Tag: Heolgerrig

by Sarnws

Ivor  Street  in particular had a reputation for being  generous to beggars, who  in those days would  just walk up the middle of the road, often silent, cap in hand, and the children would run in to tell their mothers, who in turn would spare a few coppers.

This was in the thirties. By now we had moved from “Merthyr” which generally describes Merthyr itself,  Dowlais, Penydarren,  Heolgerrig, Pant,  Georgetown  Twynyrodyn   etc.  One day I dashed in from the street, quite excited, to tell my mother that there was a beggar, cap in hand, walking down the middle of the road just chanting “Ho Hum, Ho Hum” repetitively.  She was as excited as I was and  in turn dashed out to put something in his hat.  It was a link with “home”, for he was well known to her.

I remember that beggars were quite a common sight.  My father in the very early nineteen hundreds, before going to work as an apprentice blacksmith, worked in Toomeys.  He was paying in to the bank one day when a beggar who used to push himself around, mounted on a small flat trolley with the aid if two short sticks, was paying in. When he reached the counter, the clerk checking in not an insignificant amount asked if he had had a good day.  The reply was, “Average”.

On a few occasions at about 8.30 pm on a Saturday there would be a message from one of the houses in Pontsarn or Pontsicill, to the effect that some friends had dropped in so would Mr. Toomey send up the brace of pheasants he had hanging. My father would be sent on the errand, having been given two-pence for the tram, and with the kind instruction that he needn’t come back.

Until the day she died, sadly quite young, if someone asked my mother when making her way to the train for her weekly visit, where she was going, the reply was always the same, “Home for the day”.

I remember my father, when  on a visit to Merthyr when Grandparents and Aunts and Uncles were still there, showing me the  Trevithick  memorial  in Pontmorlais, and being brought up with knowledge of the social and industrial heritage of  “Merthyr” and its contribution to the world.

Is it possible when the light is just right that a mirage of the Coal Arch can be seen?

Does the glow from the Bessemer converter still light the night sky?

When I  retired, thirty years ago I took the elderly aunt of a colleague to lunch in the Teapot Cafe at the end of the Station Arcade, which was the main exit  from Brunel’s  station. A lady came in with her husband, nodded to me and smiled.  She turned to her husband and I could see her say, ”I know that gentleman”. I could not place her, and just nodded as we left.

A little while later I saw her again in the company of friends or family one of whom I knew.  I was drawn into their company.  The lady had been living on Orpington as teacher and then head teacher for thirty-five years, so had not encountered me in that time.  It transpired that she remembered me from Dowlais  school, fifty years before.

My son has a silver pocket watch and chain, given to me by my uncle, of the same christian name just before he died.  It was bequeathed to him by an uncle, again of the same name.  His aunt had it serviced for him by the clockmaker half way up the arcade.  That must have been about 1920.

As you entered that clockmaker’s premises, facing you was a huge grandfather clock.  Integral with the  pendulum was a cylinder of mercury.  This expanded and contracted with temperature change, compensating for the temperature variation in the length of the pendulum rod, seemingly so simple a concept, but how brilliant.

I was telling a colleague, who had been brought up in Dowlais, but previously unknown to me, that I could remember standing under the railway bridge at the end of Station Road, sheltering from the rain, and watching the Fish and Chip shop opposite, in Victoria Street I think, burning down. He turned and said that he had been there too. That had happened, I think, in the winter of 38/39. Thirty-five years  or so before.

I have tooted the car horn many times on Johnny Owen, out for his morning run.  I always got a wave of the hand in return.  What a number of boxers and other sportspeople Merthyr has produced. The last years of my working life were in Merthyr, and being steeped in its history by my parents, it was interesting to encounter family names which were familiar to me, particularly the Spanish ones, as I was familiar with their family histories to some extent.

My parents are buried in Pant Cemetery, as are Grandparents, Aunts and Uncles, Cousins and more.  Whenever I visit I cannot but drive around Dowlais, now much changed, but a place to which I am still drawn.

Except for one year, October ‘38 to September ‘39, when I  attended  Dowlais  Junior  School, and was a  patient for three months in the childrens’  hospital which occupied the original Sandbrook  House, I have not lived in Merthyr since I was a baby. When I was discharged from Sandbrook House I had been indoors for nearly the whole of my stay and insisted on riding up as far as the Hollybush Hotel on the open top deck of the tram.  The era of the tram ended very shortly afterwards.

I seem to have read or heard somewhere that nature has implanted within you a sacred and indissoluble attachment to the place of your birth and infant nurture, perhaps Tydfil’s martyrdom has created this aura about Merthyr which evokes such hiraeth.