Tag: Dic Penderyn

Merthyr Central Library

by Carolyn Jacob

A ‘flourishing’ library existed in the Merthyr Tydfil Parish from 1846, although it consisted of only two dozen volumes collected by Thomas Stephens and Charles Wilkins. The books were originally for their ‘conversational club’ and believed to have been in the Temperance Room behind the Merthyr Market. Gradually a number of libraries developed in Merthyr Tydfil, Abercanaid, Aberfan, Dowlais, Penydarren, Thomastown, Treharris, Troedyrhiw and, outside the Parish, Cefn Coed. The ‘central’ library was located in the Town Hall from 1901 but transferred to two vacant shops in the Arcade by 1907. By 1918 The Arcade Library had a reference section and a sizeable number of books. In 1930 the Corporation had to find new premises for the Library and moved to 136 Lower High Street at an annual rental of £100. The Library was known as the Town Reading Room and both this library and the Thomastown Library closed in 1935 when the new Central Library opened.

Photo courtesy of the Alan George Archive

The Central Library, in a fine renaissance rectangular style, is a protected grade II historic building, it was purpose built and has always been a library. It was placed on vacant ground, given by the Council, which was once the site of the former St David’s School. The foundation stones were laid in 1935 and the building completed using money from the American Steel millionaire, Andrew Carnegie. The Carnegie Trust donated £4500 on condition there was an adequate book fund and that a properly trained and competent Librarian be appointed.

The Library was designed by Councillor T. Edmund Rees (of Messrs Johnson, Richards & Rees, architects of Merthyr) and built by Messrs Enoch Williams and Sons, contractors of Dowlais at a cost of £8,500. The exterior is in an Arts and Crafts Modern style with Portland stone, hipped Cumbrian slate roof swept to wide eaves. An attractive feature is the large central doorway and Tudor arch in moulded surround to entrance. The interior has a panelled wooden entrance-hall, although sadly the original oak wood, which is a wonderful feature of this building, was painted during refurbishment in 2011. The stained glass as you enter the building commemorates the Urdd National Eisteddfod which was held in Merthyr Tydfil in 1987. The building was opened in 1936 by the Mayor, Lewis Jones who became the first borrower of a book from Merthyr’s new Library.

The first librarian, Mr E. R. Luke received a salary of £330 a year and not only spoke Welsh fluently but he also had a working knowledge of French, German and Latin.  Merthyr Libraries have always provided a free library service for residents and visitors. The new library was a great success and the number of registered borrowers rose from 1400 in March 1936 to 10,765 by February 1940. As a child the historian Gwyn Alf Williams made ‘daring raids into alien territory in Merthyr Library’.

In 1946 Merthyr Tydfil became the first Authority in Wales to appoint a woman as Borough Librarian and an English woman at that – Margaret Stewart Taylor. She also became curator of the Cyfarthfa Castle Museum and was a remarkable local historian. Miss Taylor wrote 23 books on a wide variety of topics, a classic work on library cataloguing and classification, biography, local history such as ‘The Crawshays of Cyfarthfa’, travel writings based on her own experiences and romantic fiction set in a fictional town which was a thinly disguised Merthyr Tydfil. She compiled and edited ‘Fifty Years a Borough, 1905-1955’ to commemorate the incorporation of the Borough of Merthyr Tydfil. She set up a school library service and established local history as important in both the Library and the Museum. Margaret Stewart Taylor demanded high standards from her staff and would personally inspect the library shelves to make sure the books were all in strict order. A book incorrectly shelved would be left in the middle of the floor.

Margaret Stewart Taylor

The Plaque on the exterior of Merthyr Tydfil Library by the doorway is dedicated to Richard Lewis, (Dic Penderyn). At the time of the 1831 Merthyr Rising he was a miner in Merthyr Tydfil. He was charged with feloniously wounding Donald Black of the 93rd (Highland) Regiment. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. Despite a petition of 11,000 names for his reprieve, he was hanged at Cardiff on 13 August 1831. His last words on the scaffold were reported to be ‘O Arglwydd, dyma gamwedd’ – ‘O Lord, what injustice’. He is buried in Aberavon. Later in the century another man confessed to the crime for which Lewis had been hanged.

There is also a plaque on the front of the Central Library dedicated to Ursula Masson, who was born Ursula O’Connor in Dowlais, and became a leading Welsh academic and writer who worked closely with Jane Aaron and Honno Press/Gwasg Honno, the Welsh Women’s Press, on the imprint Welsh Women’s Classics – to bring back into print the works of forgotten Welsh women writers of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Outside the Library, the Statue and Plinth to Henry Seymour Berry are Grade II Listed monuments. The statue stands at the centre of a semicircular forecourt in front of the Library, and it was designed by W. Goscombe John RA and erected in 1931. It consists of a bronze figure in full robes with a cocked hat in the crook of his left arm and a parchment grasped in left hand.  The inscription:

Henry Seymour Berry, Baron Buckland of Bwlch, Hon. Freeman of the Co. Borough of Merthyr Tydfil.
Born 1877 – Died 1928.
Erected by public subscription.

There are recent plaques attached to the statue to mark the achievements of his two younger brothers. James Gomer Berry, Viscount Kemsley and William Ewert Berry, Viscount Camrose.

Gwyn Thomas and Merthyr Tydfil

by Daryl Leeworthy

In March 1955, on assignment with the Welsh Empire News, the novelist, playwright and television personality, Gwyn Thomas, turned his unique gaze to postwar Merthyr Tydfil. It was a rare outing for a writer more commonly associated with the Rhondda or with Barry, but Merthyr Tydfil had been the byword for poverty and neglect in the 1930s and so he was keen to see what, if anything, had changed. From the perspective of historians, the mid-1950s were a time of relative affluence, when the worst that could be said of Britain was that it was a bit damp, drab, and dismally grey. In place of mass unemployment, there were new factories – signature installations like Hoover at Pentrebach – and the population was rising again, albeit slowly, after three decades of decline. But, warned Gwyn, ‘South Wales is full of things that people forgot to sweep up’. Places, as well.

Gwyn Thomas in Pantywaun. Photo courtesy of the Alan George Archive.

A few years after that Empire News article was published, Gwyn was called back to the area. This time the request came from the BBC, who wanted him to give a piece to camera about the impending demolition of Pantywaun. The experience in 1962 formed the basis of a memorable passage in A Welsh Eye, in which Gwyn described the ‘liquidation’ of the village, the transfer of the remaining residents to council houses closer to Merthyr town, and the belated installation of a public call box ‘just in time for the villagers to tell their friends that they were leaving’.

Pantywaun was being sacrificed for the expansion of the ‘Royal Arms’ open cast site. This, it was said, was progress. In the view of older generations, it was the likely fate of all pit villages once their economic root had gone. As the slogan of the 1984-5 miners’ strike put it, ‘close a pit, kill a community’.

These visits were all part and parcel of broadcasting, of being an eminent public voice. Gwyn’s relationship with Merthyr Tydfil was older still, of course. His most important novel, the acknowledged masterpiece All Things Betray Thee published by Michael Joseph in 1949, was set in a fictionalised Merthyr. Christened in fiction as Moonlea, this was the Merthyr of the 1830s; the Merthyr of the unrest focused on the Court of Requests, of Dic Penderyn and Lewis the Huntsman, of Chartism and the campaign for a democratic voice. It was a place in which artists could sit and talk through grand political ideas, through the very tenets of philosophy that ought to have governed society but did not. Similar themes would emerge from Gwyn’s more anarchic play, Jackie the Jumper, first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1963.

Raymond Williams, the eminent writer and scholar, believed All Things Betray Thee to be the most important novel of the Welsh industrial tradition, capable of standing tall alongside its English or American or European counterparts but distinctively Welsh at the same time. During the Cold War, the novel was widely translated, notably into Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, and Romanian, bringing knowledge of Merthyr and its history to new audiences abroad.  Those very same audiences, of course, who understood the old joke, apparently invented by Gwyn A. Williams, that had Anna Karenina looked down from the train she would have seen ‘Made in Dowlais’ marked on the rails; or who understood the lineage connecting Stalino (now Donetsk) in Ukraine with Hughesovka and, of course, with Merthyr Tydfil itself.

We may ask what Gwyn Thomas knew of the 1830s, and how that knowledge had been acquired. In the 1930s, having graduated from Oxford University and unable to find stable, permanent work, Gwyn taught classes in industrial history for the Workers’ Educational Association in the Rhondda. This was the period when working-class history – the history of the coal valleys of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire – was first being written down and taught; when it was turned into self-styled pageants with input from national figures like Benjamin Britten and Montagu Slater; when it was made into literature by A. J. Cronin and Rhys Davies, at one level, and Lewis Jones and Richard Llewellyn at another, or turned into drama for production by companies like the Aberdare Little Theatre. But this history was not yet in the form of professional historiography of the sort we have come to expect from university-trained boffins, it was still framed by a social and political purpose. Ness Edwards, the leading local historian of the period, later the Labour MP for Caerphilly, wrote his small books and pamphlets above all to ignite passions. The same was true of poet Islwyn ap Nicholas.

But Gwyn Thomas stands out from this crowd and from those mythologisers who came after him, men like Harri Webb, because he did not fall for the romantic illusions contained in terms like ‘Merthyr Rising’. Instead, Gwyn’s act of rebellion was one of ideas, of art, of a people conscious of themselves and aware of their capacity for creative invention. He was using literature to write history – as the novel’s working title My Root on Earth suggested – encouraging the use of culture to define who weare as a people, and the use of historical truth to lend weight and veracity to it all. You see, in Gwyn’s mind Merthyr Tydfil was the root of industrial experience, the origins of an ‘American Wales’, as it might legitimately be called, and the Rhondda its great flowering. The two were indelibly linked: the Cain and Abel of our unique story.

There is an epilogue to all this aspect of Gwyn’s career involving the screenwriter Alan Plater who found in the Welshman an ebullient model, the man placed at the top of the Hullensian’s fantasy league of writers. In gratitude, Plater set about bringing two of Gwyn’s works onto radio and television. The first was the memoir, A Few Selected Exits, which aired on BBC television in 1993 with Anthony Hopkins in the title role. It won a Welsh BAFTA. The second was All Things Betray Thee which went out on Radio 4 in the spring of 1996. Plater tried for years to translate Gwyn’s writing for a contemporary broadcast audience. He succeeded, if only briefly, in the mid-1990s. Writing in the Independent newspaper in 1994, he lamented ‘the neglect of Gwyn Thomas since his death in 1981’ adding that ‘perhaps rough justice will be done, if we hang around long enough’. Now is the time to bring Gwyn Thomas to the heart of Welsh literature, I suggest, to understand at last the Fury of Past Time. We have waited far too long.

 

If you want to find out more about Gwyn Thomas, Daryl’s new biography of him has just been published and is available in all good bookshops, direct from Parthian, or an independent such as Storyville in Pontypridd.

Merthyr’s Heritage Plaques: Dic Penderyn

by Keith Lewis-Jones

Dic Penderyn

Plaque sited at Merthyr Library, CF47 1AF

Richard Lewis (1807/8-1831), better known as Dic Penderyn, was a native of Aberavon.

At the time of the 1831 Merthyr Rising he was a miner in Merthyr Tydfil. He was charged with feloniously wounding Donald Black of the 93rd (Highland) Regiment. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. Despite a petition of 11,000 names for his reprieve, he was hanged at Cardiff on 13th August, 1831. His last words on the scaffold were reported to be ‘O Arglwydd, dyma gamwedd’ – ‘O Lord, what injustice’. He is buried in Aberavon.

Later in the century another man confessed to the crime for which Lewis had been hanged.

Harri Webb – Poet

by Malcolm Llywelyn

The poet Harri Webb was librarian at the Dowlais Library from 1954 until 1964 when he was appointed librarian at Mountain Ash. He was a prolific writer of poetry, prose and political commentary and he has been described as the ‘People’s Poet.’  He was active in politics with the local Labour Party when he became a friend of S.O. Davies. Disillusioned with the lack of support for the policy of self-government for Wales he left the Labour Party and rejoined Plaid Cymru in 1960.

Harri Webb was a radical Welsh Republican and a well-known colourful character, who took an interest in the local history of Merthyr Tydfil. He learned Welsh in his early adulthood and he adopted the Dowlais dialect of the language. He was one of the founders of the eisteddfod in Merthyr Tydfil and the chairman for three years. A ‘squat’ in Garthnewydd was the home of Harri Webb for some 12 years where he was joined by other patriots and the house became a centre for Nationalist activities in the town.

Merthyr Tydfil, its history and people feature in several of the poems written by Harri Webb. Written in 1959, the poem Big Night, describes ‘big nights out’  in the Church Tavern, Vaynor, illustrated by the last verse:

‘And homeward we were staggering
As the Pandy clock struck three
And the stars of the Plough went swaggering
From Vaynor to Pengarnddu’.

The poem, The Lamb was written in 1963, about the iconic public house frequented by Harri Webb and many other colourful characters of Merthyr Tydfil.

The Lamb Inn. Photo courtesy of the Alan George Archive

The Old Parish Churchyard was composed in 1965 and describes the scene in St Tydfil’s Parish Church.

Cwm Tâf Bridge, written in 1968, is a poem dedicated to Penri Williams, a resident of Cefn Coed, who worked in the water industry.

Merthyr 1972, was written in 1972 and commemorates  the great  names in the history of Merthyr Tydfil:

‘And now, in kinder times, an old man dies
And the great names that blazed above the strife –
Hardie, Penderyn, Richard – are spoken anew…’

It was written at the time of the death of S.O. Davies and the poem To the Memory of a Friend is Harri Webbs’s tribute to his old friend S.O.

Born in Sketty, Swansea in 1920, a ‘Swansea Jack,’ Harri Webb in ill-health, moved to a nursing home in Swansea in 1994, where he died in 1995.

Colli Iaith

Colli iaith a cholli urddas
Colli awen, colli barddas
Colli coron aur cymdeithas
Ac yn eu lle cael bratiaith fas.

Colli’r hen alawon persain
Colli tannau’r delyn gywrain
Colli’r corau’n diaspedain
Ac yn eu lle cael cleber brain.

Colli crefydd, colli enaid
Colli ffydd yr hen wroniaid
Colli popeth glan a thelaid
Ac yn eu lle cael baw a llaid.

Colli tir a cholli tyddyn
Colli Elan a Thryweryn
Colli Claerwen a Llanwddyn
A’n gwlad i gyd dan ddŵr llyn.

Cael yn ôl o borth marwolaeth
Cân a ffydd a bri yr heniaith
Cael yn ôl yr hen dreftadaeth
A Chymru’n dechrau ar ei hymdaith.

Harri Webb

Colli Iaith

Losing language and losing dignity
Losing muse and losing bardism
Losing the golden crown of society
And in its place a shallow debased language.

Losing the old sweet-sounding strains
Losing the resounding choirs
Losing the harp’s skilful strings
And in its place the clamour of crows.

Losing creed, losing soul
Losing the faith of the old brave people
Losing everything pure and beautiful
And in its place dirt and mud.

Losing land and losing small-holdings
Losing Elan and Tryweryn
Losing Claerwen and Llanwddyn
And the whole country beneath a lake’s water.

Getting back from the door of death
A song and faith and respect for the old languge
Getting back the old heritage
And Wales begins her own journey.

Colli Iiaith was written  by Harri Webb in 1966 as his response to the by-election won by Gwynfor Evans in Carmarthen. It was the first parliamentary election won by Plaid Cymru by its president Gwynfor Evans. The tune for the song was composed by Meredydd  Evans, although it is usually sung unaccompanied and has been made popular by the well  known singer Heather Jones. It reflects the losses suffered by Wales under English rule, but ends with a defiant challenge to redeem the ancient language. The fourth verse of the song refers to the reservoirs  Elan and Tryweryn, valleys drowned  to supply water to Birmingham and Liverpool. Claerwen was the last dam built in Cwm Elan and the village of Llanwddyn was drowned  under Llyn Efyrnwy to supply water to Liverpool City.

The song featured in the Green Desert, a performance and album of the poet’s work in 1972.

Bare Knuckles, White Ladies and Martyred Rebels: The Mythic Townscape of Merthyr Tydfil

by Gareth E Rees

The article below is copied, courtesy of Gareth E Rees from his website Unofficial Britain. To view the original article, please follow this link: http://www.unofficialbritain.com/bare-knuckles-white-ladies-and-martyred-rebels-the-mythic-townscape-of-merthyr-tydfil/

In the year leading up the (Not So) Great Pandemic, I was fortunate enough to take a trip around Wales, researching my book, Unofficial Britain on a sunny weekend in spring.

It was just me, my car and a smartphone. Plus some underpants. Clean ones, at that. No expense spared. Those were the days when you could buy pants on a whim, simply by walking into a clothes shop.

One of my aims of my trip was to explore the Brymbo steelworks near Wrexham, where my grandfather worked until his death in 1976, and where my uncle worked until the factory closed in 1990.

As I was to discover, the ruins of the Brymbo works are haunted by a bottom-pinching phantom steelworker and two black dogs, which I saw with my very own eyes, but that is a story you can read in the book when it comes out.

While I was in North Wales, I was accompanied to the secret mustard gas factory nestled in the Rhydymwyn Valley by Bobby Seal, who wrote about it for Unofficial Britain in 2015: The Valley Works: Mendelssohn, Mustard Gas and Memory.

On the second day of my mini-tour I drove to South Wales, stopping at Port Talbot to look at its still-functioning steelworks, where a monk is said to haunt the grounds of Tata Steel (more of that in my forthcoming book, too).

As I approached Cardiff, I decided on a detour to Merthyr Tydfil, once the great industrial centre of the British Empire, dominated by four ironworks: Plymouth, Penydarren, Dowlais and Cyfarthfa. By the 1830s, the latter two had become the largest in the world.

As iron made way for steel in the latter half of the 19th century, the Ynysfach Ironwork closed. Its Coke ovens became a hub for the homeless, destitute and society’s outsiders. At the time is was considered a den of boozing, thievery and prostitution, but it may well have great place to hang out and – from the perspective of today – at least they could all be closer than 2 metres apart.

It was here where local bare knuckle fighter Redmond Coleman became locked in an epic battle with his rival, Tommy Lyons. The fight is said to have lasted over three hours, leaving both men flat out on the ground at the end, panting with exhaustion. It would have made the infamously long fist-fight scene in John Carpenter’s They Live seem like a minor playground scuffle. Redmond Coleman was so attached to the place that he later claimed his spirit would never leave Merthyr and instead would remain to haunt the Coke Ovens.

This form of afterlife was to be the fate of Mary Ann Rees. Alas, she had no choice in her decision to haunt Merthyr Tydfil. In 1908 she was murdered by her boyfriend, William Foy, whom she had followed into Merthyr on her final evening alive, suspecting him of sleeping with someone else. Her broken body was found in a disused furnace. Rees is considered to be the White Lady who today haunts the old engine house: a sad lady in a long, flowing dress.

The decline of the coal, iron and steel industries devastated Merthyr but it remained a hub for manufacturing. In the 20th century the Hoover factory employed over 4,000 people, with its own sports teams, social clubs, fire brigade and library.

In 1985, Sir Clive Sinclair’s infamous C5 battery operated vehicle went into production at the factory. A local urban myth was that the motors for the CV were, in fact, repurposed Hoover washing motors. They created only 17,000 units before operation was shut down six months later.

The factory closed in 2009 and remains a quiet hulk by the Taff at the edge of the town. Across the road is a derelict car park, its tarmac crumbling, with moss and grass creeping across the last faded parking bay lines.

A majestic pylon inside the perimeter of the abandoned car park slings electricity over the factory to the other side of the valley, where its brethren have amassed on the hills in great numbers. Whatever has happened in the past century, power still pulses through the town, coursing through the veins of Wales.

The fall of the Hoover factory was another blow to the economically stricken town, which might have lost its role in the world, but keeps its story alive in public artworks that I saw on my journey.

The past is never far away when you walk through Merthyr, a townscape saturated in industrial lore.

… Near St. Tydfil’s Church is an ornate drinking fountain on a raised plinth. It commemorates the pioneers of the South Wales steam coal trade. Its canopy is adorned with steel motifs of coal wheels, steamboats and a miner with a pickaxe.

…On a modern brick wall in the town centre, beneath a ‘To Let’ sign, is an abstract frieze of the industrial landscape.

….A pub that has opened in the restored water board building is named The Iron Dragon, with two resplendent golden dragons sculptures jutting from either side of the stone columns that frame the door.

…The Caedraw Roundabout outside the Aldi contains a sculpture by Charles Sansbury, which transforms an earth-bound pit winding gear into a 12 metre tall spire, surrounded by a crescent of standing stones, positing some link in the imagination between the Neolithic and the industrial revolution.

…Pink granite benches are engraved with poems about the industrial past. “the stalks of chimneys bloomed continuous smoke and flame”, says one by Mike Jenkins. Another quotes the scientist Michael Faraday:

“The fires from the hills shone very bright into my room and the blast of the furnace kept up a continual roar.”

On another bench I read lines from ‘Merthyr’ a poem by local lad, Glyn Jones:

“…I find what rustles/ Oftenest and scentiest / through the torpid trees / Of my brain-pan, is some Merthyr-mothered breeze”.

In that same poem, Jones describes the post-industrial town’s decayed slum areas mid-century as “battered wreckage in some ghastly myth”.

On this bench pictured below, was a reference to Dic Penderyn and the 1831 Merthyr uprising.

At that time, the town was home to some of the most skilled ironworkers in the world. But unrest was growing….

Locals were increasingly angry about their inadequate wages, while they were lauded over by the industrialists of the town. It was time for change, but they were hopelessly disenfranchised with only 4% of men having the right to vote.

In May 1831, workers marched through the streets, demanding Parliamentary reform, growing rowdier as their ranks swelled. They raided the local debtors’ court, reclaiming confiscated property and destroying the debtors’ records. Growing nervous about the rebellion, which was beginning to spread to other villages and towns, the industrial bosses and landowners called in the army.

On June 3rd, soldiers confronted protestors outside the Castle Inn and violence broke out. After the scuffle, Private Donald Black lay wounded, stabbed in the back with a bayonet by an unseen assailant.

Despite there being no evidence that young Richard Lewis committed the act, he was accused of the crime and sentenced to death by hanging, disregarding the petition of the sceptical townsfolk, and even doubting articles in the local newspaper. The government wanted the death of a rebel as an example to others, and poor Dic Penderyn was to be it, regardless of trifling matters like proof.

He is now an important cult figure in the working class struggle, buried in his hometown of Port Talbot, but remaining here in spirit, one small burning flame of Merthyr’s fiery legacy.

To buy a copy of Gareth’s book, please follow the link on his site.

Memories of Old Merthyr

We continue our serialisation of the memories of Merthyr in the 1830’s by an un-named correspondent to the Merthyr Express, courtesy of Michael Donovan.

On the other side of the road where the Town Offices now stand, there was first a small place used as a butcher’s shop, then the opening into the Bunch of Grapes yard, a public house of that name being at the top, then a drapery shop kept by Mr Samuel Smith, who had a sister living with him. Their brother was Mr John Smith, the mineral agent of the Abernant works, and father of Mr W Smith, now manager of Rhymney Collieries, and then what was afterwards the Canton Tea Warehouse of a Mr Watkins.

An extract from the 1851 Ordnance Survey Map of Merthyr showing the Castle Hotel (top left) and the Bunch of Grapes Pub (middle right)

We are now facing the Castle Hotel, and as far as can be recalled it is the same as in 1834-5, or at least as regards its externals. The steps remain, and the entrance and bar are so, but there have bee some slight alterations in other parts. At the date just mentioned Mr Edward Purchase was the host. Mrs Purchase and two or three daughters of hers were there also.

From all I ever heard, at the time of its building, persons wondered at its being so, for the position was not thought appropriate, but Mr John Treharne was right. Mr Treharne was evidently a person of some decision of character. He was known among his convivial friends as Sir John, and upon his widow marrying Mr Purchase she was sometimes referred to as No 25.

The Castle Hotel (right) at roughly the time detailed in this article

Immediately above the Castle, in fact a portion of the premises, was a gin shop, used also as the booking office for the coaches. Whether adjoining, or a door or two above, there was a hairdresser’s place, kept by Mr Abbott, who had made himself very unpopular to some by swearing to the identity of Dick (sic.) Penderyn of the riots of a few years before, and who had been executed for being implicated therein.

Some doors above was the Vulcan. There was an alley with cottages on two or three of its sides, then a public house – the William IV, then another narrow opening leading to the Morlais Brook, with Zoar Chapel on one side, just where Messrs Thomas had a drapery shop, and then an opening, and on the corner beyond, the residence of Mr Job James, the doctor. He had been, I always understood, a naval doctor. Next door lived his mother-in-law, Mrs Williams.

A person named Brown kept a shop adjoining, and the English Wesleyan Chapel followed. The residence of the minister of the chapel adjoined, and some doors above a Mr Thomas Williams, followed afterwards by a Mr Anstey upon Mr Williams removal to Victoria Street. Mr Thomas Williams was the father of the late Mr Thomas Williams, some time coroner. Only a few doors further and the Morlais or Pontmorlais turnpike gate was come to.

To be continued at a later date……