In 2011, Chris Williams was instrumental in serving to my husband, Ian Pricey, and me to get our e book William Downing Evans: Poetry and Poverty in Nineteenth Century Newport revealed by the South Wales File Society, devoted to selling the area’s historical past. A cheerful and charming man, on the time Chris was professor of Welsh historical past at Swansea College, and the SWRS’s common editor.
WDE, as we referred to as Ian’s great-grandfather, was a poet, painter and composer with the pen-name of Leon – from Caerleon, the place he was born in 1811 – who appeared commonly in newspapers between 1830 and 1890 as a chronicler of occasions, and as a poetic obituarist of those that died earlier than their time, together with members of his circle of relatives. He made sure that different lives mattered and Chris, as a historian, appreciated that.
