In May 2023, I travelled to Denbigh to the home of Gaynor Morgan Rees, where the personal collection of her close friend, R.M. (Bobi) Owen, awaited. I knew little of the contents of Bobi's collection before I arrived, except for a few mysterious hints that my manager, Dr Maredudd ap Huw, had dropped beforehand. I was greeted, therefore, by file upon file of material, meticulously collected and arranged by Bobi through his many years of research as a local Denbigh historian. Arranged alphabetically by surname, I found that each file contained numerous letters, postcards, and various documents by a staggeringly wide range of authors.
The scale of Bobi's work was made even more apparent when I began working on his collection back in the NLW. The authors ranged from some genuinely iconic figures of Welsh history, art and culture, and those beyond Wales too. Imagine my surprise, for instance, when turning from some files that contained great names such as Lewis Valentine and David Lloyd George to another with a letter dated 1580 from Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.
Women are also represented throughout Bobi’s collection, with some exciting examples such as Louisa Stuart Costello, Winifred Coombe-Tennant, and even a facsimile of a Charlotte Brontë letter, can be found in the files. Also, rather touchingly, a 1941 list of evacuees from Liverpool to Llangybi, Pencaenewydd, and Four Crosses was found amongst the items, which detailed the names and addresses of each child that came to the area to escape the horrors of the Blitz.
I thoroughly enjoyed working on Bobi's collection; I never knew what each file's next page would contain. Now that his work is ready for the Library's users to request and view, I have realised that it holds a rather unique place in my esteem for another reason. I first started on Bobi's incredible collection when I was a year into my Trainee Archivist role; two years later, and now qualified Archivist, I can look back and realise how lucky I was to begin my career with such a special and interesting contribution to the Library's repositories.
You can browse through Bobi Owen’s collection on our Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue.
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