David Rees Collection

Books written or edited by David Rees, 1964-1997; Journal articles written by David Rees, 1969-2003; Newspaper articles and book reviews by David Rees, 1964-1989; Files of research, notes, and correspondence regarding Rees's published works, 1977-2001; General research materials, c. 1960s-1997; Typescripts and associated research materials, ?1960s-?1993; Correspondence and Ephemera, 1981-2003; Items found inside books, c. 1949-2001.

David Edward Bernard Rees, the son of Bernard Rees, JP and Irene Rees, was born in Swansea on 5 October 1928. He went to school in Swansea and Lampeter before enrolling at University College, Swansea. In the late 1940s, while still a student, he was instrumental in the creation of the Gower Society, of which he was a founding member and the first secretary. After leaving university, he moved to London, where he worked as a writer and journalist. For a time in the 1960s he was literary editor of The Spectator, where he was well-known for sending books on politics to reviewers who shared his political sympathies. Eventually, however, continued poor health from the after-effects of tuberculosis forced him to give up full-time employment and to move to West Wales in the 1970s, ultimately to Dryslwyn in the Vale of Towy. He spent the rest of his life as a scholar and writer in the disparate fields of international relations and Welsh history and letters. He was a noted authority on Cold War politics, who served as a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Conflict in London and as a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace in 1982-1983. Until the declassification of American military archives on the Korean War in the mid-1980s, his Korea: The Limited War (1964) was the definitive one-volume study of that conflict. As a scholar of Welsh history, he focussed on the early Tudor period, publishing two full-length studies: The Son of Prophecy: Henry Tudor's Road to Bosworth (1985, reprinted 1997) and Sir Rhys ap Thomas (1992) and several more journal articles. He was also interested in the work of the Welsh artist and poet David Jones. He died on 5 October, 2004.

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