Angela V. John

John was born in 1948 and she was brought up in Port Talbot.[1]

Her first book concerned the lives of women employed in the Victorian coal mining industry.[2] The book By The Sweat of Their Brow was published in 1980.[3] In the late 1980s she was one of the founders of the academic journal Gender & History.[4]

She was employed as a History Professor at the University of Greenwich.[2]

She began to research the life of Henry W Nevinson at the Bodliean library in Oxford.[5] As a result, she published War, Journalism and the Shaping of the 20th Century: The Life and Times of Henry W Nevinson a biography that includes his interests apart from his better known work as a war correspondent.[6] His life led on to the suffragist Evelyn Sharp who was, in time, his second wife. She too was a radical. In 2009 her biography Evelyn Sharp: Rebel Woman, 1869-1955 was published.[7]

In 2012 when she was an honorary Professor of History at Swansea University she was elected to the Learned Society of Wales.[2] In 2015 she published a book based around the richness of actors around her home town. The book as inspired by a conversation she had with Michael Sheen. The book is titled “The Actors’ Crucible: Port Talbot and the Making of Burton, Hopkins, Sheen and All the Others.” [8]

Her 2013 biography, Turning the Tide, of the suffragette Margaret Haig Thomas qualified her to be consulted[4] when the Welsh National Opera performed Elena Langer's Rhondda Rips It Up!. This was a music-hall based story about the woman who became Lady Rhondda which premiered in Newport in May 2018 toured to sixteen British venues.[9]

In 2022 she succeeded the politician Hywel Francis as President of the Welsh Peoples History Society Llafur. This was an organisation she had been in since 1977 and she had served as chair and as vice-president.[10]