Tag: Social history
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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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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 -
Tea and Waterfalls: John and Jane Waters of the Llyfnant Valley
By Antony David Davies FRSA John and Jane Waters, my grandmother’s aunt and uncle, stand with their daughter at the doorway of Tymawr in the Llyfnant Valley — welcoming Edwardian visitors to their farmhouse tea room, nestled in the peaceful hills near Machynlleth. In the remote folds of the Llyfnant Valley in north-west Montgomeryshire—where waterfalls…
antonydaviesfrsa
19th-century-wales, 20th-century-wales, ancestry, cwmrhaiadr, edwardian-wales, family history, farmhouse-tea-rooms, Genealogy, history, ireland, john-waters, llyfnant-valley, local-heritage, Machynlleth, Rural Wales, Social history, tea-rooms-of-wales, travel, tymawr, victorian-wales, waters-family, Welsh history, welsh-tourism-history -
Saving the soul of Wales: why we must act now to preserve our family and chapel records
By Antony David Davies FRSA It is hard to overstate just how close we are to losing the living memory of rural Wales. Across our hills and valleys — from the sheep farms of Montgomeryshire to the slate towns of Gwynedd and the quiet chapels of Ceredigion — traces of family and community life are…
antonydaviesfrsa
Archive crisis, Call to action, Ceredigion, Chapel registers, Community history, Community memory, Cultural policy, Digitisation, Family archives, Family photographs, Farming families, Genealogy, Gwynedd, Heritage preservation, Historical advocacy, Historical memory, Historical records, Industrial heritage, Local history, Montgomeryshire, National memory, Nonconformist chapels, Oral history, Oral traditions, People’s Collection Wales, Public history, Rural Wales, Senedd, Slate industry history, Social history, Upland voices, Welsh archives, Welsh culture, Welsh Government, Welsh heritage, Welsh history, Welsh identity, Welsh Nonconformity, Welsh storytelling
Antony David Davies FIoL FRSA FRAS AFRHistS MCMI 