Where are you from? I grew up in Pontardawe in the Swansea valley and am now living in Penarth.
What is the subject of your doctoral research project? I am researching landownership changes in the lordship of Gower between 1750 and 1850, particularly the area formerly designated as Gower Anglicana. I started my project in 2021.
What are your main research interests? Landownership, landed estates, parish and community histories.
Tell us about your career so far and what led you to ISWE and your doctoral research project? I studied history and economic history at Manchester Polytechnic as an undergraduate and subsequently local history at diploma and Master’s levels with Cardiff University. I was a career civil servant at the Welsh Office and the Welsh Government working in various policy divisions. Having given two papers at ISWE events in Cardiff and at the National Botanic Garden of Wales in Llanarthne, I was attracted to becoming a doctoral researcher with ISWE, particularly after my volume, entitled The Parish of Llangyfelach: landed estates, farms and families, was published in 2018.
What is your favourite thing about ISWE and being a doctoral researcher? Being part of a like-minded cohort exploring an undervalued but highly significant and wide-ranging aspect of Welsh historiography.
What is your proudest achievement since joining ISWE? Putting my previous local history knowledge, research and methodologies to the test.
What is your favourite historical period and why? Modern history, centred on the period 1750 to 1850, when exciting new quantitative sources such as census enumerators’ returns and tithe documentation become nationally and publicly available allowing deep localised and comparative research.
Your favourite place in Wales? Swansea, because of its eclecticism and heritage as well as it being exceptionally well served by generations of historians.
Can you recommend any books, TV shows, podcasts, blogs that you have enjoyed recently? Swansea’s Royal Institution and Wales’s First Museum (edited by Helen Hallesy with Gerald Gabb), published by UWP in February 2024, is a tour de force which focuses on the Royal Institution of South Wales and Swansea Museum (Dylan Thomas’s famous ‘museum which should have been in a museum’) as well as Swansea itself. Gower Revisited (edited by Malcolm and Ruth Ridge), published in 2023, is a volume celebrating seventy-five years of the Gower Society and contains a feast of extracts from the Society’s journal, Gower. (I have reviewed both books for Morgannwg, journal of the Glamorgan History Society). The Origins of Manchester: from Roman conquest to Industrial Revolution by Alan Kidd, Carnegie Publishing, 2023, a succinct but masterly account of Manchester up to 1780. In terms of TV - PBS America’s political documentaries; podcasts - Americast (BBC); and blogs - Roath Local History Society.
What are your hobbies or favourite extracurricular activities? Have you got any other interesting projects on the go? Visiting Manchester, where ‘history is all around’, despite its rapid, ever-changing nature. Ditto Liverpool. Giving talks to various societies and other organisations although some degree of disengagement is necessary after forty-three years! My other interests include walking (and leading walks), reading, music and watching live cricket (all too rare these days). I am currently co-authoring a fourth pictorial volume on Pontardawe and district.
Contact Jeff:
jfc21ryy@bangor.ac.uk
