Aberdare Boys Grammar School

This certificate was unclaimed by its owner, the pupil Thomas Archibald Jones. It is printed on what appears to be vellum, or a very similar material. It is for the Supplementary level of the Senior Certificate of the Central Welsh Board, CWB. These Supplementary examinations were taken after one year in the sixth form, possibly to enhance the Senior Certificate taken at age 16, in the preceding year. Thomas Archibald Jones entered the School in 1907 and was the son of a Cwmaman teacher, Ruth Jones, of 15 Spencer Street.

The signatories were all prominent in the history of education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sir Edward Anwyl was a distinguished Welsh academic, who after occupying chairs of both Welsh and of Comparative Philology at Aberystwyth became the first Principal of the Monmouthshire Training College at Caerleon. Owen Owen was the CWB’s first chief inspector, appointed in 1896. He held the position until 1915. Both men have biographies in the Online Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Edward Lyulph Stanley, fourth Baron Sheffield, was initially a London-based educationalist who was an advocate of the secular control of education. On his succession to the peerage in 1903 Stanley inherited estates in Cheshire and Anglesey, becoming chairman of the Anglesey Education Committee (1904–19), which in turn brought him into the administration of the CWB. The signatures appear to be handwritten with a pen, rather than an impression produced by a stamp.