Watkins

In 1292 forty-eight per cent of recorded Welsh names were patronymics, and in some parishes the figure passed seventy per cent. A man was his father's son and not much else: Thomas's boy was Evan ap Thomas, whose son was John ab Evan, whose son was Rees ap John. The strings could be run back seven generations, as in Llewelyn ap Dafydd ab Ieuan ap Gruffudd ap Meredydd, a spoken genealogy that Welsh law needed because descent from a common ancestor decided who held what. Watkin, a diminutive of the Norman Wat, reached that system through the Anglo-Norman administration of the Marches and became a frequent baptismal name from Hereford to Brecon.

The system broke first where England pressed hardest. Fixed surnames spread in Wales from the 15th century, became hereditary among the gentry in the reign of Henry VIII, and were general after the unification of 1536; town families, the wealthy and the border districts had gone over earlier still. Some Welsh names kept the ap as a stub, giving Powell from ap Hywel, Pryce from ap Rhys and Bowen from ab Owen. The Marches families took the English genitive instead, and ap Watkin closed up into Watkins. The consequence is a small stock of surnames shared by unrelated households: two Watkins families in one Monmouthshire village need not have a grandfather in common.

Alfred Watkins was born at the Imperial Hotel, Hereford, on 27 January 1855, son of a Hereford hotelier, brewer and miller. He left school at fourteen, entered the family brewery at fifteen, and stayed in the brewing and hotel business as a partner for the next forty-five years. The day job made a traveller of him. From 1875 he worked a fortnightly circuit by horse and trap as the brewery's representative through Herefordshire, Shropshire, Gloucestershire, Monmouthshire and the Welsh Marches.

He had taken up photography in 1872, and the circuit turned into an archive. Parish churches, dolmens, Roman roads, market towns and working country went onto his plates, and he built the most extensive single photographic record of the late-Victorian Welsh-Marches landscape made by any working photographer of the period, all of it on the side of a full-time trade. About three thousand of his surviving plates are held at the Herefordshire Records Office and the Hereford City Museum.

The instrument came out of the same problem. Plate photography in the 1880s and 1890s asked the operator to judge exposure by rule of thumb from light, aperture, plate sensitivity and reflectance. Watkins worked out a calculation system for his own landscape work and in 1890 produced a clockwork device, the Bee Meter, which gave the reading on a dial. Patented in 1891 and made at his Hereford workshop, it was the first commercial photographic exposure meter, and by 1930 the Watkins Meter Company was the leading British photographic-instrument firm.

He was sixty-six when the second idea arrived. Riding across Bredwardine Hill in west Herefordshire on 30 June 1921 he stopped on the ridge and took out his Ordnance Survey map. A standing stone, a hillfort, a parish church, a moot-mound and a Roman road stood along a single straight line. He took it as evidence of what he called the ley system: ancient straight tracks across the British landscape, marked by those features and still readable on a modern sheet.

He set it out in 1925 in The Old Straight Track, which has been in print ever since. The book became a foundation text of twentieth-century British landscape writing and of earth-mysteries publishing, an influence running from the countercultural 1970s through to the Glastonbury and Stonehenge landscape tradition of the present day. Watkins died at his Hereford house on 7 April 1935, aged eighty, and is buried in Hereford Cathedral cemetery. A Marches brewer's family name, ap Watcyn worn down to Watkins, sits on both the first exposure meter and one of the most durable popular ideas about Britain's landscape.

Tasker Watkins (1918–2007) was a Welsh judge and a Victoria Cross recipient. Gino Watkins (1907–1932) took the name the other way, out of Britain and onto the ice, as a British Arctic explorer. Oscar Ferris Watkins (1877–1943) served as a British colonial administrator.

American bearers of the name carried it into the same uniforms. Guy H. Watkins (1831–1864) was a lawyer and army officer, and Travis E. Watkins (1920–1950) received the Medal of Honor. Samuel R. Watkins (1839–1901) wrote as an American author and humorist.

Leonard Watkins (1859–1901) and Stuart Watkins (born 1941) were Welsh international rugby players, and Matthew Watkins (1978–2020) played rugby union for Wales. On the association side, Alfred Ernest Watkins (1878–1957), Mart Watkins (1880–1942) and Barry Watkins (1921–2004) were all Welsh footballers, and Allan Watkins (1922–2011) and Ryan Watkins (born 1983) were Welsh cricketers.

The name turns up in other codes and other countries. Eric Watkins (1880–1949) was a New Zealand rugby footballer and Les Watkins (1914–1974) an Australian rules footballer, while Nora Watkins played football in New Zealand. Chloe Watkins (born 1992) is an Irish field hockey player and Anna Watkins (born 1983) an English rower. Edgar Watkins (1887–1960) was a British gymnast; in the United States, Fenwick Watkins (1887–1943) was an athlete and coach and Harvey Watkins (1869–1949) a baseball manager.

Wales held 587,000 people in 1801, 1,163,000 in 1851 and 2,421,000 by 1911, and most of the increase came in the coal mining districts. Glamorganshire alone went from 71,000 in 1801 to 232,000 in 1851 and 1,122,000 in 1911. The Watkins name sat thickest along the Welsh-Marches axis from Monmouthshire and Brecon north into Powys, and through the modern era it stayed tied to the iron and coal valleys of Gwent, Pontypool and Tredegar and Ebbw Vale, and to the Black Mountains farming country north of them.

What the pits did not hold, the ships took. Welsh families moved to Liverpool and Ashton-in-Makerfield during the Industrial Revolution; contract miners went to the coal towns of the Pas-de-Calais in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the Albion sailed from Cardigan for New Brunswick in 1819 with twenty-seven Cardiganshire families aboard. Emigration went in particular to Pennsylvania, where the Watkins diaspora settled in the anthracite communities, and to the Australian gold-rush districts of Ballarat and Bendigo; Jackson County, Ohio, was known as Little Wales and Malad City, Idaho, began as a Welsh Mormon settlement. Bearers of the name turn up across the same English-speaking world: Arnold Hirst Watkins (1851–1926), an English-born South African politician; Benjamin Watkins (1884–1963), an Australian politician; Daniel Watkins (1918–1982), a New Zealand businessman; J. Elfreth Watkins (1852–1903), an American engineer.

Dudley D. Watkins (1907–1969) was the English comics artist who created Desperate Dan. Maurine Dallas Watkins (1896?–1969) was an American dramatist; Elizabeth Watkins (1923–2012) was an English author; Islwyn Watkins (1938–2018) was a Welsh artist. Alan Watkins (1933–2010) worked as a Welsh journalist and Kathleen Watkins (1934–2024) as an Irish broadcaster, actress and musician.

Two more of the name made their living from the plate and the print: Carleton Watkins (1829–1916), American photographer, and Margaret Watkins (1884–1969), Canadian photographer. A. W. Watkins (1895–1970) was an English sound engineer, Charlie Watkins (1923–2014) a British audio engineer, Peter Watkins (1935–2025) an English film director and Ronald Watkins (1904–2001) a British drama teacher. In the laboratory and the clinic the name belongs to Winifred Watkins (1924–2003), British biochemist, Arthur E. Watkins (1898–1967), English botanist, Sid Watkins (1928–2012), English surgeon and race doctor, and Calvert Watkins (1933–2013), the American linguist.