Welsh Journals

OLD BRECONSHIRE FARMHOUSES: An Exhibition at Brecknock Museum, March-April 1998 Reports on the exihibitions mounted by the Brecknock Museum are usually confined to the columns of the local newspaper and to the regular summaries delivered by the Curator to the Executive Council. However, the exhibition held in the spring of 1998 was exceptional in many respects; it was an historic event warranting a short article in this journal. Anyone who has tried recently to buy volumes IX to XIII or volume XVI of Brycheiniog will have been disappointed and success will entail a long, patient search of second-hand bookshops. The reason for this scarcity is simple: those volumes included the series of articles on 'The Houses of Breconshire' by S. R. Jones F.S.A. and J. T. Smith F.S.A. Between 1963 and 1972 a unique record of the domestic architecture of this county was compiled and published; unique not just to Breconshire, but without parallel in Britain. The exhibition held in 1998 was to celebrate and commemorate this work and to bring it before an audience wider than the readership of Brycheiniog. The study of churches, castles, country houses and official buildings has a long history but the buildings of the majority of the population received scant attention until about fifty years ago. Wales can claim pre-eminence in the study of vernacular architecture. In 1946 the Earl of Plymouth offered St Fagan's castle and the land adjoining as a site for a folk museum. The first curator of this innovative museum was Dr Iorwerth Peate who had published a seminal book in 1940. The Welsh House was an exploration of the houses of the ordinary people of Wales.' The author subtitled the work 'A Study in Folk Culture' and the book looked at the forms of construction, the materials and the functions of the buildings. Between 1951 and 1954 Sir Cyril Fox and Lord Raglan wrote their three-volume study of Monmouthshire Houses. The first of Pevsner's Buildings of England (later to include Scotland and Wales) series was also published in 1951.3 The early volumes concentrated almost exclusively on churches and larger houses, later volumes acknowledged the importance of vernacular architecture but only to a limited extent. However Breconshire was keeping Wales at the forefront of the study of the people's houses. In 1959 the Breconshire Education Committee organised a course for teachers on the subject 'Looking at Buildings'. Whoever invited the lecturers to lead the course was remarkably prescient and a superb talent-spotter. The three men he chose were Mr Peter Smith, Mr A.J. Taylor and Dr. Ralegh Radford all of whom became very eminent in this field. A year later the Education Authority .was responsible for the publication and distribution to the schools of the county of The Breconshire Atlas, an invaluable guide today for students of local history. In 1963 Mr Deiniol Williams, as Chief Education Officer for the county, was responsible for inviting Messrs Jones and Smith to undertake their work on the domestic buildings of Breconshire.