Tony Carr was born in Dover in February 1938 before being taken, at six months old, to the Falkland Islands where his father was stationed as a customs officer. It was there that he spent the first nine years of his life and Tony considered himself an ‘Islander’ throughout. After a further three years on another island, Mauritius, where he became acquainted with French language and culture, he returned, at the age of thirteen, to Anglesey and to Menai Bridge. Tony attended Beaumaris Grammar School, and his prodigious and encyclopaedic memory made him the youngest ever ‘Brain of Britain’ and ‘Top Brain’ in 1956, and eventually ‘Brain of Brains’ — winner of a contest between nine former winners of the series in 1962. He retained this amazing memory to the end.Footnote1 He graduated from the University College of North Wales at Bangor in 1959 and was proud of ‘the College’ and of the University of Wales of which it was a part. After postgraduate research and training as an archivist at Bangor, he was appointed to the then pioneering archives office of Essex at Chelmsford under F G Emmison.
In 1964 Tony was appointed lecturer in the Department of Welsh History at Bangor, continuing the link between archives and history, and was immediately enlisted as one of the lecturers on the Archives course there. He became head of the postgraduate Archives course at Bangor in 1979, following the untimely deaths of Gwilym Usher and Keith Williams-Jones, and took the opportunity to update and expand the professional aspects of the curriculum, along with college archivist, Alyn Giles-Jones. As a former archivist himself, he insisted on the presence of local authority archivists on the Course Board of Studies, and valued the different perspectives of academic and administrative record-keeping that this brought — not least in the differing demands of local politicians and the general public, as opposed to the academic community. The course continued and flourished under the new regime and only came to an end when Tony retired in 2002 and the University could or would not fund a Course Director. Only then did it become apparent that Tony had, ever since 1964, supported, nurtured, lectured on and directed the Archives course without any financial recognition from the college.
The course was very close to his heart and he followed with avid interest and pride the burgeoning careers of those that had been under his care. Somehow, with his remarkable memory he could always tell an enquirer what had happened to any former student. His company was enjoyed and valued by his co-tutors on the course — the annual interview sessions were often a riotous pleasure, even to the interviewees, such was the rapport between Alyn Giles-Jones, Tomos Roberts (the assistant college archivist) and Tony himself as chair of the panel. Students of half a century ago still recall the warmness of the course, and later students were equally happy with Tony’s informal manner but inspiring lectures, sound academic standards and professional dedication.
The Archive course was, however, officially a sideline to his appointment to the department of Welsh History. Tony joined two other archivist historians at Bangor in 1964, W. Ogwen Williams and Keith Williams-Jones, and set about researching in depth the history of the late medieval period in Wales — its society and economy in particular. To Tony, the evidence and ‘facts’ gleaned from documents and archives spoke for themselves. He gathered detailed but revealing information about topics that had never before been considered — the minutiae of everyday life — and although he shunned over-emphasis on theoretical discourse (‘cut the cackle’, he would say) his work was of remarkable originality. He was interested in how people lived and saw the past as societies and communities where the bondman was of equal importance to the king. ‘Micro history’ was essential to explain the ‘macro’. And understanding place was also of central importance to understand past peoples. One of his favourite activities was to explore Anglesey in the company of his family so as to read and understand its landscape. All this can be seen in his monograph, Medieval Anglesey, that was pioneering when it was published in 1982, opening up to us an amazing vista of Welsh life during the later middle ages.
Wales was also central to Tony. As a member of the Welsh History Department he did his utmost to preserve the particular identity of Welsh History in the College. Using the Welsh language was also of paramount importance to him, and the Welsh History Department under his leadership was fully bilingual with every course or module taught separately in Welsh and English. He lectured and published in Welsh and considered that knowledge of Welsh was necessary fully to understand and analyse evidence about the Welsh past. (He even taught Latin through the medium of Welsh to his archive diploma students.) But Tony’s Wales was not an insular Wales closed from the world; it was a European Wales, part of Europe and beyond — the influence, perhaps, of his overseas upbringing. His intimate awareness of the relationship between Wales and the world beyond its borders — and, indeed, beyond England — is reflected in a large number of his articles but particularly in his monograph Owen of Wales (1991), which traced the career of the ‘last’ of the House of Gwynedd, Owain Lawgoch (Owain the Redhand). Nor was Tony’s Wales ‘Cymru fach’, an impoverished or oppressed Wales. The usual interpretation of Wales as a victim was anathema to Tony. He pinpointed, instead, the more positive elements of the medieval period, considering that Wales had adapted remarkably successfully to the social and economic challenges and changes of the period which saw an expansion of the Welsh language. His aim was to celebrate Wales and its identity as a successful particularism and this was evident in the general volume on medieval Wales that he contributed to the Macmillan series published in 1995 and in many other monographs and articles, too numerous to specify here. His last article on Owain the Redhand was published in the 2018 Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, and only two days before his death he was talking about completing his fifth monograph that would have been The Medieval Welsh Worker.
His achievements were recognized in the many responsibilities and honours that came his way before and after his retirement from the University in 2002. The highpoint of his career in Bangor came in 1999 when he was given a chair as Professor of Welsh History, and he also acted as head of the department or School of History during a difficult period, insisting on preserving the identity and integrity of Welsh History as a discipline against all odds. He was also a member of the Senate of UC Bangor for many years and eventually a member of its Council. Within a wider Welsh context he was a member of the University of Wales Board of Celtic Studies, a member of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, President of the Cambrian Archaeological Society 2008–9, Vice-President of the Institute for the Study of Welsh Estates from 2014, and president since 2006 of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society he had served as Editor of its Transactions from 1966–2006. He was also a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Society of Antiquaries.
Tony was an academic of the first order and was always both wise and generous in his advice and support, sharing his experience, knowledge and ideas without holding back — that was part of what made him so inspiring both as a teacher and as a colleague, a friend or a former student. Tony was more than an inspiring academic, however. He was an entertaining and engaging friend whose lack of bombast and what would have been very justifiable awareness of his immense knowledge and piercing intellect made him all the more engaging. He was a dedicated and loyal family man, rejoicing in the academic successes of his wife Glenda (an expert on Welsh place-names) and in the successful careers of his two children, Richard and Gwenllïan, to whom must go our deepest sympathy on their loss of a husband and father. Despite serious illness a few years ago, Tony made a good recovery and had re-engaged with research and lecturing. News of his death came as a shock to the majority of his acquaintances, hearing of it as they did on the Welsh national news bulletins. The fact that it made the headlines is testament in itself to his standing in Wales.
Perhaps the days when individuals can shape the direction of a profession and its members have gone, but Tony was one of a handful of people who stimulated the development of archive education until it reached where it is today. And above all, he was a man of principle and a man to trust.
Yn dy lais mae llais y Llyw — drwot ti
Daw’r taeog yn hyglyw;
Ti’r meistr, troi y mae ystryw
Hen oes bell yn hanes byw.Footnote2
Notes
1. This obituary is based on the eulogy delivered at a memorial service for Tony Carr. A significant contribution has been made by Gareth Haulfryn Williams, particularly in relation to the Archives Diploma course at Bangor.
2. Gareth Haulfryn Williams translates this englyn as: In your voice is the Prince’s voice — through you / The peasant’s voice is heard; / You the expert, turn the plots / Of far off days into a living story.