William Owen was born in 1717 in Nevern, Pembrokeshire, the son of a well-to-do farmer who hoped his clever son would become a clergyman. Instead, Owen ran away to sea as a teenager and, by the 1720s and 1730s, had become one of the most successful smugglers on the Welsh coast, running brandy, salt and other contraband across Cardigan Bay between the Isle of Man and the harbours of Pembrokeshire and the Llyn Peninsula.
The story
Owen's most notorious exploit came when he led an armed band of Pembrokeshire and Cardiganshire men — gathered to support a friend, 'Mr Parry', in a dispute with the powerful Johnes family of Aber-mad — in a march on the Johnes' mansion near Aberystwyth. Nominated 'general' of the assembled men, Owen led them to the gates of the great house, but at the sight of its armed and well-manned defences his troops lost their nerve and the siege collapsed without a shot fired. Owen's luck finally ran out in 1747, when he was convicted of murder at the Carmarthen assizes and hanged on 2 May that year — his trial and exploits recorded in the Great Sessions records that survive as one of the best-documented smuggler's lives of 18th-century Wales.