The Reminiscences of Mrs Ruth Evans J Graham Jones (PDF 96

THE REMINISCENCES OF MRS RUTH EVANS In June 2008, Mrs Pamela Ellis of Aberystwyth very kindly donated to the Welsh Political Archive at the National Library a file of correspondence and papers accumulated by her late husband Dr E. L. Ellis (1922-2008), the author of a magisterial biography of Dr Thomas Jones published by the University of Wales Press in 1992. During the initial stages of his research work, between 1978 and 1982, Dr Ellis had approached some of TJ’s contemporaries who were still alive, requesting them to pen their personal reminiscences of Dr Jones. Those who consented included David Astor (son of Lady Astor), Ruth Evans (widow of Ivor Leslie Evans, former Principal of the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth), A. J. Sylvester, Lady Eirene White (TJ’s daughter) and Marlene Yeo. These typescript recollections have now been designated as NLW ex 2563. Ifor (or Ivor) Leslie Evans (1897-1952) served as Principal of the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, from 1934 until his early death. 1 A native of Aberdare in the south Wales valleys, and the son of the famous musician W. J. Evans, he received his early education at Wycliffe College, Stonehouse, and also studied in France and Germany. At the beginning of the First World War, Evans was arrested in Bavaria as a suspected Russian spy and was imprisoned at Ruhelen prison camp for the duration of hostilities. It was here, ironically, that he fully mastered the Welsh language, a commitment which then saw him change his name from ‘Ivor’ to ‘Ifor’. Upon his release from Ruhelen, he travelled extensively in Europe and spent a brief period in the coal trade at Swansea (‘selling coal’ as he himself subsequently put it). At the rather late age of twenty-three, he then enrolled at St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1920. Here he was to achieve a first class in the Economics tripos in Part I in 1921 and an upper second in the History tripos in Part II in 1922. In the same year he was appointed a lecturer in Economic History there and was elected a fellow of the college in 1923. He was also elected Whewell Scholar in International Law. He was to remain at Cambridge for fourteen years – until his appointment at Aberystwyth in 1934. For five years Ifor Evans also earned his living as a part-time lecturer at King’s College, London, and he was also a visiting lecturer at the Graduate School of Economics at Washington DC and a visiting professor at the University of Geneva. He was a regular contributor to the columns of The Economist , was a member of a League of Nations commission on economic conditions in Austria, and travelled widely in eastern Europe and in Africa, partly in order to pursue his researches in agricultural economics and colonial administration. Among Evans’s many publications were The Agrarian Revolution in 16 Rumania (1924), The British in Tropical Africa (1929) and Native Policy in Southern Africa (1934). The range of his talents and interests was indeed considerable. Quite apart from his extensive teaching commitments at Cambridge and elsewhere, Ifor L. Evans also participated extensively in the administrative work at St John’s College and in the management of its estates, serving as secretary to the college council and deputy to the Senior Bursar. Such was the richness and depth of experience which Evans brought to the position of Principal at Aberystwyth when he succeeded Sir Henry Stuart Jones in 1934. Here his basic contribution was to be three-fold: prudent financial management, which enabled him substantially to reduce the debts of the university college and attract valuable long-term benefactions; the initial planning and development of a range of new buildings and facilities on Penglais hill; and a careful nurturing of agriculture as an academic discipline within the university college. On three critical occasions he also served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wales and, crucially, he was for many years Chairman of the University Estates Committee (which served all four constituent university colleges in Wales) at a time when substantial sums became available as a result of the provisions of the disestablishment and disendowment of the Welsh church in 1920. Four years into his term of office as Principal, I. L. Evans had married, on 11 November 1938, Ruth Jolles of Hamburg, who was eighteen years his junior. In old age, Ruth Evans vividly recalled the ‘much head-ache and a great deal of work’ caused her husband by the manifold complexities of the disendowment provisions of the Welsh Church Act, 1920. She wrote, ‘He often sat in his large arm chair in the lounge in Laura Place in a veritable sea of notes, strewn about his feet on the floor. Having managed to reduce the considerable debt the college was burdened with, when he first became Principal in 1934, by war economy, additional grants, donations and gifts, he was determined to start the post-war period without deficits, and gave his mind to this with whole-hearted energy’. 2 Then she continued: Amongst our regular visitors was Dr. Thomas Jones, or T.J. as he was known to us. He fully shared Ifor’s work for and enthusiastic interest in Aberystwyth College. An old student himself, he did much to enrich the College. He had an outstanding ability to encourage wealthy benefactors to make large private donations for the advancement of learning. His visionary zeal was widespread and entirely successful, but it always returned again to his old alma mater. When in 1944 Lord Davies the President of Aberystwyth College died, T.J. was unanimously elected as his successor, Ifor and he were ever more closely drawn together. 3 Dr Thomas Jones CH (1870-1955) was a native of Rhymney in north-west Monmouthshire. He had been educated at the Upper Rhymney board school and Lewis School, Pengam, but at the age of just fourteen had started work as a clerk at the local ironworks. He had later entered the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 1890, but found to his intense 17 dismay that failure in mathematics meant that he could not graduate there. Several years later, in 1901, he was awarded a highly distinguished first class honours degree in Philosophy and Economics from the University of Glasgow. He was then appointed to a lectureship there, and in 1909 he took up the new position of Professor of Political Economy at Queen’s University, Belfast. But Wales, clearly, still beckoned, most notably in the form of persuasion from David Davies MP (Liberal, Montgomeryshire), who convinced TJ that he should take up the post of Secretary to the King Edward VII Welsh National Memorial Association, set up personally by Davies in an attempt to combat the dreaded ‘white peril’, tuberculosis. Subsequently, in 1912, Jones moved on to become Secretary of the Cardiff- based Welsh National Insurance Commission, in which position he quickly earned the respect and admiration of his fellow Welshman David Lloyd George, since 1908 the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Asquith’s government. It was largely at LG’s instigation that Tom Jones became, from 1916, first, assistant secretary, and later, deputy secretary to the Cabinet secretariat. Here he was to remain until 1930, serving four successive Prime Ministers – D. Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Stanley Baldwin and J. Ramsay MacDonald. In 1919, however, a particularly cruel rebuff awaited TJ. Having been rejected for the position of principal at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, Cardiff, a short time before (a rejection which did not particularly vex him), Jones had clearly set his sights on appointment to a similar position at his alma mater, Aberystwyth, a goal which seemed realistic following the death of the long-serving Principal, T. F. Roberts, in August 1919. But, although widely supported and encouraged by an array of distinguished academics and other public figures in Wales and beyond, Jones eventually lost out to J. H. Davies of Cwrt-mawr, Llangeitho, Registrar of the college since 1906, and enormously influential and respected throughout his native Cardiganshire. The taste of rejection was bitter indeed for TJ. It was a cruel snub which he never forgave or forgot for the rest of his days, even after he had been appointed President of the College at Aberystwyth in 1944. But Jones’s dedication to public life and service continued. Following his retirement from the Cabinet secretariat in 1930, his main preoccupation was to be a fifteen-year stint as Secretary to the Pilgrim Trust, a well-financed venture set up to tackle the harsh plight of the unemployed at the height of the depression and also to protect the British heritage. Jones was also an active member of the Unemployment Assistance Board and several committees of the National Council of Social Service. Other preoccupations included unstinting support for the activities of the Workers’ Educational Association and, above all, the establishment in 1927 of Coleg Harlech, a residential adult education college for men of mature age in north-west Wales. 18 TJ’s selection (Was this “selection” or “election”?) in 1944 as President at Aberystwyth inevitably brought him into regular contact with the well-established Principal there, Ifor L. Evans. In the next year, having recently accepted an invitation from the Harvard University Press to pen a full-length biography of his old associate, the recently deceased David Lloyd George, Jones had resolved to take up permanent residence in Aberystwyth, where he might take full advantage of the magnificent resources of the National Library of Wales. Now he was truly to be ‘a President of the College in residence’.

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