The Rev'd Roy Fenn

The Society is grateful to W Lawrence Banks CBE DL for the following obituary.

Contrary to what many may think, Roy was not a Welshman by birth. He came from Purley in Surrey where he was born in 1933. He narrowly escaped a doodlebug that landed at the bottom of the garden and later a strafing by a German fighter on the beach at Torquay. Ironically he spent some of his teenage years in Kiel and Hamburg where his father was working; he was much affected by post-war poverty and deprivation and I am told that this was where he found his priestly vacation.

His enthusiasm for things Welsh may have come from his undergraduate days at Jesus College, Oxford, that his friend Jim Sinclair said that Roy chose because he liked the name. He went on to St Michael’s Llandaff Theological College. He took a Batchelor of Divinity degree in Oxford, studying ‘Celtic and Anglican Christianity in the Welsh Marches 600 AD to 800 AD’. He was ordained into the Church in Wales at Brecon Cathedral, and served as a curate in Swansea, Cardiff and Coity before becoming vicar of Glascwm with Rhulen, Colva and Cregina in 1963, where he served until 1974. His final appointment as parish priest was at the Letton and Byford group of parishes in the Diocese of Hereford. He devoted his life to the Middle March and especially to Radnorshire and Herefordshire in Gwalia, that portion of the county west of Offa’s Dyke. Indeed he might have given the same answer as was given by a witness at the County Court in Presteigne who, when asked if he was English or Welsh, said ‘I don’t know; I come from Radnorshire’. This is reflected in the title of his new history of Kington: A Border Janus: a Town Looking Into both England and Wales.

He had a distinguished academic career as both Head of Classics, Divinity and Sociology at Lady Hawkins School in Kington and later as tutor and senator for the Open University. But it will be as a historian that he will best be remembered: he was President of the Radnorshire Society, editor of the transactions for twenty years and President of the Cambrian Archaeological Association in 2004–5, where his Presidential address was on the contribution of R W Banks to the Association during the last half of the nineteenth century.

His books – of which there are more then twenty – covered a wide range of interests, from railways, chapels and quarries to local history. They were always produced to the highest academic standards, meticulously footnoted and drawing on original sources – many from the Banks archive held by the Hergest Trust, of which he was archivist for more than twenty years, following his retirement from Lady Hawkins School. No family archive can have been better cared for. He was a familiar and much-liked figure in the estate even if on occasions a somewhat querulous one if he thought that the archives were not being given the attention they deserved.

He was a scholar of the highest quality and his biography of Radnor’s greatest son, Sir George Cornwall Lewis, is a masterpiece study of one of the nineteenth century’s most neglected politicians, even if he was not at all clear that he found him very congenial. One of his abiding interests was the interaction between religion, science and the social scene, typified by his history of the Herefordshire Bow Meeting Society, in which he explored the relationship between clerical members and those who had livings in their gift.

He was fascinated by my great grandfather, Richard William Banks, who, in the Darwinian age, found no contradiction between geology and the Tractarian restoration of Kington church. He was more than half in love with my great aunt, Margaret Alford, a Christian Socialist, a suffragette, a bluestocking to the core, the descendant of a distinguished clerical family and an early undergraduate at Girton College whose editions of Livy he used in his teaching without knowing who she was nor even her sex. His catalogue of her papers is a fitting memorial to both.

His talks were always illustrated by photographs, often taken by his colleague Jim Sinclair, that included numerous pictures of railway engines and stations. He travelled widely in preparing for his lectures, and Jim Sinclair said he knew the location of every McDonalds between Kington and Cardiff.

Later in life he became archivist and historian to Tarmac, through James Stirk, the Tarmac in-house lawyer. When Bill Bolsover moved to Aggregate Industries as Chairman, Roy became Company Chaplain and Historian and majored in his role as chaplain. Bill says that ‘Roy wanted to model this on the role of a Royal navy chaplain who was said to be “a friend to all on board”’. This, Roy felt, captured the vast scope of 12,000 employees in the UK and US from different creeds and backgrounds. In y opinion, and those within the company, he did excellently, attending all company employees’ funerals, of which there were many, and comforting those that were lost at that time of their lives.

Roy was a priest, a scholar and a gentleman in the nineteenth-century tradition that he admired so much. I and many others will miss him greatly now that we can no longer ‘ask Roy’.