The Heritage and Culture of Merthyr Tydfil
Following on from the last couple of posts, even though war was not declared until 3 September 1939, the threat of war had been hanging over everyone since the previous year.
As early as January 1939, the government were supplying the population with gas-masks as can be seen in the article below, courtesy of Mike Donovan, which appeared in the Merthyr Express on 28 January 1939.
by Margaret Lloyd
The arrival of the American soldiers in the town was quite a cultural shock. These brash, noisy young men, in their smart uniforms of fine wool, stood on the pavements outside their billets and cat-called and whistled after any female between the age of sixteen and sixty. To me – a young girl approaching puberty with trepidation (the word teenager hadn’t been invented then) – they were both embarrassing and intriguing. My intense shyness caused uncontrollable blushing as I stalked past, eyes front, head held high. The more outgoing of my friends seemed to take delight in making frequent detours so as to pass through the barrage of invitations.
Later, during visits to an aunt who kept a hotel in Briton Ferry, I was often commandeered to play the piano for many young GIs. The homesick, frightened young men sang about Broadway, Dixie, Texas and every state in the union. I’m afraid I wasn’t impressed – I was still a prudish fourteen-year-old who defended her virtue by insisting that all American men drank too much, swore a lot and cried a great deal.
War to me was the horror seen on the Pathé News in the cinema, or the news on the wireless tat had to be listened to in silence several times a day. It was women wearing scarves around their heads, smoking, working in factories, smelling of oil. Things I hadn’t experienced before. Saturday afternoons meant strolling up and down the High Street. The factory girls always appeared to have extra-large heads as their scarves covered curler-wound hair. I couldn’t fathom how they expected the ‘boys’ to forget this afternoon image when they met again at the dance that evening – hair exposed in either corrugated waves or ‘victory rolls’.
War was bedroom walls plastered with posters calling for ‘Aid to Russia’, glamorous Generals, newspaper cuttings on plane recognition and uniforms. Uniforms…everywhere uniforms. Men in uniform, women in uniform. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, wardens, firemen, home-guards. To belong, one had to be in uniform. I joined the St John’s Ambulance Brigade. I don’t remember learning much first-aid, but I do remember receiving a parcel from America sent by schoolchildren. Mine came from a ‘Barbara Babitt’. It contained a bar of scented toilet soap, which was too precious to ever use, and, amongst other forgotten things, a pair of hair-clips with bows of red ribbon and white stars. They were kept for that special occasion which never came. I would take them out of the drawer in my bedroom and look at them, and wonder about the little girl who had sent them to me.
‘The day war finished’ I was to be found at the same farm where my story began. As the news of peace came of the wireless, the church bells echoed across the fields. We all gathered at the church hall, precious food was brought, and a grand tea put on. Young wounded servicemen from a local convalescent home arrived in their bright blue suits, red ties and white shirts, accompanied by pretty Red Cross nurses. During the evening I was asked if I would play some dance music. My father had never approved of my playing such rubbish, so I had kept secret my daily stint of piano playing during school dinner-times. I think I was forgiven my frivolity that evening as the dancers swirled to the fox-trot, dipped to the tango and whooped to the hokey-cokey and the conga.
I way not have made much contribution to the war effort, but I think I made a contribution to the beginning of peace.
If anyone has any local memories or stories about the Second World War they would like to share, please get in touch.
by Margaret Lloyd
‘The day war broke out’ was a catchphrase first coined by an old radio comedian, Rob Wilton, to imply that it was the day that life began. For many people, certainly it was the beginning of a life-style hitherto undreamt of.
When war broke out on 3 September 1939, I was being hurried along a country road by my aunt. I spent every school holiday with her and my cousins on their farm, six miles outside Builth Wells, and I was being taken to catch the local bus to begin my three-hour journey back to Merthyr Tydfil. As we arrived at the village, a telegram boy in his smart, short, navy jacket and pill-box hat, came tearing up to us on his bright red bicycle. He took a telegram out of the leather pouch on his belt and handed my aunt an ominous yellow envelope. Telegrams meant trouble on those days before private telephones, usually a death in the family. My aunt tore open the envelope. It was from my parents instructing her to keep me with her until they could collect me. The adult conversation of ‘troop movements and the uncertainties of public transport’ meant nothing to me, a diminutive nine-year-old. All that concerned me was that I was to have an extended holiday on my beloved farm.
Some weeks later my parents persuaded the local baker to come and fetch me. The interior of his small van had been swept clean of its crumbs, and my mother and I took our seats on the two deck chairs that had been placed in the back. As we bounced and swayed our way of the winding roads of the Brecon Beacons, I knew life would never be the same again.
School (Twynyrodyn) had still not started as the building was being used as a distribution centre for gas-masks. When it did re-open, I was one of the ‘honoured’ girls chosen to knit khaki socks and gloves for our soldiers fighting the war. I became quite skilful at knitting socks on three needles, turning heels with aplomb and completing the complicated procedure of knitting glove fingers. We chosen few were expected to carry out these tasks during story-telling sessions, assembly and play-times. The less able were conscripted to wind wool into balls from the prickly drab-coloured skeins, of which our teacher seemed to have an endless supply.
At this time, I noticed that all the insignificant little men in Twynyrodyn acquired navy uniforms and wore black tin hats with ARP written on them. They developed voices that boomed in the darkness ‘Mind that light’. They seemed to have gained a mysterious power over the neighbourhood and what was described by my granny as the ‘goings on in the black-out’.
War, to many of my school-mates, meant fathers going to work after years of squatting at street corners and being on the dole. It meant better food as regular wages came in, and rationing made it compulsory that everyone had the correct number of calories to keep healthy – something not considered essential to survival during the Depression. I was lucky, my father had always worked. Before the outbreak of war he had joined the Auxiliary Fire Service, which was formed to release the police force from fire duties. When war was declared, he and his fellow firemen were employed full time and were later to become the National Fire Service.
My father was issued with a stirrup-pump to keep at home in case any incendiary bombs fell in our neighbourhood. He would insist my mother and I practice fire drill. My poor mother, who was rather large, would puff up and down the garden steps with buckets of water, refilling the water bucket in which the stirrup-pump stood. I had the task of pumping it up and 
down to get the pressure going, no mean task as the pump as nearly as tall as me. My father would direct the thin erratic stream of water onto an imaginary fire. On certain days he would insist we wore our gas-masks, but as the visor misted over with condensation from our sweat, I never did see the point. He called these gas-mask drills at such odd times as when we were laying the table for supper or listening to the wireless. My father was very conscientious!!!
When the siren sounded, usually at night, never mind how often, we had to get up from bed and sit huddled on small stools under the stairs. The flickering light from an old miner’s lamp threw up shadows more frightening to me than the war. I wouldn’t be allowed back to bed until the ‘all clear’ sounded some hours later. Next day, it was school as usual; tiredness was no excuse for ‘mitching’. Only once do I remember any semblance of a raid. I was awoken one night by the violent shaking of the windows. Next day it was rumoured that a bomb had been dropped in Cwmbargoed and the vibrations had travelled a great distance. That was the night we weren’t sitting under the stairs.
When my father was at home, I was allowed to view the bombing of Cardiff, twenty-four miles away. Standing in the back doorway I’d watch the searchlights sweep the night sky and cheer when an enemy plane got caught in the beam like a hypnotized moth. The exploding shells from the ack-ack guns added to the spectacle.
Sometimes my father was away for days when the local brigade were sent to help out in badly hit areas like Coventry or Bristol. He rarely spoke about it in front of me. Only once did I hear him tell my mother that it had been so cold that their saturated jackets had frozen on them as they fought fires throughout the night.
To be continued….
Please see below the programme for the forthcoming term of the Merthyr Branch of Adult Learning Wales. All are welcome!!!
