About

I am a biographer, historian, and cultural commentator specialising in Welsh rural history, family memory, and the moral worlds that shaped upland communities from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth. My work explores how Nonconformity, respectability, and resilience forged the identities of ordinary people whose experiences are often absent from formal historical narratives. Through detailed family biographies and wider studies of civic and social life, I seek to recover the structures of belief, duty, and community that sustained rural Wales across generations.

Formation and early influences

A formative part of my childhood was spent at Stokesay Court, where I grew up surrounded by a dense concentration of historical memory, material culture, and lived tradition. Sir Philip Magnus-Allcroft encouraged my early interest in history and gave me a lasting sense of custodianship, the idea that the past carries responsibilities as well as stories. This early immersion in archives and historic landscapes shaped my enduring interest in how families transmit values, identity, and memory, and how history survives not only in documents, but in place, habit, and lived experience.

Research and expertise

My research spans Welsh farming dynasties, chapel-centred communities, and the wider social history of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, including middle-class identity, civic leadership, and moral culture. I draw on decades of archival research, oral testimony, and primary sources, combining rigorous scholarship with an accessible narrative style that brings local history into meaningful dialogue with national themes.

Alongside my Welsh historical work, I have developed a specialism in the Victorian and Edwardian country house and landed estate. I examine how households functioned as moral and managerial systems, shaped by inheritance and stewardship, domestic labour, hierarchy, and the rhythms of estate governance. This dual perspective, rural Wales and the country house, allows me to explore how different communities navigated duty, respectability, and moral expectation across the long nineteenth century.

Leadership and organisational culture

I also write on leadership, governance, and organisational behaviour, examining how trust, power, and moral culture shape modern institutions. My books The Trust Trap and Toxic Workplace explore the lived experience of individuals navigating dysfunctional systems, and the conditions under which organisations uphold, or betray, their responsibilities. This work reflects my belief that institutional failures are rarely merely administrative, they are cultural.

Selected publications

Voices from the Uplands: The Davies Family and the Soul of Rural Wales
Murder in the Marches: A Chronicle of Montgomeryshire, Merionethshire, and Radnorshire 1805–1910
Faith, Service, and Respectability: A Historical Biography of the Shorto Family, 1680–1997
From Fields to Railways: The Jenkins Family and the Making of Working-Class Britain

I also write articles and commentary on Welsh history, heritage, leadership, and archival preservation, including for Who Do You Think You Are? magazine and Nation.Cymru.

Recognition and engagement

I am an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (AFRHistS), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society (FRAS), and a Fellow of the Institute of Leadership (FIoL). I am also a member of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion.

Beyond publishing, I advocate for the preservation of Welsh Nonconformist chapel records and rural burial registers, fragile archives essential to understanding our collective past, and I work with archives, heritage bodies, and community groups to strengthen access and long-term care.

Contact

I welcome enquiries from readers, researchers, and organisations interested in Welsh history, family archives, cultural heritage, leadership, governance, and the social history of the Victorian and Edwardian country house.

Please feel free to get in touch via my Contact page.