Welsh Journals

OBITUARIES PROFESSOR EMERITUS D SIMON EVANS, MA, BD, BLitt, DLitt 29 May 1921 4 March 1998 In the death of Professor D Simon Evans, Carmarthenshire has lost a very distinguished son, and Wales one of its most outstanding scholars. I mention his connection with Carmarthenshire first because, like many of us, the place of his birth and childhood had a decisive influence on his character and career. He was born in the little village of Llanfynydd, some nine miles from Llandeilo and five from Dryslwyn. It was there he first went to school yr ysgol ddyddiol, the day-school, as we used to call it and to Sunday School in the Calvinistic Chapel where he and his brother (now Professor Emeritus) D Ellis Evans and their parents spent a considerable amount of their time, participating in a culture superficially different from mine in a coal-mining village not very far away, yet fundamentally the same, thoroughly Welsh and thoroughly Nonconformist. It was there at a very early age he felt the call to become a minister of the gospel. From the primary school at Llanfynydd he went to the grammar school at Llandeilo, becoming 'head boy' before he left to enter the University of Wales, Swansea, where he won the Mary Towyn Jones Scholarship, and where he graduated in Greek and Latin in 1942 and with first class honours in Welsh in 1943. He remained at Swansea as a research student on a University of Wales studentship for a year, but then proceeded to the United Theological College of his denomination at Aberystwyth where he graduated as Bachelor of Divinity in 1947 after a three- year course. From Aberystwyth he went to Jesus College, Oxford, for the session 1947-8, but by October 1948 he was back at the University College of Wales, Swansea, as assistant lecturer in the Welsh department (and for a few years as honorary lecturer in Hebrew). Evidently the Professor of Welsh, Henry Lewis, had been impressed by his former student's exceptional ability and was anxious to give him the opportunity to share in his own enthusiasm for research into the grammar and syntax of the Welsh language. From Swansea, Simon Evans went as Professor of Welsh to University College, Dublin