ITS tales of raucous behaviour and affairs with servants sound like something from the plot of Downton Abbey.
But a newly-discovered diary of a Victorian landowner in rural Wales, written 150 years ago, has revealed a vivid insight into a personal tale of promiscuity, addiction and loneliness.
My Failings and Imperfections is a Victorian gentleman’s confessional diary of his life in the countryside of the mid 19th century.
Journalist Steve Dubé, the former farming editor of the Western Mail, came across the diary of Rees Thomas of Dol-llan, Llandysul, by chance in the Pembrokeshire Record Office in Haverfordwest several years ago.
He was surprised by its bluntly honest revelations.
Now the diary is the first joint publication by Carmarthenshire Antiquarian Society and Ceredigion Historical Society.
Antiquarian society Vice-President Thomas Lloyd, Wales Herald Extraordinary and High Sheriff of Dyfed, describes it as “remarkable”.
“It gives a vivid insight into a lifestyle far from unique but seldom recorded, and especially not in such searing honesty and detail,” he said.
Rees Thomas was wealthy by the standards of his time, with tenant farmers on a small estate alongside the River Teifi in the north Carmarthenshire parish of Llanfihangel ar Arth.
He lived and wrote his diary in a mansion across the river from Llandysul parish church that is almost unchanged since his day.
Mr Lloyd, a leading architectural historian and author of the classic Lost Houses of Wales, believes the mansion may have been altered by the famous Regency architect John Nash in the late 18th century.
Thomas was a younger son of an important family closely connected with Unitarianism, and a cousin of the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
Many forbears and relatives were ministers of religion, and he was directly descended from a Welsh royal family.
But his antecedents were only burdens for an unhappy man struggling with the family’s financial and legal affairs and the intransigence and even mental derangement of his close relatives, and torn between his good intentions and his demons.
“After the death of his two elder brothers, Rees becomes head of a family that includes five orphaned children, three spendthrift younger brothers with drink problems and a sister unhappily married to a drunken vicar,” said Mr Dubé, who edited the book.
“They are all on his back, and his unsympathetic mother, who lives next door, makes matters worse.
“It’s a situation that forces him into the clutches of the demon drink and the arms of his not always willing servants, who react rebelliously. And Rees Thomas writes it all down, plainly and honestly, over a period of two years and eight months from 1860.”
Mr Lloyd said: “the lifestyle of the grandest of society is well recorded. But further down the scale, where most people lived, the less we have.
“From watching period dramas on television we naturally imagine gentleman to be finely turned out and mannered, yet in the deeper country, such as in this instance around Llandysul, there would be respectable tenant farmers whose lifestyle was more comfortable than the poorer gentry.
“Rees talks to his dairy as a way of finding solace and to set in words his promises for self-improvement, which alas, never happen.”
But it’s not all demons, drink and damsels. Rees Thomas, according to a newspaper obituary after his death in 1865 at the age of 42, was an agricultural improver who bred livestock, planted orchards and woodlands and was regarded as an influential public benefactor.
“The diary records a different age of farming, where men planted orchards and corn and built coracles to cross rivers on their land, and where women churned butter,” said Mr Dubé.
“The people of Llandysul wander across these pages, and towards the end they take an excursion train from Carmarthen to see the sights of London. We encounter old traditions like the vigilante mob justice of the ceffyl pren, funeral customs, otter baiting and fox hunting.
“It’s a window on a lost world as well as an unflinching insight into the timelessness of the human condition and its all-too-common weaknesses.”
The book is being launched at the Porth Hotel, Llandysul tonight at 7pm.
