St Tydfil’s Hospital – The Melting Pot

200 years of history at Gwaunfarren – part 2

by Brian Jones

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.

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.

Merthyr’s Lost Landmarks: Merthyr Workhouse

by Carolyn Jacob

As early as February 1833, talks were held for the erection of a workhouse in the Parish of Merthyr Tydfil; the neighbouring Parish of Llanfabon had had one since 1803. These plans, however, were superseded by the passing of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, which centralised the existing workhouse system to cut the costs of poor relief and “discourage perceived laziness”. The Act grouped local parishes into Poor Law unions, under 600 locally elected Boards of Guardians. Each of those boards had its own workhouse.

The Merthyr Tydfil Poor Law Union was formed on 3 November 1836, and was overseen by an elected Board of Guardians, and they held their first meeting at the Castle Inn. For many years, the Merthyr Board of Guardians resisted the new law, and continued giving out monetary relief, and it was not until 1848 that they were forced to plan a workhouse for the town. The plans were further interrupted by the devastating 1849 Cholera epidemic, and finally, at the end of 1850, plans were agreed upon.

The new building, to accommodate 500, was designed by Aickin and Capes of Islington, and was to cost £10,000. Mr Hamlyn of Bristol was contracted to carry out the work, but by June 1851, so little work had been carried out that he was replaced by Messrs Henry Norris and Daniel Thomas of Cardiff, and the new building was completed in September 1853, at a lower cost than the original estimate – £6,880.

Waiting for relief outside the Workhouse in Merthyr Tydfil – 1873 – Anon. Photo courtesy of the Alan George Archive

The complex was built in several ‘blocks’. The entrance block, at the west side of the complex housed the porter’s room, laundry and girl’s school. The main block, cruciform in shape, held the men’s and women’s wards, the boy’s schoolroom, a lying-in ward and the dining room and chapel.

In 1899-1900, a new infirmary block was built at the north end of the workhouse.

The complex was redesignated ‘Tydfil Lodge Public Assistance Institution’ and later became St Tydfil’s Hospital. The hospital closed in 2012, and most of the buildings were demolished in 2015.

Iorwerth Price Jones, Trelewis…The Quiet Referee – part 1

It is hard to imagine in these days when Welshmen are not allowed to referee in the English leagues, that we once had an elite class referee actually living in the High Street, Trelewis.

Iorwerth Price Jones (Iory) was born in number 1 Hylton Terrace Bedlinog on the 18^th December, 1927. He grew up in the village and attended the infants’ school at Commercial Street and then onto the Bedlinog Boys School at Oaklands Terrace (Where the new surgery has been built) the girls’ school was at the end of Hylton Terrace in those days…

When he was 13 years of age he played for the Bedlinog Boys school team, who played wearing distinctive Black and White squares on their shirts. One day they had arranged a match against Trelewis down on the Trelewis Welfare fields, a good local derby. The match was interrupted by men shouting that a young lad had wandered too close to the nearby quarry and had fallen in; people rushed to help as the game was abandoned, but the youngster lost his life in the deep waters of the quarry… a dangerous place that had a buried crane neck rising above the surface and many parents feared their children playing there. In later years the quarry was filled in with waste from the collieries.

Eddie Jones, Iory’s father was a collier on the coal face at Taff Merthyr colliery and young Iory was soon to follow in his fathers footsteps.

At 14 years of age, Iory got a job at the nearby Taff Merthyr Colliery, he spent two years underground, mainly on the tension end that pushed the coal towards the waiting trams, and it was called District 15. In those days before cap lamps, he was expected to collect a lamp weighing 14lbs and carry that all the way into his place of work, and of course back out again at the end of a long shift. Dai Hughes was the manager then, he lived in the big house on Captains Hill called Brynffynon. At 16 years old Iory had to work on top pit due to suffering with dermatitis and started work with the Blacksmiths. He used to catch one of the Bert Davies buses, with wooden seats, that picked up at Bolwells shop near his home.

Iory also attended the Treforest mining school where he studied Welding fabrication and was fully qualified upon leaving. Iory left the collieries after 9 years and worked for a number of years in Cardiff at a government training centre. He then got a teaching job at Cross Keys College, where he worked for over 25 years, during which time he became a top class football referee. He was fortunate enough to be allowed to take time off on occasions when he had to be away refereeing.

Iorwerth was a very good young footballer who got picked for the Nelson Welsh league team, he then got transferred to Treharris and finally played in the Southern league for the very powerful Merthyr Tydfil team. Unfortunately a problem with his left knee forced him to see the local doctor in Trelewis, Dr De Souza, who strangely enough held his surgery in the front room of number 12 High Street, a house that Iory would later make a home for him his wife Margaret and their daughter. Dr De Souza diagnosed a cartilage problem and performed an operation at St Tydfil’s Hospital in Merthyr to remove it, this spelt the end of Iory’s playing days, he was determined to still keep involved in football though and started refereeing local league games.

Iorwerth began serious refereeing in the Pontypridd and District league, where assessors would mark your performance; he was getting excellent marks and soon went from Grade C to a grade B. He became a Welsh league referee and move up to a grade A, eventually his talent earned him a place as a football league linesman…a great honour.

After a few years, an even greater honour came his way, when he became one of the five Welsh referees on the football league list, that was allowed by UEFA and FIFA…The other four at that time were, Leo Callaghan, Haydn Davies, Clive Thomas and Jack Gow. Unlike these days, he was expected to officiate at all levels, one week he could be at St James Park, Exeter, and the next at Old Trafford. Iory was 38 years of age, and was being paid £13 a match plus expenses, a far cry from Today’s referees’ wages.

The day finally arrived for Iory’s first match in charge; it was Portsmouth v Birmingham City at Fratton Park, August 24^th 1966, what a match it was, a nine goal thriller with the away team going away with the two points after an amazing 5-4 victory. During the season he officiated at plenty of games including matches at Tottenham, Fulham, Wolves and Chelsea, before the season was concluded he was elected to the F.I.F.A panel of referees after just one season as a football league referee as well as being put on the UEFA list to referee matches in their competitions.

To be continued….

Many thanks to Paul Corkrey for allowing me to use this article. To view the original please go to https://www.treharrisdistrict.co.uk/treharris-areas/trelewis/history/

Merthyr’s Heritage Plaques: William Thomas Lewis – Lord Merthyr

by Keith Lewis-Jones

Plaque sited outside the old St Tydfil’s Hospital, CF47 0BL

©Photo courtesy of the National Library of Wales

William Thomas Lewis (1837-1914), later Lord Merthyr, was probably the most powerful figure in Welsh industry in the decades before 1914.

From a lowly beginning in 1855, he rose, by 1880, to be the manager of all of Lord Bute’s mineral, docks, railways, urban and agricultural property. He became a major coal owner and established the Lewis Merthyr Consolidated Collieries Ltd. He was Chairman of the Coalowner’s Association and was totally opposed to trade unions.

He was made a Freeman of the Borough in 1908 and was raised to the peerage in 1911.

Statue & plinth – Grade II Listed

History

Granite plinth dated 1900. Bronze statute by T Brock RA, sculptor of London, 1898.

The monument was relocated from the original site outside the General Hospital.

Description

Standing, bearded figure with arms across front holding unrolled document or plan. Miners’ lamp and pile of papers at rear of feet. Tapering pedestal with moulded cornice and stepped plinth. Bronze heraldic plaque to front.

Long (rear) inscription of good works begins: “Erected by the Voluntary Subscriptions of Friends and Admirers….”.

Listed Building information kindly supplied by CADW ©

Scheduled Ancient Monuments information kindly supplied by The Royal Commission on the Ancient Monuments of Wales – RCAHMW ©

Arthur Trystan Edwards

Following on from the last article, here is a bit more about Arthur Trystan Edwards.

Arthur Trystan Edwards was born in Merthyr on 10 November 1884 at the Old Court House. His father, Dr William Edwards, was a School inspector and later Chief Inspector of the Central Welsh School Board.

Following his education at Clifton school, and Hertford College, Oxford, where he took honours in Mathematical Moderations, in 1907 he became articled to the prominent architect Sir Reginald Bloomfield, R.A. (who designed, among other things, the Menin Gate in Ypres), who he reverentially referred to as ‘The Master’, and in 1911 he joined the department of civic design at Liverpool University.

In 1915, however, with the First World War raging, he joined the Royal Navy as a ‘hostilities only’ rating. He enjoyed his life in the navy so much that he spent the next twelve years of peace as a rating in the R.N.V.R. and he considered his naval experiences as one of the principal cultural influences of his life.

At the end of the War, Edwards joined the Ministry of Health, then responsible, among other things, for housing policy, and there he remained for six years.

In 1921 he published ‘The Things Which Are Seen: A Philosophy of Beauty and in 1924 he published ‘Good and Bad Manners in Architecture’ in which he urged architects to respect the neighbourhood in which they designed their buildings.

He was ahead of his time, too, in founding the Hundred New Towns Association, but even his energetic and rumbustious campaigning failed to make any significant impression until the Royal Commission on the Geographical Distribution of the Industrial Population, the Committee on Land Utilisation, the New Towns Committee and the Royal Commission on Population showed that at last official thought was moving towards his point of view. He gave evidence before all these bodies and their reports show how far his influence had begun to tell.

He prepared valuable plans for an auxiliary inner by-pass at Oxford above the top of Christchurch Meadow and designed schemes for the extension of the Palace of Westminster across Bridge Street, with its fine roof terrace and minimum demolition, all of which could have brought great benefit to the nation.

In 1925 the Chadwick Trustees awarded him £250 for research into the question of density of houses in large towns. His report, Modern Terrace Housing, was published in 1946 and was much criticised on the ground that his projected density was too high.

In 1953 he published his ‘A New Map of the World: The Trystan Edwards Projection’, an attempt to solve the problem of projecting the spherical surface of the earth on to a flat surface, a problem which by its very nature is incapable of satisfactory solution, followed in 1972 by ‘The Science of Cartography’.

After retiring to Wales and his home town he contributed to the regional studies published by Robert Hale with papers on Merthyr Tydfil, Rhondda and the Valleys; ‘Merthyr-Rhondda, the Prince and Wales of the Future’ appeared in 1972. He returned to architecture in 1968 and published ‘Tomorrow’s Architecture: The Triple Approach’. He continued to write well into old age and in 1970 he published Second Best-boy: The Autobiography of a Non-Speaker.

Among his other books are ‘Architectural Style’ (1925); ‘Sir William Chambers’ (1926), ‘The Second Battle of Hastings’ 1939-45 (1970) and ‘How to Observe Buildings’, (1972),

His small stature, mercurial temperament, genial presence and sharp wit were proverbial and part of his Welsh background. His fellow architects thought highly of him as a pioneer in town planning and as a man who inspired social developments in Britain which won world acclaim. He was FRIBA, FRTPI, FRGS.

He married in 1947 Margaret Meredyth, daughter of Canon F. C. Smith. She died in 1967 and he led a lonely life until his death aged 88 at St Tydfil’s Hospital on 29 January 1973.

Dr Solomon ‘Sammy’ Bloom

One of the most well-remembered characters in Merthyr between the 1930s and the 1970s was Dr Solomon Bloom, more commonly known as Sammy.

Solomon Bloom was born on 2 November 1898, one of seven children born to Eli and Sarah Bloom. Eli and Sarah (née Levine) were born in Riga, Latvia, but moved to Britain in the late 1800s, eventually settling in Merthyr in 1901 when Eli was appointed as the rabbi at Merthyr Synagaogue.

Sammy was educated at Cyfarthfa Castle School before going to study medicine at Cardiff University, and finishing his medical studies at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, graduating in 1922 as a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons (MRCS) and Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians (LRCP). He began his medical career as an anaesthetist at the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport, but soon made the switch to become a surgeon.

In 1930, he returned to Merthyr to go into General Practice with his younger brother Myer (1905-1974), opening a surgery in Church Street; his older brother Abraham already having established himself as a pharmacist in the town, with premises in Victoria Street (right). Shortly afterwards, he was invited to become a member of the honorary medical staff at Merthyr General Hospital, and in 1940 he was appointed as consultant to the Merthyr Tydfil Corporation, working at St Tydfil’s Hospital.

His duties at St Tydfil’s included orthopaedics, obstetrics and gynaecology, and he also became obstetrician at Gwaunfarren Maternity Hospital and venereologist at the Merthyr special clinic. At the inception of the NHS in 1948, he became senior hospital medical officer at St Tydfil’s. As well as his hospital duties, he carried on his general practice until 1961, when he was given the status of consultant surgeon, a post he relinquished when he retired from surgical practice at the age of 72.

Those who worked with him remember him as a consummate professional and a perfectionist in surgery, gaining the reputation as one of the finest surgeons in the town. Short of stature, he would often have to stand on a platform to perform operations. Despite his elevated medical position and brilliance as a surgeon, his humanity always shone through, and he would always go out of his way to do the best for his patients, and to his colleagues he was simply “a lovely man”.

As well as his medical duties, Sammy Bloom was active in local medical politics, being chairman of the local medical committee and one of the representatives on Merthyr executive council for 14 years. He also served time as chairman of the medical staff committee and of the North Glamorgan Division of the British Medical Association. In addition to this he was appointed chief medical officer to the Welsh Boxing Board of Control, and officiated at many fights. He was also a volunteer for the St John’s Ambulance Brigade as the local corps surgeon, and in 1958, he was appointed an associate officer of the Most Venerable Order of St John.

Away from medicine, his religion meant a great deal to him. A devout Jew, he acted as president of the Merthyr Tydfil Hebrew Congregation for many years, and represented Merthyr on the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

In 1971, he moved to London with his wife Norah, but kept abreast of medical matters by discussing them with four of his five children – two doctors and two optometrists.

Sammy died on 17 August 1989, whilst on holiday. According to his obituary in the British Medical Journal, “typically, he had been playing roulette successfully the night before”. He was 90 years of age.

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 19^th 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:

3^rd April 1881 – Margaret PRICE, retired publican

5^th April 1891 – James JONES, decorator

31^st March 1901 – Thomas GUNTER, boot and shoe dealer

2^nd 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…..

A Short History of Merthyr General Hospital – part 3

by Ann Lewis

During the First World War, Seymour Berry rendered valuable service to the country, by relieving Lord Rhondda of his business responsibilities, so releasing him for important work as a Cabinet Minister. After the war, he became director of over 80 public and other companies, including the great Guest, Keen and Nettlefolds, eventually becoming its chairman.

He was without doubt the most generous benefactor Merthyr has ever known. Indeed the family over the years gave a total of £100,000 to the people of Merthyr. He was awarded the title Lord Buckland of Bwlch in 1926.

His tragic death two years later in 1928 as a result of a riding accident was a great loss to the people of Merthyr. A fund was opened, and over 50,000 people contributed, but by far the largest portion was given by his wife, Lady Buckland and his brothers, Lord Camrose and Lord Kemsley.

The fund was used to build the Lord Buckland Memorial Hospital which was officially opened on 5 June 1931 and cost over £40,000 to complete. The new hospital was connected to the General Hospital by a corridor, where a lift and a stairway provided access to the upper floors.

The entrance, off Alexandra Road, was where the opening of the new part of the hospital took place, when Lord Camrose unlocked the door. This was followed by the unveiling of the Memorial Panel by Mr W. R. Lysaght, C.B.E. The inscription read:-

“This hospital was erected by Public subscription as a memorial to Henry Seymour Berry, first Baron Buckland of Bwlch. A native of this town. Knight of Grace of the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem. 3rd Honorary Freeman of the County Borough of Merthyr Tydfil. Chairman of Guest, Keen and Nettlefolds.

In recognition of the high ideal of citizenship displayed in his generous gifts for the alleviation of suffering in the town and for increasing the happiness and prosperity of his fellowmen.”

The people of Merthyr gratefully appreciated the hospital and it remained a voluntary one until 1948, when all hospitals were transferred to the Ministry of Health. Our area came under the care of the Merthyr and Aberdare Hospital Management Committee.

Merthyr and Aberdare Hospital Management Committee

Many improvements have been made over the years; they include the new theatre, opened in 1960 when the area behind the Buckland Hospital was extended. By 1962 the right hand side of the first floor of the Buckland building was converted as an extension to the children’s ward, and was later used as the Special Care Baby Unit.

In the 1970’s Prince Charles Hospital was built, and the building of a new large, modern hospital had repercussions for all of the other hospitals in Merthyr. In 1978, when the first phase of Prince Charles Hospital opened, the General Hospital closed to be adapted to receive several departments from St Tydfil’s Hospital, while it was being refurbished.

In 1980, the Maternity and Special Baby Care units were transferred to the Buckland Hospital and the department for the Care of the Elderly was transferred to the main hospital.

In 1986, with the refurbishment of St Tydfil’s complete, the Care of the Elderly department was moved there, and the main building of the General Hospital closed. At this time the Sandbrook and Berry wards were demolished.

Sandbrook and Berry wards being demolished in 1986

The Buckland Hospital remained open until 1991 when phase 2 of Prince Charles Hospital was finished and the Maternity and Special Baby Care units were transferred, and the building was subsequently demolished.

The main hospital building still stands but is in a pitiful state. There is a proposal to turn the building into 23 new homes. Let’s hope that the refurbishment will be sympathetic to the history of a building that the local people gave so much of their time, energy and money to build for the people of Merthyr.

A fuller history of the General Hospital by Ann Lewis is available in Volume 4 of the Merthyr Historian.

A Short History of Merthyr General Hospital – part 2

by Ann Lewis

As the years passed the demands on the hospital increased and there was a serious lack of accommodation, so much so, that many urgent cases had to be sent to the Workhouse Infirmary. The Board of Governors felt that while there was nothing wrong with the treatment the patients received at the Infirmary, it was unfair that these men, who would have had to pay between 15 and 16 shillings a week for their maintenance there (a great deal of money in the 1910-20s) as they were already contributing to the fund of the General Hospital.

The doctors and staff were greatly concerned and approached Mr Henry Seymour Berry (right). Mr Seymour Berry, who later became Lord Buckland, was another man who played a prominent part in the development of the hospital.

After being approached, Seymour Berry offered a site on the Gurnos Estate (obviously before the development of the Gurnos Estate as we know it today), which was the area behind his home at Gwaelodygarth House, and £10,000 to erect temporary buildings to meet the emergency. His offer was rejected however, as it was felt that the site was inaccessible both for the patients and staff.

At one time, the Board of Governors had intended to purchase part of the Avenue to extend the hospital to accommodate between two to three hundred beds. It was decided to use the £10,000 to extend the hospital with two more wards, which cost just over £14,000 to complete. A lift and long corridor connected the front section with the new wards. A plaque was erected in the corridor which reads:-
“This building was presented by Mr and Mrs H. Seymour Berry as an addition to the Merthyr General Hospital October 1922”.

One ward was named after his mother Mrs M. A. Berry, the other after his mother-in-law Mrs R. Sandbrook. The building was intended to last 10 years although I doubt if Lord Buckland would have realised it would still be in use 63 years later, for the care of the geriatric patients, while St. Tydfil’s Hospital was being upgraded.

At Whitsun of 1923 the people of Merthyr held the first Fete and Gala in Lord Buckland’s honour, with all the proceeds in aid of the hospital. The carnival pageant which started at the fountain at the bottom of town stretched over 2 miles. It took over 1½ hours to travel through the town to be judged in front of Cyfarthfa Castle. There was the children’s fancy dress parade and many floats, one with the old woman who lived in a shoe and another holding the ‘Fete Queen’.

Miss Enid Mann being crowned the ‘Fete Queen’ in 1936

This first fete proved a great success and continued for 25 years with thousands attending each year to witness events like the death defying dive from a high platform into a tank of water, tight-rope walkers, comedy acrobats, gymnasts, and for many years there was a football match on bicycles with Merthyr vs. the rest. There were the horse and dog shows. And if anyone required a cup of tea it could be bought at the big tent. The Brass Bands played in the bandstand, and there was fierce competition between the many jazz bands taking part, some playing their ‘guzutes’. Great fun!

Each political ward throughout the Borough had their own stalls and there was friendly competition one against the other to see who could raise the most money. The young nurses in full uniform were sent around the town with collecting boxes and by the time they reached the park their tins were full.

In these 25 years £60,000 had been raised with a debt of gratitude owed to the committee and the ladies of the Borough for the many hours of voluntary work put into making it such a success.

Even though the fete and Gala was a great money making event, it was by no means sufficient for the smooth running of the hospital. We have already mentioned the weekly contributions, and the gifts and bequests but events like dances, whist drives, cricket matches etc., were held throughout the year. Most Merthyr people were involved one way or another and local clubs, societies and later factories contributed and took a pride in supporting their hospital.

When the Dowlais and Merthyr United Choir went to the Queen’s Hall in London in 1936, 80% of the 220 choristers were unemployed, but all proceeds went to aid the hospital.

Dowlais United Choir at Queens Hall in 1936

To be continued…..

Merthyr Historical Society Talk

Here’s a very interesting sounding talk by one of Merthyr’s foremost local historians.