Merthyr’s Bridges: Caedraw Cart Bridge

By the end of the 19th Century, the only means of crossing the River Taff in Merthyr, south of the Iron Bridge, was by means of a the Rhydycar Ford – little more than set of stepping stones.

An extract from an 1860s map showing the Rhydycar Ford

This crossing was totally inadequate, as, except when the weather was exceptionally fine, the crossing was impassable and exceptionally dangerous. Indeed, it was reported as early as 1835, that a young man from Waunwyllt, having crossed the ford to visit his fiancée in Merthyr, upon returning to the spot to make his way home, found the ford flooded. In desperation, he took refuge in the warmth of the Caedraw kiln, but overcome by the heat, fell asleep and suffocated. For many years after this requests were made that a proper crossing be erected.

By 1890, no progress had been made, and indeed the minutes from the Board of Health’s meeting on 14 May 1890 show that the question of a bridge at Caedraw was still being raised, and that a Surveyor’s Report had in fact been carried out the previous year, but the Board decided that they had more important projects to carry out and that “the question of this Bridge be deferred for the present year”.

Wranglings over the bridge continued for another three years, until the Board finally decided to give the go-ahead for plans to be drawn up for a cart bridge to be built across the Taff at Caedraw with the proviso that the building of the bridge and approaches should cost no more than £450.

By November 1894, concrete foundations and masonry footings had been erected for the abutments for the new bridge, and orders had been placed for iron girders, iron flooring and timbers. The girders forming the main span of the bridge, with iron cross-members covered by the timber forming the base of the bridge. Timber was chosen to form the ‘flooring’ of the bridge over steel flooring suggested by the surveyor, as it was £39 cheaper to use wood than iron.

Within ten years however, this ‘false economy’ proved the surveyor correct, as the wooden flooring of the bridge was disintegrating badly. Throughout 1910 and 1911, arguments continued about repairing the bridge. Again it was suggested that steel flooring be laid on the bridge, but the Board decided that creosoting the timbers would suffice. In March 1938, however, the floor of the bridge collapsed and the bridge was closed to traffic. Even though it was eventually patched up and was put back into use again, the bridge was condemned in 1951, and it was demolished in 1966.

In retrospect, the bridge was doomed from the start. In order to cut costs, the Board of Health insisted on using the wrong materials, and indeed, the materials that they did use were all second-hand, and technically unsound.

Caedraw Cart Bridge. Photo courtesy of the Alan George Archive

Thomas Stephens – part 1

by Dr Marion Löffler

Today marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Stephens, the famous historian and social reformer who although not born here, spent the majority of his life in Merthyr. To mark the occasion, I have been given permission to use this article which appears in the Dictionary of National Biography.

Thomas Stephens was born on 21 April 1821 at Tan-y-gyrchen (also known as Tŷ-to-cam, i.e. the house with the crooked roof), in Pontneddfechan, Glamorganshire, the son of Evan Stephens, a well-known boot-maker, and his wife Rachel, the daughter of William Williams (Wil y Gweydd, 1778-1834), a weaver and the Unitarian minister of Blaen-gwrach chapel. Among those who influenced Stephens in his youth were Maria Jane Williams and the Quaker Thomas Redwood (author of The Vale of Glamorgan. Scenes and Tales among the Welsh). Having first attended an elementary school ‘located in a barn’ near Cefn Rhigos, Stephens spent about three years at the Unitarian school founded by David Davis (1745-1827), which during his time there was under the care of John Davies, the former minister of Capelygroes in Ceredigion.

In October 1835, Stephens was apprenticed to David Morgan, a Merthyr Tydfil pharmacist, on whose death in 1841 he took over the business at 113 High Street, which remained his main source of income throughout his life. In 1866, Stephens married Margaret Elizabeth Davies, a descendant of a well-known family of Unitarians from Penrheolgerrig (see Morgan Williams, 1808-1883) in Llangollen Parish Church. Her brother Richard conducted most of the business after Stephens suffered a first stroke in 1868.

Thomas Stephens’s main contributions to the shaping of modern Wales are his efforts as a member of Merthyr Tydfil’s middle class to transform it from an industrial village to an urban community endowed with modern civic institutions; his tireless work on modernizing all aspects of Welsh culture, particularly the eisteddfod, education and Welsh orthography; and his pioneering works of scholarship, especially in history.

As a Unitarian, Thomas Stephens believed in the ability of individuals and society to improve their condition through education and by pursuing rational pastimes. All his work is to be viewed against this religious background. He first put his beliefs into practice by co-founding a public library in Merthyr Tydfil in 1846, for which he acted as secretary until his health failed in 1870, organizing and delivering educational lectures. In this, as in other undertakings, he received the support of Lady Charlotte Guest and Sir John Josiah Guest.

Stephens was one of the campaigners for the desperately needed Board of Health in Merthyr Tydfil in the 1850s, took a leading role in the planning of its Temperance Hall, which would provide rational pastimes for the working classes, and campaigned tirelessly for the Incorporation of the town.

The Temperance Hall. Photo courtesy of the Alan George archive.

He acted as an intermediary between iron masters and workers on more than one occasion. In 1853 it was he who chaired a mass meeting of over 3,000 people, called to achieve an end to long strike action. For the widows and children of the men killed at an explosion at the Crawshay Gethin Pit No. 2 in 1862, he instigated a relief fund, and collected and distributed money until the day before he died. He was a close friend of and political campaigner for H. A. Bruce, Lord Aberdare, Liberal MP for Merthyr Tydfil between 1852 and 1868, and served as High Constable of Merthyr in 1858.

Thomas Stephens’s talent and style as a social critic and reformer with a penchant for acerbic prose first showed itself in a series of letters to The Cambrian in 1842-3, in which he harshly criticized the romantic nature of the eisteddfod. In 1847, and reacting to the publication of the Blue Books , he took a leading part in the controversy over voluntaryism versus the acceptance of governmental grants for educational purposes which was acted out in the Monmouthshire Merlin . He was one of the very few who gave voice to the unpopular view that ‘voluntary exertions would be insufficient to provide education for the very large number of children who now remain uneducated’. For this, he was denounced by representatives of Church and Chapel alike as ‘a maniac and a liar’.

To read the original article, please follow:
https://biography.wales/article/s11-STEP-THO-1821

To be continued……

Cefn Cemetery

by Carolyn Jacob

Cefn-Ffrwd is the largest Cemetery in the Borough covering approximately 40 acres.

Cefn Cemetery in the early 1900s. Photo courtesy of http://www.alangeorge.co.uk/index.htm

In the nineteenth century burial was a huge problem here. In a hundred years Merthyr Tydfil grew from a Parish of just over 500 persons to the only large town in Wales with a population of over 50,000 in 1850. During the 1849 cholera outbreak there were over 1,000 deaths in one month alone. Infant mortality was high and other diseases such as smallpox and TB were rife. Not all the chapels and churches had their own burial ground and the responsibility for burial lay with the Parish Authorities.

In 1850 there were three Merthyr Tydfil Parish Burial Grounds, the Graveyard around St. Tydfil’s Church, the Cemetery in Twynyrodyn and the new so called ‘cholera’ Cemetery in Thomastown. Dowlais had two Parish cemeteries, St John’s Church and a small cholera cemetery near the Works. This was a time when cremation was unheard of, and these soon became inadequate.

The Board of Health, founded in 1850, took advantage of a new Act of 1852, which empowered them to set up Cemeteries and leased land in Breconshire to set up a new Cemetery. The Cemetery was managed by the Burial Board. The first burial took place on 16 April 1859. The Ffrwd portion of the Cemetery was added in 1905, the first burial being on 20 November 1905.

The bridge connecting the old cemetery with the new Ffrwd section during construction in 1905. Photo courtesy of http://www.alangeorge.co.uk/index.htm

Average burials in the nineteenth century were around 400 annually. In 1878 the son of one of the gravediggers set fire to the ‘dead-house’ of the Cefn Cemetery and a report of 21 of December 1878 described the ‘unseemly behaviour’ of children frequently climbing about the monuments of the Cemetery.  In 1902 when the road to Cardiff was widened a large section of the St Tydfil Graveyard was removed and the ‘remains’ were moved to Cefn Coed Cemetery. Those reburied included Charles Wood, who erected the first furnaces at Cyfarthfa.

Easter was a traditional time for ‘flowering the graves’ and a report in the Merthyr Express of 26 March 1916 records that:-  ‘at Cefn Cemetery on Friday and Saturday, relatives of the dead attended from long distances to clean stones and plant flowers’. 

Cefn Coed became a Municipal Cemetery for Merthyr Tydfil in 1905. Welsh Baptists were buried in unconsecrated ground and Roman Catholics in consecrated ground. There is a separate large Jewish Cemetery at Cefn Coed and there is an index to all the Jewish burials in Merthyr Tydfil Library.

There are many famous people buried in Cefn Coed Cemetery including:-

  • Enoch Morrell, first Mayor of Merthyr Tydfil and the Welsh Miners Leader who had to negotiate the return to work after the General Strike.
  • Redmond Coleman, the boxing champion of Wales at the beginning of the twentieth century.
  • Adrian Stephens, inventor of the steam whistle.
The old cemetery buildings at Cefn. Photo courtesy of http://www.alangeorge.co.uk/index.htm

Dr Dyke of Merthyr

Today marks the anniversary of the death of another very important in Merthyr’s History – Dr T J Dyke.

Dr T J Dyke

Thomas Jones Dyke was born in Lower High Street in Merthyr on 16 September 1816.* His father, Thomas Dyke, a pharmaceutical chemist, had moved to Merthyr from Bristol in the early 1800’s and set up a business in the town, first in partnership with D S Davies and then on his own at a premises at Court Street.

Thomas Dyke Jr. attended the schools of William Shaw in Gellifaelog, Taliesin Williams in Bridge Street and William Armsworth in Swansea, before finishing his education at the Bedminster House Academy in Bristol. In 1831 he began a three year apprenticeship with Mr David Davies, the surgeon at the Cyfarthfa Works, before going to London in 1834 to further his medical studies. He attended Granger’s School of Anatomy and Medicine and also Guys and St Thomas’ Hospitals, and passed as an apothecary in 1837 and as a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons the following year.

Returning to Merthyr, the now Dr Dyke set up practice, and in 1842 bought ‘The Hollies’, a cottage in Albert Street where he lived until 1894.

During the cholera epidemic of 1849 (see previous blog entry http://www.merthyr-history.com/?p=123), Dr Dyke was appointed Medical Officer of Health of one of the districts into which Merthyr had been divided due to the epidemic. Dr Dyke actually contracted cholera himself, but after battling the disease for six weeks, he eventually pulled through. Cholera hit Merthyr again in 1854 and 1866, and Dr Dyke was at the forefront of the fight against the disease.

In 1863, Dr Dyke was appointed as the first permanent Medical Officer of Health to the Merthyr Tydfil Board of Health, a position he retained until his death, the Board of Health being replaced by the Merthyr Tydfil Urban Council in 1894.

In 1876 the Hospital for Sick Children was founded in Bridge Street, and Dr Dyke was put in charge of the medical care there. The Hospital for Sick Children would grow and eventually become the General Hospital in 1888.

Dr Dyke’s services were recognised when he was appointed High Constable of Caerphilly Higher (which covered Merthyr at the time) in 1876 and 1877; and in 1886 he was appointed as a Justice of the Peace of Glamorganshire.

The above facts do not give justice to the immense service he provided to Merthyr. Throughout his life Dr Dyke fought to improve medical and sanitary conditions in the town, and as Medical Officer to the Board of Health, he used his influence to facilitate many of these improvements. Through the auspices of the Board of Health, Merthyr received a reliable and clean water supply in 1861, and between 1865 and 1868 a system of new sewers was built in the town leading to a new sewage farm ensuring that very little sewage was deposited directly into the River Taff.

Thomas Dyke died peacefully in his sleep on 20 January 1900. In his obituary in the South Wales Daily News on 22 January 1990 was written:

“He was closely identified with Merthyr and all its works for the greater part of a century. The public came to recognise him as one who did something to the benefit of the community at large. No man did better life saving work in South Wales”.

*ADDENDUM

I have received an e-mail from Roger Evans with the following information:

Your page on Thomas Jones Dyke (a man I greatly admire), states he was born in Lower High Street in Merthyr on 16 September 1816.

Many sources quote 1816 as his year of birth which I believe may have originated in Charles Wilkins ‘History of Merthyr Tydfil’ 1908. The year may have been estimated from Census records which record a person’s a age rather than year of birth.

The National Archive however  definitely, shows he was born on 22 July 1815 and then baptised 13 August 1815, in the presence of his parents Thomas and Maria. (Record number 216;  TNA/RG4/4090).

I attach the original record and a clear transcript both obtained from the National Archive.  

Regards
Roger Evans

Record number 216;  TNA/RG4/4090

Thank you to Roger Evans for pointing this out. I do appreciate it as it really matters that all the facts are correct.