Owen Rhoscomyl

John Ellis

Description

Around the turn of the century, Welsh readers thrilled to the heroic stories of Owen Rhoscomyl. Having been a cowboy, frontiersman, soldier and mercenary, Rhoscomyl was as adventurous and exotic as his stories. Roving the wilds of the American West, Patagonia and South Africa before finally settling in Wales, Rhoscomyl was a flawed hero who led a rough life that exacted a personal price in poverty, delinquency and violence. He identified deeply with the Welsh nation as a source of tradition, legitimacy and belonging within a wider imperial world. As a popular commercial writer of historical romance, imperial adventure, popular history and public spectacle, he rejected accusations of national inferiority, effeminacy and defeatism in his depictions of the Welsh as an inherently masculine and martial people, accustomed to the rugged conditions of the frontier, ready to advance the glory of their nation and eager to lead the British imperial enterprise. This literary biography will explore the vaulting ambitions, real achievements, and bitter disappointments of the life, work and milieu of Owen Rhoscomyl.

Sujets

• Adventurers
• Biography
• Autobiography
• Explorers

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783169504
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 7 Mo

Extrait

Writers of Wales
Owen Rhoscomyl
00 Prelims Owen 2016_10_13.indd 1 10/13/2016 12:50:24 PMEditors:
Jane Aaron
M. Wynn Thomas
Andrew Webb
Honorary Series Editor:
R. Brinley Jones
Other titles in the Writers of Wales series:
Dylan Thomas (2014), Walford Davies
Gwenlyn Parry (2013), Roger Owen
Welsh Periodicals in English 1882–2012 (2013), Malcolm Ballin
Ruth Bidgood (2012), Matthew Jarvis
Dorothy Edwards (2011), Claire Flay
Kate Roberts (2011), Katie Gramich
Geoffrey of Monmouth (2010), Karen Jankulak
Herbert Williams (2010), Phil Carradice
Rhys Davies (2009), Huw Osborne
R. S. Thomas (2006), Tony Brown
Ben Bowen (2003), T. Robin Chapman
James Kitchener Davies (2002), M. Wynn Thomas
00 Prelims Owen 2016_10_13.indd 2 10/13/2016 12:50:24 PMWriters of Wales
Owen Rhoscomyl
John S. Ellis
University of Wales Press
2016
00 Prelims Owen 2016_10_13.indd 3 10/13/2016 12:50:25 PM© John S. Ellis, 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any
material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium
by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to
some other use of this publication) without the written permission
of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the
copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this
publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10
ColumbusWalk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff, CF10 4UP.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78316-949-8
e-ISBN 978-1-78316-950-4
The right of John S. Ellis to be identifed as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The publisher acknowledges the fnancial support of the Welsh Books
Council.
Typeset in Wales by Eira Fenn Gaunt, Fenn Typesetting, Cardiff
Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Melksham
00 Prelims Owen 2016_10_13.indd 4 10/13/2016 12:50:26 PMContents
Acknowledgements vii
List of illustrationsix
1 Cowboy 1863–1886 1
2 Romancer 1886–1899 26
3 Scout 1899–1902 63
4 Flame-bearer 1903–1908 86
5 Knight Errant 1909–1918 126
Notes 165
Bibliography184
Index189
00 Prelims Owen 2016_10_13.indd 5 10/13/2016 12:50:26 PMAcknowledgements
I am grateful to many individuals and institutions for their
assistance and support in this project. In particular, I am indebted to
Vicki and Keith Matthew for not only their permission to use and
quote from their private collection of family letters and papers but
for their kindness, hospitality and friendship. I would also like to
acknowledge the late Alice and Dorothy Stott who preserved the
family letters and passed them on to the Matthews. I am grateful
to Geoffrey Pocock for the use of his private collection, friendship
and many stimulating discussions regarding the Legion of
Frontiersmen. I want to acknowledge Janet Rietz who discovered the sources
on the hospital incident and gave invaluable assistance by providing
me with copies of archival material from South Africa. Hazel Walford
Davies gave much appreciated assistance regarding Lord Howard
de Walden and the National Theatre of Wales. I would like to thank
the many individuals with special information with whom I
have corresponded and consulted, including David Bath for his
help with the history of Mawddach Crescent, and Jim Wallace and
Neil G. Speed for sharing their knowledge of the Canadian Scouts.
I am grateful to the late historians Hywel Teif Edwards and Bryn
Owen for their interest and kindness. I am very much indebted
to Professors Paul O’Leary, Chris Williams and Bill Jones for their
mentorship over the years and for their patience and
encouragement during manic conversations where I have rambled on endlessly
about Rhoscomyl. In a similar vein, I would like to thank my wife
Karen, my children Rhys and Jaclyn, and my parents Bob and
Donna for sharing me with the shade of Rhoscomyl over the last
several years. I would like to thank Joscelyn M. Davies for her kind
00 Prelims Owen 2016_10_13.indd 7 10/13/2016 12:50:26 PMAcknowledgements
permission to quote from the J. Glyn Davies Papers and the staff
of the National Library of Wales and the National Archives for all
their good work and assistance. I have appreciated the opportunity
to discuss my project with colleagues at the conferences of the
North American Association for the Study of Welsh Culture and
History and the Association for Welsh Writing in English. I am
grateful to Llion Wigley, the editorial board for the Writers of
Wales series, their anonymous reader and the staff of the University
of Wales Press for their interest and assistance. I am grateful for
the funding and support for this study from the University of
Michigan-Flint Department of History and the Offce of Research
as well as from the Eisenberg Center for History at the University
of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
viii
00 Prelims Owen 2016_10_13.indd 8 10/13/2016 12:50:26 PMIllustrations
1: Robert Mills as a cowboy. Reproduced with kind permission
of the National Library of Wales.
2: Robert Milne in the Royal Dragoons, c.1890. Reproduced with
kind permission of the National Library of Wales.
3: Illustration from The Jewel of Ynys Galon (1895).
4: A. O. Vaughan bearing the ‘tiger’s claw’ in Rimington’s Tigers.
Reproduced with kind permission of Vicki Matthew.
5: Katherine Vaughan. Reproduced with kind permission of
Vicki Matthew.
6: Lily Rautenbach displaying her wounds from the hospital
attack. From Emily Hobhouse, War without Glamour
(Bloemfontein, 1924).
7: Owen Rhoscomyl, c.1910. Reproduced with kind permission
of the National Library of Wales.
8: The Legion of Frontiersmen with A. O. Vaughan, second from
the right. From The Sketch, 1 July 1895.
9: Illustration from Lone Tree Lode (1912).
10: A. O. Vaughan in the First World War, c.1915. Reproduced
with kind permission of the National Library of Wales.
00 Prelims Owen 2016_10_13.indd 9 10/13/2016 12:50:26 PM1
Cowboy 1863–1886
Although an infuential and versatile pioneer of Welsh writing in
English, Owen Rhoscomyl is an almost forgotten fgure in the
literary history of Wales. With its breathless tone of soaring romance
and melodrama, Rhoscomyl’s forid prose has often been dismissed
or ignored by scholars. A staunch Welsh nationalist as well as a
monarchist and imperial patriot, Rhoscomyl held views that further
estranged his work from the conventional narrative of Welsh history
and literature. Yet, Owen Rhoscomyl was a popular commercial
writer and a public personality in Edwardian Wales. Exploiting
his colourful past as a cowboy, adventurer and war hero, he became
a minor celebrity and a well-known advocate of Welsh cultural
nationalism, particularly in south Wales. Rhoscomyl strove to create
a heroic and inspirational past for the Welsh nation through his
novels, short stories, journalism and historical writing. Often
featuring gallant Welsh characters, he also wrote short stories and
three adventure novels of a semi-autobiographical nature set in
the American west, Patagonia and South Africa.
His was a distinctly Welsh contribution to the historical romance
and adventure fction epitomized by such authors as Sir Walter
Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and Stanley Weyman. Seeking to
further engage the masses, Rhoscomyl experimented with other
genres and would extend his popular literary campaign into the
production of spectacle and drama, playing major roles in the
National Pageant of Wales (1909), the investiture of the prince of
Wales (1911) and the movement towards a national theatre of Wales
(1912–14). Sensitive to accusations of national inferiority and
defeatism, Rhoscomyl depicted the Welsh as an inherently martial people,
01 Main text Owen 2016_10_12.indd 1 10/13/2016 12:48:28 PMOwen Rhoscomyl
accustomed to the rugged conditions of the frontier, ready to
advance the glory of their nation and eager to lead the British imperial
enterprise. Along with his celebrated contemporary Allen Raines,
Rhoscomyl was a pioneer of Welsh writing in English. Although
aimed at a broad buying public and sold on four con tinents, his
work was written primarily with a Welsh audience in mind. With
no pretentions to literary greatness, his work was overtly commercial
and spoke to many in ‘imperial Wales’ whose Welsh nationalism
and British imperialism were mutually compatible sentiments.
Widely distributed across libraries and schools in early
twentiethcentury Wales, Rhoscomyl’s heroic image of the Welsh continued
to inspire schoolboys beyond his death in 1919. Indeed, Roland
Mathias, the father of Anglo-Welsh literary studies, once confessed
that his own Welsh identity was awoken by a Rhoscomyl adventur e
novel he read as a boy. Owen Rhoscomyl is an important if
overlooked and unconventional fgure in the history of modern Welsh
literature, a voice that speaks to the imperial dimension of the
Welsh experience and to the multiple ways in which Welsh national
identity has been imagined, projected and contested.
* * *
According to public records, Owen Rhoscomyl was born in 1863
with the more prosaic name Robert Scowfeld Mills. His father,
Robert Mills, was a skilled mason from the hills of Rochdale who
in 1855 married Jane Ann Schofeld. Residing in before
relocating to the growing resort town of Southport, Jane Ann gave
birth to four children by Robert, but only two of them survived
infancy: Robert and his elder sister Ada, who was born in 1861.
In 1863, a scant few days after his son’s birth, the elder Robert
Mills was killed in a construction accident. In 1865, the widowed
mother married Luke Etchells, an iron moulder from Droylesden.
Relocating with her family several times acro