Lives in Cricket No 11 - CP Lewis

most readily found in West Glamorgan and the counties of Brecon, Cardigan, Carmarthen and Pembroke. The name means offspring of ‘Llewi’, itself short for Llewellyn, which in its turn refers back to Llewellyn, the famous name of the last independent Prince of Wales. C.P. was the fifth of seven children born to Frederick and his wife, Anna Letitia, née Price. He had two older brothers; Frederick William, who became a doctor and served as Medical Officer of Health for Llandovery; and David Jones, who subsequently became a barrister. He had a younger brother, Arthur Middleton, who became a stockbroker and lived in later life in Surbiton in Surrey. C.P. also had two older sisters – Anna and Mary Agnes – plus a younger sister, Emily Louisa, and the Lewis family lived, comfortably it would seem, at Llwyn Celyn with a governess, a groom and five other servants. Another measure of their decent situation was that Frederick and his wife could afford to pay the full tuition and boarding fees for all of their boys at Llandovery College, in the town of that name five miles further up the Tywi valley from Llangadog. The College had been endowed by Thomas Phillips, a London-born but Radnorshire-bred gentleman who spent thirty years in India, before retiring to London and becoming important in the Royal College of Surgeons. For a while in younger life, he had been a surgeon’s apprentice in Hay-on-Wye, near the Welsh border, about thirty miles from Llandovery. When he wanted to promote educational links between Welsh speakers and the church, he offered to fund a professorship in Welsh at the theological college of St. David’s, Lampeter. However, his offer was oddly and rudely rebuffed by the college authorities and so, Kerry Packer-like, Phillips decided to go it alone in Llandovery, a drovers’ town where herds of Welsh cows and flocks of sheep rested as they were driven from the mountain pastures to the markets of London. It was a most apt location for his Welsh Collegiate Institute, because it was a stop on the stagecoach ride of the Bishop of St. David’s from his palace at Abergwili, outside Carmarthen, to London, and his support was thought crucial. Llandovery – in its pure Welsh form it translates as ‘The Church amongst the Waters’ – stands at the confluence of three rivers – the Tywi, the great salmon river that runs from the mountains of mid-Wales through Carmarthenshire to the sea, splitting west Wales in half, with the smaller Bran and 12 School Days in Llandovery, Swansea and Gloucester