Influenza in Merthyr
Just as the First World War was coming to an end, Britain was gripped by a devastating worldwide ‘flu epidemic. Below is a transcription of a report about the ‘flu reaching Merthyr.
INFLUENZA – FATALITIES IN MERTHYR BOROUGH AND CEFN
Many people have been suffering from influenza in various parts of the Borough of Merthyr Tydfil, which, up to about a fortnight ago, had been immune from fatal cases. During the intervening period influenza and pneumonia have produced baleful effects in a series of homes at Dowlais, Troedyrhiw, Treharris, and the outside village of Cefn Coed.
A stalwart Troedyrhiw miner, W. Evans, was seized with the malady only a day after his second marriage, and in a few days the bridge was left a widow. Soon afterwards his daughter was brought home ill from Cardiff. In one house at Treharris two children died, and a third was removed to a Merthyr hospital. At Cefn the death has occurred of Mr. Morris, a clerk at the Cyfarthfa offices, and at another house in that locality, Miss Morris, his niece, died subsequently. Her funeral took place on Tuesday. Mr. J. Hughes, who had been a well-known Merthyr bookmaker, member of the V.T.C., died from pneumonia last week and was interred at Cefn Cemetery on Monday, with military honours.
On account of the epidemic, Cefn Schools were again closed this week to 1,200 scholars. The Rev. Dyfuallt Owen, Congregational Minister, of Carmarthen, has been laid up at Merthyr. He was on Sunday week visiting preacher at Ebenezer, and was prevented by an attack of influenza from lecturing here on the following day. He was put to bed at the house of some of his friends, and was obliged to re- main there until the early days of this week.
(The Pioneer – 9 November 1918)
By the time the epidemic had run its course in 1919, a quarter of the population of Britain had been affected, and over 228,000 people died. This, however, is a drop in the ocean compared to the death-toll worldwide. Exact numbers of the dead are not known, but the total is reckoned to be in excess of 50 million.
Josiah Roger Lloyd Atkins: World War 1 P.O.W. – part 2
Continued from previous post…..
One recalls the eventual arrival at an open compound with its double line of barbed wire fence; the panic of a prisoner who tried to scale the barbed wire and escape from this human rat trap, and the sharp bark of German rifle as he slumped to the ground. Poor devil… he never stood a chance, but sheer dementia had banished all reason before he steeled himself in adjustment to a situation which he had probably never contemplated. Possibly most of us had envisaged a lost limb or hoped for a slight ‘blighty’ wound which offered a short respite from the horror of stinking trenches and that black morass of mud which had all the quality of a sucking quicksand. But – Prisoner of War – how many had ever considered that an option? Military manuals gave little space to such a possibility. You were told that you were not compelled to afford anything other than your name, age and rank to anyone seeking information which could possibly be of use to the enemy, in the event of your being captured. Such a possibility seemed to be ruled out, really. The situation was most unlikely to arise.
Well, it had that day for thousands of men, whose future was clouded in nebulous speculation. Nobody could offer you anything tangible to bite on. For a long time ahead, in fact, there would be little of anything to bite on. Starvation was a word one had never used, much less contemplated as a possibility for oneself. Still, you would learn to allay that gnawing hunger pain which gave you a sickening nausea as your inner mechanism clamoured for sustenance. The British naval blockade was doing this to millions of Germans too, to a lesser degree perhaps, but you could derive little comfort from this knowledge.
Food, always FOOD, became an absolute obsession. All conversations revolved around it, making its lack even more devastating. If those nocturnal junketings with friends offered temporary euphoria or satisfaction, stark reality of your plight would crash into your mind as soon as you awakened. Then back to the endless discussions on the unchanging theme. God. What fools we were, just turning the knife in the wound with those gastronomic repetitive exercises of the past. Menus of London eating houses. Joys of the ‘Cheshire Cheese’, where you selected and served yourself from a loaded Dumb Waiter or sideboard. ‘Sam Isaacs’, the fish restaurant with the inevitable succulent chips. Even the merits of trotters and tripe, whelks, oyster bars, jellied eels. Your choice conversationally was endless. But oh, the futility of it all.
Then at long last: parcels from home, and those Red Cross parcel days which gave life a new colour and hope and courage. You even invited a friend to ‘dinner’. The liquid from the pork and beans tin with added water made soup – of a kind. The remaining beans, mashed with the odd potato salvaged from your daily German soup ration, provided a pâté. Satisfying and quite Mrs Beetonish. Rice and milk – one tin between four guests – from the Red Cross parcel. This could be stretched by the further addition of water; the only commodity still plentiful. Occasionally a biscuit, with an infinitesimal portion of cheese. All swilled down with issued ersatz coffee of crushed acorns, if you could stomach that beverage. Then an Abdulla cigarette, passed round for a ‘drag’ until you got to the pin at the smoked out butt end, all rather like an Indian Pow Wow pipe of peace.
Then conversation and ‘experiences’ of men who, before the war, had followed diverse occupations: diamond mining, timber felling, Canadian trapping, District Commissioner in India. Life had become fuller again as stomachs became fuller. An occasional discussion on religion brought on your own realisation of how little thought you had given to this subject, and you recalled a little shamefacedly that Drumhead Service when you and thousands of other new prisoners had knelt and given thanks on that Easter Sunday, some days after capture, conducted by that South African Padre with one arm only and one eye. He who refused to be repatriated on account of his disabilities because, as he said, “I can do God’s work in a Prison Camp.” And then you thought of the little camp chapel, with its dwindling attendances as parcels became more plentiful and the war news from the Western Front and the High Seas gave hope of a return home. As one cynic remarked, “Let’s hope the Almighty has a sense of humour,” as he recalls that pious service of thanksgiving on that first Easter in captivity, when “Morgens, caput” seemed quite a possibility.
Josiah Roger Lloyd Atkins
Many thanks to Forces War Records for allowing me to use this article, and I would encourage everyone to visit their excellent and very informative site.
If you would like to view the original article, it appeared in Forces War Records Magazine dated January 2016, and is available at the following link:-
www.forces-war-records.co.uk/magazine/issues/2016/01/content/assets/basic-html/page-I.html
Josiah Roger Lloyd Atkins: World War 1 P.O.W. – part 1
The following story appeared in the Forces War Records Magazine dated January 2016, and is transcribed here with the kind permission of Forces War Records. www.forces-war-records.co.uk
My father, Josiah Roger Lloyd Atkins, was born in Merthyr Tydfil on 23rd November 1896 and served in WW1. When he died in the late 1970s, I found, amongst his papers, an account of his memories of being taken prisoner by the Germans on 21st March 1918, which he typed 50 years after the end of the war.
In the hope that this may be of interest to you, I have attached a copy of his account, together with a photograph of him in uniform. I also have an original copy of the POW camp Graudenz ‘The Vistula Weekly Newspaper’, 1918. The camp was in West Prussia. When he first joined the army he was accepted into the Honourable Artillery Company, until he became a Commissioned Officer in the Machine Gun Corps.
One of my grandsons, aged 10, was given a school project for half term which was to be based around WW1. It was with great pleasure that I was able to offer him information based on my father, his great grandfather, and I have just received his completed half term homework, on A3 paper, which included my father’s photograph, his typed account, the significance of the poppy, the poem by John McCrae, and a photocopy of a Dead Man’s Penny. I felt very proud and emotional at my young grandson’s interest and application, and know that his great grandfather would have been equally proud and emotional.
Yours faithfully, Mrs Gilly Lloyd Whitlock (Dorset)
By Josiah Roger Lloyd Atkins, Officer, Machine Gun Corps: This happened to me.
Whenever the 21st of March comes around, memories come crowding back of the incident that happened on that day in the year 1918. As it all occurred a little over 50 years ago, you who read this might well be excused for expressing the doubt that, after such a period of time, memory must become a little dim, and imagination must supplant accurate memory to some extent. As the pundits in the field of human memory will tell you, if impressions are strong enough, they become firmly planted in the mind and recollection becomes effortless and more or less automatic. So I can, without the slightest hesitation, claim that the impressions of that day were as strong as any impressions could be, and the recollections today are as crystal clear as though everything happened yesterday. Why? Well, it was the day that I first became a guest of the Kaiser until the end of the Great War. ‘Guest’ perhaps is a slightly extravagant word for incarceration in a Prison Camp, so if you prefer ‘offizier kriegsgefangen’, well, you just make your own choice.
There was great jubilation in Germany on that day, or maybe the next day. Not, mark you, because they regarded my capture as all that important, but I was just one of an estimated 20,000 soldiers of the Allied Forces, and one must admit, that’s quite a lot of soldiery, by any standard of fighting potential. Now, on consideration, it seems somewhat ironic that they – the Jerries – employed almost the identical military tactics which culminated in our disastrous Dunkirk in the Second World War. All of which goes to prove that they seemed to know their job, while we… well, the less said the better, perhaps.
Being ‘taken prisoner’ is a very disturbing business, leastways I found it so. I became acquainted with the German language for the first time when an interrogating N.C.O. gave me a rather baneful look, drew his hand across his throat and quite cheerfully said, “Morgens. Caput. Sie.” A remark which produced a supporting chorus of “Morgens, caput,” from his fellow soldiers – displaying obvious glee. One could be excused, I think, for feeling this was a little playful humour on their part, until one of our chaps, who spoke German, explained to me that it meant, “Tomorrow. Finished. YOU.” And that little gesture with the edge of the right hand across his throat made one feel that the joke – if joke it was – appeared to be in very bad taste. I was young, you see, just 21, and there seemed such a lot of things that one had planned to do with one’s life, and you never expected it to end like this. I thought of lots of friends I would never see again. I felt I’d like to have been privileged to thank my mother for lots of sacrifices she had been compelled to make since my father died when I was a boy of 10. It all seemed so unfair that now I could never do anything to repay her.
Still, buoyancy of spirit is very marked in the young and the depression soon passed. It was comforting to see many beribboned, very senior, officers in that column of weary prisoners trudging through the Flanders mud and the back areas of German occupied territory. One experienced a comforting warmth from the pat on the shoulder from some ageing peasant woman, who darted out from a shell ravaged little hovel with a wary eye on that mounted Uhlan with his menacing lance, as his mount cantered along that straggling line of prisoners, tapering back in an endless ribbon, getting dimmer and dimmer in the early evening light.
To be continued…..
A Mystery
I have received the following e-mail from Dan Gordon that contains a bit of a mystery….
I am a Londoner but have lived in Cardiff 50+ years.
My grandfather, James William Crouch, born Hampshire about 1880, was a deep sea diver who worked all around UK but spent some time working in Merthyr! He and my grandmother had two (of 13) children whilst there. He had a with a son of the same name who may have married in Merthyr but was killed World War 2.
What was a diver doing in Merthyr?
Can anyone shed any light on the above?
Dai Richards
110 years ago today, Dai Richards the famous Merthyr footballer was born. To mark the occasion here is another piece courtesy of John Simkin.
David (Dai) Richards was born in Abercanaid on 31 October 1908. He played football for Merthyr Town before being signed by Major Frank Buckley, the manager of Wolverhampton Wanderers, in 1927. Richards, who played at left-half, established himself in a first-team that included Noel George, Reg Hollingsworth, Billy Wrigglesworth, Tom Galley, Billy Hartill, Billy Barraclough, Tom Smalley and Charlie Phillips.
In the 1929-30 season Billy Hartill scored 33 goals in 36 games. Despite these goals Wolves could only finish in 9th place in the league. The following season Wolves finished 4th in the Second Division. Once again Hartill was again top scorer with 30 goals in 39 appearances. Richards was in great form and was selected to play for Wales. It was the first of 21 international caps for his country.
Billy Hartill scored 30 goals with hat-tricks against Plymouth Argyle, Bristol City, Southampton and Oldham Athletic, in the 1931-32 season and helped the club win the Second Division championship. Charlie Phillips was also in great form adding 18. The club scored 118 goals that season.
In August, 1933, Frank Buckley purchased Bryn Jones from Aberaman for a fee of £1,500. In his first season at Wolves he scored 10 goals in 27 appearances. Although very popular with the fans, Jones was unable to immediately turn Wolves into a successful side. Billy Hartill remained in good form scoring 33 goals. In the 1933-34 season they finished in 15th place in the First Division.
Richards was sold to Brentford in 1935. He had scored 5 goals in 219 games for Wolverhampton Wanderers. Over the next two seasons he played 55 games for his new club. He also played for Birmingham City (1936-38) and Walsall (1939).
Dai Richards died in 1969.
To read more of John Simkin’s excellent essays, please visit:
http://spartacus-educational.com
The Edwardsville Tornado – part 2
The storm reached Edwardsville where the destruction was devastating.
The signal box on the Taff Vale Railway was severely damaged, and all the trees in the path of the storm, which was now 150 yards wide, were torn from the ground and flattened, blocking the old tramroad with timber, whilst at Goitre Coed Farm, a horse and cart were hurled against the wall of the barn.
At Edwardsville the storm first hit Prospect Place, all but demolishing the cottages there, before reaching Beechgrove Cemetery where the wind flattened most of the tombstones, demolished the cemetery chapel and caused severe damage to the sexton’s house.
The storm moved on to Windsor Road, Nantddu Terrace and The Avenue where tremendous damage was done to most of the houses, and the post office was almost totally destroyed. The postmaster’s son, 13 year old Gomer Israel was seriously injured and was rushed to Merthyr General Hospital with a fractured skull. He would eventually succumb to his injuries a few days later.
Professor T D Edwards who lived at Rock Cottages had the roof blown off his house. Such was the force of the gale that he later found a ladder embedded in the wall of his house. As neither he nor any of his neighbours owned a ladder, one can only speculate how far this ladder had been blown for it to be so firmly embedded. On a lighter note, one of his neighbours had gone to bed early and was woken by the noise of the storm…..only to find himself, in waking up, in a different bedroom to the one in which he had gone to sleep!!!
A few doors away, the roof was ripped off the Edwardsville School, and the English Congregational Chapel was severely damaged. The chapel’s caretaker, Mrs Wheeler, was cleaning the chapel with her two daughters at the time the storm hit. They were buried by debris and had to be rescued. One of the daughters, Gertrude, aged 9, sustained serious injuries and was taken to King Edward VII Hospital in Cardiff.
On 27 October, Ton Pentre Football Club had been playing at Treharris. The team were returning to the Railway Station when the storm hit. Frank Owen (Corby) Woolford, right-back and captain of Ton Pentre FC, Walter Breeze, trainer at Ton Pentre FC and Fred Tregrage another player and were walking ahead of the rest of the team. As they entered The Avenue, the full force of the storm hit and all three were picked up off their feet and hurled over 50 yards. Breeze and Tregrage were injured, but Woolford was hit by a falling slate which sliced through his head. A local policeman, P.C. Fisher rendered first aid at the site and the injured men were taken to a nearby shop where Dr Evans, Maesybryn treated Woolford. A car was immediately made available by Mr Thomas, a local chemist, and Frank Woolford was rushed to Merthyr General Hospital for emergency treatment. Woolford’s injuries proved too great and he died at 2am the following morning. He was 22 years of age.
Elsewhere in Treharris, everyone did what they could to help with the injured and homeless. Rev J R Morgan, the minister at Trinity Forward Movement Chapel in Treharris, who lived in Edwardsville gave shelter to many people at his home. His neighbour Rev Thomas, minister at Saron Welsh Wesleyan Chapel in Treharris, immediately offered assistance, despite his own house being badly damaged.
Having caused devastation at Edwardsville, the storm left the valley and began to lose some of its force, and it travelled in a straight line via Cefn Forest before hitting Bedlinog. Houses were damaged in Hylton Terrace and Bedw Road, but the force was going out of the storm. Leaving Bedlinog, the storm continued over the Rhymney Mountain and on to Tredegar where the torrential rain overwhelmed the drains and caused severe flooding.
The storm continued to move northwards throughout the night, but having left the confines of the Taff Valley, the storm’s ferocity had by now dissipated, and the storm front was now about 7 miles in width. However, the storm continued to leave a trail of destruction in its path with severe damage to buildings reported in Shropshire and Cheshire, until it eventually abated during the night.
An investigation was instigated by the Meteorological Office (now known simply as the Met Office) in the aftermath of the storm, and concluded that the tornado contained winds blowing in an anti-clockwise direction. Reports of the tornado’s duration varied from two seconds to five minutes. The Met Office investigators concluded that “…the storm was circular in shape; …it advanced at thirty-six miles an hour; …the width in South Wales was three hundred yards; ….the maximum duration of the storm at any one place must have been about seventeen seconds.”
It is inconceivable that so much destruction could be caused in just seventeen seconds. Four people were killed in the tornado – the worst confirmed death-toll for a UK tornado, scores injured and damage to property was estimated at £40,000 in terms of repairs required – a considerable sum equivalent to around £2.5 million today.
If you would like to read more, a fuller account of the tornado has been published in the Merthyr Historian – Volume 25. Please contact me at the e-mail address shown if you would like to purchase a copy, and I will forward your request.
The Edwardsville Tornado – part 1
Today marks the 105th anniversary of one of the most destructive incidents in the Merthyr Valley and indeed in South Wales’s history, when on 27 October 1913, a force six tornado hit the Taff Valley south of Pontypridd and moved up the valley wreaking havoc until it reached its peak at Edwardsville, causing destruction on a massive scale, killing four people and injuring hundreds of others.
Contemporary accounts state that Monday 27 October 1913 was, in Edwardsville, a fine day – actually an unseasonably mild day, but by 4pm, the sky began to darken and within an hour, rain was falling which would soon turn torrential. By 6pm the full force of the storm was pounding the village and causing destruction on an unparalleled scale.
The first reports of the storm came from the Exeter area at about 4pm, and it continued to move north into Somerset and crossed the Bristol Channel coast at Watchet, about nine miles east of Minehead, and made landfall on the Glamorgan coast near Aberthaw at about 4.40 pm. The storm then seems to have developed somewhere between Efail Isaf and Llantwit Fardre, just east of Llantrisant and moved into the Taff Valley.
At around the same time, a secondary storm of less intensity had started near Treforest. At about 6pm the two storms met at Treforest, the secondary storm joining the main storm at an angle of about 45 degrees. According to witnesses, there was suddenly heard a ‘rushing sound’ which some people described as the sound of a train leaving the Severn Tunnel, which in a few moments became a raging wind which struck with tremendous force, lifting people off their feet and levelling any temporary structures.
The storm developed on the Western side of the Taff Valley, but swept diagonally across to the eastern side of the valley, where it hit the hills south of Pontypridd and, damaging Glyntaf Church and vicarage en route, was diverted up the valley towards Pontypridd itself. Gathering pace as it progressed up the valley; the wind tore the roof off Calvary Baptist Chapel in Pontypridd and caused major damage at the athletic ground.
By the time it had reached Cilfynydd, the ferocity of the storm had increased and it was approximately 200 yards in width. Due to the position and linear layout of Cilfynydd, it was badly hit, with the storm sweeping through the entire village from South to North. The local branch of the Ynysybwl Co-operative Society which stood in Howell Street had its corrugated iron roof ripped off. Some of the corrugated iron sheets were later found on Graig Evan Leyshon Common over a mile away, and one of the sheets was so firmly wrapped around a telegraph pole that it could not be removed.
The roof of every chapel in the village was damaged, the North wall of Rehoboth Baptist Chapel was blown inwards, and the roof of the school was blown off. A vast amount of structural damage was done to houses in the village and all of the shops in Richard Street had their windows smashed by falling debris, their goods strewn over the road, mingled with debris from the structural damage. The local branch of the Miners Federation at Albion Colliery was totally destroyed.
Thomas John Harries, a 35 year old collier of Oakland Terrace was walking down the street when he was lifted into the air by the wind and carried over the roofs of the houses. A search was made for him, but it wasn’t until the following morning that his body was found in a nearby field, having been killed by the fall.
Having wreaked havoc in Cilfynydd, the storm carried on up the eastern side of the valley before hitting the Llanfabon Mountain where it was deflected across the valley once again, striking the eastern part of Abercynon. Fairview Terrace was almost totally destroyed, as was the Royal Oak pub.
A short distance away stood Old Station House, home to Mr Alfred Blake, aged 86, a former inspector on the Taff Vale Railway and his 74 year old wife. The house, taking the full force of the storm, collapsed. Mrs Blake managed to escape the worst of the destruction but Mr Blake, his son and Miss Pierce, their servant, were trapped in the building. After some time they were rescued from the ruins. All three were taken to hospital, but Mr Alfred Brake succumbed to his injuries and died two days later.
The storm then followed the river northwards, and, funnelled by the railway cutting at Goitre Coed (south of Quakers Yard railway station); the winds reached over 160 mph and hit Edwardsville with devastating force.
To be continued…..
Commercial Break
Death of a Boy Collier
The following article is transcribed from the issue of South Wales Daily News published 120 years ago today (22 October 1898).
PIT ACCIDENT AT MERTHYR
ONE BROTHER KILLED; THE OTHER ESCAPED
Yesterday at the Merthyr Police Court Mr Coroner R. J. Rhys held an inquest upon the body of Sidney Oates (14), who was killed by a fall of coal or rubbish on Tuesday afternoon at the Castle Pit, belonging to Messrs Crawshay Bros., Limited, Cyfarthfa. Mr F. Adams, assistant inspector of coal mines, was present also Mr David Abraham, general manager of the Cyfarthfa Collieries, and Mr Rees Howells, manager of the Castle Pit.
From the evidence of William Arthur Oates (19), of 22, Lower Colliers’-row, brother of the deceased, it appeared that deceased worked with him as a collier’s boy, and was standing near when witness was putting up a piece of timber. A fall occurred, which knocked a post out and killed his brother. Witness escaped, and after- wards got round to the place through another man’s working place. The piece of coal which fell down was about two yards long. There had been two sprags against it. The post knocked out was the one between the two road posts. The top was of stone, and it was weak at that place. He saw the fireman twice during the turn. Witness had had a place of his own for 12 months. He had worked underground ever since he started work. There were two slants in the seam at this place. They were to be seen before the fall took place. He had put up two posts as a precaution. He thought that was enough, and did nothing more. He thought if it had not been for the piece of coal knocking the post out it would have been all right.
John Protheroe, Cefn, collier, who was working on the lower side of the place where the brothers Oates were engaged, said he heard the fall take place, and he was about the first man afterwards to get there. The deceased lad was quite covered up by the fall. Witness helped to get deceased out. He was dead. When the fall was sufficiently cleared be saw posts had been knocked out. He could not say how, many. There was timber mixed up with the rubbish. Oates always kept his place tidy.
William Jones, the fireman, in reply to the Coroner, said he had visited the place three times on Tuesday – once before the men went in, and twice afterwards, the last time being about 2 o’clock in the afternoon. He told Oates to stand the post on the lower side at that time. He (Oates) had two sprags before the slip. The two slants spoken to by Oates could be plainly seen. He went to the spot on hearing of the accident. A fall of rubbish was on the deceased boy. The fall had occurred between the two slants. He could see some timber had been discharged by the fall. The post he told Oates to put up was on the lower side. This had nothing whatever to do with the fall on the boy. He thought it was quite likely as Oates said, that a piece of coal fell out and knocked out a post. There were three posts between the two slants. He gave Oates no orders to sprag this upper side; two sprags were already there, and these in his opinion were sufficient.
Rees Howells, the pit manager, produced plans of the workings, and described the visible conditions of the accident. The fall was 11 feet long by 4 feet wide and 4 feet high. The fall had not yet been cleared away.
Oates was also recalled, and questioned as to the position of the particular post which he was putting up when the accident arose, and the examination of Mr Howells was continued by the Coroner and the Mines Inspector.
The jurymen asked no questions.
The Coroner, in the course of a succinct reference to the salient points of evidence said it seemed to him that if the coal had not burst out as it did nothing would have happened – that was if the boy (witness Oates) was telling the truth. There was every likelihood that, as Oates had described it, this coal broke out, knocked out the timber near it, and fell down. The jury at once announced they were all of opinion that this was a case of “Accidental death.”