Welsh Journals

Notes and Queries John Howells of St Athan In his recent study of the folklore of Glamorgan,' Allan James of the University of Glamorgan has drawn attention to a significant group of three men who, in the 1890s, set out systematically to collect the folk customs, folk poetry and local history of the county. They saw the urgent need to rescue and record such traditional lore which was then rapidly fading from memory as the social life of Glamorgan was transformed from predominantly rural to predominantly urban and industrial. Thomas Christopher Evans (Cadrawd) of Llangynwyd, David Jones of Wallington, Surrey (a native of Llanblethian), and John Howells of St Athan were the three. There were others too who were independently pursuing similar antiquarian interests such as Charles Wilkins of Merthyr, the Revd William Thomas (Glanffrwd), a native of Llanwynno, and Emma Mary Paslieu (Marie Trevelyan) of Llantwit Major, all remarkably prolific authors in the later decades of the nineteenth century. Most of these figures are well enough known, and can be read about in standard works of reference and elsewhere, but one, John Howells, is not so easily tracked down. Readers of Morgannwg may like to know something about him. John Howells was born in 1822 at the Green Farm in Sigingstone, midway between Llantwit Major and Cowbridge. His parents were prosperous farmers who lived in several local parishes before finally settling in Wick in the late 1820s; it was there that their only son spent much of his childhood. It is possible that he attended the Eagle School in Cowbridge, as his cousin William Howells (who became principal of Trefeca College) certainly did. But at the age of twelve John was apprenticed to a draper in Merthyr perhaps he was too delicate (as an asthmatic) to be a farmer. He left Merthyr about 1838 and served in drapers' shops in Cardiff and London for some years before establishing his own business in the Mall, Clifton, Bristol. Retiring because of ill health, he came back to Glamorgan in the 1870s to live with his sister,