Following on from the recent article about Gwaunfarren House (https://www.merthyr-history.com/?p=8282), here is a pictorial look at just ten of the magnificent ‘grand’ houses that we once had in Merthyr, but have been swept away by ‘progress’.
Firstly, the aforementioned Gwaunfarren House…
The home of the Guest family – Dowlais House…
The home of the Homfray family, Penydarren House….
The home of the Crawshay family (pre-Cyfarthfa Castle), Gwaelodygarth House….
Gwaelodygarth Fach…
Sandbrook House, Thomastown…
Gwernllwyn House, Dowlais…
Vaynor House…
Ynysowen House, Merthyr Vale…
Bargoed House, Treharris…
All photos courtesy of the Alan George Archive.
If anyone has any more information or any memories of any of these houses, please get in touch. Also, if anyone has any photos of other lost houses or landmarks in Merthyr, please let me know.
The next family to take up residence in the large house was Richard Harrap and his wife Mary with 5 children and just 3 servants. Richard was born in Yorkshire and prior to taking up residence in Gwaunfarren he lived on the Brecon Road. He was a brewer, and in 1871 he went into partnership with another brewer to form the growing company “Giles and Harrap’s”. They owned the “Merthyr Brewery” and marketed “Merthyr Ales” from their brewery on the Brecon Road, and grew the company to own 62 public houses.
Photo courtesy of the Alan George Archive
Eventually they were bought out by William Hancock and Co. in 1936 and brewing ceased on the Brecon Road. In 2010 the brewery was demolished however the company name lives on etched in the glass windows of “Y Olde Royal Oak” public house in Ystrad Mynach (built 1914.). Richard died in 1895 with his wife remaining at Gwaunfarren House and she decided to give the house a personal name “Glenthorne”. She passed away in 1916 whilst her son James Thresher Harrap, resided there until 1921 when he moved to the Grove.
There is a gap in the historical record after the Harrap family vacated the house sometime in the early 1920s so I was unable to ascertain the use of the property until 1937. It is likely that the downturn in the economy of Merthyr and the dearth of very large wealthy families made the occupancy of this large house uneconomic.
The house, although apparently empty, seemed to have continued in a reasonable state and not vandalised in the inter-war years. There are numerous references to the future of the house considered by various committees of the Merthyr Borough Council during the years between 1921 and 1937. The house remained in the ownership of the freeholder with the Council making enquiries about its purchase for a variety of uses. For example, in 1934 the Education Committee thought it could be used as a training centre for unemployed boys and girls. They sought the approval of the Ministry of Labour for funding to purchase the property for £6,100 but were unsuccessful.
There was a suggestion that the house be used to accommodate children with Learning Difficulties but again nothing came of these proposals until the freehold, house, garden and lodge were acquired in 1937 by The Merthyr Tydfil Community Trust. This began life as the Merthyr Tydfil Educational Settlement and was formally opened in July 1938 by Earl Baldwin and Countess Baldwin. At that time there were many such Settlements providing education and welfare services to people during the Depression of the 1930s. The Settlement continued for four years at Gwaunfarren until the building was requisitioned by the government for use by the Emergency Medical Services in 1941. There were two possible wartime uses, either for the care of injured World War II servicemen and women or for expectant mothers.
Merthyr Express – 4 October 1941
Dr. Joseph Gross wrote an essay in Volume Two of the Merthyr Historian in 1978 on “Hospitals in Merthyr Tydfil”. He stated that injured service personnel were treated at Merthyr General Hospital, St. Mary’s Catholic Hall and the Kirkhouse Hall. Instead, the house was to provide 25 beds for pre- and post-natal maternity services when the Welsh Board of Health took responsibility for the house then renamed as “Gwaunfarren Nursing Home”. Babies continued to be born there for the next 30 years.
The ownership of the building was transferred to the Ministry of Health when the NHS was formed in 1948 and it was agreed to use the proceeds of the sale for charitable purposes. However, it took until 1954 to agree a price for the building. In 1948 Gwaunfarren Nursing Home became Gwaunfarren Maternity Hospital managed by the Merthyr and Aberdare Hospital Management Committee (HMC) The beds were increased to 30 beds with similar units at Aberdare General and St. Tydfil’s Hospital. Many adults alive today were born at Gwaunfarren often staying with their mother for a considerable number of days unlike current maternity practice of short hospital stays. The unit continued for some years until there were further improvements to the maternity unit at St. Tydfil’s Hospital, including a small Special Care Baby Unit. Gradually the number of births at Gwaunfarren decreased and confinements ceased at the end of the 1960s. Some post-natal transfers were continued for a short period of time until the hospital closed in the early 1970s.
Gwaunfarren Hospital then remained empty for some years although it was put to occasional and varied use to include a location for television filming. The land, together with the house and lodge was sold, the house demolished, and plots allocated to accommodate the present makeup of Gwaunfarren Grove. Gwaunfarren Lodge still remains today at the entrance to the original position of the drive.
Today the vast majority of the general public look at the way land is used very much in the here and now without giving much thought to its history over the ages. A review of the use of the land at post code CF47 9BJ allows us to peel away the pages of history. Now passers- by at the entrance to Gwaunfarren Grove will not know that the access road once served as the driveway to a substantial Victorian family home, educational centre, maternity hospital and that prior to all of those uses it had been a farmstead known as “The Dairy”, part of a farm of considerable antiquity.
At the junction of Alexandra Road and Galon Uchaf Road is a triangular piece of land on which are sited ten houses named as Gwaunfarren Grove at postal code CF47 9BJ. Of extra significance is an additional older property named “Gwaunfarren Lodge” positioned at the entrance to the much newer residential development. The location comprises a modern housing development on land which has undergone considerable change in the last 200 years. A review of the history of this small portion of the Gwaunfarren locality reveals a sequence of events which mirror cultural and social changes in pre- and post-industrial Merthyr Tydfil. This article plots the timeline of the land use played out between the latter years of the eighteenth century and the present day.
The Medieval Hamlet of Garth comprised of land stretching from Morlais Castle to Caeracca, then south to Gellifaelog, Goytre, Gurnos, Galon Uchaf, Gwaunfarren, Gwaelodygarth and Abermorlais. Some of this land was occupied by both yeoman and tenant farmers with pasture for sheep and cattle. The freehold ownership of the land, with its few farms, passed from family to family and at the geographical centre of the Hamlet was a parcel of land then called Gwaun Faren. In 1789 Gwaun Faren was mapped by William Morrice who noted that both farms, Gwaun Faren and the adjacent Gwaelod Y Garth, had been purchased by Mr William Morgan of Grawen in 1785. That map was redrawn in 1998, and annotated, by Griffiths Bros and show in detail the fields comprising Gwaun Faren farm. This revised map conforms to the 1850 Tithe Map and particular attention is drawn to the field marked C annotated as Cae Bach (little field). This field now relates to post code CF47 9BJ which is the locus for Gwaunfarren Grove.
The 1850 Tithe Map shows field number 1901 as the homestead identified as “The Dairy” at the centre of a number of fields which made up the farm named as Gwaun Faren. The name has varied over time to include Gwaun Varen, Gwain Varen, Gwaun Faren, Gwaun Farren to the present-day spelling of Gwaunfarren. There is some debate as to the meaning of part of the name: “Gwaun=meadow” however there is some uncertainty as to the origin of “faren/Farren”. The Welsh-English Dictionary “Y Geiriadur Mawr” does not have a translation for this word and there is some speculation that it may have originated in the Irish word “Fearann” pronounced “Farran” meaning “pasture”. The book “Merthyr Tydfil – A Valley Community” (1981) published by The Merthyr Teachers Centre Group records the name as “Gwaun=meadow” and “Farren= warren” thus “Warren Meadow”.
In 1850 the freeholder of the farm was Mary Morgan the widow of William Morgan and the farmland was leased to the Penydarren Iron Company. That ironworks was less than half a mile away and the roads accessing the general locality conform in major part to the present-day road system. These were trackways and subsequently they became the present-day Alexandra Avenue and Galon Uchaf Road. There is no evidence of coal mining on the Gwaunfarren farmland however it is likely that iron stone and coal transited the adjacent trackways into the nearby iron works. The 1850 map identifies the farm homestead as “The Dairy” and it is probable that the farm produced milk, butter and cheese for the growing industrial population. The nearby Penydarren Ironworks opened in 1784 in the ownership of the Homfray family and George Forman. This was the smallest of the four local ironworks and in due course it made the cables of flat bar link for the Menai Straits Suspension Bridge. The works closed in 1857 followed shortly thereafter by the Plymouth Ironworks in 1859 whilst the two larger works at Cyfarthfa and Dowlais remained open.
Field number 1901 on the 1850 Tithe Map configures with the 2-acre piece of land that is now identified as post code CF47 9BJ. This land was leased in 1862 to William Simons for 25 years and he funded its redevelopment He was the first of two successful wealthy individuals and their families who lived there in succession until the 1920s. William was a barrister practising in Castle Street and he lived in the house with his wife and children from 1862 until 1888. He purchased the farmhouse and set about making substantial changes to that building, laid out a new garden, driveway and built a Lodge at the main entrance to the drive. His great grandson, Graham Simons later recounted a story detailed by one of Williams daughters, Phoebe, that some of the walls of the house were 4 feet thick and this perhaps indicates that some of the original farm building had been incorporated in the new house identified in the 1850 Tithe Map as “The Dairy”. A plan of the new house and garden is shown below. Note that the architect identified the house as “Gwain-faren” later named as “Gwaunfarren House”.
Parts of the old farmhouse were retained, the building substantially increased in size and an impressive new facade was built based on a Victorian style of architecture much in vogue at the time as demonstrated in an early photograph of the new house.
Photo courtesy of the Alan George Archive
Margaret Stewart Taylor did not include the house in her essay titled “The Big Houses of Merthyr Tydfil” published in the inaugural edition of the “Merthyr Historian Volume I” in 1976. However this was indeed a large house necessary to accommodate the first large family to reside there. The 1871 census shows that in addition to William Simons and his wife, Clara, there were 8 children and 7 staff: a governess, nurse, nursemaid, cook, laundress and 2 housemaids. Ten years later the family had increased to 11 children making a compliment of 20 family plus staff. It is suggested that there were legal disputes between William Simons, the leaseholder, and the freeholder of the land which played a part in the move of the Simons family to Cardiff in 1888.
