Welsh Journals

Welsh Bibliographical Society Annual Meeting, 1944 THIS year the Society's ANNUAL MEETING was held at the village of Llandybie in Carmarthenshire on Friday, August 11th. It being National Eisteddfod week, the district was rather crowded, accommodation somewhat difficult to obtain, and transport so unpromising (with lack of petrol for private cars) that many of our distant members had to forego the journey-though several enthusiastic book-lovers braved the excursion from North Wales, and even Liverpool sent its quota. This was our first attempt to hold the Annual Meeting in a village; but the results, despite cloying drawbacks of space and time, were in some respects notable. It was a district traditionally attuned to the arts of literature, where song (as Carmen Sylva," the Queen of Roumania, once declared at a North Wales Eisteddfod) had a throne and the bard a crown." Literary men of no mean calibre and Welsh poets of distinction have hailed from that limestone and stone-coal region. Ecclesiastical scholars too, like the late distinquished member of this Society, Canon John Fisher, B.D., of the St. Asaph cathedral library, and Canon Jackson of the same diocese, together with several notable Nonconformist ministers, drew their mother's milk here at the shrine of St. Tybie--one of the remarkable female figures of the Welsh Saints' Calendar. It must be this sense of a notable tradition that inspired the people of Llandybie and the neighbouring Amman Valley area-where poets lurk in every bush and every other collier's stall claims a writer of parts or an aspirant in native song-to lay claim to this year's National Eisteddfod and its satellite conferences. The call of the blood was clear. At Ammanford, hard by, the bard Watcyn Wyn reigned for a generation as the head of a school for authors and poet-preachers-the most remarkable of its kind perhaps that Wales has known. Many notable pupils of that school have passed away, but its halo remains like a sweet incense over the meditations of the people. Eloquent testimony to the grip of this modern tradition was given by two old pupils of the school-