The Association for Welsh Writing in English: A Short History
Professor Tony Brown, Bangor University
The Association was formed in 1984, following a series of meetings between lecturers in the constituent colleges of the then University of Wales with the aim of stimulating the reading, study and teaching of Welsh writing in English. At that point, while Welsh writing in English was being taught by individual academics in the various colleges, there was no organisational structure by means of which these academics could confer and plan for the development of the future of this field of study. The members of staff who were involved with the venture at that early stage included: Tony Brown (Bangor), James A. Davies (Swansea), Wyndham Griffiths (Aberystwyth), Desiree Hirst (Swansea), Belinda Humfrey (Lampeter), John Pikoulis (Cardiff) M. Wynn Thomas (Swansea), Ned Thomas (Aberystwyth), J. P. Ward (Swansea), Ioan Williams (Aberyswyth). The Association formalised itself as ‘The University of Wales Association for the Study of Welsh Writing in English’ and then (as colleagues from Trinity College Carmarthen and the new University of Glamorgan became involved) as ‘The Universities of Wales Association for the Study of Welsh Writing in English’; the present, simpler form came into being in 1996. The first Chair and Secretary of the Association were, respectively, John Pikoulis and M. Wynn Thomas, who had been instrumental in bringing colleagues together for the initial meetings. (Subsequently Katie Gramich became Chair (2002), followed (in January 2012) by Kirsti Bohata and Matthew Jarvis as joint chairs; Wynn Thomas was succeeded as Secretary by Tony Brown (1998) and then (in 2014) by Aidan Byrne of Wolverhampton University.)
In many respects the idea of the Association was a joint product of both the ‘intra-mural’ and Extramural departments of the University and for the first period of its existence that ‘broad church’ character coloured the Association’s activities, including the annual conference: participants were not just drawn from the community of professional academics but also from those of a more general ‘lay’ interest, people with a general, sometimes long-time interest in the English-language literature of Wales. Some of them indeed had had active involvement in the literary scene in Wales over many years: one recalls Glyn and Doreen Jones being present at the conference, along with Glenys Ormond, the widow of John Ormond. It was as we moved into the twenty-first century and as English departments began to assemble greater numbers of undergraduates and postgraduate students studying Welsh writing in English – itself a measure of the Association’s success – that AWWE in many ways became more professional in nature.
The Association’s purpose was to extend the attention paid to the study of Welsh Writing in English within the University of Wales, not only by developing new courses but by being officially recognized as a group by the University and thereby being able to make representations for funding for the establishment of, for example, research scholarships, symposia and publications. While the Academic Board of the University formally agreed to recognize the Association as an official university body in 1987, they declined to advance any money for conducting the Associations’ activities. The Association has been largely funded out of the pockets of its members, sustained only by helpful subventions from individual institutions towards specific projects like the annual conferences.
However, the combined energy of those involved has seen the Association initiate a range of projects over the ensuing thirty years which have transformed the field of Welsh writing in English, at the level of undergraduate and postgraduate study and indeed, to some extent, in the public realm generally. In terms of academic study it is perhaps worth noting that at a meeting in 1986 a survey showed that the provision of teaching in the field consisted of the following: one undergraduate course at Aberystwyth and occasional postgraduate theses; no undergraduate courses at Bangor, though with the occasional MA thesis; no teaching in the field in the Department of English at Cardiff, some Extramural teaching; at Lampeter, which under the guidance of Belinda Humfrey was very much a path-finder in the field, there was some provision at both undergraduate and MA level; at Swansea there was some teaching of Welsh writing in English in the context of modern literature, a (new) special author course on Dylan Thomas and provision at MA level. Thirty years later Welsh writing in English is taught at all of these institutions in undergraduate courses and at MA level and beyond. An even fuller measure of what has been achieved is the fact that, according to a recent survey by the Learned Society of Wales, in the period 2000-2015 some 60 PhDs were completed at HEIs in Wales on topics in the field of Welsh writing in English.
Gregynog Conferences
At the core of the Association’s activities has, from the outset, been the annual conference at Gregynog, organised in turn by members from the various Welsh HE institutions. However, as a measure of the increased activity in the field, especially at postgraduate level, the scale and format of these conferences has changed significantly. For instance, at the first conference, organised by Ned Thomas in 1986, there was no over-arching theme, though there was much consideration, both in formal sessions and informally, of the future direction of Welsh writing in English. Thus a session on literary biography saw short papers by Michael Parnell (biographer of Gwyn Thomas), John Harries (on Caradoc Evans) and John Pikoulis (biographer of Alun Lewis). There was an acute awareness of how much more biographical work needed to be done on Welsh writers. A session on ‘The State of Book Publishing’ (with contributions by representatives from Poetry Wales Press and Gwasg Gomer) was followed by a session led by Cairns Craig from the Association for Scottish Literary Studies; the situation in Scotland, and what examples it might provide us for Wales, was revisited in a discussion session on Scottish and Welsh literary journals, with editors from both countries.
In general, the conferences in the first decade or so consisted of notably fewer papers than at current conferences, and those papers were all full-length ‘plenary’ sessions. In 1991, for instance there were full-length papers on Dylan Thomas, Edward Thomas, Dannie Abse and, on the final day, a publishers’ panel and a creative writing workshop. Saturday afternoons at conferences in the 1980s and 1990s were programmed as ‘free time’, all the more urgent when the conferences on several occasions clashed with a Welsh rugby international!
As the number of postgraduate students attending the conferences increased, a session, usually of three papers, was put on during the Saturday afternoon as a sort of ‘optional’ extra, for those who were not walking in the grounds, or watching the rugby... It is a measure of how far we have come that postgraduate students, very much at the cutting edge of work in the field, are now fully integrated as speakers in conferences which have to have parallel sessions, such is the pressure on time.
From 1993 conferences centred on a specific topic or theme, beginning with a consideration of origins: a conference on the ‘First Flowering’ of Welsh writing in English in the 1930s and 1940s. One of the speakers at that conference was Raymond Garlick, a founding editor of Anglo-Welsh Review and author of the first monograph survey of ‘Anglo-Welsh’ Writing; he professed himself ‘astonished’ at the degree of interest in Welsh Writing in English which the conference represented. (For a full list of conference themes and dates, please see the Association's conference archive.)
As well as papers on critical topics, AWWE conferences have regularly included readings and talks by creative writers and artists; these have included R. S. Thomas, Emyr Humphreys, Tony Conran, Iwan Bala, Michael Longley, Menna Elfyn, Robert Minhinnick, Nigel Jenkins, Wiliam Owen Roberts, Tristan Hughes, Deryn Rees-Jones, Zoë Skoulding and Jasmine Donahaye.
Contact with Schools
Those who came together in the 1980s to establish the Association were very aware that one way in which future interest in Welsh writing in English could be enhanced and secured was by increasing the visibility of this writing at secondary school level. Thus contact was established with the WJEC and with English advisers in various parts of Wales. In the early years, and largely though the good offices of the English adviser for Gwynedd, Helen Butler Lewis, a number of secondary teachers attended and played a full part in the conference, including a paper given by one of them on ‘R.S. Thomas in the Classroom’. Eventually, though, as support funding diminished and staff cover in schools became an issue, it became increasingly difficult for teachers to maintain their attendance. However, a number of members of the Association have over the years continued to be involved with the development of Welsh writing in English at secondary level by visiting schools and addressing gatherings of secondary students and teachers. Indeed, Welsh writing in English has had an increased role in the GCSE and A-level syllabus of the WJEC as part of initiatives by Dr Sandra Anstey at the WJEC. Again, the Association has made a contribution by means of its development of texts (see below). In particular, two of the ‘Edited Texts’ series were specifically commissioned, in an agreement between the Association and the University of Wales Press, with an eye to their use in schools. Emyr Humphreys’s A Toy Epic, edited with an Introduction and afterword by Wynn Thomas, was on the WJEC syllabus for some years, being repeatedly reprinted, and Glyn Jones’s The Island of Apples, edited and with an Introduction by Belinda Humfrey was also successful as part of the WJEC syllabus.
Texts
As those involved with the work of the Association were aware, a crucial element in the attempts to widen the study of Welsh writing in English was, firstly, that so many important texts were out of print and, secondly, that there was an urgent need for high quality critical discussion of these texts, discussion that utilised the new critical approaches that were being developed and employed in the literary field from the 1980s onwards. Thus, from the outset, the Association entered into discussion with publishers in Wales, mainly the University of Wales Press (UWP) and Seren, and indeed initially in England, with a view to bringing texts back into print, in good, authoritative editions, and to commissioning new critical discussion of key authors and themes. The Association set up a sub-committee (John Pikoulis, Jim Davies and Belinda Humfrey) which at several stages met with publishers. These were not auspicious times, especially for UWP, though by the second half of the 1990s UWP did earmark funding which enhanced the possibility of books in the field to become a regular part of their publishing programme. Ultimately, the publications initiated by the Association, and published with the Association’s logo, formed three series: Edited Texts Series (General Editors: James A. Davies (until 1994), Belinda Humfrey, M. Wynn Thomas); Collected Works Series (General Editor: John Pikoulis) and the Critical Texts Series (General Editor: John Pikoulis). (For all the books published in these series, please see the full list of AWWE-sponsored texts.)
A later development was the establishment of the Writing Wales in English series, published by UWP under the general editorship of M. Wynn Thomas, succeeded in 2015 by Daniel G. Williams and Kirsti Bohata. This was not an Association initiative as such, though the series carries the Association’s badge; this series, now the key one in the field, in many respects carries on the work of the ‘Critical Texts’ series and is itself the result of the increase in academic staff across the sector devoted to the study of Welsh Writing in English, the development of programmes of undergraduate teaching, and the establishment of increasingly specialist postgraduate programmes of research activity, with the associated creation of research clusters and Centres.
New Welsh Review
In 1987 the Welsh Arts Council called for applications for a franchise to publish a new literary magazine for Wales. Representatives of the Association met with representatives of the Welsh Academy to form a joint bid for this franchise. The bid was successful and the first issue of New Welsh Review was published in 1988, under the editorship of Dr Belinda Humfrey (who, remarkably, edited the journal while being a full-time Senior Lecturer at St. David’s UC, Lampeter). The Editorial Board was composed of representatives of the Association and the Academy. Having successfully established the NWR as a significant presence on the Welsh scene, Belinda Humfrey retired as editor at the end of the first three-year franchise period, to be replaced by Michael Parnell. When he died suddenly and tragically, Robin Reeves, whose wide experience as a journalist included some years on Fleet Street, became editor. Under his editorship NWR flourished and indeed achieved several ‘scoops’ which brought media attention. However, the journal was subject to criteria set down by the Welsh Arts Council, designed to extend the readership of the journal. One result of this was that the scope for literary critical essays in the NWR was limited and, as members of the Association pointed out, there was anyway certainly no platform for serious essay-length academic discussion of Welsh writing in English, and certainly not discussion which sought to utilise the approaches and registers of contemporary critical theory. It was clear that the lack of an appropriate fully-refereed journal in which academics could publish their work would seriously inhibit scholarship in the field, especially in the new era of the Research Assessment Exercise.
Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays
At the Association’s AGM in March 1993, a working party was set up to ‘explore the possibility of creating an academic journal that would explicitly serve the needs of scholars and critics working in the field of Welsh writing in English’. A successful bid for funding was made to the Welsh Arts Council and Tony Brown was appointed Editor, with Jane Aaron and M. Wynn Thomas as Associate Editors; the first issue of Welsh Writing English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays was published, with further financial support from the British Academy and the Association, in time for the 1995 Conference. Eleven issues of the Yearbook were published under Brown’s editorship, funded by both the Association and grants from the Welsh Books Council, publishing over eighty essays on the whole range of Welsh writing in English, including pre-twentieth-century writing. In 2007 Katie Gramich took over as editor of a revamped journal now entitled Almanac: Yearbook of Welsh Writing in English and published by Parthian. Five issues of Almanac were published, with continued success, until this was in turn replaced in 2013 by The International Journal of Welsh Writing in English, under the editorship of Alyce von Rothkirch (with Matthew Jarvis as Reviews Editor) and with an international editorial board. Published by UWP, the first WWiE journal to be published by them, the journal is sponsored by the Association. Jarvis subsequently took over the editorship in 2014 (alongside Mary Chadwick as Reviews Editor), with von Rothkirch retaining an advisory role. Neal Alexander joined the group in 2015, whilst von Rothkirch also returned to formal editorial duties later that year, thus completing the current four-person editorial team.
International Links
While the Association has sought primarily to enhance awareness and understanding of Welsh writing in English in Wales and in the UK generally, efforts were also made by members to develop greater international awareness of Anglophone literature in Wales. Forays were made to the biannual international conferences on The Literature of Region and Nation at Nottingham (1988), Luxembourg (a full session on WWiE at the 1990 conference), Bratislava (1992) and at Swansea (1994). Similar interventions were made at the conferences of the European Association for the Study of English (ESSE), with a substantial contingent travelling to the ESSE conference at Bordeaux, where a session devoted to Welsh writing in English was held. The most active current platform is the biannual conferences of the North American Association for the Study of Welsh Culture and History (NAASWCH). Association members have played an active role in the NAASWCH, as officers and at all its conferences: Bryn Mawr (Penn.), West Virginia, Toronto, Washington D.C., Kingston (Ontario) and Harvard, as well as, on this side of the Atlantic, successful conferences at Swansea and Bangor.
In many respects the idea of the Association was a joint product of both the ‘intra-mural’ and Extramural departments of the University and for the first period of its existence that ‘broad church’ character coloured the Association’s activities, including the annual conference: participants were not just drawn from the community of professional academics but also from those of a more general ‘lay’ interest, people with a general, sometimes long-time interest in the English-language literature of Wales. Some of them indeed had had active involvement in the literary scene in Wales over many years: one recalls Glyn and Doreen Jones being present at the conference, along with Glenys Ormond, the widow of John Ormond. It was as we moved into the twenty-first century and as English departments began to assemble greater numbers of undergraduates and postgraduate students studying Welsh writing in English – itself a measure of the Association’s success – that AWWE in many ways became more professional in nature.
The Association’s purpose was to extend the attention paid to the study of Welsh Writing in English within the University of Wales, not only by developing new courses but by being officially recognized as a group by the University and thereby being able to make representations for funding for the establishment of, for example, research scholarships, symposia and publications. While the Academic Board of the University formally agreed to recognize the Association as an official university body in 1987, they declined to advance any money for conducting the Associations’ activities. The Association has been largely funded out of the pockets of its members, sustained only by helpful subventions from individual institutions towards specific projects like the annual conferences.
However, the combined energy of those involved has seen the Association initiate a range of projects over the ensuing thirty years which have transformed the field of Welsh writing in English, at the level of undergraduate and postgraduate study and indeed, to some extent, in the public realm generally. In terms of academic study it is perhaps worth noting that at a meeting in 1986 a survey showed that the provision of teaching in the field consisted of the following: one undergraduate course at Aberystwyth and occasional postgraduate theses; no undergraduate courses at Bangor, though with the occasional MA thesis; no teaching in the field in the Department of English at Cardiff, some Extramural teaching; at Lampeter, which under the guidance of Belinda Humfrey was very much a path-finder in the field, there was some provision at both undergraduate and MA level; at Swansea there was some teaching of Welsh writing in English in the context of modern literature, a (new) special author course on Dylan Thomas and provision at MA level. Thirty years later Welsh writing in English is taught at all of these institutions in undergraduate courses and at MA level and beyond. An even fuller measure of what has been achieved is the fact that, according to a recent survey by the Learned Society of Wales, in the period 2000-2015 some 60 PhDs were completed at HEIs in Wales on topics in the field of Welsh writing in English.
Gregynog Conferences
At the core of the Association’s activities has, from the outset, been the annual conference at Gregynog, organised in turn by members from the various Welsh HE institutions. However, as a measure of the increased activity in the field, especially at postgraduate level, the scale and format of these conferences has changed significantly. For instance, at the first conference, organised by Ned Thomas in 1986, there was no over-arching theme, though there was much consideration, both in formal sessions and informally, of the future direction of Welsh writing in English. Thus a session on literary biography saw short papers by Michael Parnell (biographer of Gwyn Thomas), John Harries (on Caradoc Evans) and John Pikoulis (biographer of Alun Lewis). There was an acute awareness of how much more biographical work needed to be done on Welsh writers. A session on ‘The State of Book Publishing’ (with contributions by representatives from Poetry Wales Press and Gwasg Gomer) was followed by a session led by Cairns Craig from the Association for Scottish Literary Studies; the situation in Scotland, and what examples it might provide us for Wales, was revisited in a discussion session on Scottish and Welsh literary journals, with editors from both countries.
In general, the conferences in the first decade or so consisted of notably fewer papers than at current conferences, and those papers were all full-length ‘plenary’ sessions. In 1991, for instance there were full-length papers on Dylan Thomas, Edward Thomas, Dannie Abse and, on the final day, a publishers’ panel and a creative writing workshop. Saturday afternoons at conferences in the 1980s and 1990s were programmed as ‘free time’, all the more urgent when the conferences on several occasions clashed with a Welsh rugby international!
As the number of postgraduate students attending the conferences increased, a session, usually of three papers, was put on during the Saturday afternoon as a sort of ‘optional’ extra, for those who were not walking in the grounds, or watching the rugby... It is a measure of how far we have come that postgraduate students, very much at the cutting edge of work in the field, are now fully integrated as speakers in conferences which have to have parallel sessions, such is the pressure on time.
From 1993 conferences centred on a specific topic or theme, beginning with a consideration of origins: a conference on the ‘First Flowering’ of Welsh writing in English in the 1930s and 1940s. One of the speakers at that conference was Raymond Garlick, a founding editor of Anglo-Welsh Review and author of the first monograph survey of ‘Anglo-Welsh’ Writing; he professed himself ‘astonished’ at the degree of interest in Welsh Writing in English which the conference represented. (For a full list of conference themes and dates, please see the Association's conference archive.)
As well as papers on critical topics, AWWE conferences have regularly included readings and talks by creative writers and artists; these have included R. S. Thomas, Emyr Humphreys, Tony Conran, Iwan Bala, Michael Longley, Menna Elfyn, Robert Minhinnick, Nigel Jenkins, Wiliam Owen Roberts, Tristan Hughes, Deryn Rees-Jones, Zoë Skoulding and Jasmine Donahaye.
Contact with Schools
Those who came together in the 1980s to establish the Association were very aware that one way in which future interest in Welsh writing in English could be enhanced and secured was by increasing the visibility of this writing at secondary school level. Thus contact was established with the WJEC and with English advisers in various parts of Wales. In the early years, and largely though the good offices of the English adviser for Gwynedd, Helen Butler Lewis, a number of secondary teachers attended and played a full part in the conference, including a paper given by one of them on ‘R.S. Thomas in the Classroom’. Eventually, though, as support funding diminished and staff cover in schools became an issue, it became increasingly difficult for teachers to maintain their attendance. However, a number of members of the Association have over the years continued to be involved with the development of Welsh writing in English at secondary level by visiting schools and addressing gatherings of secondary students and teachers. Indeed, Welsh writing in English has had an increased role in the GCSE and A-level syllabus of the WJEC as part of initiatives by Dr Sandra Anstey at the WJEC. Again, the Association has made a contribution by means of its development of texts (see below). In particular, two of the ‘Edited Texts’ series were specifically commissioned, in an agreement between the Association and the University of Wales Press, with an eye to their use in schools. Emyr Humphreys’s A Toy Epic, edited with an Introduction and afterword by Wynn Thomas, was on the WJEC syllabus for some years, being repeatedly reprinted, and Glyn Jones’s The Island of Apples, edited and with an Introduction by Belinda Humfrey was also successful as part of the WJEC syllabus.
Texts
As those involved with the work of the Association were aware, a crucial element in the attempts to widen the study of Welsh writing in English was, firstly, that so many important texts were out of print and, secondly, that there was an urgent need for high quality critical discussion of these texts, discussion that utilised the new critical approaches that were being developed and employed in the literary field from the 1980s onwards. Thus, from the outset, the Association entered into discussion with publishers in Wales, mainly the University of Wales Press (UWP) and Seren, and indeed initially in England, with a view to bringing texts back into print, in good, authoritative editions, and to commissioning new critical discussion of key authors and themes. The Association set up a sub-committee (John Pikoulis, Jim Davies and Belinda Humfrey) which at several stages met with publishers. These were not auspicious times, especially for UWP, though by the second half of the 1990s UWP did earmark funding which enhanced the possibility of books in the field to become a regular part of their publishing programme. Ultimately, the publications initiated by the Association, and published with the Association’s logo, formed three series: Edited Texts Series (General Editors: James A. Davies (until 1994), Belinda Humfrey, M. Wynn Thomas); Collected Works Series (General Editor: John Pikoulis) and the Critical Texts Series (General Editor: John Pikoulis). (For all the books published in these series, please see the full list of AWWE-sponsored texts.)
A later development was the establishment of the Writing Wales in English series, published by UWP under the general editorship of M. Wynn Thomas, succeeded in 2015 by Daniel G. Williams and Kirsti Bohata. This was not an Association initiative as such, though the series carries the Association’s badge; this series, now the key one in the field, in many respects carries on the work of the ‘Critical Texts’ series and is itself the result of the increase in academic staff across the sector devoted to the study of Welsh Writing in English, the development of programmes of undergraduate teaching, and the establishment of increasingly specialist postgraduate programmes of research activity, with the associated creation of research clusters and Centres.
New Welsh Review
In 1987 the Welsh Arts Council called for applications for a franchise to publish a new literary magazine for Wales. Representatives of the Association met with representatives of the Welsh Academy to form a joint bid for this franchise. The bid was successful and the first issue of New Welsh Review was published in 1988, under the editorship of Dr Belinda Humfrey (who, remarkably, edited the journal while being a full-time Senior Lecturer at St. David’s UC, Lampeter). The Editorial Board was composed of representatives of the Association and the Academy. Having successfully established the NWR as a significant presence on the Welsh scene, Belinda Humfrey retired as editor at the end of the first three-year franchise period, to be replaced by Michael Parnell. When he died suddenly and tragically, Robin Reeves, whose wide experience as a journalist included some years on Fleet Street, became editor. Under his editorship NWR flourished and indeed achieved several ‘scoops’ which brought media attention. However, the journal was subject to criteria set down by the Welsh Arts Council, designed to extend the readership of the journal. One result of this was that the scope for literary critical essays in the NWR was limited and, as members of the Association pointed out, there was anyway certainly no platform for serious essay-length academic discussion of Welsh writing in English, and certainly not discussion which sought to utilise the approaches and registers of contemporary critical theory. It was clear that the lack of an appropriate fully-refereed journal in which academics could publish their work would seriously inhibit scholarship in the field, especially in the new era of the Research Assessment Exercise.
Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays
At the Association’s AGM in March 1993, a working party was set up to ‘explore the possibility of creating an academic journal that would explicitly serve the needs of scholars and critics working in the field of Welsh writing in English’. A successful bid for funding was made to the Welsh Arts Council and Tony Brown was appointed Editor, with Jane Aaron and M. Wynn Thomas as Associate Editors; the first issue of Welsh Writing English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays was published, with further financial support from the British Academy and the Association, in time for the 1995 Conference. Eleven issues of the Yearbook were published under Brown’s editorship, funded by both the Association and grants from the Welsh Books Council, publishing over eighty essays on the whole range of Welsh writing in English, including pre-twentieth-century writing. In 2007 Katie Gramich took over as editor of a revamped journal now entitled Almanac: Yearbook of Welsh Writing in English and published by Parthian. Five issues of Almanac were published, with continued success, until this was in turn replaced in 2013 by The International Journal of Welsh Writing in English, under the editorship of Alyce von Rothkirch (with Matthew Jarvis as Reviews Editor) and with an international editorial board. Published by UWP, the first WWiE journal to be published by them, the journal is sponsored by the Association. Jarvis subsequently took over the editorship in 2014 (alongside Mary Chadwick as Reviews Editor), with von Rothkirch retaining an advisory role. Neal Alexander joined the group in 2015, whilst von Rothkirch also returned to formal editorial duties later that year, thus completing the current four-person editorial team.
International Links
While the Association has sought primarily to enhance awareness and understanding of Welsh writing in English in Wales and in the UK generally, efforts were also made by members to develop greater international awareness of Anglophone literature in Wales. Forays were made to the biannual international conferences on The Literature of Region and Nation at Nottingham (1988), Luxembourg (a full session on WWiE at the 1990 conference), Bratislava (1992) and at Swansea (1994). Similar interventions were made at the conferences of the European Association for the Study of English (ESSE), with a substantial contingent travelling to the ESSE conference at Bordeaux, where a session devoted to Welsh writing in English was held. The most active current platform is the biannual conferences of the North American Association for the Study of Welsh Culture and History (NAASWCH). Association members have played an active role in the NAASWCH, as officers and at all its conferences: Bryn Mawr (Penn.), West Virginia, Toronto, Washington D.C., Kingston (Ontario) and Harvard, as well as, on this side of the Atlantic, successful conferences at Swansea and Bangor.
© Tony Brown, Spring 2016
The image at the top of this page (taken from an original photograph © Aidan Byrne) shows the grounds at Gregynog Hall in March 2013.
