieval London and polished by early work in Aberystwyth on Welsh eighteenth-century radicals. That would need to be righted, as would the surprising lack of books on Welsh history. In 1976 Gwyn, with huge