From the Merthyr Express 90 years go today…..
A follow up story from the Merthyr Express….
Fatal Gas Leak at Merthyr
Tag: Twynyrodyn School
New Ration Books
From the Merthyr Express 80 years ago today…..
Earthquake in South Wales
Most people will know about the terrible earthquake that devastated San Francisco on 18 April 1906, but did you know that another, much less powerful, earthquake actually hit Merthyr later that year, 115 years ago today?
At 9.45 am on 27 June 1906, a powerful earth tremor was felt across much of South Wales, its epicentre being placed just offshore of Port Talbot. The quake, which struck just a few weeks after the devastating San Francisco earthquake, was felt as far afield as Ilfracombe, Birmingham and southwest Ireland. Measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale, the quake was caused by movement in the ‘Neath Disturbance’ and ‘Swansea Valley Disturbance’, two fault lines in the South Wales area.
Although there were no fatalities, and only minimal minor injuries sustained by falling masonry, people were terrified by the unexpected tremor.
In Swansea, there was damage to St Andrew’s Church, Swansea Prison, the Board of Trade offices and the gasworks, and the Mumbles Lighthouse was said to have ‘rocked on its foundations’. In Llanelli, the town hall clock stopped and people in Ammanford were convinced there had been a huge pit explosion, and colliers from several pits in South Wales were hurriedly brought to the service due to concerns over the stability of the mines.
The tremor hit Merthyr about five minutes after the original quake. Chimneys on two houses on the Tramroad were dislodged and crashed to the street, a similar fate befalling a house at Bryn Sion Street in Dowlais, and the plasterwork in several buildings cracked. Apart from these incidents, there were several incidents of pictures and clocks falling off walls, and crockery was smashed as it fell from shelves and tables. Yet again, however, people were terrified.
At Abermorlais School, the glass partitions between the classrooms ‘shook like leaves’, and it was only due to the calmness of the teachers in reassuring the terrified pupils that panic didn’t ensue. At Twynyrodyn and St David’s School, windows rattled and the blackboards swayed alarmingly. Yet again it was only due to the presence of mind of the teachers that panic was avoided.
A rumour quickly spread that the roof of the school at either Abercanaid or Pentrebach had collapsed injuring many of the pupils, but luckily this was not the case. At the Dowlais Gas and Coke Company, the offices were shaken with such force that the staff there feared that one of the gasometers had exploded. The staff at the Town Hall were also greatly alarmed, and they described two shocks being distinctly felt, one gentleman present remarked however, that he thought that “the Ratepayers Protection Association had commenced its work”.
Merthyr Memories: The Last Days of Georgetown School
I was one those people lucky enough to attend Cyfarthfa School on all three of its sites – Georgetown, Cyfarthfa Castle and Cae Mari Dwn. In fact, I was in the very last intake of pupils to go to Georgetown before it closed its doors forever.
Georgetown School was in fact a cluster of several buildings. The two main buildings – in my day ‘The Main Block’ and ‘The Art Block’, were the original school buildings – formerly Georgetown Girl’s School built in 1905 and Georgetown Boy’s School built in 1907. These subsequently became Georgetown Secondary Modern School, with the ‘Main Block’ being the the Boys and girls school, now joined by a corridor whilst the ‘Art Block’ was Georgetown Infants School.
There was also a wooden building, dating from the days when Georgetown was a Secondary Modern, known in my day as ‘The Annexe’, housing the metalwork workshop and the domestic science room on the ground floor, and the chemistry/biology lab and the physics lab on the first floor. There were also two ‘huts’ – one housing the language lab, and one the woodwork workshop.
With the coming of the comprehensive system, Georgetown merged with Cyfarthfa Castle Grammar School to become Cyfarthfa High School. Georgetown served as the lower school – housing forms 1 and 2.
It is fair to say that, by the time I went to Georgetown in 1980, the school had seen better days. One of my lasting memories is seeing various types of mushrooms growing out of the walls in several of the classrooms….a new experience for me!!!!! There were also one or two classrooms with broken windows (health and safety wasn’t such an issue in those days). Granted, the windows were quite high up…but there was no escaping the arctic blasts of wind that would regularly infiltrate the classrooms and reach the parts that other breezes could not reach!!! To be fair, the school was on the verge of closure, so I’m sure material repairs were low on the list of priorities.
Going to Georgetown was a major upheaval for all of us. Up until then, we had all had the same classmates for many years, in my case through infants and junior school in Twynyrodyn, but going to Georgetown we would be mixing with people from OTHER SCHOOLS – Caedraw, Cyfarthfa, Gellideg and Heolgerrig…what’s more, we’d all be mixed up in different classes. It was unbelievably traumatic to think that we would be wrenched from our friends and thrown in with strangers, and we just knew that we would NEVER mix with these others. Within a few weeks however, new friendships were forged.
The other big difference was that, in Twyn School, we had one classroom and one teacher (the incomparable Eddie Humphries in my case). In Georgetown we would have different teachers for different subjects, and we would move from one classroom to another. What’s more, we were doing subjects we’d never even dreamt of – French, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Metalwork & Woodwork. It was all a great adventure.
For me though, the bane of my existence in Georgetown were the compulsory PE lessons, especially when we had to trudge up to the Wern Field in Ynysfach in all weathers. Even now, after all of these years, I come out in a cold sweat at the thought of it.
Another, and indeed happier memory springs to mind – I remember the whole school assembling in the playground to watch, on a quite a small TV screen, the launch of the first ever Space Shuttle – the Columbia, on 12 April 1981. I remember that there was great excitement, but what we could actually see of the launch on such a small screen, and outdoors, I can’t remember, but the fact that I can remember the occasion must mean it had special significance.
At the end of my first year at Cyfarthfa High School, everything changed. The new Cyfarthfa School at Cae Mari Dwn was ready, and from the next school year, the lower school would be moving to Cyfarthfa Castle. For me, and I think for most people, this was really exciting…..going to school in the famous Cyfarthfa Castle – so we all blithely left Georgetown, not even giving it a second thought – far more exciting prospects lay ahead.
During that summer holiday, the wooden Annexe was destroyed by fire, and within a few years, the rest of the school was demolished. Nothing remains of Georgetown School – except the memories, and they are, on the whole very pleasant ones. I think I was lucky to go there – albeit briefly.
Air Raid Precautions
80 years ago today…..
In Search of the Dowlais Railway
by Victoria Owens
When the Taff Vale Railway between Merthyr Tydfil and Cardiff received its authorisation in 1836, the Act gave the Railway Company leave to construct a branch to the tramroad at Dowlais. For various reasons, the Railway Company procrastinated over the work, with the result that the Dowlais Iron Company eventually took responsibility for making the Branch themselves. The terms of the 1849 Dowlais Railway Act authorised them to build not only the line, but also a passenger station, situated close both to the Iron Works’ lower entrance gate and the Merthyr-Abergavenny road.
Although the 1849 Act allowed the Iron Company five years to complete the railway, it was in fact ready in three. Financed by Sir John Guest, MP for Merthyr Tydfil, promoter of the TVR and soon to be sole partner in the Dowlais Iron Works, at a mile and sixty-eight chains in length, the steep gradient of its route up Twynyrodyn Hill meant that its lower part operated as an inclined plane. The Newcastle firm of R & A Hawthorn designed a stationary engine capable of drawing trains of up to six carriages in length and 33 tons in weight over s distance of 70 chains and 30 links, up the 1 in 12 slope. It had two horizontal cylinders of 18 inch diameter and 24 inch stroke and worked at 50 strokes per minute. The steam pressure was 30 lbs psi.
Viewing its erection in March 1851, a local newspaper drily enquired whether in ten years’ time, a ‘chronicler of local events’ might have reason to report the completion of a notional line ‘from Dowlais to the extreme point of Anglesey.’
Modest it might be, but at the Dowlais Railway’s official opening in August 1851, Royalty graced the ceremony. Three days before the event, just as Sir John and his wife Charlotte were about the set off on a carriage drive, the horse-omnibus drew up outside their home, Dowlais House, bringing Charlotte’s cousin Henry Layard, known as ‘Layard of Nineveh’ on the strength of his recent archaeological discoveries in Assyria, and with him, his friend Nawab Ekbaled Dowleh, whom the newspapers called the ‘ex-King of Oude.’
With the help of Works Manager John Evans, Charlotte organised every stage in the celebration, from welcoming a party of Taff Vale Directors who had travelled down from Cardiff for the occasion, to pairing up her ten children to walk in the procession: ‘viz. Ivor and Maria; Merthyr bach and Katherine; Montague and Enid; Geraint [Augustus] and Constance; Arthur and little Blanche.’ Flanked, probably as much for show as for protection, by the local police, they made their way to the station, decked with greenery for the occasion, with the school-children and company agents following. The ‘trade of Merthyr and Dowlais’ joined them along the way, all to the accompaniment of music from the combined bands of Cyfarthfa and Dowlais.
From Dowlais station, the passengers travelled to the top of the incline where their locomotive was uncoupled. Messrs. Hawthorn’s engine lowered the carriages down the slope, and the intrepid travellers made their way on to Merthyr. Some of them chose to continue by TVR to Abercynon, but the Guests and their visitors preferred to return to Dowlais.
Later in the day, a ‘small party comprising about five hundred ladies and gentlemen’ enjoyed a sumptuous meal at the Iron company’s Ivor Works, to be followed by speeches and dancing. Sir John, whose health was none too good, left the festivities early but Charlotte remained on hand to propose the healths the Directors of the Taff Vale railway and to open the dancing with Rhondda coal owner David William James as her partner. With Layard as his interpreter, the Nawab set the seal upon the day’s pleasures by expressing his delight at the hospitality that he had received in Dowlais and asserting that he had never enjoyed himself so much as he had during his ‘brief sojourn’ in Wales.
Although Sir John envisaged the Dowlais Branch primarily as a mineral line, he seems to have been perfectly happy with the requirement that it should also accommodate passenger traffic. Records indicate that over 1853,it came in for usage by 755 first class, 1884 second class and 7253 third class passengers but, sad to say, disaster struck at the end of the year. December 1853 witnessed an ugly accident when a passenger carriage over-ran the scotches to hurtle down the Incline unchecked and two passengers lost their lives, with five more suffering serious injuries. Officially speaking, passenger traffic on the railway ceased in 1854.
Unofficially, as Merthyr Tydfil writer Leo Davies would explain, it was usually possible – given a combination of unscrupulousness and agility- to obtain a lift. In an article of 1996, he described the whole unorthodox procedure in graphic detail. Access was obtained via the wingwall of a bridge and through some railings. The sound of the hawser gave advance warning of the approach of a train on the incline – ‘four ballast trucks, each half-filled with sand.’ Travelling typically at ‘a nice, sedate trotting pace’ there was evidently ample scope for the non-paying passenger to grasp the outside rim of the buffer, and ‘swing both legs up and around the buffer spring housing.’
The Dowlais Railway closed finally in 1930 and the trackbed would be filled in sixteen or so year later, over 1946-7. In the 1990s, when Leo Davies reminisced about the ‘Inky’ as he fondly calls it, the ‘straight, green, grass grown strip of land’ ascending Twynyrodyn Hill remained visible. Perhaps, with the eye of knowledge or faith it remains so. Admittedly, former pupils of Twynyrodyn School remember the old line’s route, but without local knowledge it is not easy to trace. Only a few yards of broad green path survive to mark the site – perhaps – of the old trackbed and the name ‘Incline Top’ given to a hamlet at the edge of a plateau of rough ground extending towards Dowlais and its great Ironworks commemorate the location of Sir John Guest’s last great enterprise.
Fitting of Gas Masks
Following on from the last couple of posts, even though war was not declared until 3 September 1939, the threat of war had been hanging over everyone since the previous year.
As early as January 1939, the government were supplying the population with gas-masks as can be seen in the article below, courtesy of Mike Donovan, which appeared in the Merthyr Express on 28 January 1939.
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….
Josh Powell – A Tribute
In September this year, Merthyr lost one of its most esteemed historians, and indeed one of its best known and most respected citizens, when Josh Powell passed away at the age of 97. With the blessing of his family, and with thanks to his grandson David who provided the following narrative, I would like to pay tribute to this great man.
Josh was born on 1 May 1921 at Inspector’s House, Cwmbargoed to George and Selina Powell. His mother cared for her two younger sisters and brother, whilst his father was employed as a waterman by the Dowlais Iron Company.
Josh was named after his grandfather, Joshua Owens, a farm labourer who moved his family to Cwmbargoed from Gladestry in Radnorshire. Whilst many of the children in Cwmbargoed went down the Bogey Road to Twynyrodyn School, his house was to the north of the railway line and in the Dowlais ward, so he had to attend the famous Dowlais Central School.
In 1935, Josh passed his scholarship even though he had to miss some academic years due to ill health. He went on to study Latin, Welsh and chemistry. As he grew up and moved further up the school, examinations and reports became of vital importance but Josh still continued to play school rugby matches. In 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, he returned to sixth form to study Maths, Chemistry and Physics.
In 1940, Josh was called up for National Service before he could sit his Higher School Certificate exams. When he told his mother that he wanted to join the RAF, she was not willing. However, when he explained the alternatives, she reluctantly agreed and filled in the application form. He reported to RAF Uxbridge (No.1280653 AC2 J. Powell) in the May of that year.
He travelled with his friend Leslie Norris, from Merthyr Station to Uxbridge, but upon his transfer to RAF Norfolk, he caught Meningitis and was put under quarantine. Shortly after this illness, he was sent home back to Cwmbargoed on sick leave so he could rest.
Later, in 1941, Josh was transferred to Innsworth where he had to spend a lot of time in a tent (this put him off camping for the rest of his life!) Whilst he was there, he was able to go on weekend leaves and that’s when he met his future wife Nancy. On 2 January 1943, Josh and Nancy were married in Disgwylfa Chapel, Merthyr Vale. However, there was no honeymoon and they spent the weekend in Cwmbargoed before they travelled back to Gosport Camp where they lived in a haunted house. It was said that when Josh and Nancy left their house, the radio switched on and the doors swung open!
During this time, Josh became a Maths lecturer for airmen going to leave the RAF for new careers and completed his Inter BSC in Maths and Geography.
After his time in the RAF, Josh decided he wanted to embark upon a teaching career. He was demobbed on 9 April 1946; however, he wasn’t able to start Cardiff Teacher Training College until the September so he needed to find a job for five months. Josh joined a large gang of navvies digging and fitting trenches to connect the Bargoed gasworks to the ones at the bottom of Town and the Bont, due to lack of coal. Fortunately for Josh time flew by and as the front trench neared Cwmbargoed, he had finished work as a navvy and started college, to study Maths and Geography. When he passed his studies, he went on to work as a fully qualified teacher at a school in Nailsea as a Maths and Games teacher and then at Bromyard.
In 1953, Josh went to work at Troedyrhiw Secondary Modern as a Science teacher. He was more than pleased when he was allowed to take over the school soccer team, and he became chairman of the Merthyr League in 1957. His love for sport, and in particular school boy football, led him to become Secretary of Merthyr Schools FA in 1966; Chairman of Glamorgan Schools FA in 1971 and Chairman of Welsh Schools FA in 1973.
In 1967, Josh started teaching at the newly-opened Afon Taf School and whilst there he had set up a project to record the weather in Cwmbargoed for the MET Office. Every morning before breakfast and after school each evening, Josh recorded the wind, the cloud and the temperature in a log book. He was paid a small salary but the money didn’t matter to him, he wanted to get a record of the highest temperature. He absolutely loved recording the weather (Afon Taf even gave him a weather station, situated on the roof of the school!).
In 1981, Josh retired from Afon Taf after 33 years of teaching and knew he had lots of time on his hands. During this time, Josh became secretary of Zion Welsh Baptist Church in Merthyr Tydfil, a church he was part of for 48 years. Josh visited so many chapels and churches in the borough, as a lay preacher, a member of the congregation and to talk at Prayer meetings and Sisterhood fellowship.
Josh’s love of the past led him to joining and becoming a founder member of the Merthyr Tydfil Historical Society and he wrote entries for the publication, Merthyr Historian, and published several books including: ‘Living in the Clouds’, ‘All Change’ and ‘Gone But Not Forgotten’.
Apart from all this, Josh cherished his family – six children, 13 grand-children and 10 great-grandchildren.
Josh was a font of knowledge, always willing to help anyone with his extensive knowledge of local history, and as Carolyn Jacob once remarked, no-one had a bad word to say about him. He will be sorely missed.
Merthyr Memories: Twynyrodyn School
In the first of what I hope will be a new regular series of articles, I share my memories of Twynyrodyn School.
Whenever I drive along Primrose Hill in Twynyrodyn, and pass the site of the old Twynyrodyn School, I always feel a pang of regret. Regret that the old school is gone, and regret that I didn’t really appreciate it more when I was there. I attended ‘Twyn’ School for four years in the late 1970’s, and now, in retrospect I realise what an impact it made on my life.
Twynyrodyn Junior School was an old school (I have since found out it was built in 1875), and was originally two schools – a boy’s school and a girl’s school, and these two ‘wings’ were separated by the central hall (in days gone by this was apparently the ‘infants’ school). The corridors were tall and echoing and tiled throughout, and in the old boy’s school wing were a flight of stone steps, leading to three upper classrooms, that had been worn down over the course of decades by the feet of thousands of children and staff going to and from their classes.
The classrooms were large and airy, lit by tall gothic windows. In my classroom (in the old boy’s wing, and incidentally the same classroom where my grandfather was pupil in the 1910’s on ’20’s) we had old individual desks with lifting lids and (now redundant) inkwells, all arranged in straight lines facing the door, with the blackboard to one side on an easel. Along the one wall were two very large, old cupboards containing text-books, some of which I am convinced hadn’t been looked at for decades. The walls of the classroom were lined with educational posters, and I remember vividly that the poster next to my desk depicted British Castles, and I spent many hours staring at that poster and dreaming of visiting all of the castles shown….I am getting there slowly!!!!!
In my day, the staff consisted of nine teachers and the headmaster, Mr Ken Adams-Morgan – red-faced, eyebrows with a personality all of their own, and feared by all!!!! I have since realised of course, that he was a very good and a very fair headmaster, not to mention a fine musician, and the school ran like clockwork under his leadership. The teachers were: Miss Davies, Mrs Phillips, Mrs Evans, Mrs Thomas and Mr Fitzgerald over in the old girl’s school (or over the other side as we used to say); and on ‘our side’: Mr Price, another Mrs Phillips, Mr Morgan, and last but by no means least, my own teacher – Mr Humphries.
I was taught by Mr Eddie Humphries for the whole time I was at Twyn School. Mr Humphries was a big man – in every sense of the word. He was a teacher of the ‘old school’, a strict disciplinarian, and focusing very much on ‘the Three R’s’. English and Maths were drilled in to us on a daily basis, with spot tests on spelling and times-tables. I didn’t mind the spelling tests – I was usually very good with those, but the times-tables struck fear into my heart. Anything mathematical still brings me out in a cold sweat. Mr Humphries had a cane hanging behind his desk, and in the four years I was in his class, I never recall him using it – the fact that it was there was enough!!!!
The above makes it sound as if Mr Humphries was a fearsome tyrant. He wasn’t. Every one of us respected him, and I know everyone I speak to today who had the privilege of being taught by him, still remembers him fondly. I know that Eddie Humphries had a profound effect on my life. Without doubt he was the biggest influence in my life, and made me the person I am today – for that I will always be grateful. If I can try to live by the standards he instilled in us all, and if I can be half the man he was, I will count myself a very lucky person.
I’m sure children today would think that the above description of school is from a totally bygone age, but it is in fact just 40 years ago. Schools and the process of teaching have totally changed – but are these changes for the better?
Twynyrodyn School is gone now. It closed in 2003 and amalgamated with the infants school, and the building was demolished in 2008, but it still holds a very special place in my memories.
If anyone has any Merthyr related memories that they would like to share, please get in touch. They can be about any subject as long they are connected with Merthyr.