Tag: Second World War

Saturday Football in our Local Community

by Brian Jones

Allan “Salty” Jones has recently published the centenary story (1913 -2013) of football played by a myriad of local teams. His account draws on a vast number of photographs of boys and men who set out to enjoy Saturday football on pitches of variable quality from the north to the south of the Merthyr Borough. Their faces shine out of the black/white and coloured prints spanning a number of generations the vast majority of whom are sadly not still with us. Nevertheless their spirit epitomises their love for the game, and perhaps more importantly, their camaraderie bound together by work, community, church or public house.

The names of the clubs who played in the MERTHYR LEAGUE ring out through the ages. Merthyr Trams, Aberfan Thursdays, Bethania Chapel, Court Rangers, Gellifaelog Youth Club, Mountain Hare, Hoovers, Castle Rangers, Miners Hall, Great Escape and Vaynor Quarries. The list is endless. A review of the history of local football mirrored the social and industrial changes spanning the 100 years. Gone are the teams representing local employers such as Guest Keen, Lines, B.S.A , Teddington Controls, Kayser Bondor, Welsh Products to name but a few.

Of the hundreds of teams who joined then left the League was S.W.E.B. who played post World War II into the early 1950s. The South Wales Electricity Board team of young men who served in the Army, Navy or Royal Air Force and went to work in an industry which blossomed with the surge in demand for an alternative power source. The sprint was on to convert homes from coal gas to electricity. Mains cables had to be laid in streets, Electricity meters installed and wiring to be linked to light switches and power points. Who can recall the demand for one shilling coins for the electricity slot meters to ensure the lights stayed on during dark winter nights!

The S.W.E.B team of 1954/55 played their home games in Heolgerrig and perhaps there are readers who are the grandchildren and great- grandchildren of those in the photograph. Were they players of great skill, who knows, but we can be assured that on their Monday stint in their work base at the Traction Yard in Penydarren they would certainly be enthusing about the win, draw or loss of the previous Saturday game

P.S. The author is the eight year old in the photograph

Court Rangers and Frank Cass

by David Watkins

In the 1940s, young men living Courtland Terrace and the surrounding area decided to start off a football team, appropriately naming their club Court Rangers A.F.C.

They first played in the Rhymney Valley Football League before joining the Merthyr League. Ken Tucker remembers the exciting times and the camaraderie that existed between the players, also the superb organisation of Frank Cass the manager, John Power the captain and an enthusiastic committee.

There were many extremely talented individuals in the team, including a young Philip Jones – later to become famous as Philip Madoc, however I wish to concentrate on another fascinating individual.

During a conversation with Ken, he asked me if I was aware of a Court Rangers player named Frank Cass? Although I knew he was in the publishing business, I was very surprised at the Court Rangers connection!

Whilst a young man, Frank and his Jewish family from London moved to Merthyr Tydfil at the start of the Second World War, and found accommodation at Dowlais, later moving to Courtland Terrace. He immediately integrated himself into the community, enjoying his stay in Merthyr, making friends before joining the Court Rangers Football Club and furthering his education at the County Grammar School.

All his life Frank was passionate about reading and knew he wanted a career in the world of books. Leaving Merthyr at the age of eighteen, he returned to London, and fortunately, a year later, found a job at the Economist Bookshop in Bloomsbury. Frank opened his own shop in 1953, and then, onwards and upwards, he became the owner of a number of prestigious publish firms.

One of the most satisfying decisions of his illustrious career was to publish the Goon Show Scripts in 1972. He knew that the Prince of Wales was a Goon fan and invited him to the book launch, along with Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers. They all attended and the book became an instant bestseller.

Frank’s love of Merthyr continued throughout his life and because of this he later published a book of particular interest to Merthyr entitled “Labour and Poor in England and Wales, 1849/1951 – Vol 3 South Wales, North Wales”. The first ninety-six pages are devoted to the working class of Merthyr Tydfil, with an illustration of Dowlais Ironworks on the cover.

After a wonderful and fulfilling career in the book trade, Frank sold off some of his publishing interests for fifteen million pounds! Not bad for a boy from North London, who for a short time in his life enjoyed himself living, studying, playing football for Court Ranger A.F.C. in Merthyr Tydfil.

Frank Cass died in 2007 aged 77

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/