From the Cardiff & Merthyr Guardian 160 years ago today….
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Tag: Pentrebach
Remembering Merthyr’s Cinemas
Do you have memories of going to the cinema when you were younger?
Merthyr and the surrounding area had almost a dozen cinemas in years gone by, and Dr Steven Gerrard of the Northern Film School at Leeds Beckett University (and a Pentrebach boy) is working on a project to collect people’s memories of them.
To achieve this, Steve will be holding a drop in session at Canolfan Soar between 10.00 and 12.00 on Monday 20 November for people to come along and share their memories.
If you would like to take part, please come along and have a chat about your memories – you will be guaranteed a very warm welcome.
To recap – Canolfan Soar – 20 November – 10.00 to 12.00. Please come along and share your memories.
New Ration Books
From the Merthyr Express 80 years ago today…..
Merthyr’s Home Guard
From the Merthyr Express 80 years ago today….
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.
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.
Earthquake in South Wales
Most people will know about the terrible earthquake that devastated San Francisco on 18 April 1906, but did you know that another, much less powerful, earthquake actually hit Merthyr later that year, 115 years ago today?
At 9.45 am on 27 June 1906, a powerful earth tremor was felt across much of South Wales, its epicentre being placed just offshore of Port Talbot. The quake, which struck just a few weeks after the devastating San Francisco earthquake, was felt as far afield as Ilfracombe, Birmingham and southwest Ireland. Measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale, the quake was caused by movement in the ‘Neath Disturbance’ and ‘Swansea Valley Disturbance’, two fault lines in the South Wales area.
Although there were no fatalities, and only minimal minor injuries sustained by falling masonry, people were terrified by the unexpected tremor.
In Swansea, there was damage to St Andrew’s Church, Swansea Prison, the Board of Trade offices and the gasworks, and the Mumbles Lighthouse was said to have ‘rocked on its foundations’. In Llanelli, the town hall clock stopped and people in Ammanford were convinced there had been a huge pit explosion, and colliers from several pits in South Wales were hurriedly brought to the service due to concerns over the stability of the mines.
The tremor hit Merthyr about five minutes after the original quake. Chimneys on two houses on the Tramroad were dislodged and crashed to the street, a similar fate befalling a house at Bryn Sion Street in Dowlais, and the plasterwork in several buildings cracked. Apart from these incidents, there were several incidents of pictures and clocks falling off walls, and crockery was smashed as it fell from shelves and tables. Yet again, however, people were terrified.
At Abermorlais School, the glass partitions between the classrooms ‘shook like leaves’, and it was only due to the calmness of the teachers in reassuring the terrified pupils that panic didn’t ensue. At Twynyrodyn and St David’s School, windows rattled and the blackboards swayed alarmingly. Yet again it was only due to the presence of mind of the teachers that panic was avoided.
A rumour quickly spread that the roof of the school at either Abercanaid or Pentrebach had collapsed injuring many of the pupils, but luckily this was not the case. At the Dowlais Gas and Coke Company, the offices were shaken with such force that the staff there feared that one of the gasometers had exploded. The staff at the Town Hall were also greatly alarmed, and they described two shocks being distinctly felt, one gentleman present remarked however, that he thought that “the Ratepayers Protection Association had commenced its work”.
Evacuees in Merthyr
The article transcribed below appeared in the Merthyr Express 80 years ago today (8 June 1940).
Merthyr Welcomes Evacuees
Sixteen Hundred Arrivals
“You will get a square DEAL here, FOLK-stone”. This clever slogan on a banner at the main entrance to Merthyr Railway Station greeted 1,600 children evacuated from Deal and Folkestone when they arrived at Merthyr on Sunday.
Several thousand people lined High Street and Church Street to welcome the evacuees, who were accompanied by their teachers.
The children were met by Merthyr’s Mayor (Mr. J.W Watkin J.P.) and the Mayoress. Others present at the station were the Deputy Mayor (Mr. A.J. Brobyn), Ald. Wm Powell, Ald. Sam Jennings, Ald. David Jones J.P., Ald. John Williams, Ald. T. Edmund Rees, Councillors Andrew Wilson J.P., J. E. Jones J.P., B. J. Williams (chairman, education committee), Lewis Jones, F. J. Bateson J.P., T. J. Evans, John Harris, Mrs. Mary Thomas J.P., F. A. Phillips J.P., David Parry J.P, and D O’Driscoll; the Town Clerk (Mr. Edward Roberts) and Mrs. Roberts, Canon J. Richards Pugh (Rector of Merthyr), the Rev. Emlyn Davies (president, Merthyr Free Church Council), Mr W. T Owen M.A. (director of education), Dr. T. H. Stephens (medical officer of health), the chief constable (Mr. T A Goodwin), the Rev J. T. Rogers, the Rev H. Davies, Mrs Margaret Gardner M.B.E., Mr A. P. Thomas J.P., Mr T. E. Lewis (station-master), Mr J. Crossland (borough treasurer), Mr. G. A. Cook (public assistance officer), Dr. King (H.M. inspector of schools), Mr. T Longville Bowen (editor, Merthyr Express), Mr. David J. Owen (chief billeting officer), Mr. Israel Price, Mr. T. S. Evans (deputy food controller), Major T. R. Evans (A.R.P. officer) and others.
After the playing of “Hen Wlad fy Nhadau” by the Salvation Army Band at the Station approach, the children – many of the younger ones carrying dolls and toys, and all with their gas masks – were led by the Mayor and officials to the Miners’ Hall.
In extending a welcome on behalf of the townspeople, the Mayor expressed the hope that the children would be happy and well cared for at their new homes.
Coun. B. J. Williams and Mr. David Owen were in charge of the dispersal of the children from the Miners’ Hall.
After being allocated to the various wards, the children were taken to the St. David’s Hall, where they were medically examined by 14 local doctors. When the examinations were completed, buses were waiting to take the evacuees to the dispersal centres in the various wards. At these dispersal centres they were provided with a meal, and later they were conveyed to their new homes.
On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday Merthyr’s schools were closed while arrangements were being completed for the education of the evacuees, who are drawn from secondary, technical, elementary and infants’ schools. Throughout the borough the evacuees could be seen fraternising with the local children and “exploring” their new surroundings.
The slogan already referred to was thought out by Mr William Morgan, of Twynyrodyn, one of the ward billeting officers.
Troedyrhiw
Bridge Street, Troedyrhiw, was decorated with flags and bunting to greet Pentrebachthe children from Deal when they arrived at 9.30 pm, and crowds of people lined the streets to welcome them. The children, numbering 96, and varying in ages from four to fourteen, marched to the Welfare Hall, where they were provided with a meal.
The Rev. J. C. Bowen, during the proceedings, introduced the Rev. T Rees (vicar), who spoke to the children and said they were now among people who were kindly disposed to them, and were united to make them happy. On behalf of the people of Troedyrhiw, and also of the churches and chapels, he extended to them a warm welcome. Great credit is due to the chief billeting officer, Mr. D Rowlands, and his staff of assistant billeting officers for the smooth working of the arrangements for billeting the children. There was evidence of fine teamwork, which included the chairman, Coun. B. M. Davies; Mr. M.Morgans, secretary; and Mr. G. Bryn Jones J.P., treasurer. Valuable services were also rendered by the police and special constables, under the direction of Sergt. Pugh; also by the ambulance division (Capt. David Jones); the Auxiliary Fire Service, with Mr. Harry Lucas, officer in-charge; and the committee of the Welfare and Boys’ Club (chairman, Mr J. J. Palmer); and Mr Fred Bristowe (Boys’ Club secretary).
The members of the committees were busy on Monday writing letters to the parents of each evacuee child.
Abercanaid
Although the contingent of the evacuee children, numbering 65, for the Abercanaid and Pentrebach area, from Deal, arrived at a late hour on Sunday, the villagers crowded the streets to give them a welcome to the area. The chief billeting officer (Mr. D. W. Davies) had the arrangements so admirably planned, that within an hour of their arrival the children were in their new homes. The billeting and welfare committee were all out to attend to the provision of a meal at the Abercanaid schools, and parents of the children have been informed of their safe arrival, and with the assurance that they will be well cared for during their stay. Splendid services were rendered by the special constables, under the direction of P.C.’s Caleb Evans and R. Davies.
Merthyr Vale
Children evacuated from Deal arrived at the Gordon-Lennox Hall, Merthyr Vale, close on 9 p.m. Outside the hall hundreds of local residents gave them a rousing welcome. About 210 children, with their teachers and a few adults, were handed over to a competent staff of workers, drawn chiefly from the teaching profession, and the difficult task of placing the children in their new homes began. All the clergy and ministers of the village, together with local members of the St. John Ambulance Brigade and the local police (with Inspector Young in charge) worked as one, and many of the children brought letters of introduction from their clergy to those of their new home. Praise must be accorded the women helpers who served the children with a meal. All worked together, and tribute must be paid to Mr. W. J. Williams, headmaster of Pantglas Boys’ School, and Mr. A James, headmaster of Merthyr Vale Boys’ School, through whose energy the children were all placed in good homes.
Many thanks to Tracy Barnard for transcribing this article.
A Full House – part 1
by Barrie Jones
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 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.)
To be continued…..
Merthyr’s Lost Landmarks: The Triangle, Pentrebach
One of Merthyr’s most sorely missed landmarks is undoubtedly the Triangle in Pentrebach.
The Pentrebach Triangle was a planned settlement of fifty-four houses constructed in the 1830s and 1840s, in association with the development of the Pentrebach Forge by the Hill family of Plymouth Ironworks. It comprised four rows of double-fronted terraced houses, two of them facing each other across Church Street (which was part of the Merthyr – Cardiff turnpike road to c.1840 when a new alignment was laid out to the west), and two rows enclosing a triangular space to the west of Church Street. The houses had two rooms and a pantry on the ground floor, and two rooms above, accessed by half-spiral stone stairs built into the very thick party walls between alternate pairs.
By 1813 there was already a row of terraced housing, Long Row, to the east of Church Street, and a building on the east side of Church Street itself, possibly an alehouse which was later converted to four houses.
Further building of Triangle probably began in the late 1830s, with two stages of six houses each on the east side of Church Street, attached to the south end of the alehouse building. The first seven houses of the south row (from the east end) of the Triangle probably also date from this period. The later houses used greyish-yellow bricks for window arches and chimneys.
All were built by 1851. At first there were no back doors, and all had small enclosures at the front, some of which contained sheds for coal. Water came from a pump and trough in the centre of the triangle, and a block of four privies was constructed behind the south-west corner. Later many of the houses acquired single-storey rear extensions.
The houses were Listed Grade 2 in February 1975, but had already been purchased by Merthyr Council and earmarked for clearance. Local civic and heritage groups fought to save them, and the Civic Society even produced a scheme showing that they could be renovated for less than the cost of new housing, and at the same time provide 12.5% more floor space than the basic basic new-build design of the day.
All the efforts to save them were in vain however, and The Triangle was demolished on 12 December 1977, and the whole site and all related landscape features have been obliterated by the building of large industrial units.
The demolition of the Triangle is one of the most grievous losses to Merthyr’s Heritage. It beggars belief that the powers that be sanctioned its destruction, knowing how important and unique it was, and in the face of such public opposition….but should we be surprised?
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.
To return to the coach journey, the Bridgewater Arms was then kept by Mr George Roach, who afterwards move to the Castle at Merthyr,and after the change of horses they came to Quakers’ Yard. Here a slight halt was made, it might have been put down to kindness towards the animals, but the hostelry also supplied refreshments for the inner man. Whatever may be the reason, a long and steep hill had then to be ascended. After passing Pantannas the ascent modified, and on arriving at Nantddu turnpike, the pace could be again increased.
A run of about two miles after this brought us to a pleasant cottage on the right hand side, owned and occupied by a Mr Stephens, and the Mount Pleasant Public House, kept by John Griffiths, who afterwards moved to the Star opposite the Old Church in High Street, was close by on the other side of the road.
The drive through the woods up to Troedyrhiw was a pleasant one. The road just before entering Troedyrhiw has been altered a little for the making of the Taff Vale Railway, and after passing Troedyrhiw for about 1½ miles the road was subsequently diverted by Mr Anthony Hill. After crossing the line of the railroad forming the connection at present between the Taff Vale Railway and the South Duffryn Coal Pits, it kept to the east of the present road, passing close in front of Duffryn Cottage, the east end of Taibach and Pentrebach Rows, through what was part of the Forge Yard, then past Pentrebach House (where I believe Mr Probert now resides), and came out at a little above Plymouth Lodge.
From here there has not been any deviation of route, but until the Britannia Public House on the right-hand side, there was not a single cottage on either side. There was a bridge over the road for the conveying of mine rubbish between the Dowlais Branch Bridge and the Britannia similar to one passed under at Pencaebach. About a hundred yards on towards the High Street, and on the other side of the road stood the Bell, and adjoining the Bell was the Plymouth Tollgate. On the opposite side of the road, but just before coming to the Bell there was an open space to the town road that was used as place where coal was delivered; which with some others will be alluded to to exemplify the arrangements at the time.
After coming through the Plymouth gate there were cottages on both sides until the Plymouth watercourse came so close to the road as to prevent their being built on the left hand. Where the Taff Station was at the opening of the railway and for years afterwards, there was nothing but rubbish tips, but they were not high, and the road with a ford through the river went from Plymouth Street across by Rhydycar. Perhaps this was the very Rhyd (a ford), but the place called Rhydycar was on the side of the canal bank, a house and mine pit with a winding engine. It was doubtless a parish road for Mr Bruce, the grandfather of the present Lord Aberdare, when Stipendiary of Merthyr, passed that way home to his residence in Mountain Ash.
To be continued at a later date….