My friend Ruth Bidgood, who has died aged 99, was one of the finest Welsh poets in English and one of the best British female poets of her generation. She was also a local historian who patiently recorded the hidden history of the Black Mountains and mid-Wales.
She was born in Seven Sisters, near Neath, the daughter of the Rev Herbert Jones and his English wife, Hilda (nee Garrett), an elementary school teacher, and educated at Port Talbot secondary school and St Hugh’s College, Oxford. In 1943 she joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service (the Wrens) and worked in Alexandria, Egypt, as a coder, a job she later said was “akin to writing poetry” – that is, searching for the right and precise word.
