Audrey Williams

Audrey Williams ( Davies; 1902–1978) was a Welsh archaeologist. She was the first woman president of the Royal Institution of South Wales (RISW) and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. She worked on several notable excavations during the mid-20th century in Wales, London and south-east England, including the Gower Peninsula, Verulamium and the Temple of Mithras in London. Biography Williams was born Audrey Davies in Dinas Powys, Wales. Her family moved to Swansea when she was 14, and she studied at Swansea Girl's High School. In 1920, she won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, to study English, the same year that the Statute for Degrees for Women was passed, giving women the right to take degrees. She returned to Swansea after graduation in 1923 and worked as a teacher at a local school. She resigned this post when she married her first husband, Percy James Williams, a local architect. It was through Williams, who had a keen interest in Swansea ceramics, that she became involved with Swansea Museum and the Royal Institute of South Wales in the 1930s. She helped her husband to reorganise and catalogue ceramic collections within the museum. She became the Honorary Curator of Antiquities, and in 1936 compiled an accession register of all the objects, information from which is still used today. It was during this time that she first worked with W. F. Grimes who was assistant keeper of archaeology at the National Museum of Wales. She excavated three Iron Age Promontory Forts on the Gower Peninsula. Between 1941 and 1944 she was appointed Assistant Inspector of Ancient Monuments by the Ministry of Works. She was to excavate archaeological sites before they were developed for defences or military instillations, again working alongside Grimes.