Tag: books
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Hugh Wynn Wilding Jones (1896–1918)
Education, Inheritance, and the Long Road to Dojran The life of Hugh Wynn Wilding Jones sits at the intersection of Edwardian inheritance, elite education, and the totalising demands of the First World War. His story is not merely that of a young officer killed in action, but of a man whose life trajectory, intellectual formation,…
antonydaviesfrsa
Battle of Dojran, books, British Army officers, Corpus Christi College Oxford, Edwardian Britain, family history, First World War, Genealogy, Glandwr Hall, Great War, Heirs and inheritance, history, Hugh Wynn Wilding-Jones, Junior officers, Lewis gun, military biography, Officer Training Corps, Oxford University, Postcards from the Great War, Private correspondence, Remembering the fallen, Royal Welsh Fusiliers, Salonika Campaign, Tonbridge School, War illness and convalescence, Welsh landed families, ww1 -
The Welsh Blood Behind an England Captain, Arthur Owen Jones, and Why His Story Still Matters
There is something quietly extraordinary about the story of Arthur Owen Jones, one of the most gifted cricketers of the Edwardian era, a man who captained England, broke county records, and reshaped the game through sheer athletic intelligence, yet is now far less widely remembered than he deserves. What makes his story even more personal,…
antonydaviesfrsa
Arthur Owen Jones, Ashes history, Barmouth, books, British identity, British sporting history, Cambridge University cricket, cricket, Cricket fielding, Cricket history, Dolgellau, Edwardian Britain, Edwardian cricket, England cricket captain, England v Australia, English cricket, family history, Genealogy, Glandwr, Great War era, Gully position, history, Jesus College Cambridge, Jones family, Merionethshire history, Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club, Nottinghamshire cricket, Pneumonia, Social history, Sporting biography, Sporting heritage, sports, test-cricket, Tuberculosis history, Victorian Britain, Victorian sport, Welsh ancestry, Welsh diaspora, Welsh family history, Welsh roots, Wisden Cricketer of the Year -
Off the Rails: Why This Book Matters
Off the Rails: The Story of Crewe Steam Train Driver Alfred Jenkins began not as a publishing project but as an act of recovery, an attempt to give structure and permanence to a life that had been lived with discipline, endurance, and quiet dignity, and then almost lost to time. Alfred Jenkins (1882–1956) was my…
antonydaviesfrsa
Biography, books, British railways, British social history, Crewe history, Crewe railway history, Edwardian Britain, Everyday lives, family history, Footplate life, Genealogy, Great Western Railway, Hidden histories, history, Industrial Britain, Interwar Britain, Labour history, Microhistory, Occupational history, Railway history, Railway towns, Railway workers, Railwaymen, Social history, Steam locomotives, Steam railway, travel, Twentieth-century Britain, Victorian industry, working-class history, World War One home front, World War Two home front -
Richard Emmett, and the Value of an Ordinary Life
In the 1880s, a retired soldier sat down to write a short book for his children. He did not imagine an audience beyond his family, nor did he attempt to shape his life into a story of heroism or distinction. He wrote, instead, to explain himself. To account for absence. To leave behind a record…
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A Christmas in the Victorian Welsh Uplands
In the high country of mid and north Wales, where the hills folded into one another like great, weathered blankets and the lanes were little more than tracks worn by generations of hooves and boots, Christmas in the Victorian era arrived quietly. There was no sense of sudden abundance, no dramatic break from the rhythm…
antonydaviesfrsa
19th century Wales, Agrarian Wales, books, Calennig, christmas, Christmas in Wales, Cultural memory, fiction, history, Mari Lwyd, Mid Wales, Nonconformist Wales, North Wales, Noson Gyflaith, Plygain, Rural communities, Rural winter life, Upland farming, Victorian Christmas, Victorian domestic life, Victorian Wales, Welsh Chapels, Welsh Christmas traditions, Welsh countryside, Welsh farmhouse life, Welsh folk traditions, Welsh rural life, Welsh Social History, Welsh uplands, writing -
Sir Philip Magnus-Allcroft: The Gentleman Who Inspired a Historian
When I trace the beginnings of my love of history, I always return to one figure — Sir Philip Magnus-Allcroft of Stokesay Court, the elderly baronet who, quite unknowingly, set a child on the path to becoming a historian. I met him in the great Shropshire house that dominated my early world. He would summon…
antonydaviesfrsa
20th century biography, AFRHistS, Anglo-Jewish heritage, Antony David Davies, art, biographical writing, books, British biography, British historians, childhood inspiration, Edwardian England, Elizabeth Longford, English country houses, FRSA, Gladstone biographer, historian memoir, historians of character, historical reflection, history, inspiration, intellectual formation, literary biography, Ludlow history, mentorship, moral history, New College Oxford, Onibury Church, rural gentry, Shropshire heritage, Shropshire history, Sir Philip Magnus-Allcroft, Stokesay Court, Victorian and Edwardian era, writing -
Teenage Years on the Doldowlod Hall Estate
The mid-1990s were years of transition in rural Wales. Farming incomes were under strain, country houses were redefining their purpose, and politics in Britain seemed poised between the certainties of Thatcherism and the coming landslide of New Labour. For me, those years were marked most vividly by the Doldowlod Hall estate on the upper reaches…
antonydaviesfrsa
1990s-wales, books, british-politics, conservative-party-history, country-estate-life, country-house-history, doldowlod-hall, family history, fiction, forestry-and-woodland-management, garden, gardening, gibson-watt-family, historical-memoir, lady-diana-gibson-watt, Local history, lord-david-gibson-watt, Mid Wales, personal-history, Powys, rhayader, river-wye, rural-heritage, sir-philip-magnus-allcroft, Social history, teenage-memories, Welsh history, welsh-country-houses, writing
Antony David Davies FIoL FRSA FRAS AFRHistS MCMI 