In 2011, Chris Williams was instrumental in helping my husband, Ian Dear, and me to get our book William Downing Evans: Poetry and Poverty in Nineteenth Century Newport published by the South Wales Record Society, dedicated to promoting the region’s history. A cheerful and charming man, at the time Chris was professor of Welsh history at Swansea University, and the SWRS’s general editor.
WDE, as we called Ian’s great-grandfather, was a poet, painter and composer with the pen-name of Leon – from Caerleon, where he was born in 1811 – who appeared regularly in newspapers between 1830 and 1890 as a chronicler of events, and as a poetic obituarist of those who died before their time, including members of his own family. He made certain that other lives mattered and Chris, as a historian, appreciated that.
