Hello all.
When she was a little girl, my mother Laura WILLIAMS, now aged 87, was
told by her Taid that
he was the King of Bardsey Island, and that she was a
princess. Needless to say, this led one day to an ill-placed boast to a
childhood adversary and poor mam being laughed out of the school playground.
We have always regarded this as nothing more than a cruel family anecdote
until
this weekend I happened to notice, in a book entitled Islands of
England and Wales by Donald McCormick (Osprey ISBN 0 85045 166 3) :-
".....Eventually Lord Newborough became the owner of Bardsey, and he
appointed one of his tenants as head man and instructed the rest to obey his
rule. By way of jest, Lord Newburgh bestowed the title of "King" on the head
man and gave him a crown of brass. The tradition of "kingship" has been
preserved ever since, and on one "coronation" day in 1874 the ceremony was
attended by a Royal Navy detachment".
It's quite likely, of course, that Taid Richard JONES, a grocer & smith in
Aberdaron in the 1881 Census, was simply perpetuating a local joke. But
there's also just an outside possibility, I suppose, that he really was at
some time the
"technical" King of Bardsey, and nothing would give me greater pleasure than
to be able to tell my mother this before her time is run.
Does any lister know, please, of a way of verifying whether a
Richard JONES, born 1846/7 in Liverpool, was ever "head man" of Lord
Newborough's Bardsey Island estate, and/or whether there is a newspaper
archive somewhere containing reports of the "coronation" ceremonies?
Gordon Wynne Evans
Herefordshire