Tag: General Hospital

My Dad Makes Sweets

by Tiffèny Davies (née Bray)

When I first started school, my teacher told my mother that I was the only one in my class who knew what their father did for a living!  “My Dad makes sweets!”, I’d said.   My mother told her, it was because I saw him at work, as the factory was in an old water mill, just off Merthyr Tydfil High Street, across the garden from our house and we would often pop in to see him on our way back from town.

My father at work in the factory

Frederick William Bray, my Great Grandfather, who established F W Bray and Sons, started his business in Glyn Terrace, Merthyr Tydfil.

F W Bray & Sons shop at Glyn Terrace. Photo courtesy of the Alan George archive

Frederick had a sweet factory at the back of the house and he would load his horse drawn cart full of jars of sweets and deliver to market traders as well as running his own stall in Aberdare market. In 1904, Frederick married, Mary Ann Vining, the daughter of a china merchant based on Pontmorlais who also had large china stalls in Merthyr and Dowlais Markets as well as a shop on Pontmorlais.

In 1934, Frederick and Mary Ann moved into Pontmorlais and established a sweet shop, continuing to make sweets in a building at the bottom of Old Mill Lane and eventually taking over the Old Mill that had, until then, been used by the Vining family in which to store China. The Vinings had bought the Old Mill in 1922 after the Millers failed to return from the First World War.

Frederick and Mary Ann had three children, Thomas, Sydney and Phyllis. Both sons joined the family business, becoming Master Sugar Boilers and also helped to deliver to all the small retail shops in the surrounding valleys.

During the Second World War my Grandfather, Thomas, served as a cook with the Royal Engineers while Sydney and Phyllis worked in the local munitions factory, which meant that there was little time for sweet making. I am told, that in order to keep up the supply of sweets, Mary Ann contacted the local Member of Parliament, S O Davies, on two occasions, to request Thomas’ return from the frontline. It is said that S O Davies would take a bag of sweets up to Parliament, to Winston Churchill’s War Cabinet.

F W Bray & Sons shop in Pontmorlais in the 1940s. Photo courtesy of the Alan George Archive

In 1937, Thomas married Anne Berry Powell who had been working as a Night Sister in the General Hospital. After the war, they lived above their own sweet shop at Park Place, Merthyr Tydfil. While Thomas travelled the valleys, visiting the small shops, delivering and taking orders, Sydney made sweets.

When I was born in March 1963, my Father, Fred Bray, was already working in the well-established sweet making business which employed around 25 people; in the factory, the shop on Pontmorlais, market stalls in Merthyr and Aberdare as well as a newsagents on Glebeland Street, Merthyr.

F W Bray & Sons stall at Merthyr Market. Photo courtesy of the Alan George Archive

They manufactured a range of hard boiled sweets, as well as whole sale and retail of ranges from across the confectionary spectrum. Sales representatives from brands such as Cadbury’s, Taveners, Rountrees, Walkers, Milady and even the man from Mars, were frequent visitors. To a young child, it was really exciting to be around when a travelling sales representative was visiting, they always had a case full of colourful delights out of which I might be handed a sample to try.  Sometimes there would even be promotional toys – I acquired a clockwork dalek, cuddly chipmunk (that advertised chipmunk crisps) and even a digital watch that came with Bazooka bubblegum!   I remember being closely watched as I sampled a packet of popping and fizzing, space dust which I thought was great fun and, on another occasion, Uncle Sid handed me a packet of Wotsits, that he’d been sampling, before dashing to the sink to wash out the gooey mess from his false teeth!  Needless to say, the Wotsits were a hit with the kid, and the sales representative got an order!

It would be all hands on deck to unload deliveries from the lorries of large companies and stock our warehouse ready for distribution to shops across the valleys. Our adverts read “Home Made Sweets with Glucose – Good For You!”  We had a burgundy coloured Commer van, emblazoned with the family name – F W Bray and Sons – kitted out with shelves to hold the glass sweet jars and boxes, that my Grandfather, Thomas, used for deliveries to all the small shops, all over the valleys.   As a child, it was always a novelty to sit, up front, with him in the “big van”.

The advent of the supermarket eventually meant that confectionary was being sold cheaper by them than we could buy directly from the manufacturer and, as a result the wholesale of other brands dwindled. Focus shifted to the Bray’s lines and links with the National Museum of Wales, doing sweet making demonstrations at events and fairs.

My mother and father demonstrating sweet making

As I grew older, I have memories of helping in the factory, washing jars, pasting labels, mixing the Braymix and adding colour and flavour to the sherbet. During one school summer holiday, I even operated the cut and twist wrapping machine. I sat for hours, putting sweets into holes and watching them go round, the machine picking up our branded cellophane, chopping it and spinning pincers twisting the ends before dropping them down a shute into a tray. I must say, the novelty quickly wore off!

Although, my Father told us to break away from the business, we could not help but be drawn in and we did get involved, especially when it was all hands on deck! I nagged my Father to allow me to work as Saturday staff and my sister, Fiona and I worked in the Merthyr Market Stall, my brother, Jason, who had a morning paper round, occasionally helped out in the shop on Pontmorlais.

Until 1994, when my Parents retired, they ran the business together, changing the structure to sweet making and travelling to events in order to do demonstrations, at mostly Welsh Heritage Sites. The wholesale business, shops and stalls were now gone. The watermill that used to store china, and then became a sweet factory, is now a garage.

My parents Fred and Pam Bray

My father always said that the sweet making business would end with him and advice was to break away. On the 8 of September 2024 at my brother, Jason’s installation as Dean of Llandaff Cathedral, I remember those words, and how things have worked out. The business did end when my father retired in 1994 and he handed machinery to St Fagans Welsh National Museum of History and his recipes, glass jars and labels handed to relatives in Bray’s of Cardiff. I sometimes see some of our lines of hard boiled sweets in the supermarket and Bray’s sweets were sold at St Fagans from the original glass jars with our labels.

Me at St Fagans

William Thomas Lewis, Lord Merthyr

The following article is transcribed from the Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement. It is out of copyright and is now in the public domain.

William Thomas Lewis, first Baron Merthyr, of Senghenydd (1837–1914), engineer and coal-owner, the eldest son of Thomas William Lewis, engineer, of Abercanaid House, Merthyr Tydfil, by his wife, Mary Anne, daughter of John Watkin, was born at Merthyr Tydfil 5 August 1837. He received his early training under his father, and in 1855 became assistant engineer to William Southern Clark, mining agent for the Marquess of Bute’s estate in South Wales—in Cardiff and its neighbourhood.

He succeeded Clark in 1864 at an important period in the history of the coal industry and, as consulting engineer, was connected with various colliery and railway schemes in South Wales. In 1881 Lewis was given entire control of the Marquess of Bute’s Welsh estates, and, by reducing the costs of working at the Cardiff docks (constructed by the Bute family), he made possible the expansion necessary for the rapidly increasing trade in steam coal. By 1887 he had constructed the Roath dock and by 1907 the Queen Alexandra dock. He also introduced new appliances, including the Lewis-Hunter crane, of which he was part inventor. When the Bute Dock Company was formed in 1887, he became managing director, and some years later helped to secure direct access to the South Wales coal-field by opening up the Cardiff Railway. Undoubtedly, the growth of Cardiff and the prosperity of the coal-field are bound up with Lewis’s career.

Lewis’s work for the Bute estates, however, represents but one phase of his activities. His marriage in 1864 to Anne (died 1902), daughter of William Rees, colliery-owner, of Lletyshenkin, Aberdare, brought him into close contact with the steam-coal trade, of which his wife’s family were pioneers. His main colliery interests ultimately lay in the lower Rhondda valley and in the Senghenydd district. He possessed a remarkable knowledge of the South Wales coal-field and of coal-working in general, and was appointed to serve on the royal commissions on the action of coal dust in mines, on mining royalties, on coal supplies, and on accidents in mines (1878–1886). For his valuable services on the last-named commission he was knighted in 1885. From coal Lewis was drawn into iron-working, and he helped to revive the industry by applying the new Bessemer process for the production of steel. In 1908 he was elected president of the Iron and Steel Institute.

Probably some of Lewis’s greatest work was done in the cause of industrial peace. Little effort had been made to organize the coal industry until after the strike of 1871, when he succeeded in persuading coal-owners and iron-masters of South Wales to form the Monmouthshire and South Wales Coal-Owners’ Association. During the great strike of 1873 he counselled arbitration and urged the adoption of a sliding scale as the basis of the new wage agreement. The acceptance of this principle in 1875 brought peace and stability to the industry for many years; and, as chairman for eighteen years of the sliding-scale committee, Lewis was largely responsible for the efficient working of the scheme. The principle led to a distinct improvement in the relations between capital and labour, and later came to be adopted in other coal-fields.

Lewis had won for himself a high reputation as an industrial expert and as a conciliator. In 1881 he was president of the Mining Association of Great Britain, and he served on the royal commissions on labour (1891–1894), on trades’ disputes (1903–1906), and on shipping combinations (1906–1907). He was successful in effecting a settlement of the Taff Vale Railway strike in 1900, and his proposal for the institution of permanent boards of arbitration became the basis of settlement of the general railway strike of 1907.

Lewis, who had been created a baronet in 1896 and had received the K.C.V.O. in 1907, was raised to the peerage in 1911 as Baron Merthyr, of Senghenydd, Glamorganshire. In 1912 he received the G.C.V.O. He took a keen interest in education and in the social welfare of the coal-field, and was a generous supporter of hospitals and other institutions. He had played a prominent part in the founding, in 1881, of the Monmouthshire and South Wales permanent provident fund for the relief of colliery workers in case of sickness or accident—a scheme which anticipated by many years some of the advantages of old age pensions, compensation for accident, and insurance against sickness or unemployment.

Lord Merthyr died at Newbury 27 August 1914. He had two sons and six daughters, and he was succeeded as second baron by his elder son, Herbert Clark Lewis (born 1866).

The statue of W T Lewis that now stands in front of what remains of St Tydfil’s Hospital. It used to stand in front of the General Hospital.