Cylchgronau Cymru

Chwiliwch trwy dros 450 o deitlau a 1.2 miliwn o dudalennau

CASTLE IN THE MAKING CASGLIAD CASTELL GWYN EVERY man born of Woman (and there are a great many of us) with a bee in his bonnet, five bats in his belfry, or worst fate of all- a writer's itch in his fingers, may well come to feel, with the passing of the years, the need to write one more piece if his oeuvre and image are to show as rich and rounded as he would have them. Again, some may enjoy a succession of 'one- mores', and happy indeed is the man who is permitted to complete them. I speak with authority, as one who is repeatedly promising himself, if nobody else, just one more before the fingers wince and the memory falters. So what am I on about now? For what is there left after the Vikings, the English- language writers of twentieth-century Wales (i.e., the 'Anglo-Welsh' from, shall we say? Caradoc Evans and W. H. Davies to Dylan and Gwyn Thomas, Emlyn Williams, Rhys Davies and Alun Lewis, to the Jones brotherhood (including Arthur Machen) from Jack and David to Glyn and ahem! Gwyn, their sixty years of authorship apiece rich in confreres and peers), and last but not least, the Mabinogion? The answer: another pre-occupation of mine, in a very different vein: the gift of some 650 books, presently entitled Casgliad Castell Gwyn, which my wife Mair and I donated to the National Library of Wales in 1987, and some account of which may be of interest to the bibliophile and bookworm alike. I propose to begin at the beginning, and deal with the Castell's foundations, probably unknown to everyone save myself, before proceeding to the visible superstructure up on Penglais. We start with the name and style of the Casgliad's first benefactress, but for whom, quite simply, there would be no Casgliad Castell Gwyn. This was Alice Rees Jones. Born in Cardiff on March 8, 1904, she married Gwyn Jones, then a postgraduate student at Cardiff on December 4, 1928. She died, greatly loved and deeply missed by all who knew her, on the thirteenth day of January, 1979. Eight months later Gwyn married Mair, the widow of his longtime friend and Mabinogion-partner, Professor Thomas Jones. About this I could write its own One-More, with its Capital Letters in gold leaf, and hope one day to do so, but for the present I must keep within the white walls of Castell Gwyn, and record with equal pleasure and gratitude that when the Collection that would come to be known by that name, and was presented to the National Library of Wales in 1987, Mair (whilom N.L.W.) was fully participant in the gift. But the story of the Making as distinct from the Conveying of that gift has yet to be told, and it is to that pleasurable task that I now turn. Gwyn's first job, in September 1929, was as an English master at Wigan Grammar School, whence he could follow the fortunes of his fellow-countrymen Jim Sullivan and Billy Boston over on Central Park. That was, of course, when he