From the Merthyr Express 80 years ago today….
All in a good cause?
Tag: Second World War
Court Rangers and Frank Cass
by David Watkins
In the 1940s, young men living Courtland Terrace and the surrounding area decided to start off a football team, appropriately naming their club Court Rangers A.F.C.
They first played in the Rhymney Valley Football League before joining the Merthyr League. Ken Tucker remembers the exciting times and the camaraderie that existed between the players, also the superb organisation of Frank Cass the manager, John Power the captain and an enthusiastic committee.
There were many extremely talented individuals in the team, including a young Philip Jones – later to become famous as Philip Madoc, however I wish to concentrate on another fascinating individual.
During a conversation with Ken, he asked me if I was aware of a Court Rangers player named Frank Cass? Although I knew he was in the publishing business, I was very surprised at the Court Rangers connection!
Whilst a young man, Frank and his Jewish family from London moved to Merthyr Tydfil at the start of the Second World War, and found accommodation at Dowlais, later moving to Courtland Terrace. He immediately integrated himself into the community, enjoying his stay in Merthyr, making friends before joining the Court Rangers Football Club and furthering his education at the County Grammar School.
All his life Frank was passionate about reading and knew he wanted a career in the world of books. Leaving Merthyr at the age of eighteen, he returned to London, and fortunately, a year later, found a job at the Economist Bookshop in Bloomsbury. Frank opened his own shop in 1953, and then, onwards and upwards, he became the owner of a number of prestigious publish firms.
One of the most satisfying decisions of his illustrious career was to publish the Goon Show Scripts in 1972. He knew that the Prince of Wales was a Goon fan and invited him to the book launch, along with Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers. They all attended and the book became an instant bestseller.
Frank’s love of Merthyr continued throughout his life and because of this he later published a book of particular interest to Merthyr entitled “Labour and Poor in England and Wales, 1849/1951 – Vol 3 South Wales, North Wales”. The first ninety-six pages are devoted to the working class of Merthyr Tydfil, with an illustration of Dowlais Ironworks on the cover.
After a wonderful and fulfilling career in the book trade, Frank sold off some of his publishing interests for fifteen million pounds! Not bad for a boy from North London, who for a short time in his life enjoyed himself living, studying, playing football for Court Ranger A.F.C. in Merthyr Tydfil.
Frank Cass died in 2007 aged 77
British Restaurant at Cefn
From the Merthyr Express 80 years ago today….
Leslie Norris Remembered
by Meic Stephens
Following on from the last post, here is an excellent courtesy of Meic Stephens.
Leslie Norris, who died in Provo, Utah, on 6 April 2006, at the age of 85, was a poet and short-story writer perhaps better known in America than in Britain, though in his native Wales he kept in touch with a few writers such as Glyn Jones and John Ormond, whose friendship meant much to him. He came home every summer to attend conferences and festivals, in particular the Hay Festival, and to reacquaint himself with the places and landscapes in which he felt most at home. Towards the end of his life he often talked about returning to Wales, but ill health always prevented it.
He had left Merthyr Tydfil, the old industrial town where he had been born in 1921, just after the end of the Second World War, in which he had served briefly with the RAF. Desperate to escape a humdrum job as a rates clerk and a town that seemed a dead end for the young, he enrolled as a student at the teacher training college in Coventry. He was never to live permanently in Wales again, though his childhood in Merthyr, the town’s colourful characters and its hinterland of the Brecon Beacons all left an indelible mark on him. I well remember his astonishment when, in 1965, he discovered that I was editing Poetry Wales in Merthyr: he turned up at my door with a sheaf of poems, which I published as The Loud Winter two years later, and thus began a friendship that was to last until his death.
From 1952 to 1958 Leslie taught at schools in Yeovil and Bath and was headmaster of Westergate School, Chichester, then lectured at Bognor Regis College of Education. He and his wife Kitty, who survives him, lived at Aldingbourne in West Sussex, where the poets Ted Walker and Andrew Young were among their neighbours. The years he spent in England, during which he served as chairman of the Southern Arts Association’s literature panel, were crucial to his development as a poet, largely on account of his reading of Edward Thomas.
Encouraged by Richard Church, he sent his poems to Cecil Day-Lewis at Chatto & Windus, who published them as Finding Gold in 1967 under the Hogarth Press imprint. Two more volumes appeared in the Phoenix Living Poets series: Ransoms (1970), which won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, and Mountains, Polecats, Pheasants (1974). He also began publishing stories regularly in The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker.
Having tried for several years to give up teaching, in 1973 he accepted an invitation to be Visiting Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, and thus began an association with American universities which was to last the rest of his life. On his return to England he found himself so unsettled by the experience of America that he resigned his Principal Lectureship at Bognor Regis and resolved to earn his living by his pen. His first collection of stories, Sliding, won the David Higham Prize for Fiction when it appeared in 1978, and his second, The Girl from Cardigan (1988), won a Welsh Arts Council prize.
After a second visit to Seattle, he was appointed in 1983 Christiansen Professor of Poetry in the English Department at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah; six years later he was made Humanities Professor of Creative Writing. In Provo, where he was particularly happy, he enjoyed great prestige. I witnessed at first hand the esteem in which he was held by the Mormons of BYU when, in 1991, I was Visiting Professor there: students and staff flocked to his readings and lectures – he was among the most accomplished readers I have ever heard – and queued to buy his books at the campus bookstore. Apart from his amiable personality and serious approach to the writer’s craft, I think it was the chaste nature of Leslie’s work that appealed most to the zealous Mormons. He was criticised in both Wales and England for a lack of social awareness and avoidance of adult relationships, for seeing everything through the eyes of a boy, and for his conventional techniques. But in Mormon country, despite not being a member of the Church of Latter-day Saints, he was their laureate. And so he stuck to his last, choosing to write as an outsider, content to remain always ‘at the edge of things’, that mysterious land where the familiar and the wondrous meet, and where his poems and stories had their abundant source.
Many thanks to the Royal Society of Literature for their permission to use this article. To view the original, please see https://rsliterature.org/fellow/leslie-norris/
Heroism at Sea
From the Merthyr Express 80 years ago today…..
A Welsh Quilt
At the recent launch of the remarkable new book ‘Dowlais Educational Settlement and the Quaker John Dennithorne’ by Christine Trevett, local historian Terry Jones recognised someone on a photograph shown during the presentation. Following a discussion between Terry and Christine, it transpired that the photograph came from an article (below) which appeared in the Merthyr Express on 31 January 1948.
Terry subsequently put the article on his Facebook page, and received the following message:-
The lady on the left is my mother. She was asked to make a Welsh bed quilt to raise American dollars after World War II. She agreed and my Dad made a special frame for her to use because the quilt was so big. He made it so that she could quilt then turn the frame under until she got to the middle, then because the material and padding got so thick, she started from the other end. The lady with her is the lady who drew the pattern in special chalking. That alone was amazing because she had to stay in exact pattern all the way through although she couldn’t see the rolled under quilt. The designer’s name was Miss Neale (not sure of the spelling). Other people in the UK were asked to make things too and the dollars raised went to help the repayment of the dollar debt the UK owed to America.
My mother was Mrs Gwyneth Pritchard née Richards from Caeracca Farm. She was living in 41 Edward Street when she was working on this quilt and it took up the whole of the front room. The furniture had to be removed to make room for the the frame to fit in.
At the end of the making it was put on exhibition in London, along with all the other hand made contributions and the Queen’s grandmother. Queen Mary wrote Mam a letter of congratulations to Mam for her excellence in work done on the quilt. I would love if we could find out who it was that eventually bought the Quilt.
One other incident that may raise a smile. When Mam was working on it, my sister Lynfa who was about two at the time, sat most of the time under the quilt. Mam had her there to keep an eye on her, and make sure she was safe.
Sybil Watkins
Many thanks to Terry Jones and Sybil Watkins for allowing me to use this article.
If you would like to purchase a copy of ‘Dowlais Educational Settlement and the Quaker John Dennithorne’ by Christine Trevett, please contact me at merthyr.history@gmail.com and I will pass your details on to the Merthyr Tydfil and District Historical Society who published the book.
Saved at sea
From the Merthyr Express 80 years ago today…
The Dowlais Sanitary Laundry Company
by J Ann Lewis
At a meeting held in September 1901 at Cambria Chambers, North Street in Dowlais by the Sanitary Laundry Company Ltd, it was decided to open the Dowlais Sanitary Laundry Company in Pant, with a capital of £3,000 in 300 shares at £10 each.
The ground near Caeracca Villas, described as an excellent site, was leased on 1 November 1901 from Mr Edward Davies, Machen, for a period of 999 years at a reduced rent of £14 per year while it was used as a laundry. It was formally opened on 14 September 1904, with Miss Wood being the first manageress.
Upon receipt of a postcard, a horse drawn van would collect the parcels. All British machinery was used and the water came from a fresh water spring a few hundred yards up the mountain.
After the Laundry closed (unfortunately I have been able to find the exact date of its closure), on 22 September 1933, the then owner, Miss Bertha Jenkins (Consett), gave the building to Christ Church to be used as a much-needed church hall.
On 23 November 1942, as part of the war effort, the hall became a British Restaurant – the first to be opened in the area. This restaurant formed a link in the chain of communal feeding in South Wales, with the policy that people should never again lack food, and that the food eaten should be the kind to make them strong and healthy.
The feeling was that the restaurant was ‘a bit out of the way’, but some thought the bus service was such, that the hall’s position would be of no hindrance to its success. It was opened by Mr E Hill-Snook (Divisional Food Officer), with about 200 people attending the opening ceremony. As well as the meals served on the premises, an outdoor scheme was introduced so that people wishing to take cooked dinners home could do so for the sum of 8d per head.
After the war, the hall was returned to the church until the cost of the upkeep proved too great. By September 1959, the church had leased the hall to Webber’s Cake Factory. Three men, Charlie Webber, K Hill and Bob Roberts opened the factory, and were joined a year later by Bill Healey and Mr Clark, all five becoming managing directors. The factory employed 12 full-time workers, and several part-time workers during busy periods. At their peak they had three vans on the road, selling cakes wholesale, but due to the economic slump in the 1960s, the first was forced to close in December 1966.
The hall remained empty for a while until a group of local residents approached the directors of Webbers Cake Factory asking to buy the building to open a social club, and in 1968/9 the new Pant Social Club opened. The club had a large dance hall, a separate bar and a snooker room with two well used snooker tables. The club proved a great success, and over the years, hundreds of pounds were raised by the members for charity, but by the end of the millennium, membership had fallen and the club closed in 2000. With the building of The Rise, the building was demolished to make way for the new houses.
The Memories of a Child Evacuee from Folkestone to Merthyr Tydfil, 1940 – part 3
by Peter Campbell
When we arrived we were given lemonade and cakes to eat while the teachers and staff decided what would happen next. We were all very tired and wanted to sleep. After a while they came to us, that is me and my brother and sisters, and told us we would not all be able to stay together, that me being the youngest would stay with my eldest sister Pat which was good but my other sister Ivy would be on her own, as would Gordon and Terry. Soon a couple came to us to take us to their home a Mr and Mrs Evans. Our teachers said we would all meet back at the hall in the morning, I never saw where my sister and brothers went. We left and went with Mr and Mrs Evans to go to their home.
The first night was very strange I did not sleep very well, I just wanted to be back home with my Mum and Dad, my sister Pat said it would be alright the war would not last very long we would soon be home again.
Next day we went back to the church hall to find out about our new school, we also saw my sister and brothers again; they were staying in a different part of the town. The school we were going to was called St Illtyd′s not far from where we were staying. It was a big school and everybody there thought we were funny because we did not talk like them but they were nice to us.
After a couple of weeks things were not right where we were staying. They were cruel to us, we were told not to come home till late, sometimes we had to go to school without any breakfast. I cried quite a lot and told my teacher I wanted to go home and we were not happy with Mr and Mrs Evans my sister told her teacher they were cruel to us.
The next day we were moved from there to another house, to a Mr and Mrs Mahoney they were very nice and made us welcome right away. We had good food warm and comfortable beds. They wrote to our parents to tell them we were OK.
There was no bathroom so having a bath was quite an ordeal. In the back yard hanging on the wall was a big long tin bath, on bath nights twice a week the bath was brought into the living room and put in front of the coal fire. The bath would then be filled with part cold water then boiling water from kettles until it was warm enough. I was lucky I got the first bath then my sister Pat had the same water and when my brother Terry came to stay that was three in the same water, we had to be quick because the water did not stay hot for very long. My brother Terry said it was great because where he had been staying before he had to have his bath outside!
Then one day about two years after we had moved to Wales, we were told some great news; we as a family were going to be all together once again. My Dad who worked for the Air Ministry was to be posted to Carlisle – which was considered to be a safe part of the country.
Everybody was happy that we were going home although they would miss us and we would miss them, our teachers, friends, Mr and Mrs Mahoney.
We felt sorry for all the other children we were leaving behind, they would have to stay there until the war finished.
So the day came for us to say goodbye to everybody Mr and Mrs Mahoney were very sad, they had been very good to us. We promised to keep in touch with them.
On the train to our new home in Carlisle (we really could not say it properly) we were told it was in Scotland and everybody wears a kilt! We were very excited and happy and could not wait to see our Mum and Dad and baby brothers again after two years. The further we travelled north the more mountains we saw it was fantastic we had never seen mountains as big before.
We were met at the station by our Mum and Dad I thought they looked a lot different since we last saw them two years ago. We jumped off the train and gave them lots of hugs and kisses. Mum said we all looked very grown up. It was a strange place Carlisle very big and noisy not a bit like Merthyr, but the difference was we were all together one happy family! We got on to a bus to take us to our new home which was in Dalston Road, It was a very big house with lots of rooms. We were met by our Granddad and the rest of the family and had a great big party which went on for ages.
Life changed again; new town, new school, new friends.
We were very happy to be able to say we were no longer evacuees, but we couldn′t help thinking about our other Mum and Dad who looked after us so well and all our school friends we had left behind in Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales.
Like all good stories this has a fairytale ending….. and we all lived happy ever after!
Many thanks to Les Haigh for giving me permission to reproduce this article. To see the original please visit:-
The Memories of a Child Evacuee from Folkestone to Merthyr Tydfil, 1940 – part 2
by Peter Campbell
THE EVACUATION
I am not quite sure of the date. It must have been around May 1940.
I was six years old. I lived in a lovely seaside town on the south coast of England called Folkestone in Kent with my Mum and Dad and 3 sisters and my 5 brothers. I was very proud of my eldest brother Harry he was in the RAF.
I went to a Catholic school called ‘Stella Maris’ with my sisters Pat and Ivy and two brothers Gordon and Terry they were all older than me. My teacher was called Sister St Teresa and our Head was Sister St John.
One day we were all at school assembly as every morning, I never used to listen to very much; I would be looking out of the window up at the sky to see if I could see any fighter planes. Our Head Mistress was telling us that because of the war and the risk of bombing, the government said it would be necessary for all the school children to be sent to a part of the country that would be safe from any bombs. We would be going to a town in South Wales called Merthyr Tydfil, we had no idea where Wales was or how far away, my sister said it was over 200 miles. I thought it would be very nice to go away on holiday it sounded like fun, but what I did not realise was that my Mum and Dad and my little brothers, too young to be at school, would not be coming with us and we would have to stay there until the war was over.
I couldn′t wait to get home a tell my Mum and Dad but they already knew and were very sad, they did not want us to go to a strange place on our own, but we knew our teachers were coming with us, so it would not be too bad and the whole school would be together.
During the next week we were all busy getting our things together we would not be able to take any toys just things like change of clothes, underwear, pyjamas, soap, toothbrush, shoes and such like, but I did manage to stuff my teddy ‘Chuckles’ in.
The school said we would get new things when we got to our new homes. Then the day came for us to leave home – we all met at school about 100 children. Our teachers called the register to make sure we were all present then tied labels on our coat collars, which had not to be taken off because it had our Name, Address, School and Age also where we were going to.
We all had to carry our gas masks which we had been doing for a long time, our little parcels of clothes, and we were taken to the railway station where there was a very long train waiting. We said goodbye to our Mums and Dads everybody was crying but we all tried to be brave and hoped we would all be together again soon. As the train left the station everybody was still waving, There were over 800 children on the train from all schools in Folkestone and Dover, we sat down and cried but our teachers said come on let′s all sing and we did.
It was about 10 in the morning and a very hot sunny day we were told that we would be stopping at stations on the way to get refreshments, and would reach Merthyr Tydfil by 2 in the afternoon. It was a terrible journey the sun was too hot through the windows of the train and there were air raids. The train had to stop just in case the German planes bombed the rails or the train. My brown paper parcel got very hot in the sun which gave of a funny smell I was very sick we did not reach Merthyr Tydfil until 5.30pm.
There were no buses to meet us so we were told we would have to walk to a mission hall, which was at the top of this steep hill. We set off to walk in twos hand in hand, People were lining the street right to the top, waving flags and cheering. I think they were trying to make us welcome, some were crying especially the women I suppose they felt sorry for us. Half way up the hill the string on my parcel came off and I dropped everything all over the street. Some kind ladies ran forward and picked them all up, wrapped them up again and carried it up to the mission hall.
To be continued…….
Many thanks to Les Haigh for giving me permission to reproduce this article. To see the original please visit:-