Welsh Journals

To return to Jacob Hans, ancestor of our Radnorshire squire," he married a Yorkshire girl, Rachel Wadsworth. The youngest son of this marriage became Sir Wadsworth Busk, Treasurer of the Middle Temple, and for 20 years Attorney General in the Isle of Man, where all his sons received their early education, including the youngest, Hans, who was to become High Sheriff of Radnorshire. The home of Hans in Radnorshire, named by Mr. Stedman Davies as Glenalders, lies in the hills to the north of the Rhayader-Penybont road, some 31 miles from Rhayader. It is shown as Glenalder Hall on the one-inch Ordnance map No. 128 of 1947. Mr. Davies said that Hans Busk had leased the tithes of Nantmel, the parish in which Glenalders is situated, and surmised that he had taken the house in order to have a place where he could store his tithes of corn, etc. Colonel Busk, however, suggested that his original intention was to have a holiday home for his large and growing family. However this may have been, according to the D.N.B., he took an active interest in the business of the county, was made a Justice of the Peace, and, as already stated, became High Sheriff in 1837. How long he remained in the county is uncertain. None of his children is recorded as having been born at Glenalders, though we may infer that all of them spent some part of their early lives there. These included, besides Hans the younger, the pioneer of the Volunteer movement, of whose career Mr. Stedman Davies gave a full description, two others mentioned in the Dictionary of National Biography. For four members of one household to be named in the Dictionary is surely something of a record-at any rate, for Radnorshire. The other two were Julia Clara Pitt Byrne, whose husband owned and edited the Morning Post and Rachel Harrietta, the youngest child (1831-1907), who eventually lived in Rome and wrote on the folklore of Italy, Austria, and Spain. Our High Sheriff, Hans Busk the elder, was evidently a rich man. In addition to Glenalders, he owned in the 1830's a house at Brighton and another at Tunbridge Wells, and in later life owned or leased 8 Great Cumberland Place, London, where he died in 1862. The D. N. B. described him as a Radnorshire squire, as already noted, and stated that he published poems in the period 1814-34. Mr. Stedman Davies found an advertisement in a second-hand bookseller's catalogue offering for sale (at £ 20) a first edition of some of his poems dated 1814-19, and describing the author as "A Poetic Welsh Bard of Radnorshire." It would appear that Hans Busk, despite his many other contacts, cherished his connection with Radnorshire, and we may hope that his children carried through their lives happy memories of the wild and beautiful surroundings of their early Radnorshire home.