Tag: Cardiff Times

Merthyr’s Historians: Charles Wilkins

Over the years, Merthyr has produced some excellent historians, and I would like to introduce a new feature celebrating some of them. To mark the 110th anniversary of his death, we kick off with Merthyr’s first ‘official’ historian – Charles Wilkins.

Charles Wilkins was born on 16 August 1830 in Stonehouse, Gloucestershire, the second of nine children of William Wilkins, a Chartist bookseller, and Anna Maria Wilkins. In 1840 the family moved to Merthyr, with William Wilkins opening a shop on the High Street (opposite the current Lloyd’s Bank), and eventually becoming postmaster at the post office adjoining his business. At the age of fourteen, Charles left school to work with his father as a clerk at the post office.

In 1859, Charles married Lydia Jeans and they settled at Springfield Villa in Thomastown. The (by contemporary accounts) idyllic marriage was shattered in 1867 when Lydia died giving birth to their third child.

Cardiff Times – 8 June 1867

The following year, Charles married Mary Skipp in Topsley, Herefordshire, and she would bear him two further children.

In 1871, William Wilkins died, and Charles took over as postmaster.

Merthyr Telegraph 27 October 1871

From 1846 to 1866 he was also librarian of the Merthyr Tydfil Subscription Library of which Thomas Stephens was secretary.

From the age of fourteen, Charles began writing articles for local and national Welsh newspapers, and in 1867, he published ‘The History of Merthyr Tydfil’, the first ‘official history of the town. It was subsequently extended and re-published in 1908.

As well as writing some fiction, he also wrote several other major historical works including:-

  • Wales, Past and Present (1870) (The History of Wales for Englishmen)
  • Tales and Sketches of Wales (1879, 1880)
  • The History of the Literature of Wales from 1300 to 1650 (1884)
  • The History of Newport (1886)
  • The South Wales Coal Trade and Its Allied Industries (1888)
  • The History of the Iron, Steel, Tinplate and Other Trades of Wales (1903)

In 1877, he was “initiated into the mysteries of the Druidic lore”, and at the 1881 National Eisteddfod, held in Merthyr Tydfil, he won a £21 prize (approximately equivalent to £2,100 in 2019) and gold medal for the best “History of the Literature of Monmouthshire and Glamorganshire from the earliest period to the present time.” In 1882 he founded ‘The Red Dragon: The National Magazine of Wales’. That same year, it was reported in the Western Mail (7 December 1882) that, “after careful examination of the various works written by Mr. Wilkins”, he was “unanimously elected to the super graduate Degree of Literature (Lit. D.)” by the Druidic University of America and its affiliate in Maine.

Charles Wilkins retired as postmaster at the end of 1897 after almost 50 years of service. He died at Springfield Villa on 2 August 1913 and was buried at Cefn Cemetery.

Although his history of Merthyr contain some inaccuracies; bearing in mind when it was written, and that a lot of it was based on oral history; it is a remarkable work, being the first of its kind to chronicle Merthyr’s history, and it is an invaluable resource to use as a starting point for further research.

You can download the 1867 version of Wilkins history of Merthyr here:

https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_History_of_Merthyr_Tydfil/FWk1AQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

The 1908 revision is available here:

https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/_/A_YRnQEACAAJ?hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiBkKbRz7OAAxXvX_EDHX-LDaAQre8FegQIAxAc

In Memoriam: Meta Scott

Following on from the last article, here is a very moving tribute to Meta Scott that appeared in the Cardiff Times on 30 January 1892.

How hard it is to realise the dreadful truth that poor Miss Meta Scott has passed from our midst to the Great Beyond; and that never again shall we see her on the concert platform or in front of a competitive choir!

True, we had missed her from her favourite post for considerably more than a year, but we knew that she lived, and Hope bade us look forward to the time when we should see her again. But Hope, alas was deceptive. That slight, fragile figure for whose reappearance we so often looked, and sighed when we found we had looked in vain, now lies cold and immovable in the Cefn Cemetery. She who was wont to thrill vast audiences with her marvellous performances on the pianoforte and the violin will never again waken the melodies of earth. She has gone to waken sweeter music among the angels. Yet poor human nature refuses to be comforted with this knowledge, “for frightful to all men is death, from of old called King of Terrors”, and we mourn with heavy hearts the loss of one who in public was a brilliant musician, and in private a true and sincere friend.

It is not necessary to enter into details of the career of the deceased lady; those details have already been given by the daily papers. Her career was, as everyone knows, brilliant from first to last. Hers was a life of assiduous labour from her very childhood; she was in very truth a slave to her art. The amount of hard work the poor slight figure got through was really remarkable, and there can be but little doubt that her end was brought about in the same way as that of Kirke White was. There is something unspeakably sad in the thought of one who had toiled so hard, and who was in very truth a child of genius, passing to the tomb just at the moment when the gates of fame were open to her.

Poor Miss Scott was a favourite with all classes wherever she went. She never appeared at a concert without calling forth unbounded enthusiasm from her audience, and as an eisteddvod accompanist she was eagerly sought after. On many occasions have I heard her praised by the adjudicators for her excellent playing with the choirs.

Her last days were full of incidents of an intensely pathetic nature. She was taken ill shortly after the Brecon Eisteddvod, but she continued her work until imperatively commanded to desist by her medical adviser – fighting the fell consumption, that was gnawing her young life away all too soon, with a courage that none who knew her imagined she possessed. But as months of gloomy illness succeeded one another, and that poor fragile form grew weaker and weaker, the sufferer lost hope, and realised that she had been all too surely “nipt by the winds’ unkindly blast”. She saw that all the high hopes which her friends centered on her, and that the career which had opened out so brilliantly and which promised such a glorious future were all to be buried in the merciless tomb.

On the first day of the present year she dictated a little poem which she bad composed on the death of the old year. It was the wail of farewell which the stricken child of genius poured out upon the world she was so soon to leave. A friend came to visit her, and the sufferer on being given her violin attuned its strings and played “Lead, kindly Light”. “There”, said she at the close, “you have heard me play for the last time on earth”.

A few hours ere her poor body lay tenantless she heard the singing of a funeral party that was passing along the road. She requested those near her that at her own funeral the grand old hymn, “Bydd myrdd o ryveddedau” should be sung. Reader, canst thou think of that pathetic request without shedding a tear? And her request was granted. When I heard that old hymn sung with such wonderful impressiveness at Swansea Eisteddvod last August I little thought that ere six months would pass it would be sung by a host of sorrow-stricken men and women over the unclosed grave of poor Meta Scott. But so it was. She whose career had been so meteoric in its brilliancy and whose end was so inexpressibly sad, was laid to her rest amid the strains of the hymn she had asked them to sing at her funeral.

It is not Merthyr alone, but the whole country that is poorer by her loss.