Ruth Herbert Lewis
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Ruth Caine | |
|---|---|
,_by_unknown_photographer.jpg) Ruth Lewis, Lady Lewis by unknown photographer | |
| Born | 29 November 1871 Liverpool, England |
| Died | 26 August 1946 (aged 74) |
| Alma mater | Newnham College, Cambridge Trinity College Dublin |
| Occupation | Temperance movement activist |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 2 |
| Parents |
|
| Relatives | William Caine (brother) John Roberts (brother-in-law) |
Ruth, Lady Herbert Lewis, OBE (née Caine; 29 November 1871 – 26 August 1946) was an English temperance movement activist of Manx descent and collector of Welsh folk songs. She published collections of Welsh folk songs, and was a key member of the Welsh Folk-Song Society in the first half of the 20th century.
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Ruth Caine was born in Liverpool, the daughter of William Sproston Caine and Alice Brown Caine. Her father was a Member of Parliament,[1] and her maternal grandfather was Baptist minister Hugh Stowell Brown (1823–1886).[2] She had two older sisters, Hannah (1869–1951) and Dorothea (1870–1953), and two brothers, David and William Caine (author). Ruth Caine attended Miss Mallison's School in Liverpool, then Clapham High School for Girls after her father was elected as an MP in 1880 and the family moved to London. She later attended Newnham College, Cambridge, between 1890–1893 but as Cambridge did not award degrees to women at the time, she was granted a master's degree in 1906 by Trinity College Dublin as one of the so-called Steamboat Ladies.[3][4]
Folk music
After she married John Herbert Lewis, a Welsh politician, she moved to Wales, learned to speak Welsh, and committed herself to learning Welsh culture. Her determination to assimilate into Welsh culture "o galon, er nad o waed"’ (‘at heart, if not by blood’) was met with respect, to the extent that at the 1912 National Eisteddfod of Wales she was welcomed into the Gorsedd of Bards under the Bardic name of Caerwen.[4]
In 1906, she was one of the charter members of the Welsh Folk-Song Society (Cymdeithas Alawon Gwerin), and in 1930 she was elected to a term as president of the society.[5] She and other Society members collected wax cylinder recordings of Welsh-language traditional songs, and published a journal of their findings, having been inspired by "all their wild beauty & pathos".[6][7][8][4] Lewis used a portable Edison Gem phonograph to make the recordings and leading Welsh musicians such as Dora Herbert Jones and Morfydd Owen worked on the transcriptions of her recording.[4]
Books authored by Ruth Herbert Lewis include Folk-Songs Collected in Flintshire and the Vale of Clwyd (1914) and Second Collection of Welsh Folk-Songs Collected by Lady Herbert Lewis (1934).
