David Jenkins

David Jenkins, librarian: born Blaenclydach, Glamorgan 29 May 1912; Assistant Keeper, Department of Printed Books, National Library of Wales 1949-57, Keeper 1957-62, Senior Keeper 1962-69, Librarian 1969-79; Editor, Journal of the Welsh Bibliographical Society 1964-79; Editor, National Library of Wales Journal 1968-79; General Commissioner of Income Tax 1968-87; Chairman, Welsh Books Council 1974-80; CBE 1977; married 1948 Menna Rhys Williams (one son, one daughter); died Aberystwyth 6 March 2002.

David Jenkins, librarian: born Blaenclydach, Glamorgan 29 May 1912; Assistant Keeper, Department of Printed Books, National Library of Wales 1949-57, Keeper 1957-62, Senior Keeper 1962-69, Librarian 1969-79; Editor, Journal of the Welsh Bibliographical Society 1964-79; Editor, National Library of Wales Journal 1968-79; General Commissioner of Income Tax 1968-87; Chairman, Welsh Books Council 1974-80; CBE 1977; married 1948 Menna Rhys Williams (one son, one daughter); died Aberystwyth 6 March 2002.

David Jenkins was for 10 years Librarian at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, a post he filled with distinction and a quiet pride that a son of working-class parents could rise to such illustrious heights. He was one of a long line of Librarians who made a substantial contribution to the cultural life of Wales both ex officio and as writers devoted to the Welsh tradition of scholarship and local history.

He never forgot that he had been born and bred, a collier's son, in the Rhondda Valley, at Blaenclydach, near Tonypandy, where in 1910, two years before his birth, the famous riots had taken place during a strike by miners employed by the Cambrian Combine. It was one of the major disturbances in the South Wales coalfield and ended only when Winston Churchill sent troops into the valley, thus earning the abiding contempt of Rhondda people and a place in the mythology of militant socialism.

For this reason Jenkins, although a native Welsh-speaker, took a keen interest in the work of such English-language writers as Rhys Davies and Lewis Jones, also born in Blaenclydach, both of whom set some of their stories and novels against the events of 1910, and in that of Idris Davies whose long poem The Angry Summer caught the mood of the General Strike of 1926.

Most of Jenkins's boyhood and adult life was spent, however, not in the Rhondda but in Penrhyn-coch in Cardiganshire, where he was sent at the age of seven to live with an aunt and uncle while recovering from a chest infection. He was educated at Ardwyn Grammar School in Aberystwyth and at the University College of Wales in the town, where he took a degree in Welsh Literature in 1936 and an MA two years later for a thesis on Huw Morys, the 17th-century poet and Royalist.

He joined the staff of the National Library in 1939 as an assistant in the Department of Manuscripts but was conscripted into the Army. He saw action during the Second World War as a major in north-western Europe, taking part in the liberation of Paris and the push into Germany and Poland, where he was among the first British soldiers to reach the concentration camps.

Returning to Aberystwyth and the National Library in 1945, he rose quickly in his chosen profession: appointed Assistant Keeper of Printed Books in 1949, Keeper in 1957 and Senior Keeper in 1962, he became Librarian in 1969, a post in which he remained until his retirement.

With the post came myriad responsibilities which he accepted with alacrity, his jovial nature helping him to win friends among his colleagues and to promote the interests of the National Library wherever he found an opportunity. He served on the committees of the Library Advisory Council and the British Library, the BBC Archives Advisory Committee and the College of Librarianship, Wales. Among the many bodies which benefited from his professional advice was the Welsh Books Council, of which he was Chairman, helping it to expand and assume the role of national body which it enjoys today.

But it was as a bibliophile that he found greatest satisfaction. He was editor of The National Library of Wales Journal and The Journal of the Welsh Bibliographical Society, and contributed prolifically to such learned periodicals as The Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies.

He also played a practical role in the legal affairs of his adopted town and county, serving as a Justice of the Peace and chairman of the local bench, and as a member of the Dyfed Magistrates' Court Committee and the Dyfed-Powys Police Authority.

It is thought that, if his duties at the National Library had not been so onerous, he would have published more literary criticism ranging over the wide variety of his interests, particularly Welsh writing in English. Even so, in Thomas Gwynn Jones: cofiant (1973), he wrote one of the finest biographies ever published in Welsh: he had sat at the feet of Thomas Gwynn Jones during the poet's last years as Gregynog Professor of Welsh at Aberystwyth. And he edited the literary journalism and essays of Kate Roberts (Erthyglau ac ysgrifau llenyddol, 1978), generally regarded as the foremost Welsh prose-writer of the 20th century.

His most important essay is undoubtedly that on Dafydd ap Gwilym, the greatest of the medieval Welsh poets, whose youthful haunts he succeeded in identifying with places in the district of Penrhyn-coch. This seminal work, first published in The Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies in 1936, marked the beginning of modern research into what little is known of the poet's life and paved the way for the magisterial edition of his work which was edited by Thomas Parry, one of his predecessors as National Librarian, and published in 1952.

In retirement he devoted himself to local history and toponymy, expanding his famous essay in Bro Dafydd ap Gwilym ("Dafydd ap Gwilym's District", 1992) and tracing the history of the Baptists of north Cardiganshire in O Blas Gogerddan i Horeb ("From Plas Gogerddan to Horeb", 1993). He was for many years a deacon at Horeb, the Baptist chapel at Penrhyn-coch, and one of his denomination's most liberal members. The literary society which he founded in the village is one of the most flourishing in the whole of Wales.

David Jenkins was a good example of the Welsh scholar who, fully equipped and of wide learning, chose to use his skills and knowledge in the service of his community, in the belief that "the local is the real" and that the life of the cultivated mind should be firmly rooted in the experience of the people.

For the last 20 years of his life he had been working on a history of the National Library of Wales. A Refuge in Peace and War: a history of the National Library of Wales to 1952 will be published in May.

Meic Stephens