Welsh Journals

brought him into constant postal and personal contact with an ever- growing host of Welsh Americans in search of their ancestors. A broadcast by him, and most certainly a TV appearance, was always something of an event, but the memory that so many of his fellow- countrymen will cherish is of Bob holding court on the Eisteddfod field, his moustache a-bristle and his sharp little eyes dancing, now flaying unmercifully some University pundit, now declaiming with iconoclastic fervour against one of the hallowed national figures. For his services to Welsh history and culture the University of Wales gave him the honorary degree of M.A., the State an O.B.E. and a rather belated Civil List pension-honours which none merited more than this quite irreplaceable representative of his nation at its best and most typical. E. G. JONES. DR. THOMAS RICHARDS (1878-1962) Thomas Richards was born on 15 March 1878, in the neighbourhood of Tal-y-bont, Cardiganshire; he was the son of a small tenant-farmer. He came up by the hard way: with no secondary school education, he worked his way up, under the old rigid system of preparation for teachers -monitor, pupil-teacher, student-in-training. Fortunately for all of us, he won one of the old 'Queen's scholarships', which enabled him to enter the University College at Bangor-in that period, a 'normal' two-year training course was provided by the college, and Richards pursued this, side by side with a university course-an exacting combination, especially for a man who was also president of the Students' Union during a difficult disciplinary controversy. He emerged in 1903 with a good honours degree in History, and then went straight into school-teaching, at Towyn (1903-5), Bootle (1905-11), and Maesteg (1912-26). It was at Bootle, in 1910, that his good pastor, Peter Williams (Pedr Hir), inspired him to embark on historical research. Though he had no training at all in methods of research, he ventured (fortified by the counsel of Thomas Shankland) upon an inquiry into the beginnings of Dissent in Wales, and presented himself at Lambeth Palace library, whose librarian at the time was Dr. Claude Jenkins. Jenkins was not a man who believed in dry-nursing a raw researcher, but his sharp tongue licked Richards into pretty good shape; as a result, the tyro produced a long series of substantial books, beginning with The Puritan Movement in Wales (1923) and ending with Wales under the Indulgence (1928); their publication was ensured by substantial prizes and grants awarded him by the National Eisteddfod, and they were accompanied by long essays on the period, printed without thought of expense by Sir Vincent Evans in the Cymmrodorion periodicals. In this respect, Richards might well be regarded as lucky-but let us not forget his own long poring over his materials, in a schoolmaster's scant