Speaker: David Jenkins, National Museum of Wales

Chair: Alan James, Senior Lecturer in War Studies

This paper discusses the highly unusual role played by a prominent Welsh Calvinistic Methodist minister, the Rev. John Cynddylan Jones, in the promotion of share sales on behalf of an expanding Cardiff tramp shipping company, Evan Thomas, Radcliffe & Co., in the 1880s and 1890s. What started out as a mutually beneficial arrangement, with Jones receiving handsome commissions for his ‘missionary work’, rapidly descended into acrimonious chaos as the details of the arrangement leaked into the contemporary shipping press.

David Jenkins is secretary of the British Commission for Maritime History and an honorary research fellow of Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales. He has written widely on aspects of Welsh maritime, transport and industrial history, and is currently working on a centenary photographic history of Cardiff shipping firm Graig Shipping plc.

Hosted by the Laughton Naval History Unit of the Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War on behalf of the British Commission for Maritime History and the Society for Nautical Research