Conwy grave Evan Evans
Evan Evans (d.1903)
Evan Evans was Conwy’s harbourmaster for many years. He and his wife Elizabeth lost five children in infanthood – the first occupants of this family grave. Then in 1890 their son Robert, aged 19, drowned in the “Conway boating disaster”, described on our page about the nearby grave of Fanny and Beatrice Varcoe.
Robert belonged to the Royal Welsh Fusiliers’ local volunteer brigade. He received a military funeral, attended by local comrades and 60 men from the Manchester Regiment. An “immense crowd” of c.4,000 people paraded from Conwy quay to St Agnes Cemetery via High Street and Upper Gate Street. The band of Robert’s battalion played, and the choirs of Conwy’s chapels sang together.
In 1893 Evan Evans made headlines after being arrested for accepting a gift of duty-free tobacco from the captain of a ship at the quay. He was prosecuted on a charge that practically amounted to “smuggling” and had to pay a fine, legal costs and treble the tobacco’s value.
His business interests included shipping gravel from North Wales river beds to Liverpool. He owned a small ship, a coasting flat called Hannah, but it broke free from its mooring in a storm in 1899 and was wrecked near Clynnog, on the Llŷn Peninsula.
Despite having lost so many children, Evan left six sons and two daughters when he died in December 1903, aged 60. Elizabeth died in 1922, aged 76. The family’s home was Bro Llewelyn, on Bangor Road.