From the Merthyr Express 70 years ago today…..
Television for Merthyr
Author: merthyr.history@gmail.com
Merthyr’s Lost Landmarks: St Cynon’s Church, Quaker’s Yard
Today marks the 160th anniversary of the opening of St Cynon’s Church in Quaker’s Yard. Unfortunately, it is yet another Merthyr landmark that has disappeared into the ether.
With the growth of the iron industry in Merthyr, the population ‘down the valley’ also increased due to subsequent developments associated with the industry. Foremost amongst these was the development of the Glamorganshire Canal which passed near to Quakers’ Yard. The small church at Llanfabon soon became too small to accommodate the burgeoning congregation, so it was decided, with the backing of Thomas Shepherd Esq., the General Manager of the Glamorganshire Canal to build a new church.
The site for the new church, on a commanding position overlooking the River Taff (now Fiddler’s Elbow), was given by Baroness Windsor, the landowner, and the foundation stones were laid on 18 July 1861. The new building, which measured 73ft by 22ft, was designed by Messrs Pritchard and Suddon, architects, of Llandaff, and the contractor assigned to carry out the work was Mr Richard Mathias. The Gothic style church was built of local Blue Pennant sandstone from the Park and Pandy Quarry in Trelewis, with Bath stone dressing, and comprised of a chancel, nave, south porch and belfry. There was also a small vestry at the north side of the east end. The church could seat 200 people, and in total cost £4,820, which included stained glass windows and an American organ. It was officially opened on 10 July 1862, and was consecrated the following year.
Above the main entrance to the church was a sculpture depicting Jesus as the Good Shepherd, with the inscription ‘I give unto them eternal life’ (right). Local legend says that the sculpture was the work of a tramp who was passing through the area.
In 1876, enough funds had been raised to build a school. It was used as both a Sunday School and as a National School to educate the children of the area. The school continued to operate until 1949, and at the time of its closure was the last Church School in the Borough.
In its heyday, St Cynon’s boasted its own brass band and football club, but as the congregation dwindled, the church was forced to close on 9 March 1986. Over the next few years the church fell into disrepair and was vandalised on several occasion, and in late 1989 the Church authorities decided to demolish the building. When the church was demolished, the sculpture of ‘Good Shepherd’ was saved and is now in the porch at St Matthias Church in Treharris.
Going….going….gone!!!!
Below is a remarkable series of photos from the Alan George Archive showing the last moments of the ‘Goat Mill Stack’ at the Dowlais Ironworks which was demolished 85 years ago today – 9 July 1937.
A Great Night Out
Below is an example of some the varied entertainment that was available in Merthyr in years gone by. All of these adverts appeared in the Merthyr Express 70 years ago today.
How time have changed.
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.
Now it always occurs to me that the doctoring system is a remainder of what in other cases would be called the truck system. Pray understand, I know how careful and skilful medical men are generally, and how admirably they perform their duties, yet there is always the thought that the system does not always co-ordinate with those general principles adopted in other things.
My own conviction is that truck in the early age of Merthyr was actually a necessity. When the works really began they were small, and no certainty of continuance. I am well aware of attempts that have been tried in various systems to alter it, but the system seems too firmly rooted to be altered for some time at least. An experiment in the adoption of a another method is, I believe, now being tried.
After a while Plymouth had Mr Probert (who by the bye, had been an assistant of Mr Russell), and so remained until his death, I think, but yet doubt that he resigned previously. Penydarren had Mr John Martin, and Mr Russell retained Dowlais, but it passed into the hands of his nephew Mr John Russell, for some time, and on his leaving Dr John Ludford White came to Dowlais.
This gentleman married a niece of Mr Wm. Forman, of the firm of Thompson and Forman, Cannon House, Queen Street, London, and after some years moved to Oxford, with the intention, it was said, of taking higher degrees. Dr White obtained the appointment through the recommendation of the London physician of Sir J John Guest, and in order that an accurate knowledge of the requirements might be, had visited Dowlais to see for himself. I remember him there, and an incident followed that will be mentioned when Dowlais is visited which will show the kind-heartedness of Sir John, and I hope also to mention one demonstrating his decision of character and another where I saw him weep.
We now return to Mr Russell’s surgery. A little further down, on the other side was Adullam (sic) Chapel, and cottages thence to the road to Twynyrodyn, while on the same side as Mr Russell’s was the way from the High Street, John Street by name, cottages somewhat irregular. The old playhouse also stood here; yes reader. It was a stone and mortar structure, and was for a long time unused.
Further on there was the Fountain Inn, between which and the Glove and Shears the road passed to Dowlais over Twynyrodyn, Pwllyrwhiad etc, but we cross and a few yards brings me to what was the boundary wall of Hoare’s garden, which continued down to where the line to Dowlais is now.
It has been my pleasure to see many gardens, but in all my experience I never saw one kept in such trim as this. Upon its being taken for the railway, Hoare started a garden and public house, if I remember well, at Aberdare Junction. Owing to the Taff Vale Company not allowing anyone to cross the line, a very long way around became a necessity to get there, and he did not do as well as anticipated or (I think) deserved.
Lower down the tramroad were some cottages on the right hand side, in one of which, adjoining the Shoulder of Mutton, a cask of powder exploded. It was kept under the bed upstairs for safety, and, lifting the roof off its walls, it fell some dozen yards away. The roof was covered with the thin flagstones often used and very little damaged. No one was fatally injured but one or two were injured, and altogether it was a wonderful escape. Moral: Do not keep a cask of explosive material upstairs under the bed!
To be continued at a later date……
Gilbert Evans – 10 October 1907- 17 January 1986
by Sian Herron
A century ago today, on 30th June 1922, my Great-Uncle Gilbert Evans from Dowlais was sent to Ontario, Canada to work. He was a “British Home Child”, who along with around 100,000 other British children, from the 1860’s until the 1930’s, was sent to be used as cheap farm labour.
The Evans family lived in Muriel Terrace in August 1909, when William Arthur Evans was killed in a pit accident in Fochriw, leaving his wife Mary with 9 children and my Grampa, Arthur Evans, on the way.
In March 1915 Mary Evans was admitted to The Workhouse and her youngest 5 boys were admitted to The Cottage Homes in Llwydcoed – both run by The Merthyr Board of Guardians.
In October 1915 Mary’s son, Brynmor Cornwallis Evans, aged 9, died of tubercular meningitis whilst being cared for by The Homes. By December 1915 the other children were removed to the care of their mother, however her youngest two, Gilbert and my Grampa, Arthur soon returned to spend their childhood there.
In 1922 Gilbert was emigrated, via The Liverpool Sheltering Home, on behalf of The Llwydcoed Children’s Home & Industrial School.
He spent 5 years slaving on a remote farm in Forest Falls, Ontario, from dawn until dusk, living in an out-building & washing in a water trough, alongside another boy of a similar age. In 5 years, he never entered the main house, and his report card states, “Boy well pleased with the situation – happy”.
So happy that 5 years later, in 1927, Gilbert, then aged 19, transported himself back to Dowlais!
If you want to find out more about these children, I can recommend the book pictured, entitled “The Little Immigrants”, although I can guarantee it will make you cry.
The hardships endured at such a tender age made the Government award each British Home Child £20,000 in an attempt to compensate them for what was done.
Gilbert never received his compensation, since he died in 1986, long before the compensation was offered.
People have asked me what happened to Gilbert following his return to Dowlais. He stayed with his elder brother Johnny, wife Leticia and their three children at Castle Row in Pengarnddu.
Gilbert returned home shortly before The Great Depression and work was scarce. He joined The Army, served in India, and improved his education by doing his exams. He later worked for The MOD in Bath. I’ve been told he had a small bag of Roman coins that he’d found in the tunnels under the city of Bath, when he was a ‘runner’ carrying messages through these tunnels.
Gilbert married Agnes Buckle and remained in Bath until his death. They had a council flat in a block just behind Royal Crescent, where I visited them as a child. They didn’t have children.
Gilbert regularly stayed in Merthyr with my Grampa, Arthur. Together they took me for a college interview in Carmarthen when I was seventeen. I just wish I’d asked more questions when I had the chance!
Many thanks to Sian for sharing this remarkable and incredibly well-researched story with us.
If anyone has any interesting family stories (Merthyr-related obviously) they would like to share please get in touch.
A New Cinema
110 years ago today………
Here is how the event was reported in the Merthyr Express of 29 June 1912…
Uneconomical Schools
From the Merthyr Express 90 years ago today…
Leslie Norris Remembered
by Meic Stephens
Following on from the last post, here is an excellent courtesy of Meic Stephens.
Leslie Norris, who died in Provo, Utah, on 6 April 2006, at the age of 85, was a poet and short-story writer perhaps better known in America than in Britain, though in his native Wales he kept in touch with a few writers such as Glyn Jones and John Ormond, whose friendship meant much to him. He came home every summer to attend conferences and festivals, in particular the Hay Festival, and to reacquaint himself with the places and landscapes in which he felt most at home. Towards the end of his life he often talked about returning to Wales, but ill health always prevented it.
He had left Merthyr Tydfil, the old industrial town where he had been born in 1921, just after the end of the Second World War, in which he had served briefly with the RAF. Desperate to escape a humdrum job as a rates clerk and a town that seemed a dead end for the young, he enrolled as a student at the teacher training college in Coventry. He was never to live permanently in Wales again, though his childhood in Merthyr, the town’s colourful characters and its hinterland of the Brecon Beacons all left an indelible mark on him. I well remember his astonishment when, in 1965, he discovered that I was editing Poetry Wales in Merthyr: he turned up at my door with a sheaf of poems, which I published as The Loud Winter two years later, and thus began a friendship that was to last until his death.
From 1952 to 1958 Leslie taught at schools in Yeovil and Bath and was headmaster of Westergate School, Chichester, then lectured at Bognor Regis College of Education. He and his wife Kitty, who survives him, lived at Aldingbourne in West Sussex, where the poets Ted Walker and Andrew Young were among their neighbours. The years he spent in England, during which he served as chairman of the Southern Arts Association’s literature panel, were crucial to his development as a poet, largely on account of his reading of Edward Thomas.
Encouraged by Richard Church, he sent his poems to Cecil Day-Lewis at Chatto & Windus, who published them as Finding Gold in 1967 under the Hogarth Press imprint. Two more volumes appeared in the Phoenix Living Poets series: Ransoms (1970), which won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, and Mountains, Polecats, Pheasants (1974). He also began publishing stories regularly in The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker.
Having tried for several years to give up teaching, in 1973 he accepted an invitation to be Visiting Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, and thus began an association with American universities which was to last the rest of his life. On his return to England he found himself so unsettled by the experience of America that he resigned his Principal Lectureship at Bognor Regis and resolved to earn his living by his pen. His first collection of stories, Sliding, won the David Higham Prize for Fiction when it appeared in 1978, and his second, The Girl from Cardigan (1988), won a Welsh Arts Council prize.
After a second visit to Seattle, he was appointed in 1983 Christiansen Professor of Poetry in the English Department at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah; six years later he was made Humanities Professor of Creative Writing. In Provo, where he was particularly happy, he enjoyed great prestige. I witnessed at first hand the esteem in which he was held by the Mormons of BYU when, in 1991, I was Visiting Professor there: students and staff flocked to his readings and lectures – he was among the most accomplished readers I have ever heard – and queued to buy his books at the campus bookstore. Apart from his amiable personality and serious approach to the writer’s craft, I think it was the chaste nature of Leslie’s work that appealed most to the zealous Mormons. He was criticised in both Wales and England for a lack of social awareness and avoidance of adult relationships, for seeing everything through the eyes of a boy, and for his conventional techniques. But in Mormon country, despite not being a member of the Church of Latter-day Saints, he was their laureate. And so he stuck to his last, choosing to write as an outsider, content to remain always ‘at the edge of things’, that mysterious land where the familiar and the wondrous meet, and where his poems and stories had their abundant source.
Many thanks to the Royal Society of Literature for their permission to use this article. To view the original, please see https://rsliterature.org/fellow/leslie-norris/
Merthyr’s Heritage Plaques: Leslie Norris
by Keith Lewis-Jones
Leslie Norris
Plaque sited at the main entrance of the Merthyr Central Library, CF47 8AF
Merthyr-born Leslie Norris (1921-2006), was much influenced by his upbringing in the South Wales valleys.
He spent most of his life in England and the United States, where he earned his living as writer-in-residence at various academic institutions.
He came to prominence in the 1960’s and soon established himself as a major figure in Welsh literature in English. He published over twenty books of short stories, translations, poetry and criticism.