Tag: Twynyrodyn

William Cuthbert Taylor – 1909-1977

WILLIAM CUTHBERT TAYLOR – 1909 – 1977
A matter of black and white.
A Merthyr Tydfil story of racial exclusion.

by Irene Janes

Now there’s a name to conjure and in a way it was as his first name of William was dropped, and he was known as Cuthbert Taylor. He was born to Cuthbert Taylor and his wife Margaret Anne in 16 John Street, Georgetown, in 1909. By 1920 the family had moved to Mary Street, Twynyrodyn.

Merthyr boxing enthusiast may recognise his name others for racial discrimination. During his career, Cuthbert fought two hundred professional bouts. He won one hundred and fifty one. Lost sixty-nine and drew twenty two times and only knocked out once, a worthy opponent for anyone.

He was selected to represent Britain in the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam but was defeated in the quarterfinals of the flyweight class to the potential silver medallist Armand Apell. At this time, the Olympic Games competitors were strictly amateur status.

Cuthbert may not have won a medal but was and still is celebrated as the first black boxer to compete for Great Britain in an Olympics. He was only the third black British Olympian. The others were Harry Francis Vincent Edward and Jack London, both athletes.

After the Olympics Cuthbert returned home and turned to the professional side of the sport. On 29 December 1929, his first professional match was in Merthyr, the contest was a draw. Nevertheless, his next fight was a win over Armand Apell. By the middle of this year, he moved up a weight division to Bantamweight. He went on to defeat defeated Dan Dando to gain the Welsh Bantamweight Championship.

Although being recognised as one of the best in Britain there was one hurdle that his perfection at his craft could not overcome. He could not fight for the British title, and why? The colour of his skin.

His father was of Caribbean decent, his mother white welsh, the championship was closed to non whites regardless of their established good character, record and skill. As an amateur, he was good enough to represent Great Britain in the Olympics but not as a professional to claim the title of British Champion.

Later he passed on his boxing expertise onto another great Merthyr boxer Howard Winstone.

Cuthbert died on 15 November 1977 and still living in the town of his birth.

N.B in 1911 the then Home Secretary Winstone Churchill succumbed to pressure when Jack Johnson an American black boxer was billed to fight British white boxer ‘Bombardier’ Billy Wells in London. There was uproar that a black boxer and a white boxer would compete on British soil. At this time, there were anxieties over the future of the ‘white race’ and concerns over how a coloured fighter defeating a white opponent would affect the colonies. This rule of racial exclusion was not reversed until 1948. In June of that year boxer Dick Turpin defeated Vince Hawkins, in Birmingham, to win the British middleweight title. So not only did Dick win the title fight but is credited to be the first non- white man to win it since the ban was lifted.

The central library in Merthyr Tydfil holds a black file containing photocopies of many letters sent to Cuthbert Taylor him from agents.

A book has been written about our Champion think it is titled ‘Just a Little Bit of Brown’. I don’t know the author but would love to find a copy.

Merthyr Memories: The Second World War – part 1

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….

 

Merthyr Memories: Memories of Dowlais – part 2

by Sarnws

Ivor  Street  in particular had a reputation for being  generous to beggars, who  in those days would  just walk up the middle of the road, often silent, cap in hand, and the children would run in to tell their mothers, who in turn would spare a few coppers.

Ivor Street in the 1970’s, shortly before it was demolished. Photo courtesy of http://www.alangeorge.co.uk/index.htm

This was in the thirties. By now we had moved from “Merthyr” which generally describes Merthyr itself,  Dowlais, Penydarren,  Heolgerrig, Pant,  Georgetown  Twynyrodyn   etc.  One day I dashed in from the street, quite excited, to tell my mother that there was a beggar, cap in hand, walking down the middle of the road just chanting “Ho Hum, Ho Hum” repetitively.  She was as excited as I was and  in turn dashed out to put something in his hat.  It was a link with “home”, for he was well known to her.

I remember that beggars were quite a common sight.  My father in the very early nineteen hundreds, before going to work as an apprentice blacksmith, worked in Toomeys.  He was paying in to the bank one day when a beggar who used to push himself around, mounted on a small flat trolley with the aid if two short sticks, was paying in. When he reached the counter, the clerk checking in not an insignificant amount asked if he had had a good day.  The reply was, “Average”.

On a few occasions at about 8.30 pm on a Saturday there would be a message from one of the houses in Pontsarn or Pontsicill, to the effect that some friends had dropped in so would Mr. Toomey send up the brace of pheasants he had hanging. My father would be sent on the errand, having been given two-pence for the tram, and with the kind instruction that he needn’t come back.

Until the day she died, sadly quite young, if someone asked my mother when making her way to the train for her weekly visit, where she was going, the reply was always the same, “Home for the day”.

I remember my father, when  on a visit to Merthyr when Grandparents and Aunts and Uncles were still there, showing me the  Trevithick  memorial  in Pontmorlais, and being brought up with knowledge of the social and industrial heritage of  “Merthyr” and its contribution to the world.

Is it possible when the light is just right that a mirage of the Coal Arch can be seen?

Does the glow from the Bessemer converter still light the night sky?

When I  retired, thirty years ago I took the elderly aunt of a colleague to lunch in the Teapot Cafe at the end of the Station Arcade, which was the main exit  from Brunel’s  station. A lady came in with her husband, nodded to me and smiled.  She turned to her husband and I could see her say, ”I know that gentleman”. I could not place her, and just nodded as we left.

The Station Arcade in the 1980s. Photo courtesy of http://www.alangeorge.co.uk/index.htm

A little while later I saw her again in the company of friends or family one of whom I knew.  I was drawn into their company.  The lady had been living on Orpington as teacher and then head teacher for thirty-five years, so had not encountered me in that time.  It transpired that she remembered me from Dowlais  school, fifty years before.

My son has a silver pocket watch and chain, given to me by my uncle, of the same christian name just before he died.  It was bequeathed to him by an uncle, again of the same name.  His aunt had it serviced for him by the clockmaker half way up the arcade.  That must have been about 1920.

As you entered that clockmaker’s premises, facing you was a huge grandfather clock.  Integral with the  pendulum was a cylinder of mercury.  This expanded and contracted with temperature change, compensating for the temperature variation in the length of the pendulum rod, seemingly so simple a concept, but how brilliant.

I was telling a colleague, who had been brought up in Dowlais, but previously unknown to me, that I could remember standing under the railway bridge at the end of Station Road, sheltering from the rain, and watching the Fish and Chip shop opposite, in Victoria Street I think, burning down. He turned and said that he had been there too. That had happened, I think, in the winter of 38/39. Thirty-five years  or so before.

I have tooted the car horn many times on Johnny Owen, out for his morning run.  I always got a wave of the hand in return.  What a number of boxers and other sportspeople Merthyr has produced. The last years of my working life were in Merthyr, and being steeped in its history by my parents, it was interesting to encounter family names which were familiar to me, particularly the Spanish ones, as I was familiar with their family histories to some extent.

My parents are buried in Pant Cemetery, as are Grandparents, Aunts and Uncles, Cousins and more.  Whenever I visit I cannot but drive around Dowlais, now much changed, but a place to which I am still drawn.

Except for one year, October ‘38 to September ‘39, when I  attended  Dowlais  Junior  School, and was a  patient for three months in the childrens’  hospital which occupied the original Sandbrook  House, I have not lived in Merthyr since I was a baby. When I was discharged from Sandbrook House I had been indoors for nearly the whole of my stay and insisted on riding up as far as the Hollybush Hotel on the open top deck of the tram.  The era of the tram ended very shortly afterwards.

Sandbrook House. Photo courtesy of the Alan George Collection

I seem to have read or heard somewhere that nature has implanted within you a sacred and indissoluble attachment to the place of your birth and infant nurture, perhaps Tydfil’s martyrdom has created this aura about Merthyr which evokes such hiraeth.

Mountain Hare – an Early History

by Carolyn Jacob

MOUNTAIN HARE is the name of an old inn above Pen yr Heol Ferthyr which gave the district its more modern name – the 1851 Census Returns recorded Pen yr Heol Ferthyr (see below).

It is not certain when the inn was built, but it would seem to have ideally positioned for the time before industrialization and the road links and pre-1750 conditions, but the name suggests a post-1750 inn. It is an English name. The other public house in the area, the Farmer’s Arms, has the interesting nickname of ‘the Spite’, and there may be truth in the local legend that it was intended to ruin the trade of the other inn. However the name might be derived from the Welsh for a water spout because there was one there. There is another public house with this name in Carmarthenshire, and many of the residents of Mountain Hare came from there. This is very curious but the truth behind the name is hard to be certain of.

Mountain Hare in 1949. Photo courtesy of http://www.alangeorge.co.uk/index.htm

The Mountain Hare Ironstone Mine in mentioned by Clive Thomas in Merthyr Tydfil – A Valley Community, page 305, this pre-1860 ironstone mine was at Mountain Hare, just southwest of Dowlais No 2 Pit. In 1841 ironstone mining, coal mining and associated employment such as haulier are practically the only two occupations in the district, however, by 1851 there are different occupations in the area. Gradually the ironstone mining dies out and gives way to coal.

The 1851 census returns, which records place of birth, give clear evidence that the population of Mountain Hare (Pen yr Heol Ferthyr) came from various Welsh counties. We can find people born in Montgomgeryhire, Denbighshire, Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire. There are only a few Englishmen here later but no Irish or Scots.

On 31 May 1856 the Merthyr Express reported the conversion of a small cottage to a Sunday School because of ‘the large number of children running about the whole of Sunday at Pwllyhwyaid. The school was connected to Zoar Welsh Independent Chapel.

Zoar Chapel Pwllyhwyaid School Room

Also, according to All Change by Josh Powell, page 63, a garden at Pen yr Heol Ferthyr was sold by David Robert Davies to Zion Welsh Baptist Chapel in 1861 for £20. A Sunday School called ‘The Bryn’ was then built on this site.

PEN YR HEOL FERTHYR: The ‘top of the road or ancient byway from or to Merthyr Tudful’, a place generally located below the old ‘Mountain Hare’ Inn, immediately east of the former Dowlais Inclined Plane, just above the former bridge which (in the 1940s) took the road called Heol Ferthyr alias Twyn yr Odyn Road across the Dowlais Inclined Plane. Sometime the name is on documents without the ‘yr’. The Dowlais Inclined Plane went right through this locality, mostly as a deep cutting, requiring a bridge to take Heol Ferthyr over the railway and another bridge lower down taking a lane over the railway to Tir Ysgubor Newydd homestead.

By 1885, the six-inch Ordnance Survey Map showed nearby Mountain Hare Inn, Maerdy, some houses to the rear and a row of houses along­side the road. This apart, there is very little if anything known of the history and occupants of this ‘farm’ or small-holding which lay alongside one of the main access roads to the village of Merthyr Tydfil. However, evidence taken from the census returns 1841- 1911 reveal quite a large number of persons residing in this district.

Mountain Hare was pictured in the Illustrated News of 1875 because this popular London based magazine did a feature about Merthyr Tydfil during the 1875 Strike, the longest strike to date. The men met at Mountain Hare for huge outdoor political rallies,  but the area had long been a general outdoor meeting place gathering crowds of working men for sports and activities such as dog fighting (actually illegal from 1835) and bare knuckle fighting. Its main claim to fame is that the greatest politician of all time, Keir Hardie, spoke here to a gathering of working people in 1898.

 

London Illustrated News 1875

Memories of Old Merthyr

Whilst looking through back issues of the Merthyr Express, local historian Michael Donovan came across a remarkable feature which ran across several editions of the newspaper in 1901. The article concerns  reminiscences of Merthyr dating back to the 1830’s. Unfortunately, there is no indication who the person who wrote these memories is. Michael has passed copies of these articles on to me to feature on this blog. I will post extracts periodically, starting with the transcription below.

Merthyr Tydfil, erstwhile the metropolis of the iron manufacture, although that proud distinction no longer applies, is yet progressing and prosperous. Being able to recall it as was so many years ago, it is my intention to describe things that can be remembered, and to say in a gossiping garrulous manner what may instruct and amuse the present generation.

I think it was in 1834 I first saw Merthyr, coming by coach from Cardiff. The impression upon me was strange, for until then all ideas of existence had been gathered in a city, and the transition from such to a long, straggling village was very great. From Cardiff one set of horses ran to the Bridgewater Arms, and another on to Merthyr. The starting place in Cardiff was the Angel Hotel, which stood about the position of the Bute Estate Offices at the present, and the finish was at the Castle Hotel, or the booking office which was adjoining it on the Pontmorlais side. The coach stopped at the Bush Hotel to set down some passengers, and unless memory plays me false, the coachman’s name was Howells.

The Castle Hotel in Merthyr in the mid 1800’s

There was a great dearth of houses. Anything except workmen’s cottages were very few, and, as a rule, occupied by their owners. Just call to mind what Merthyr would be without Thomastown and Twynyrodyn, the site of the present Market-house and its surrounding streets a field, a field where the present station is (Cae Gwyn), a market garden where the lower part of the station yard is, no water except what could be had from a well here and there, no drainage, no police, and I almost think no gas works.

Further afield, Troedyrhiw had few houses, Pontyrhun was not, except a pumping engine and residence for the attendant. His name was Gibbons, and the engine supplied the Glamorganshire Canal from the river. Not above a dozen houses in Abercanaid; and as for Cefn, if you could find a cottage to spare, provided any means were used to come to Merthyr, no less than three turnpike gates would have to be passed through, to two of which a toll would be paid; and if, instead of turning round to enter the ‘village’, anyone went a short distance up the road to Penydarren, another toll would be demanded.

The old Penydarren Toll House (front) at the bottom of The Avenue. Photo courtesy of http://www.alangeorge.co.uk/index.htm

And yet with these conditions and surroundings –

“Content could spread a charm,
Redress the place, and all its faults disarm.”

To be continued at a later date…..