JENKINS, EVAN (1799 - 1877), cleric

Born 12 January 1799, at Waun-fawr near Aberystwyth, to David and Anne Jenkins. In a letter (11 September 1822) to the bishop of Llandaff, he says that he was then about to finish three years' study at 'Usk Divinity School.' He received orders in 1822 and 1823, and was licensed to Trostre, Monmouth, and further (1823) to Monkswood. In 1827, the earl of Bute presented him to the rectory of Dowlais. He is found in 1833 giving Welsh lessons to lady Charlotte Guest, and his name occurs fairly frequently in her diaries - they had a common interest in schools, and a common antipathy to the Oxford Movement. Jenkins was a somewhat stern puritan (he once offended lady Charlotte by objecting to a dance given by her), and was throughout his life a fervent advocate of total abstinence. When the Chartist movement broke out locally (1839), he came out strongly against it; he preached a sermon (17 November 1839) which he afterwards expanded into a pamphlet, Chartism Unmasked, 1840 -this went to at least sixteen editions and caused ' a kind of feud ' between him and John Guest, who disagreed with some of its statements and refused to circulate it among his workmen. The contents of the pamphlet are conventional enough, but it has points of interest - industrial unrest is attributed chiefly to the new Poor Law, moral delinquency to the practice of paying the workers their wages in public-houses, irreligion to the Establishment's inadequate provision of services in Welsh, for according to the rector not a single Anglican church in the area had monoglot Welsh services. Naturally, the Chartist newspaper Udgorn Cymru (see under John, David) bitterly attacked the rector; but long after this (1849) Jenkins won universal esteem for his courage during a cholera epidemic - he himself sickened under it. In 1851 he was made a prebendary of Llandaff, and at some time or other was given a Lambeth M.A. In 1862 he accepted the rectory of Llangynyw, Montgomeryshire; he died there during the last week of 1877, and was buried there; he left an endowment of £10 to the poor of the parish being communicants.

Author

• Emeritus Professor Robert Thomas Jenkins, (1881 - 1969)

Sources

• Llandaff Diocesan Records at the National Library of Wales in N.L.W. (by the kindness of Mr. Walter Morgan)
• Lady Charlotte Guest: Extracts from her journal, 1833-1852 (1950), 1833-52 (indexed)
• Yr Haul, 1862, 87-8
• H. B. Thomas, A History of the Diocese of St. Asaph (1874), i, 483
• The Merthyr Telegraph, 2 February 1877

Additional Links

• Wikidata: Q20733026

Published date: 1959

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