Mari Ellis: Writer who worked for the New Wales Union and championed women’s rights

Mari Ellis led a busy life as the wife of TI Ellis, whose father was Thomas Edward Ellis, the Liberal MP for Merioneth whose premature death in 1899 robbed his country of an influential advocate of Home Rule and canonised him as the lost leader of Victorian Wales. TE Ellis, who was appointed Chief Whip in Gladstone’s government in 1894, is commemorated by a large bronze statue in the High Street of Bala, his native place, and by another in the quadrangle of the Old College at Aberystwyth, of which he was a staunch champion. Mari Ellis was once amused to overhear a neighbour say that she had “married the statue’s son”.

Thomas Iorwerth Ellis carried on his father’s work as the indefatigable secretary of Undeb Cymru Fydd, a non-political organisation known in English as the New Wales Union, which brought together many prominent Welsh people and, in the 1940s, lobbied the government on behalf of Wales in such fields as broadcasting, land acquisition for military purposes, the Welsh language and the increasing demand for administrative devolution to Cardiff. He was the epitome of establishmentarian Wales, and came to the attention of a wider world as a member of the team representing Wales in the popular BBC programme Round Britain Quiz for some 20 years.

Ellis had the dedicated support of his wife, Mari, who worked alongside him in a voluntary capacity as secretary, amanuensis and researcher for his books, memoranda and journalism. Between 1953 and 1959 TI Ellis published five volumes in the Crwydro Cymru (“Wandering Wales”) series of travel books exploring the counties of Wales, their topography and cultural life. In each of these books Mari is thanked for her companionship “along paths old and new”, and it was she who finished a London volume after her husband’s death.

Mary Headley was born in 1913 at Dylife, a lead-mining village in the Plynlimon range in Montgomeryshire, where her father was an Anglican vicar. Unusually for the time and her father’s station in life, she was brought up Welsh-speaking and never wavered in her commitment to the language.

After the John Bright Grammar School in Llandudno she read Welsh at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, graduating BA in 1936 and MA two years later, and then trained as a librarian. She worked in libraries in Colwyn Bay and Kingston-on-Thames until her appointment to the staff of the National Library of Wales in 1944. Five years later she married TI Ellis, who, until his appointment as secretary of Undeb Cymru Fydd in 1941, had been a lecturer in classics at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth.

A devout Churchwoman, whose membership of the Anglican communion had survived the bruising disestablishment of the Church in Wales in 1920, Mari Ellis was one of its most distinguished lay women, regular in attendance at Eglwys y Santes Fair (St Mary’s), the Welsh Anglican church in Aberystwyth. A prolific contributor to the periodical press, she contributed a women’s column to Y Llan (“The Church”), the magazine of the Church in Wales, and wrote with her daughter a lively survey of the parish churches of Wales. She also edited Yr Angor (“The Anchor”), a community newspaper for Welsh-speakers in Aberystwyth.

Her principal field of research was the group of Anglican churchmen known as Yr Hen Bersoniaid Llengar (“The old literary clerics”), who fostered Welsh culture between 1818 and 1858. They kept Welsh scholarship alive until the advent of the new learning emanating from the Celtic Department at Oxford University and the University of Wales; they also revived the Eisteddfod as a national festival in which the common people could participate.

Associated with the group were a number of lay women such as Lady Llanover (inventor of the Welsh traditional dress) and Charlotte Guest (translator of the Mabinogion), who held a special attraction for Ellis because, she once told me, they were less backward-looking than their male counterparts. She wrote so extensively about these patriotic people that when she came to assemble her articles for publication she found they amounted to some 200,000 words – and that no publisher would agree to publish them without massive subsidy or without making cuts which she would not countenance. The articles remain unpublished.

Her other keen interest was in the emancipation of women. She made no secret of the fact that, as a feminist avant la lettre, she was most comfortable in Plaid Cymru. Her advocacy of women’s rights runs like a thread through her three novels and collections of essays, many of which first appeared in the women’s section of Y Cymro (“The Welshman”), the venerable Welsh-language weekly paper.

Genial, homely in appearance but with a formidable intellect, she was often to be found in the National Library, beavering away amid the manuscripts and periodicals. When I was looking into the life of Georg Sauerwein, the Welsh-speaking polyglot, it was to her I turned. Our acquaintance was not dented even when I, with others, recommended winding up Undeb Cymru Fydd on the grounds that it had outlived its usefulness; I think she concurred.

Ellis’s editorial ability was at its best in Y Golau Gwan (“The faint light”), a selection of love letters from her father-in-law, TE Ellis, to his wife, Annie, in which the zeitgeist of Liberal Wales, with its hopes for a Nonconformist nation, shines from every page.

It was a source of great satisfaction to Ellis that her daughter Marged Dafydd (Meg Ellis) threw herself into the rumbustious but non-violent activities of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (The Welsh language society), which from its inception in 1962 challenged the London government and local authorities to provide better provision for Welsh, its members often breaking the law in order to make their point.

One of Marged Dafydd’s novels, I’r Gad (“To battle”, 1975), takes the form of a prison diary; another, Cyn Daw’r Gaeaf (“Before winter comes”, 1985), is a diary of the peace protests at Greenham Common. Mari, like Marged, was often to be seen carrying a placard and wrote in defence of the young people who were dragged before the courts or fell foul of their employers. She thought it better to light a small candle than to curse the dark.

Mary (Mari) Gwendoline Headley, writer and historian: born Dylife, Montgomeryshire 21 July 1913; married 1949 Thomas Iorwerth Ellis (died 1970; one daughter, one son); died Aberystwyth 25 January 2015.