Welsh Journals

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Notes and Comments SOURCE NOTE: The Diarist, David Griffith The diaries of David Griffith [1841-1910] are located in the library of University College of North Wales. Described in the appendix of The Dictionary of Welsh Biography by Dr Thomas Richards as "schoolmaster, cleric and diarist", there is an article on him by R 0 Roberts in Province XII (1961) 60-6. 113-6. Griffith was an uncertificated teacher for fourteen years before spending two years in study at St David's College, Lampeter. His long career as an assistant curate began at Aberdare in 1877 and took him to many parts of the dioceses of Llandaff and Bangor until his death at Cwmavon thirty-three years later, still unbeneficed. The manuscript diaries of David Griffith, written largely in Welsh, are an invaluable source for the history of the Church in Wales on the eve of Disestablishment, provided that one takes into account the hyper-sensitive character of the diarist himself, his taste for hyperbole and his capacity for quarrelling with people. Griffith was a contemporary of the more famous diarist Francis Kilvert who predeceased him. While Kilvert was writing lines that reflected the innocent charm of Bredwardine, Griffith was penning prose, often equally lyrical, that reflected the harsher landscape of Aberdare. Yet as a source of contemporary ecclesiastical opinion, David Griffith is hardly in the same league as the Revd John Griffith of Merthyr Tydfil. At the same time David Griffith, the Welsh diarist, deserves to be better known. From his diary at Gaerwen in 1884 comes the following quotation expressing Griffith's opinion of his parish- ioners: our heart feels for the poor old Church of England the cream of the parish she has lost entirely at Gaerwen, and only possesses a bigoted and wrangling band of self-conceited and densely ignorant malcontents from all the tribes of Israel". Griffith wrote in similar vein of the parishioners of Aberdare while he was assistant curate there. Although the nonconformists were numerically in the ascendancy at Aberdare, nothing could be further from the truth than that the Church had failed there. Yet in his diary for 29 June, 1880, Griffith recorded, "The Church at Aberdare is dormant". He disliked his clerical colleagues whom he regarded as Romanizing priests and he disliked the English congregation at St Elvan's Church. He