Ffeil NLW MS 12061C. - Album

Edward Owen Davies, Calvinistic Methodist minister and author, was born in Betws Gwerfyl Goch. He began his ministerial and theological training at the University College of Wales Aberystwyth in 1885 before continuing his studies at Mansfield College, Oxford, then at universities in Bonn, Heidelberg, Gottingen and Kiel. He was ordained in 1894 and ministered in Liverpool before being appointed lecturer at Bala Theological College in 1897, where he remained for the next ten years. He delivered the 1913 'Davies Lecture' on 'The Miracles of Jesus'. In 1919 he took up the post of general secretary of the reconstuction commission of the North Wales Association; Davies's work for the commission culminated in the guidance through the church's courts and the final passing through Parliament in 1933 of the Bill to amend the constitution of the church and to enlarge its powers . He served as moderator of the North Wales Association in 1922 and 1935 and as moderator of the General Assembly in 1928. From 1924 to 1926 he was secretary of the joint committee which prepared the Calvinistic and Wesleyan Methodist hymn-book. He died at Bangor in 1936.

John Glyn Davies (1870-1953), a Celtic scholar, was born in Liverpool, the son of John Davies, a tea merchant, and his wife Gwen, the daughter of John Jones (1796-1857) of Tal-y-sarn, Caernarfonshire, a celebrated Methodist preacher. He received his education at the Liverpool Institute, and worked for two sailing boat companies before being employed in 1899 as librarian of the Welsh Library of the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, which was intended to form the nucleus of a national library of Wales. He left in 1907 for Liverpool University's Celtic Department, where he was head of department from 1920 until his retirement in 1936. His published works include collections of songs for children, Cerddi Huw Puw (1923), Cerddi Robin Goch (1935) and Cerddi Portinllaen (1936), many of which are based on sailors' songs he had heard during his youth, and a posthumous book of poems, Cerddi Edern (1955). He assembled the Tanycastell collection of papers, books and paintings relating to his ancestral Davies and Jones families, particularly John Jones of Tal-y-sarn (1796-1857), and manuscripts of Welsh poetry, including the Henblas manuscript and Gwallter Mechain manuscripts.