Laura Ashley Plaque sited at 31 Station Terrace, Dowlais
Laura Ashley, the fashion designer, was born, Laura Mountney, at 31 Station Terrace, Dowlais in 1925.
The Laura Ashley Company was started by Laura and her husband Bernard in a London flat in 1953. It started with tea towels and scarves in their own distinctive style. When the company was floated in November 1985, two months after Laura Ashley’s sudden death, it had become an international group with 219 shops worldwide.
The ground floor of my Grandparent’s house comprised of the traditional front parlour, a back room with window looking onto the garden and a back extension of kitchen/scullery. All three rooms were heated by coal fires, the one in the kitchen having the traditional Victorian cooking range. All three rooms were connected by a wide hallway, from which the staircase leads up to the three bedrooms. The bathroom was in the extension over the kitchen/scullery comprising of a bath and wash hand basin, although, quite spacious there was no toilet. The WC was outside at the far end of the garden, a novelty for me as I lived in a Council house on the Keir Hardie Estate which had two toilets! As a small child staying overnight at my grandparent’s house, use of the chamber pot kept under the bed took some getting used to.
My father’s comment on not knowing where he would be resting his head each evening had some resonance with me when studying the 1939 Census. On the Census night of the 29 September there were a total of 11 people residing in number twelve:
Caradog JONES
Margaret JONES
Jack Bailey JONES (my father)
Betty Bailey JONES (my aunt), and
Stanley HENDON, Journeyman baker, aged 20 years
Albert WHITLEY, Music hall artist, aged 28 years
Thomas BONNY, Music hall artist, aged 36 years
Eric RYAN, Music hall artist, aged 28 years
George WILDER, Music hall artist, aged 32 years
Thomas KEITH, Music hall artist, aged 28 years
Charles SMYTHE, Travelling stage manager, aged 29 years.
One of my grandparent’s boarders that night, Albert (Eric) WHITLEY, was the lead singer with the Teddy Joyce Orchestra. WHITLEY performed under the name of Tony LOMBARDO and was born in Wrexham in 1910; he died in his ‘home’ town in 1991.
For all that week from Monday 25 September to Saturday 30 September the Joyce Jamboree was appearing at the Theatre Royal. The ‘Jamboree’ comprised the Teddy Joyce Orchestra and a number of variety acts. Teddy JOYCE, real name Edmund CUTHBERTSON was born in Toronto Canada and came to Britain in the 1930s after a short career in the USA. Part of the pre-war ‘Big Band’ era, Joyce was known as “Hollywood’s Dancing Bachelor” and the “Stick of Dynamite”. However, his career was cut short, dying in Glasgow, February 1941, aged 36 years.
The Tommy Joyce Orchestra
One can only guess where all these men slept at night, both downstairs rooms must have been jam-packed and some must have slept on the floor. The census does give us some insight into the kind of life these young men spent, with late night performances, makeshift accommodation and constant travelling to contend with for weeks/months on end.
My paternal grandparents lived in 12 Union Street, Thomastown, Merthyr Tydfil. My grandfather Caradog JONES was born in Troedyrhiw in 1896 and was one of five brothers who were coal miners, as was their father, grandfather and great-grandfather before them. Crad’s great-grandfather John Evan JONES was born in Abergwili, Carmarthenshire, in 1814, moving to Duffryn, Pentrebach, sometime in the 1840s to work in the local Plymouth Work’s mines.
By contrast, my grandmother Margaret Ann nee BAILEY was born in Merthyr Tydfil in 1898, her great-grandfather Abraham BAILEY, was born in Bristol, Gloucestershire, in 1804, arriving in Merthyr town with his extended family sometime in the 1850s. Abraham was a street hawker of earthenware goods, and for a while in the late 1850s to 1860s, ran a china and earthenware shop in 6 Victoria Street, Merthyr Tydfil. For the most part, he and his sons Abraham and Thomas, and his son-in-laws were street traders. My grandmother must have inherited the Bailey entrepreneurial gene, as to augment the family income and help purchase number 12 Union Street; she took in boarders, mainly ‘travellers’ and ‘theatricals’. My father once commented that coming home from school each day he was never sure where in the house he would be sleeping.
12 Union Street is one of 23 terraced properties in the northern portion of the long street that runs at right angles to the top of Church Street. The southern portion of the street contains the imposing Courtland Terrace. The dual terraces of Union Street leads off Church Street up to the boundary wall of the now derelict St Tydfil’s Hospital, formally the Merthyr Tydfil Union building, the ‘Workhouse’. A terrace numbered 1 to 11 on the left hand side and a terrace numbered 12 to 23 on the right hand side. All the houses were three bedroomed apart from numbers 1 and 23 which had extended frontages on Church Street and were much bigger properties. Number 12 being an end of terrace property was flanked by the lane leading up to Thomastown Park and thence on to Queen’s Road.
Union Street – Coronation Party 1937
Union Street is in the Thomastown Conservation Area, the first area to be designated in Merthyr Tydfil. Built from the 1850s onwards on a grid-iron pattern, Thomastown has the largest group of early Victorian buildings in Wales. Built for the middle classes, the professional and commercial people of the town, its best examples are Church Street, Thomas Street, Union Street (Courtland Terrace) and Newcastle Street. This area (Thomastown) striking toward the higher and open ground of the ‘Court Estate’ was the first exclusively residential area to be created by those in the top stratum of Merthyr’s population. Thomastown was the forerunner of what was to occur at the end of the 19th century in the northern part of the town between the parklands of Cyfarthfa Castle and Penydarren House. These later developments contained even larger and more prestigious properties.
The two terraces of Union Street must have been one of the later developments. The 1876 Ordnance Survey Map shows only the single terrace of numbers 1 to 11. The 1881 census records both terraces but 7 of the 23 properties are shown as uninhabited, (numbers 3, 6, 7, 15, 16, 17 and 18), indicating that the development of the street was barely finished in 1881.
The census returns for number 12 clearly shows that the occupiers in the early years were part of Merthyr’s ‘middle’ class:
3rd April 1881 – Margaret PRICE, retired publican
5th April 1891 – James JONES, decorator
31st March 1901 – Thomas GUNTER, boot and shoe dealer
2nd April 1911 – Thomas GUNTER, boot and shoe dealer
(Thomas GUNTER was the manager of the Leeds Boot Warehouse, no. 33 Victoria Street and was a leading figure in both the Merthyr Chamber of Trade and St. David’s Parish Church.)
Following on from the last couple of posts, even though war was not declared until 3 September 1939, the threat of war had been hanging over everyone since the previous year.
As early as January 1939, the government were supplying the population with gas-masks as can be seen in the article below, courtesy of Mike Donovan, which appeared in the Merthyr Express on 28 January 1939.
The arrival of the American soldiers in the town was quite a cultural shock. These brash, noisy young men, in their smart uniforms of fine wool, stood on the pavements outside their billets and cat-called and whistled after any female between the age of sixteen and sixty. To me – a young girl approaching puberty with trepidation (the word teenager hadn’t been invented then) – they were both embarrassing and intriguing. My intense shyness caused uncontrollable blushing as I stalked past, eyes front, head held high. The more outgoing of my friends seemed to take delight in making frequent detours so as to pass through the barrage of invitations.
Later, during visits to an aunt who kept a hotel in Briton Ferry, I was often commandeered to play the piano for many young GIs. The homesick, frightened young men sang about Broadway, Dixie, Texas and every state in the union. I’m afraid I wasn’t impressed – I was still a prudish fourteen-year-old who defended her virtue by insisting that all American men drank too much, swore a lot and cried a great deal.
War to me was the horror seen on the Pathé News in the cinema, or the news on the wireless tat had to be listened to in silence several times a day. It was women wearing scarves around their heads, smoking, working in factories, smelling of oil. Things I hadn’t experienced before. Saturday afternoons meant strolling up and down the High Street. The factory girls always appeared to have extra-large heads as their scarves covered curler-wound hair. I couldn’t fathom how they expected the ‘boys’ to forget this afternoon image when they met again at the dance that evening – hair exposed in either corrugated waves or ‘victory rolls’.
War was bedroom walls plastered with posters calling for ‘Aid to Russia’, glamorous Generals, newspaper cuttings on plane recognition and uniforms. Uniforms…everywhere uniforms. Men in uniform, women in uniform. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, wardens, firemen, home-guards. To belong, one had to be in uniform. I joined the St John’s Ambulance Brigade. I don’t remember learning much first-aid, but I do remember receiving a parcel from America sent by schoolchildren. Mine came from a ‘Barbara Babitt’. It contained a bar of scented toilet soap, which was too precious to ever use, and, amongst other forgotten things, a pair of hair-clips with bows of red ribbon and white stars. They were kept for that special occasion which never came. I would take them out of the drawer in my bedroom and look at them, and wonder about the little girl who had sent them to me.
‘The day war finished’ I was to be found at the same farm where my story began. As the news of peace came of the wireless, the church bells echoed across the fields. We all gathered at the church hall, precious food was brought, and a grand tea put on. Young wounded servicemen from a local convalescent home arrived in their bright blue suits, red ties and white shirts, accompanied by pretty Red Cross nurses. During the evening I was asked if I would play some dance music. My father had never approved of my playing such rubbish, so I had kept secret my daily stint of piano playing during school dinner-times. I think I was forgiven my frivolity that evening as the dancers swirled to the fox-trot, dipped to the tango and whooped to the hokey-cokey and the conga.
I way not have made much contribution to the war effort, but I think I made a contribution to the beginning of peace.
If anyone has any local memories or stories about the Second World War they would like to share, please get in touch.
Laura Ashley, the fashion designer, was born, Laura Mountney, at 31 Station Terrace, Dowlais in 1925.
War was bedroom walls plastered with posters calling for ‘Aid to Russia’, glamorous Generals, newspaper cuttings on plane recognition and uniforms. Uniforms…everywhere uniforms. Men in uniform, women in uniform. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, wardens, firemen, home-guards. To belong, one had to be in uniform. I joined the St John’s Ambulance Brigade. I don’t remember learning much first-aid, but I do remember receiving a parcel from America sent by schoolchildren. Mine came from a ‘Barbara Babitt’. It contained a bar of scented toilet soap, which was too precious to ever use, and, amongst other forgotten things, a pair of hair-clips with bows of red ribbon and white stars. They were kept for that special occasion which never came. I would take them out of the drawer in my bedroom and look at them, and wonder about the little girl who had sent them to me.