Emyr Wyn Jones, O.B.E., M.B. Ch.B., M.D., F.R.C.P., LL.D.

Emyr Jones, a son of the manse, was born on 23 May 1907 in Waunfawr on the Lleyn peninsular. He attended the county secondary school in Caernarvon and, a brilliant student at Liverpool University, graduated with first class honours in medicine and surgery in 1928 at the age of twenty-one, after winning numerous scholarships and prizes. He undertook further medical training in London and in 1938 joined the staff of the Liverpool Royal Infirmary, from which he retired as senior physician and head of the cardiology department in 1972. Quaker beliefs in pacifism and service to others had attracted him from an early age and, a committed member of the Society of Friends, Jones spent the war as consultant to the widely dispersed hospitals of Bangor, Rhyl and Wrexham, regularly visiting sick patients throughout the area on Sunday mornings. From 1953 he also taught medicine at Liverpool University, was director of cardiac studies there from 1966-72, and for a time chairman of the Faculty of Medicine. Bilingual in Welsh and English, Jones was a strong advocate of the wider use of Welsh in medical circles, believing the language to be at the heart of the national ethos. It was only during his long retirement spent, of course, in north Wales that Jones could pursue his interest in local history and folklore, on which he wrote elegantly in both languages. Always a private man, his new found leisure was jealously guarded but he nevertheless devoted much time to the National Eisteddfod and the Gorsedd of Bards (which, a rare honour, elected him an Honorary Bard as Emyr Feddyg); the University of Wales (which awarded him an LL.D. in 1987); the National Museum; the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion and the National Library, in which he was never happier. He was able to research and publish articles and books on Welsh medical men from the sixteenth century and the history of Welsh folk medicine; a biography of John Rowlands of Denbigh, better known as H M Stanley, the journalist who greeted Dr Livingstone at Ujiji in 1871; and a study of Wales’s first colony, Cambriol in Newfoundland, the failure of which in the early seventeenth century Jones attributed to the poor health of the settlers. During a visit to an exhibition at Bosworth Jones was dismayed to find that Henry Tudor’s Welsh background was not appropriately recognized and his book, Bosworth Field, was written to repair the omission. It came out in 1984 to mark the quincentenary of the battle and traces the progress of Henry Tudor from Harfleur to his landing point at Mill Bay on the northern shore of Milford Haven and his march along the Cardiganshire coast to Shrewsbury bearing the Red Dragon, the standard of Cadwaladr. Jones gives due prominence to Rhys ap Thomas of Dinefwr and the `great bande of soldiers’ he recruited to follow Henry and fight to establish the Tudor dynasty. It is a work of scholarship in which Jones elucidates the numerous references in Welsh poetry from Taliesin and Geoffrey of Monmouth to Henry Tudor as Mab Darogan, or national deliverer, `the son of prophecy’ who would restore to the Welsh the sovereignty of the Isle of Britain and deliver them from `such miserable servitudes as they piteously long stood in’. Naturally, music was important to Jones, particularly folk singing to the accompaniment of the harp, and he loved books. His splendid collection, which includes the early publications of the Gregynog Press, remains one of the most distinguished private libraries in the principality. He died on 14 January 1999.