J. Geraint Jenkins
John Geraint Jenkins was a native Welsh speaker, maritime historian and historian of rural crafts.
Eaarly life, education and career
Jenkins was born in 1929 into a Welsh-speaking "seafaring" family based near Llangrannog in Ceredigion; he attended the village school and Cardigan Grammar School, before completing his university education at the University Colleges of Wales at Swansea and Aberystwyth.He graduated from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth in 1950 with a degree in geography and anthropology, and then completed a master's degree there under E. G. Bowen and Alwyn J. Rees. He worked at a museum in Leicester from 1952 to 1953, when he was appointed Assistant Keeper at the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading, which came with a part-time lectureship at the University of Reading. In 1960, he returned to Wales as Assistant Keeper of the Welsh Folk Museum at St Fagans, and nine years later he secured promotion as Keeper of Material Culture. He then moved in 1977 to the Welsh Industrial and Maritime Museum in Cardiff, to be closer to the sea and his interest in maritime history; he regarded the decade he spent there as the happiest of his career. In 1981, the University of Wales conferred on him a doctor of science degree. But his move back to St Fagans and the Folk Museum in 1987 to be its Curator was less happy, owing in part to clashes with management and what Jenkins regarded as English interference. He retired early in 1992, and moved to Penbryn. He was the High Sheriff of Dyfed in 1994–95 and joined Ceredigion County Council, serving as its Chairman in 2002–03.