The Beauchamps of Dinas - a century long connection

News of Dinas

In 2012 Ann and John Hughes published “The News of Dinas 1894-1900”. This had involved them in painstakingly scrutinising pages of several hundred issues of the County Echo newspaper, sometimes via microfilm, and transcribing any information relating to Dinas. In those days the eight pages were large and the print was small. Theirs was a mammoth task.

The preface to the 147 pages includes the following. “The content is remarkable for its comprehensive coverage of village life. The correspondents, perhaps unwittingly, produced a social history of Dinas . . . . . . . A picture emerges of a lively, sometimes controversial, but confident community in the far south-western fringe of Wales at the very end of the Victorian era. The way of life recorded is both rural and truly parochial, but always tempered with the globe-trotting adventures and tragedies of the many sailors and master-mariners from the village.”

TOURISM. With improving rail and road links to Pembrokeshire, one important aspect of Dinas life was catering for the increasingly numerous summer visitors, who helped to boost the incomes of many Dinasites. The County Echo regularly reported on both the hosts and the visitors, and also on the busy owners of horse-drawn conveyances. Small-boat owners also benefited from the increasing holiday trade, along with the shops and pubs. Visitor numbers steadily increased and by 1900 there were over forty-two reported addresses for visitors in Dinas, including four hotels. A shortage of accommodation was often reported and proposals for a new hotel discussed. (Some tenants were apparently wary about offering lodgings, in case their landlords threatened eviction.)

The Beauchamp family

Montagu and Florence Beauchamp first brought their family on holiday from Kings Lynn to Dinas around 1906, when they stayed at Pencnwc Farm. Their children then were Montagu 13 (later a lieutenant in the Norfolk regiment, killed at 22 in WW1 at Suvla Bay in Turkey); Muriel (Dornie) 9; Victor 8; and Ivor 6.
Their father, Rev. Montagu Harry Proctor-Beauchamp MA, was a missionary in China and later chaplain to British forces in the Mediterranean and Russia (1915-20). In 1909 Florence purchased the two terraced cottages, Llandre and Trem-y-Don in Cwmyreglwys, and a year or two later the terrace was extended by building Nant yr Ynys. The family (including young Basil, born in June 1906) then came on their summer holidays for the next fifty years or so.

The two early photos show the family at Cwmyreglwys in 1919. Basil is the twelve-year-old boy by the gate and playing with the model yacht. (See also Lunch afloat)
In 1933 they bought a nearby plot and built a garage for their two cars, used for travelling from Bath.
Finally, in 1956 Ivor Beauchamp sold the three terraced cottages, which were later marketed separately. In 1969, Ivor’s son Christopher built a large house, Ty’r Cwm, on the garage site.

BASIL AND DIANA BEAUCHAMP. Educated at Marlborough College and Toronto University, Basil had three children, Carol, Elizabeth and Nicholas in the early 1930s, by his first wife Joan Storey. In 1958 he and his second wife Diana Elliot, had a daughter Sophie. Little is known of his working life, though he may have spent some years teaching on a tea plantation in India.
Electoral registers show that he and Diana were living in Pembrokeshire at Rhosydderwen, Rhos Hill in 1973, and at Eastgate House, Narberth from 1974-79. In 1980 they arrived at Penhwyr in Dinas.

From 1990 the author got to know Basil and Diana quite well, supplying them with eggs and goat’s cheese, and later meeting Sophie and Hugh, who lived in London. Basil was a rather gentle, retiring figure who read a great deal, wrote poetry, explored the countryside, gardened and practised yoga*. He was bothered by deafness which inhibited socialising.
Diana was very different. She had raised three children from her first marriage to Arno Rohde; Sonia, Christine and John, and was, by nature, a social reformer. This intrepid lady had welcomed exiled Tibetans into her home, and helped establish at least one Steiner school in the UK, regularly visiting the one at Nant-y-Cwm near Llandissilio.
In Dinas, aged 75, she agitated for improvements to footpaths and street-lighting. She drove a car, learned to use a computer and attended local history events, whilst also renovating Penhwyr. When researching her family tree she acquired free lodging with a Mormon family in Salt Lake City. They helped with her research and revealed that the poet Robert Browning was amongst her ancestors. Her last journey abroad was to Hong Kong where she had relatives.
Later, in her eighties, she became a familiar figure, driving to the local shops in her motorised wheelchair. When Basil died at 99 in March 2006, Diana moved to Lydford’s Care Home in Sussex, where she died in 2017 aged 100. Sadly her daughter Sophie died in 2020 aged 62.
*Basil was the subject of an amusing HTV documentary on yoga in August 2000.

The Beauchamp connection to Dinas seems to have ended in 2006.

The author is still hoping to locate a photo of Diana Beauchamp!
With thanks to Rex Harries for information on the Cwmyreglwys homes, to Christopher Beauchamp for the early photos, and to Hugh Simons for details of Diana’s life.