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“Was she named after Arglwyddes Nest, perch Rhys ap Tewdur, Giraldus’s grandmother?”Wales was indeed in her bones, as it had been in Giraldus Cambrensis, the fount of knowledge of medieval Wales. She was born in 1920, the fourth of five daughters of James Abraham and Winifred Lewis, each of whom was given a Welsh and an English name (she detested and never used her English “Elinor”). Her father, himself from a long line of Welsh schoolmasters, was Vicar of Aberdare, a mining parish that suffered deeply from the post-war depression that led to the “hunger marches”. Any day Richard Burton, Frank Duncan, Carleton Hobbs (a special favourite), Judi Dench or Derek Jacobi might be there trying out parts. Nest darned David Jones’s vests, Flanders and Swann tried out new songs, David Gascoyne and Henry Reed agonised, John Betjeman and Stevie Smith sang Hymns A & M, with Nest (who knew all the words by heart) at the piano, and Dylan Thomas drank.There was a first-night party for Under Milk Wood – produced by Douglas and first broadcast, 50 years ago this month, in 1954 – where the young Welsh actors were offered pat?”Putty?” they said. “That’s what they put the windows in with in Dowlais.”People always thought that “Nest” was short for something, perhaps because she was so short herself, but the poet and artist David Jones knew better.

Hospitality was at the core of the life of Nest and Douglas Cleverdon. She was a secretary at the BBC and he was a bookseller and publisher turned BBC producer when they married, 60 years ago on Thursday, in 1944. Elinor Nest Lewis: born Aberdare, Glamorgan 17 December 1920; married 1944 Douglas Cleverdon (died 1987; two sons, one daughter, and one son deceased); died London 27 December 2003.
Hospitality was at the core of the life of Nest and Douglas Cleverdon. Indeed, his love of travel remained with him till the end, and his last camping trip in France took place, at the age of 79, just three months before he died.Rory Miller. This reflected the generosity that he had shown throughout the 1970s in encouraging younger staff, supporting them through personal crises, and in particular aiding refugees from Chilean authoritarianism who arrived in Liverpool after 1973.Having remarried in 1979, he thoroughly enjoyed life after retirement. He continued to undertake research on Peru, while remaining as Chief Examiner in A-Level Geography for the Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate until 1990. Thereafter he continued to examine for the International Baccalaureat.

These appointments allowed him to combine his liking of travel with the need to visit centres undertaking Cambridge and IB exams overseas. None the less, the future looked increasingly bleak, and in 1982 Smith decided to take early retirement, at least partly in the hope of protecting his colleagues from further cuts. This was almost entirely due to the affection and respect in which his colleagues and students held him.When the first round of university-funding cuts arrived in 1981, the Centre for Latin American Studies was picked out by the UGC as worthy of retention. First, he continued his own research on the historical geography of Peru and on agrarian reform and colonisation in Peru and Venezuela; he also co-edited, with Harold Blakemore, another major textbook: Latin America: geographical perspectives (1971).

Second, he was co-editor of the Journal of Latin American Studies for a decade after 1971, shaping it into one of the two leading interdisciplinary journals on Latin America in the world.Third, after arriving in Liverpool as Director of the Centre for Latin American Studies in 1970, he negotiated a further tranche of “Parry” funding from the University Grants Committee, and, with the staff of the centre, he created an academic community that was both intellectually stimulating and one of the friendliest places to work in that one could imagine. His influence was felt in many directions, but he made three particularly important contributions. The paper that he delivered to the Royal Geographical Society on his return reflects him beautifully: a thorough piece of research ranging widely over key issues in Peru’s development; a clear love of travelling; and the humour with which he answered a question about Andean microclimates: The importance of diurnal freeze and thaw was brought home to me forcibly by camping one evening on what seemed a dry and well-sheltered site below a vertical cliff, until the following morning brought a steady and most uncomfortable trickle of meltwater.Smith was one of the generation of scholars who mapped the path for Latin American Studies in the United Kingdom. He travelled the country widely, driving on very rough roads and camping in remote conditions.