Cylchgronau Cymru

ROBERT JONES, ROTHERHITHE 6 January 1809 28 March 1879 ROBERT JONES, vicar of All Saints church, Rotherhithe, London, a popular and convivial character, was one of the most active supporters of Welsh L cultural and educational movements in the second half of the nineteenth century. He was a notable book-collector who built up an unrivalled personal working collection of Welsh literature together with primary manuscript sources for his main area of research, the life and works of the eighteenth-century poet Goronwy Owen. The collection is an indication of the interests of a committed and cultured Welsh Anglican priest in the period ca 1850-70s but it is of particular importance in Welsh library history in that it was purchased complete on his death by the recently established Swansea Public Library to form the nucleus of its Welsh library. It remains a separate collection in that library. Robert Jones, the eldest of five children three sons and two daughters was born in Llawr-y-cwm, near Llanfyllin, Montgomeryshire, 6 January 1809. The family were members of the Independent chapel at Llanfyllin where Robert was baptized (as would be his younger siblings) on Sunday 15 January 1809. They were an old Montgomeryshire family hailing from Meifod: Thomas Griffiths Jones, 'Cyffin' (1834-84), the local historian and antiquary of Llansanffraid, was Robert's cousin. His father, also Robert Jones,and his mother Jane,are described in Bye-gones, April 1879,194, as 'well-to-do persons in the town and of sterling character', holding 'a respectable middle-class position' in the neighbourhood. These words are capable of bearing almost any meaning but they suggest that Robert Jones senior was not a professional man but may have been a well- established merchant or farmer. But whatever his position may have been the young Robert was in no way inhibited from mixing with all classes and types in the small market-town of Llanfyllin. During his youth he got to know the old town and its history and, more importantly, to make the acquaintance of many of the characters of the town, its folk poets and story-tellers, in popular meeting- places like the smithy and shoemaker's shop and so to learn something of the local literary tradition. Robert Jones never lost his affection for Llanfyllin and its Welsh life. It has not proved possible to trace the sketches of Llanfyllin, 'Old Scenes and New' which he is said to have written ca 1845, but one can get a taste of what the area meant to him in another series of articles which he wrote towards the end of his life in 1875-77 on the poets and patrons of Montgomeryshire (or more broadly Powys-land). In one of these essays he recalls the road from Llanfyllin to his home village: