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Ruth Bidgood (née Jones; 20 July 1922 – 4 March 2022) was a Welsh poet and local historian who wrote in English.
Ruth Jones was born at Blaendulais, Seven Sisters,[1] near Neath, Wales, on 20 July 1922. Her mother, the former Hilda Garrett, was a teacher.[2] Bidgood's Welsh-speaking father, Rev William Herbert Jones, became vicar of St Mary's Church, Aberavon,[3] where Ruth was brought up. She was educated at a grammar school in Port Talbot, and went on to read English at St Hugh's College, Oxford.[3] During World War II, she served in the Wrens as a coder, at Alexandria in Egypt.[4]
After the war, Bidgood worked in London helping to prepare a new edition of Chambers's Encyclopaedia,[5] but eventually she and her husband, David Bidgood, whom she had married in 1946,[2] moved to Coulsdon in Surrey.[3] She and her husband had two sons and one daughter, Janet (died 2007).[2]
Bidgood and her husband bought a holiday bungalow at Abergwesyn, near Llanwrtyd Wells in Powys.[5] During the 1960s, she became concerned about the construction of reservoirs and introduction of forestries in mid Wales, which she felt adversely affected the life of the region; this influenced her 1970 collection, The Zombie-Makers.[6] In the 1970s, after her husband had left her,[2] she made her home permanently at the bungalow, and began publishing poetry and researches into local history.
Bidgood died at Bryn Gwy residential home in Rhayader, on 4 March 2022, at the age of 99.[7][8]
In April 2011 her collection, Time Being, was awarded the Roland Mathias Prize.[9]
A book-length study of Bidgood's work, written by Matthew Jarvis, was published in 2012 by the University of Wales Press in the "Writers of Wales" series.[10] The book was launched together with Bidgood's Above the Forests collection at Aberystwyth Arts Centre on 27 July 2012.
- The Given Time, 1972
- Seven articles in Transactions of the Radnorshire Society, (1974–1980) on Llandewi Hall
- Not Without Homage, 1975
- The Print of Miracle, 1978
- Lighting Candles, 1982
- Kindred, 1986
- The Fluent Moment, 1996
- Abergwesyn: Bwlch y Ddau Faen (1997). Newtown, Powys: Gwasg Gregynog. ISBN 0-948714-72-7
- Singing to Wolves, 2000
- Parishes of the Buzzard, a local history of Abergwesyn
- New and Selected Poems, 2004
- Symbols of Plenty, 2006
- Hearing Voices, 2008
- Time Being, 2009
- Above the Forests, 2012
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