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OBITUARIES JACOB REES GABRIEL (1881-1962) THE older generation of Welsh historians will learn with deep regret of the death of J. R. Gabriel. He was known to them as a fine scholar and delightful personality. It must be admitted that he was most reluctant to put his pen to paper and little survives, apart from an abundance of short notes, to show the extent of his learning. He apparently found the labour of sustained composition irksome. He had a most promising academic career. Graduating with first-class honours in History at Bangor in 1904, he proceeded to M.A. in 1906, when he submitted a thesis on the religious and social condition of Wales at the outbreak of the Glyndwr movement. Some of the material of this research was later included in his article in Archaeologia Cambrensis (1923) on 'Wales and the Avignon Papacy'. Otherwise, he published nothing. He greatly disappointed Sir John Edward Lloyd (Gabriel had been his favourite student) by failing to contribute a section which he had promised to the Bibliography of the History of Wales (1931). Much against Sir John's will Gabriel was approached to write a chapter for the History of Carmarthenshire (1935), but he did not do so. Nor did he write anything for the Bywgraffiadur Cymreig (1953), though he was highly critical of some of the entries in it. But Gabriel never ceased to collect material, for he had a voracious appetite for facts and keenly sought for them over a wide range of authorities. I have put it on record elsewhere that when I was an assistant lecturer at Bangor and Gabriel came as tutor to the Normal College we projected the writing of the history of the Civil War in Wales. The plan was that I should write draft chapters and submit them for comment and amend- ment. They were returned in due course with many corrections (for he knew much more about it than I did) and detailed notes which it was difficult to incorporate in the narrative. The basis for our work was naturally the Memoirs of the Civil War in Wales and the Marches by J. Roland Phillips, which was published in 1874. This pioneer work was Subjected to Gabriel's gift for detecting mistakes; an uncanny gift which he loved to exercise over his wide range of the reading of other books. 'I know enough', he declared, 'about the period to quarrel with every paragraph in Rowland P. Errors with regard to place-names and genea- logies were severely dealt with. 'Llanwrda is here an absurd mistake for Llanforda'; 'Henry Vaughan of Derwydd was the uncle and not the brother of Lord Carbery'; 'George Owen, York Herald, is confused with his father, the Pembrokeshire historian'; and so on and so on. In fact he knew so much about the period that he set a high standard. When J. C. Morrice