Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, 10th Baronet

Lt-Col. Sir Owen Watkin Williams-Wynn, 10th Baronet, CBE, KStJ (30 November 1904 – 13 May 1988), was a Welsh soldier and landowner. He was Lord Lieutenant of Denbighshire from 1966 to 1974, then Lord Lieutenant of Clwyd from 1976 to 1979.

Background and early life Williams-Wynn was the son of Sir Robert William Herbert Watkin Williams-Wynn, 9th Baronet, KCB DSO, who (as his own father had done) employed a Welsh-speaking nanny to ensure that his son would be able to speak Welsh. He was educated at Eton and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.

One of the few members of the surviving ancient Welsh nobility, Williams-Wynn was the closest certain heir of the House of Aberffraw, the former ruling family of Gwynedd and Wales, who were deposed in the English Conquest of 1282. The Williams-Wynn baronets were an important family of Denbighshire landowners, whose 17th-century ancestor had married into the Wynn family of Gwydir, the patrilineal descendants of Owain Gwynedd, Prince of Gwynedd (1137–1170), and in time they became the senior surviving branch of his family. On the death of Sir John Wynn in 1719, his heiress Jane Thelwall inherited both the Wynnstay Estate and the Wynn claim to Aberffraw. Her husband Watkin Williams then added the Wynn family name to his own.

Life and career

In 1925, after graduating from Woolwich, Williams-Wynn was commissioned into the Royal Regiment of Artillery; He served in the Royal Horse Artillery, was an instructor at the Army School of Equitation, Weedon, adjutant of the 61st (Carnarvon and Denbigh Yeomanry) Medium Regiment of the Royal Artillery (Territorial Army), from 1936 to 1940, and was promoted Major in 1940, having been appointed a Justice of the Peace in 1937. He was second in command of his regiment while it was part of the British Expeditionary Force to France and was at the evacuation of Dunkirk, then was posted to the Far East. During service with the 18th Infantry Division at Singapore he was twice mentioned in despatches, and after the fall of Singapore in February 1942 was a prisoner of war of the Imperial Japanese Army on the Burma Railway until the end of the war in 1945. In 1947, he was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant for Denbighshire. On 23 November 1951, on the death of his father, he inherited the Williams-Wynn Baronetcy, and was High Sheriff of Denbighshire in 1954. He was also Master of the Flint and Denbigh Foxhounds from 1946 to 1961 and became Joint Master of his own Sir W. W. Wynn's Hounds in 1957. until 1979, when he retired. The ruins of Owain Glyndŵr's Sycharth stand nearby. An obituary in The Times said "He was a countryman to his bones. From his estate at Llangedwyn, South Clwyd, he exercised his wide agricultural and conservationist interests".

Marriages In 1939, Williams-Wynn married firstly, at Holy Trinity, Brompton, Margaret Jean, the daughter of Colonel William Alleyne Macbean, late Royal Artillery, and the Hon. Mrs Gerald Scarlett, step-daughter of Major General Gerald Scarlett. They were married by William Havard, Bishop of St Asaph. They had two sons, of whom David Watkin was heir to the title and estates. and in 1968 Williams-Wynn married secondly Gabrielle Haden Matheson, the daughter of Herbert Alexander Caffin. Knight of the Venerable Order of Saint John, 1972 Fellow of the Royal Agricultural Society

Coat of arms