Bobby Freeman

The late Bobby Freeman was born and brought up in Bury, Lancashire, though her maternal grandparents were from North Wales. She qualified in Industrial Design at Manchester and after a short spell in teaching she spent 16 years in advertising and press relations, becoming the first woman advertising executive in the Midlands. Bobby's interest in traditional Welsh food began in the early 1960's when she was running her restaurant, part of her Compton House Hotel, Fishguard, Pembrokeshire. At that time there was no interest and no support from within the trade for the concept of offering traditional Welsh dishes for tourists. It was the difficulty in obtaining authentic Welsh recipes, which eventually led to Bobby's post-restaurant serious research into the traditions, resulting in 1980 in the first, authentic study of the economic social and historical background to the traditions: First Catch your Peacock, which sold worldwide.There followed eight more titles: A Book of Welsh Bread, A Book of Welsh Country Cakes and Buns, A Book of Welsh Bakestone Cookery, A Book of Welsh Country Puddings & Pies, A Book of Welsh Fish Cookery, A Book of Welsh Soups & Savouries; Welsh Country House Cookery (for Mid-Wales Development), and Welsh Country Cookery. She also edited Lloyd George's Favourite Foods, which included a number of traditional Welsh dishes, and later edited and published Enid Roberts' Food of the Bards - the very first Good Food as the Bards were describing the food encountered on their visits to the Welsh nobility.Another contribution was a 6000 word introduction and explanation of the eccentric Victorian cookery treatise - The First Principles of Good Cookery, by the Rt Hon Lady Llanover, a rarity in its original edition, published in facsimilie by Brefi Press in 1991 - for Bobby the realisation of a 20-year dream. In addition to books, Bobby wrote on Welsh food and related topics for the Birmingham Post, The Western Mail and South Wales Magazine during the 1960's and 70's, and for Y Faner the Welsh language weekly, for two years, and broadcast regularly on Welsh radio and TV on Welsh food and restaurant reviews. In the 1970's she spent two years with the Wales Tourist Board which increased her knowledge of Wales and the Welsh. One of her regular jobs there was devising celebration Welsh dinners for special events - such as St David's Day and for visiting foreign journalists. In 1982 Bobby returned to west Wales after 10 years in Cardiff to found her Welsh Cookery Centre just outside Cardigan at the foot of the beautiful Teifi Valley. The year of her return to west Wales (1982) was marked by participating in the first ever film about Welsh food traditions - a historically accurate, very evocative and superbly filmed production for S4C.