In Association with the Merthyr Tydfil & District Historical Society
Please see below details of the Annual Conference of the Women’s Archive for Wales. Our very own Chris Parry (from Cyfarthfa Museum) is one of the guest speakers – see the programme below.
If anyone would like to attend the conference, please use the contact details shown in the poster below.
The article transcribed below appeared in the Western Mail 140 years ago today (5 August 1879):-
Monday was observed as a holiday, and all business establishments were closed, the majority of the population apparently turning out pleasure seeking. The camp at Forest Mountain, Ynysowen, took away a very large number of the inhabitants, and several school picnics into the country were organised.
Nothing in the way of amusement was got up in Merthyr, but the employed on the permanent way of the Taff Vale Railway had their annual outing, and, with their wives, sweethearts, etc, to the number of about 1,500, were conveyed to Merthyr in a train of 24 carriages, which the company had, as usual, kindly placed at their disposal. The excursionists were accompanied by Mr. J. Hurman and Mr. T. H. Riches. Arrived at Merthyr, the large party marched in an orderly manner through the High Street of the town to Penydarren Park, on which delightful spot athletics sports, etc., were indulged in. On the present occasion, the committee by whom the arrangements were made dined together at the Court Arms, kept by Mrs. Brown, by whom and Mr. J. P. Jones the refreshments were served in the park.
About half-past seven in the evening the excursionists returned by their special train to Cardiff, having thoroughly enjoyed themselves.
From the Merthyr Express 110 years ago today (31 July 1909)….
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.
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.
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.
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.
by “Sarnws”
If only I could sleep just for one night, in winter, in the front bedroom of the house which now stands where my grandfather’s did, in Church Row in Dowlais, nearly on the corner of Ivor Street, would I in that early morning reverie, half awake and half asleep, hear the frost hardened paving stones ringing with the footsteps of hundreds and hundreds of men making their way to the Ivor Works and the trains taking them over Dowlais Top to the mines and coke ovens beyond?
Are too, the ghosts of women scurrying from the Tip Station along Station Road and Church Row, past the Bonevitch’s shop, to Dowlais Market, with a basket of merchandise in the crook of each elbow to be seen?
In those days when times were hard, “Daddy Thorn”, as he was known to the local children would come out of retirement as a sugar puller, and make a walking stick of “rock” for a birthday present. This fuelled our activities as roller skating was a popular pastime, and Church Row was surfaced and as smooth as silk. I can now admit to stealing grease from the axle boxes of the goods wagons parked opposite the Stables by the market for my roller skate wheels, as the statute of limitations applies, hopefully.
You could buy spare roller skate wheels from Atkins the ironmonger down the hill from the Co-op, and I often went there to buy “carbide” for my grandfather’s flame lamp.
Dowlais Library was, still is I think, just by the site of the Co-op, and even though I did not appreciate it at the time, was told later that the librarian was so addicted to snuff that every book was so scented.
I would go to the Co-op to fetch pipe tobacco for my grandfather, which came in a foil sealed tin. I still remember the aroma as the foil was peeled back. One of the staff on the provision counter was a Mr. Sheen, always in immaculate whites. To see him boning out a side of bacon was a demonstration of skill. In those days bacon was not laid out ready, but cut on demand. If it ran out you would patiently wait and look on as the Provisions hand fetched and boned another side.
If the “American Cheese” came to an end the provision hand would appear embracing a barrel shaped cheese weighing fifty-six pounds, and cut it up with the wire cheese cutter. Everyone waited, with no complaints.
At the end of Mary Ann Street there stood a bakery which in summer would be open to the world, where real bread was baked.
In Dowlais market the stall always doing a roaring trade was the faggots and peas stall. Traditionally most people would add a sprinkling of vinegar, probably to cut the richness of the faggots.
One regular vendor was the man selling corn ointment, who, to demonstrate the effectiveness of his treatment would stamp his highly polished black boots on the flagstones.
I was told of one old lady, a self appointed arbiter of the quality of poultry sold in the market, who never bought a bird, but would go from stall to stall prodding the breasts of the chicken on show with a hatpin. She would then pronounce on the quality of the merchandise.
An older colleague could remember the matriarch of a rather rough and ready family who on pay day would take the husband’s pay, go down to the market, and buy and don a new apron. She would then gather up the hem to form a shopping bag, and do the weekly shop . When the family had consumed her purchases, they went hungry ‘till the next pay day.
If the term “Disposable Income” had been common parlance then it would have had no relevance for the majority who survived from pay day to pay day.
Dowlais in the 1930’s. Photo courtesy of http://www.alangeorge.co.uk/index.htm
To be continued…….
From the Merthyr Express 110 years ago today (24 July 1909):
From the Aberdare Leader 100 years ago today (21 July 1919):
One of Merthyr’s most sorely missed landmarks is undoubtedly the Triangle in Pentrebach.
The Pentrebach Triangle was a planned settlement of fifty-four houses constructed in the 1830s and 1840s, in association with the development of the Pentrebach Forge by the Hill family of Plymouth Ironworks. It comprised four rows of double-fronted terraced houses, two of them facing each other across Church Street (which was part of the Merthyr – Cardiff turnpike road to c.1840 when a new alignment was laid out to the west), and two rows enclosing a triangular space to the west of Church Street. The houses had two rooms and a pantry on the ground floor, and two rooms above, accessed by half-spiral stone stairs built into the very thick party walls between alternate pairs.
By 1813 there was already a row of terraced housing, Long Row, to the east of Church Street, and a building on the east side of Church Street itself, possibly an alehouse which was later converted to four houses.
Further building of Triangle probably began in the late 1830s, with two stages of six houses each on the east side of Church Street, attached to the south end of the alehouse building. The first seven houses of the south row (from the east end) of the Triangle probably also date from this period. The later houses used greyish-yellow bricks for window arches and chimneys.
All were built by 1851. At first there were no back doors, and all had small enclosures at the front, some of which contained sheds for coal. Water came from a pump and trough in the centre of the triangle, and a block of four privies was constructed behind the south-west corner. Later many of the houses acquired single-storey rear extensions.
The houses were Listed Grade 2 in February 1975, but had already been purchased by Merthyr Council and earmarked for clearance. Local civic and heritage groups fought to save them, and the Civic Society even produced a scheme showing that they could be renovated for less than the cost of new housing, and at the same time provide 12.5% more floor space than the basic basic new-build design of the day.
All the efforts to save them were in vain however, and The Triangle was demolished on 12 December 1977, and the whole site and all related landscape features have been obliterated by the building of large industrial units.
The demolition of the Triangle is one of the most grievous losses to Merthyr’s Heritage. It beggars belief that the powers that be sanctioned its destruction, knowing how important and unique it was, and in the face of such public opposition….but should we be surprised?
Following on from yesterday’s post, here’s a bit of a mystery.
Alan Jones and David Watkins are currently researching Merthyr Tydfil A.F.C., and they have unearthed this photograph.
Can anyone shed any light on it?
The inscription on the football is all but illegible, but I have blown the photo up as best I can.
If anyone can help identify the team, please let me know and I will pass the information on to Alan and David.
Thanks