St David’s Day Parade

SEVERAL events are taking place in Aberystwyth over the weekend of 5 March to celebrate St David’s Day.Amongst the activities will be a St David’s Day Parade. This will be the largest event to date and will be led by piper Gwilym Bowen Rhys. The artist Mary Lloyd Jones will be the guide and members of Aberystwyth choirs will be singing and walking to music from the town’s Silver Band.The Cambria Drum Band will appear for the first time since 2013.As part of the event, Cered Menter Iaith Ceredigion, has organised loads of free events, workshops and performances throughout the day for children and families.During the day entertainment will start at 10.30am on Owain Glyndwr Square and in MGs Café. Amongst the artists who will be singing will be Gwilym Bowen Rhys, Cambria Drum Band, Raffdam, Dilwyn and Huw Banjo and Carwyn Fowler.There will also be various work-shops and stands in The Old Col-lege, before the celebrations move to the Town Clock by 1pm to start the Parade. Activities in the Old College will encompass song writing workshops, crafts, beatboxing, poetry, ukulele and graffiti and stands by Cowbois selling Welsh T-shirts and Coleg Ceredigion doing face painting.At 1pm, the parade will start from the town clock to Kings Court, and at 2pm, the Cered children’s activities will re-start in the Old College throughout the afternoon.The music will continue in the Black Lion with Gwilym Bowen Rhys and a folk session.

Bibliographical Group

THE Bibliographical group welcomed Dr Hannah Thomas of the University of Durham as its speaker on Saturday, 20 February. After training as an archivist in Aberystwyth, Hannah Thomas undertook doctoral studies at Swansea University, which she completed last year. Her research was based at Hereford Cathedral Library, where she investigated the Cwm Jesuit Library, located originally at the Jesuit headquarters on the Herefordshire-Monmouthshire border, but seized and brought to Hereford Cathedral by Bishop Herbert Croft in 1679. Her lecture explained the back-ground of the Jesuits’ clandestine missionary activities after the Reformation, recounted the circumstances in which the library was confiscated, and went on to explain the speaker’s own painstaking work in identifying the Cwm books amongst the historic holdings of Hereford Cathedral. This involved deciphering marks on title pages, bindings and else-where in the volumes, and eventually led to a catalogue of 337 volumes, twice as many as had previously been identified. This makes the Cwm collection the largest known surviving post-Reformation mis-sionary library in Britain.The meeting was held in the Octagon at St Paul’s Methodist Centre, preceded by coffee in the concourse. After the lecture there were numerous questions and comments from the audience of about forty, which the chairman eventually had to curtail so that the speaker could be taken to lunch at the Pier Brasserie. The committee met in the afternoon to plan the coming year’s programme.The next meeting will be the AGM at 6.30pm on Tuesday, 15 March, again at St Paul’s, after which Dr Rhiannon Ifans will speak on Manuscript Songbooks of mid Wales.

Wildlife Trust

THERE is a change of speaker for the next meeting of the north Cere-digion section of the Wildlife Trust South and West Wales, which will be held at 7pm on Monday, 7March in C22in the Hugh Owen building on Penglais Campus. The advertised talk by local wildlife artist Owen Williams, on the Woodcock Network, has had to be postponed as he will be aboard then. Dr Pippa Moore of the Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences, at Aberystwyth University, has stepped in at short notice and will be speaking on observed and future effects of climate warming on marine biodiversity.Pippa is a lecturer in Marine and Freshwater Biology and Leader of the Animal and Aquatic Sciences Theme at the institute.All are welcome to the meeting, and more information on it and the section’s programme of outdoor and indoor meetings through to mid-July is available from the secretary, David Purdon on 01970 871012.

Rotary Club

AT THE beginning of last week’s meeting, president John Harries read out a letter from Water Aid, the global charity that sets out to pro-vide and improve water supplies in the third world, to acknowledge the club’s donation of £1,270, the result of money collected in the Wishing Well on the promenade during the past 12 months.This sum was being matched by the treasury, producing a very worthwhile total of £2,540.The speaker at the meeting was Gareth Lloyd Roberts who was appointed to the post of director of the Aberystwyth Arts Centre in November 2013. Prior to his appointment, Mr Roberts had held various roles in the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay and had also worked as a director, script writer and researcher for Welsh language TV programmes.Mr Roberts emphasised the importance of the Arts Centre, which in his opinion, is the largest and most dynamic of its type in the country, to the Aberystwyth area. A recent economic intelligence survey had estimated a positive impact of £10.5m on the local economy it having attracted upwards of 750,000 visitors.The aim was to increase this even further by making Mid Wales a major player in the production of artistic output and promoting Aberystwyth as a centre of cultural tourism. It was hoped to stage an arts and music festival in the town in 2017/2018 as well as various other productions.Major refurbishment of the Arts Centre was programmed assuming sufficient funding was forthcoming. In this context, Mr Roberts emphasised the need for more commercial activity to alleviate the effects of government and local authority grant cutbacks and generating outside funding was to become more and more vital in ensuring the continued success of the Arts Centre in the future.

First World War lecture

WHO, and how many people, opposed the First World War in Wales? Who were the conscientious objec-tors leading the opposition? And what parallels can be drawn with conflicts today?A revealing and informative public lecture on conscientious objectors and opposition to the First World War in Wales will be delivered by former BBC Wales head of news and current affairs, Aled Eirug at 4.30pm, today (Wednesday, 2 March) at Aberystwyth University’s International Politics Department.Mr Eirug said: “As we mark the centenary of the First World War in Wales, and given the tendency to concentrate on the soldiers, in this lecture I will focus on those who opposed the war throughout Wales and especially on the over 800 conscientious objectors. “Whilst it’s important to remember the soldiers who lost their lives in the war, it is also important to remember that there was a significant minority who chose another path which was difficult and often unpopular.”

This is one in an on-going series of challenging and topical lectures by Wales for Peace, where lesser-exposed aspects of WW1 are explored by experts, as an inspiration for communities and families to gather their own hidden histories relating to the First World War.

The lecture will be delivered in Welsh, with simultaneous translation. Aled Eirug will be accompanied by Cyril Pearce of Leeds University, one of the UK’s leading experts on this topic and author of the Pearce Register of Conscientious Objectors.Later, on the same evening, there will be a follow-on activity, namely Y Lolfa’s book launch of Pilgrim of Peace - A Life of George M Ll Davies by Jen Llywelyn at 6.30pm in the National Library.