According to Michael Foot's biography Nye Bevan had a Radnorshire mother. In reality Phoebe Protheroe was born in Tredegar. Her people were from Glasbury though, that part of the parish south of the Wye purloined by Brecknockshire in 1832. Clearly Bevan's family can't have approved that act of theft.
George Lansbury actually made it to the leadership of the Labour Party and he certainly had a Radnorian mother, she was from Clyro. Lansbury was proud of his Radnorshire roots, he was also the grandfather of actress Angela Lansbury and of Oliver Postgate - creator of the Clangers.
Perhaps our readers would like to guess at the identity of a third noted left-wing politician with local connections:
1. Born in Merthyr in 1894, his mother, Emily Lewis, came from the Radnorshire village of Penybont.
2. Imprisoned in 1917 for sedition.
3. Came within 3000 votes of winning Rhondda East for the Communist Party.
4. Took part in the 1916 Easter Rising.
5. General Secretary of the NUM from 1946 to 1959.
You should have got it by now, otherwise click here for the answer.
Here's a face that wouldn't look out of place perusing the stock pens at Llanelwedd, although in reality he found fortune in the Orient rather than the hills of Radnorshire.
It's a paradox that although Welsh was in rapid retreat across the Radnorshire countryside during the late 18C and early 19C, this only seems to have inspired some of the county's sons to take a deeper interest in the language and its antiquities. For example the autodidact William Probert of Painscastle translated Y Gododdin and Edward Davies of Llanfaredd's researches earned him the sobriquet Celtic Davies. Another who can be added to the list of the Welsh Language's Radnorian well-wishers was the man pictured, Thomas Phillips (1760-1851)
Although Phillips was born within the sound of Bow Bells, he came from a Nantmel family and spent part of his childhood in the county. Having made a fortune in India and consolidated it with the purchase of a profitable estate in the Windward Islands, he returned to London and devoted himself to educational philanthropy.
Phillips gave over 22000 books to St David's College, Lampeter, endowing a chair of natural science at the college. He also planned to endow a chair of Welsh but the Anglican hierarchy were having none of it. Suitably rebuffed Phillips and his Radnorian friend John Jones of Cefnfaes planned to open their own Welsh Educational Institution in Rhayader. Problems purchasing suitable land saw them transfer the project to Llandovery, leading to the opening of the College on St David's Day 1848. Phillips provided £4666 and 7000 books towards the new institution, in his will he would leave a further £12000. Phillips and Jones stipulated that the Welsh language be taught at the college and that, for some portion of the day, it should be the only medium of communication and instruction. A man ahead of his time.
It's plain enough from the Laws of Hywel that slavery existed in medieval Wales. It would be strange if it hadn't since it was an institution that was found in nearly every human society, from the Maoris of New Zealand to the Aleuts of Alaska.
For most of us slavery means the chattel slavery found in North America and the Caribbean - a somewhat Eurocentric outlook on such a universal and continuing phenomenon - and as S4C have gone to some trouble to point out the Welsh played a part in all of this. How else could John Henricus, for example, a runaway slave from New York in 1727, be described as speaking very good English and the Welsh dialect. Incidentally runaway bond servants were just as numerous as runaway slaves and pursued with equal vigour, they sometimes ran away together.
A rare exception to those who saw slavery as just a normal part of life was a Pennsylvania Quaker named Cadwalader Morgan, who, in 1696, after much pondering over the practicalities of owning a slave, decided that he had "no freedom to buy or take any of them upon any account." He took his message to the Quaker's Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, which, although it rejected the call to forbid slavery, did agree that Friends "be careful not to encourage the bringing in of any more Negroes."
Cadwalader Morgan had emigrated to Pennsylvania from Merionethshire but, as Charles Browning's Welsh Settlement of Pennsylvania points out, his will of 1711 shows him to have been the son of James Morgan from the township of Faenor in Nantmel parish. Cadwalader, who had married into a Merionethshire Quaker family, migrated to Pennsylvania in 1683. His parents, three brothers and a sister sailed out to America in 1691; both father and mother died on the voyage.
It's interesting that Morgan based his opposition to slavery on practicalities rather than principle - he felt that owning a slave could have a negative moral impact on the owner and his household. The abolitionists of 19C America also had to face practical concerns; how exactly could one emancipate what, in some states, amounted to 40% of the population without causing economic and social chaos. In the end the matter was decided on the battlefield, with one soldier dying for every six slaves freed.
Live long enough and perhaps you'll achieve a whit of fame. This is what happened to Evan Edwards of Torquay, described in the Edwardian press as the oldest Baptist minister in the world. Born in Nantmel in February 1815, Edwards died just a few weeks before his 100th birthday in January 1914. At the time of his death he had been a Baptist minister in Somerset and Devon for more than 80 years and was one of the last witnesses to the preaching of such men as John Elias and Christmas Evans.
I'm more interested in his brief comment about the Nantmel of his youth and Dolau Baptist chapel:
"Cymraeg oedd iaith addoliad yn y capel ac yr aelwyd foreu a hwyr, ond ymledai y Saesneg i Faesyfed a mwy cyfarwydd oedd y plant yn y Saesneg"
"Welsh was the language of worship in the chapel and at home morn and night, but English had spread to Radnorshire and the children were more familiar with English."
Now this confirms that Ffransis Payne had the right idea when he wrote that Dolau Chapel turned to English around 1840. It also shows how unreliable - in Radnorshire at least - it is to rely on the language of Anglican church services to estimate the date of language shift. Nantmel parish church turned to English in 1755* and this very large parish (8 miles by 5) is consequently shown as thoroughly English on the published maps that illustrate language shift in Wales. Before the 1891 census such maps are mostly based on Anglican services. I tend to think the dropping of Welsh services in the churches marked the disappearance of the last generation of monoglots rather than the demise of all local Welsh speakers as the maps assume.
Evan Edwards' family lived on the eastern side of the parish and it's a pity that no-one thought to ask him in greater detail about the linguistic ins-and-outs of his youth. The 19C Welsh language press was too busy trumpeting what a thoroughly pagan, immoral and stupid lot the Radnorians were to bother over-much about reporting on their recent history. Even the Western Mail joined in the fun saying that the county's inhabitants lived in an "intellectual twilight, so inactive that a game of football would be a godsend to them."
* Nantmel is said to have had a monthly Welsh language service until 1807 but this has escaped the attention of the mappers.
Mr Eric Ogden, Liverpool, West Darby: Is the Minister aware that the Falkland Islanders who have
been so tragically killed or injured are personally known to the hon.
Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Shersby) and myself and that we are proud to
call them our friends? Mrs. Doreen Bonner was a fine and courageous
lady. She was a third generation kelper, who was much respected and will
be missed by everyone who knew her. Mrs. Susan Whitley was a lovely and
lively lady of good Welsh parentage, newly married to an excellent
young husband. She was a teacher who was dedicated to the children and
other people of the islands.
Susan Whitley was killed by a missile, probably fired by HMS Avenger, during the final assault on Port Stanley. Like her husband - the islands' vet who had spent the occupation cutting Argentinian communication wires with his gelding tool and was subsequently awarded the MBE - Susan seems to have taken a defiant stance towards the invasion, reportedly refusing to dive for cover during the shelling.
Older Radnorians will remember Susan by her maiden surname of Giles and that she was born in Llandrindod and educated at the town's Grammar school. Hardly forgotten, either in Llandrindod or the Falklands where she was a home economics teacher at the islands' Senior School, charitable trust was set up in her name and an annual arts and crafts exhibition for Falklands schoolchildren continues to be held in her memory.
Susan Whitely is buried on Sea Lion Island, the most southerly inhabited island in the Falklands.
The surname Burgoyne is a reminder that to the south and east of Radnorshire lay districts which once had a decidedly French character - the name means a native of Bourgogne or Burgendy. In Radnorshire, at least, it was often spelt Burgwyn or, as in the case of young Thomas of the Gobe* farm christened at Gladestry parish church on 17th June 1827, Burgwynne.
By the time Thomas reached Australia in 1849 he had a young wife, a sound knowledge of all aspects of the building trade - a speciality of his family - and was spelling his name as Burgoyne. You can read more about him in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, here. To this we can only add that once, when confronted by a party of aborigine warriors, he impressed upon them the superiority of European weaponry by shooting their dog. Thomas led his Independent (Country) Party in the South Australian assembly for 30 years, attributing his eventual defeat at the age of 88 to the fact that many hundreds of itinerant workers, engaged in building a railway, were on the electoral register.
John Evans, originally of Esgair Rhiw, Nantmel (1867-1958) and later a Saskatchewan politician and member of the Canadian House of Commons between 1921 and 1930, was a radical, anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist voice who eventually left the Progressive Party to join the socialist CCF.
Why given this background was Evans accused of being a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and why does his comment in the Canadian Commons that the Klan's members were "not in any way what one might call hot-headed and they are absolutely against any violent or unconstitutional way of doings things" get quoted in various histories of racism in Canada?
It comes as a surprise to learn that the Klan was estimated to have 25,000 members in Saskatchewan in the late 1920s, this in a province with less than a million inhabitants. The prairie Klan had only the most tenuous links with its American progenitor, although it adopted the same regalia and cross-burning antics. It exploited fears about East European immigration and the influence of the Roman Catholic church in some of the province's public schools. If John Evans sought to ride the Klan tiger - and he would have known of another popular, secretive, oath-bound society from his native parish, the Rebeccaites of Radnorshire - his political enemies rode it better; Evans' defeat in the 1930 General Election being put down to Klan backing for his Conservative opponent.
This is Clem Edwards, the Knighton born trade unionist, journalist, barrister and politician, pictured at the age of 25 in 1894. By which time he had already:
Assisted Ben Tillett in founding the Tea Operatives and General Labourers Union.
As Assistant Secretary of the Dockers Union played a leading role in the London Dock Strike of 1889.
As General Secretary of the newly formed Federation of Carrying Trades built up a union with 130,000 members.
Organised the great Hyde Park rally of female laundry workers in 1891.
Masterminded the Progressive Party's clean sweep of the East End in the London County Council elections of 1892.
As Labour Editor of the Sun newspaper organised the fund which raised £67000 (around £3 million in modern terms) for the striking miners of Wales and the English Midlands in 1893.
Of course in later years Edwards, always a conciliator, opposed the Leninists and those who sought to use the trade union movement for their own more revolutionary ends. Sylvia Pankhurst called him "the notorious anti-socialist." Perhaps this is the reason his contribution to the New Unionism has been largely ignored. Personally I would knock down the monument in New Radnor to "Radnorshire's... most distinguished son" and replace it with a statue of Clem Edwards. Not much chance of that though, he didn't even get a mention in the recently published history of his home town.
I see 1960s Newbridge-on-Wye racing driver Liz Jones's Mini is currently for sale at £25K. The snap shows Liz, or Rosemary as she was known locally, at the Paris start of the 1963 Monte Carlo Rally, accompanied by co-driver Daphne Freeman..
As far as I can tell Liz competed in the Monte Carlo rally on three occasions, in 1963 as above in car 92, in 1964 starting from Minsk with Shelagh Aldersmith in car 27, and again from Minsk in 1965 in car 89 with Tish Ozanne. On each occasion in an Austin Mini and all non-finishing.
While the Anglicans continue to agonize over female bishops, Quaker women like Mary Pennell were leading congregations and preaching on both sides of the Atlantic some 300 years ago. Born Mary Morgan in the parish of Nantmel in 1678, she migrated to Pennsylvania at the age of sixteen, presumably with her brothers John and Hugh Morgan. In 1703 Mary married and in 1722, by which time she had had six children, "became a Quaker Minister and traveled through the
eastern states, England, Ireland and on the Continent."
Mary Pennell left a sister Amy (1689-1762) back home in Radnorshire who had married a farmer from a non-Quaker background called John Griffith. In 1726 a visitor from Pennsylvania inspired Amy's fourteen year old son John to travel out to the colony accompanied, at his father's insistence, by an older brother Thomas and their eight year old sister Martha. In time they would be joined by two other sisters Mary and Sarah.
The Quaker congregation at Talcoed, Nantmel provided the following certificate to accompany the young adventurers:
"To the Monthly Meeting or Quarterly Meetings of Friends and Brethren
in the Province of Pensilvania in America but more particularly to the Monthly
Meeting of Friends at Abington in the Sd. Province --- whereas three children
Thomas Griffith about 18 years of age and John Griffith his brother about 14 years of age and Martha Griffith their sister about 8 years of age, all born
in
the Parish of Nantmeal and County of Radnor in South Wales, Being the Sons and
Daughter of John Griffith and Amy his wife, inhabitants and Land holders in the
Parish and County aforesaid, are by the order and free consent of their sd
parents intending in a few days to go aboard a Ship Belonging to the Port of
Bristol, Whereof Edward Foy is Captain, In order to Sail in Sd Ship (if God
permit) to the City of Philadelphia in the Sd. Province. There to be delivered
to their uncles, John Morgan, Hugh Morgan or either of them or to Mary the wife
of John Pennell who is their Mother's sister, who all of them if living are
settled inhabitants in this Sd. Province to the intent that they the Sd. John
Morgan, Hugh Morgan and Mary their sister may take care of them and dispose of
them as they shall think best and in case their relations doe perform what is
desired and hoped for by the Sd. parents. --We then the persons hereunder
named who are members of the Meeting which the Sd. parents belong by order of
our Monthly Meeting held at Talcoed the 10th instant doe desire that the Sd.
three children or either of them may be disposed of according as Friends of the
Sd. Meeting of Abington shall think most expedient, and as to their Sd.
children's descent we give you to understand that their Parents are Honest
Friends having each of them a Public Testimony for the Truth wherewith Friends
have Unity; and we further Desire (as well on the behalf of the Sd. Children
who are hopeful as also for their parents and their aged Grandmother's sake who
is an Honest Woman, namely Sarah Rees) that you will as need shall require,
advise or assist the Sd. children in Order that they may be settled to Honest
Friends,further and we, according to our power shall be willing to answer what
you or any of our Brethrenvshall in Love desire of us who are your Loving
Friends. Signed at and by Order of our MonthlyMeeting at Talcoed the 10th of
the 4th month 1726"
This younger John Griffith (1713-1776) also became a Quaker minister eventually settling in Chelmsford, Essex. His journal published in both England and Philadelphia is available here.
It's clear from reading about these Radnorshire Quakers that they were at home with the English language and that marriage to fellow Friends was more important to them than any national or regional loyalty. They were also better educated than others of their class, the small farmers, weavers etc. Take a look at the signature of John Griffith's sister-in-law Alice Pugh, a farmer's wife from Llandegley. At a time when many would have made a mark or signed with a scrawl it has the look of a hand well used to using a pen:
This North Korean stamp commemorates the destruction of the General Sherman, a heavily armed American merchant ship, in 1866. Among those executed after escaping from the burning vessel was a Protestant missionary, Robert Jermain Thomas, who had been engaged as an interpreter.
Mr Thomas, he was born in Rhayader in 1839, is still remembered by Korea's nine million Protestants and many come to Wales to visit sites associated with his life. This blog has more information.
The parishes east of Presteigne seem to provide fertile ground for the more radical religious movements of the day. After all the Lollard John Oldcastle was from Almeley and Ffransis Payne has some interesting things to say about the Quakers of the area, who "in comparison to whom the driest and least joyful members of our most narrow puritan sects would appear like cheerful pagans."
It was to this district that a young fellow from the Ysfa, Llewellyn Mantle of Crugnant, made his way in the 1820s. Here he found work as a waggoner and in 1835 married a local girl, Kitty Watkins, in Byton parish church. In 1842 the couple were converted by the latest missionaries to invade the district and quickly determined to join their prophet Joseph Smith and his Latter-Day Saints in Nauvoo Illinois. You can read about Llewellyn's subsequent adventures here. The Mantles were in Nauvoo when Smith was murdered, they migrated west, crossing the frozen Mississippi into Iowa. Having lost his sight in 1848 Llewellyn walked the thousand miles to Salt Lake City, arriving there in the autumn of 1851. He died in Utah in 1901, aged 83.
Its easy to forget just how radical a group the Mormons were, with their polygamy - Llewellyn took a second wife in 1870, a Swiss woman called Margaret Egg - and violent confrontations with their neighbours such as the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857. Indeed the Mantles' daughter Sarah married the son of the legendary gunfighter Porter Rockwell, Mormondom's "destroying angel."
The migration of Radnorshire Quakers and Baptists, and indeed Anglicans, to Pennsylvania and Delaware in the 1680s is well-known. Perhaps the biggest Welsh, and no doubt Radnorian, contribution to the American gene-pool is less remarked upon - the migration of individuals as indentured servants to the Carolinas and other southern states. For example in the 1790s more than 10% of the free population of the Carolinas had typically Welsh surnames. It's why a name like Wynette Pugh (AKA Tammy Wynette) raises no eyebrows in Mississippi.
An even less familiar migration is that of families from North Radnorshire (mainly the parishes of Llanbadarn Fynydd, Llananno, Bugeildy and Llanbister) to Green County in Wisconsin - an area better known today for its Swiss cheesemakers. Together with neighbours from Kerry and Llandinam in Montgomeryshire and Betws-y-Crwyn in Shropshire, this migration, which commenced in 1844 and lasted until 1881, was centered around what is rather inaccurately called the English Settlement in the township of Albany.
A local historian from Wisconsin has done a great deal to rescue the history of these Welsh pioneers, publishing articles and booklets, organizing a reunion and seeing the settlement recognized as an official historic site. Mrs Bagley estimates that the 77 Welsh families who moved to Green County would have comprised more than 700 individuals in the first generation. These settlers, in addition to those with the usual Welsh surnames, had names familiar to Mid-Walians - Ingram, Bubb, Hamer, Layton, Bufton, Gravenor, Smout, Sheen, Kinsey, Jarman and a good many Swancutts*. Having initially bought land - it had been taken by the US governemt from the Ho-Chunk tribe - at $1.25 an acre, by the 1870s the Welsh families owned over 6000 acres, around half the farmland in the township of Albany. Large families were the order of the day, Margaret Davies had nine children, Kezia Hughes eleven, Mary Ann Hamer nine, Mary Swancutt nine and Mary Jarman fourteen. You can find photographs of some of these early settlers and their offspring here.
Here are a selection Radnorshire weddings in Green County: Willaim Hope and Mary Lloyd (1846); Edward Price and Elizabeth Swancutt (1848); James Trow and Caroline Price (1850); Aaron Jones and Eliza Edmonds (1852); Ellen Griffith and Moses Ingram (1854); Jane Gravenor and George Jones (1856); William Francis and Jane Swancutt (1857); John Swancutt and Ann Lloyd (1858); Thomas Lewis and Margaret Jones (1860); Benjamin Swancutt and Emma Francis (1860); Evan Layton and Eliza Francis (1864); James Francis and Sarah Griffith (1864); John Jones and Emma Pryce (1868); Thomas Bufton and Ellen Jones (1870); Richard Williams and Mary Kinsey (1878)
* According to Mr Howse cider was called swancut in the Radnorshire argot.
It's something of a mystery, at least to me, but every one of the fifteen Treasurers of the United States appointed since 1949 has been a woman, indeed five of the last six have been Latinas. It must be a quaint custom in a far off country of which we know less than we think.
To avoid any misunderstanding, the Treasurer is not responsible for the corruption and on-going destruction of western capitalism. No, that would be the similarly named but quite separate Secretary of the Treasury. But still it's an important role and was even more so in 1789 when George Washington appointed the son of an old friend to the post. The son was Samuel Meredith and his father, Washington's friend, was one Reese Meredith, born in Llandegley in 1708. You can read about Reese and his connections here.
To listen to some accounts you'd think Radnorshire was a remote backwater which the speaker had personally discovered. The truth is that the county has been as much at the centre of things as anywhere else. Examine the will of some humble fellow who died 300 years ago and one shouldn't be too surprised to find a reference like this:
Just as modern day censuses tend to exaggerate the strength of the Welsh language in Radnorshire, those of the late 19C and early 20C probably exaggerate its weakness, especially in the west of the county. The rapid process of language shift - 19C observers describe the language retreating 20 miles in a lifetime - can surely be best explained by a deliberate rejection on the part of the local community. The situation in Radnorshire may well have echoed that described by a witness who lived through a similar period of rapid language shift in Limerick in Ireland: "the growing public feeling that Irish was a dying language, a mark of a degraded people who were not 'decent'
- all this combined to produce a new people who from youth were pledged
to speak no Irish. And so in West Limerick you had many who persisted
in trying to speak a broken English and never again uttered a word in
the old tongue they knew so well."
Given such attitudes it comes as a welcome surprise to come across a local Crossgates/Penybont family who actually seem to have passed on a knowledge of Welsh in the late 19C, when all around them were denying any connection with the native tongue.
Edward Stephens, an agricultural labourer, and his wife Elizabeth were born in Nantmel parish in the 1790s - a time and a place where you would expect them to have a knowledge of both languages. By the time of the 1841 Census they were living at the Cummey, a place in Llanddewi Ystradenni parish, but nearer to the Gwystre Inn than the Walsh Arms. By 1851 Edward has died and Elizabeth and her sons have moved to the Breconshire iron town of Beaufort, where in 1864 the youngest son, Hugh, marries a local girl called Ann Williams. Perhaps it is Ann who is responsible for the subsequent linguistic history of the family.
Hugh and Ann have returned to Radnorshire by 1871 with their children Thomas and Sarah - both born in Beaufort. Two more children, Elizabeth and Hugh jnr would be born in Llanddewi and Penybont respectively. At first Hugh snr is as an agricultural labourer, later working as a plumber and glazier.
The first language information is provided by the 1891 census. The Stephens family were then living in the part of Llandegley parish which fell under the Kington Union and did not bother itself with such details. In 1901 Thomas and Sarah have married but Hugh, his wife and two younger children are all recorded as being able to speak Welsh.
Ann Stephens died in 1903, her husband in 1905, but the 1911 Census identifies all of their children, living in and around the Penybont area. Thomas and Hugh have married English speaking wives but are still recorded as being able to speak Welsh themselves. Elizabeth and Sarah, both dressmakers, are living together - Elizabeth's English-speaking husband, a coachman, was away, lodging in Garth Road, Builth. Both Elizabeth and Sarah are recorded as being able to speak Welsh, as is Elizabeth's five year old son - the child of a Llanddewi born mother who has never lived outside the county.
If we look at this through modern-day eyes this example of language survival within a family must seem commonplace. But in early 20C Penybont? Without the benefit of Welsh medium education or S4C and in the face of an animus against the language which had seen it abandoned on hearths across the county. No, this family's persistence is surely quite remarkable.
"What about motor racing
pioneer Rosemary Jones from Newbridge on Wye," the blog comment asked. "She raced in the Monte
Carlo in a Mini in the early 60s?"
The truth is I'd never heard of this Rosemary Jones and a check of some of the old entry lists for the Monte didn't help either. But then people I spoke to agreed, "Rosemary Jones? Oh she was a daughter for Tom Jones from the garage in Newbridge. Took part in the Monte Carlo rally. you know"
Well, I didn't know but then someone mentioned the fact that Rosemary was a dog-breeder and a possibility dawned, did she actually race as Elizabeth Jones (AKA Liz Jones) and did she drive a Mini-Cooper with the registration number LIZ 1?
Now this Liz Jones wasn't a run-of-the-mill club driver, along with her rivals Christabel Carlisle and Anita Taylor, she was one of the fastest saloon car racers in the country in the early Sixties, and I don't mean one of the fastest female racers either.
The you tube clip below is well worth watching for some elegant drifting from Jim Clark, but around the 40 second mark we get to see Liz burning up the track:
Mainly a track racer Liz certainly did enter the Monte Carlo rally. In the 1964 event she took the rather unusual option of starting from behind the Iron Curtain in the Belorussian city of Minsk.
Elizabeth was one of the top half-dozen or so graduates from the Cooper Driving School entitled to an occasional outing in the school's FJ car during the 1960 season, she also competed in an Austin Healey 3000. From 1962 through to 1964 Ms Jones - actually by this time she was Mrs Degerdon - drove Mini-Coopers, first for the Downton Engineering and then the Alexander Engineering teams. Anyone who is interested can check out her record in the British Saloon Car Championship for those years here. Ms Jones also competed in the RAC Rally; the 1963 Tour de France and the 1964 24 hour race at Spa. A career highlight must have come in the 1963 Brands Hatch 6 Hour race where she finished 2nd in class, Her co-pilot was one Timo Mäkinen but Liz was actually the lead driver in that race.
So it seems that Rosemary Jones - Forgotten Radnorian - was also the Liz Jones who had quite a motor-racing career before dropping out of the sport in the mid-Sixties. In later life as Mrs Degerdon she became a well-known but, if the forums are anything to go by, very controversial breeder of dogs - with talk of deportation from the United States amidst charges of animal cruelty.
Elizabeth Rosemary Degerdon, born 1930, died in 2010, she is buried in Newbridge churchyard. Wyesiders who think they are related might wish to check out this site.
UPDATE: For those who are interested in genealogical matters Ms Jones's father Thomas Irfon Jones was a son for Daniel Jones of Penrhiwmoch, Llanafan and his wife Flora Thomas - she was born in the gold mining town of Ballarat, Australia and in the 1891 census was working as a schoolteacher in Abergwesyn. Ms Jones's mother was Annie Alice Jones, daughter of George W. Jones, a Newbridge butcher and wool dealer and his wife Elizabeth Lloyd.
After years of mainly Independent candidates, often elected unopposed, party politics is back with a bang in this Thursday's election of the Radnorshire members to Powys County Council. Of course this is nothing new, since in the late Victorian period even the humblest parish contest would have witnessed Tories and Liberals battling for supremacy.
It was perhaps this bitter party rivalry which saw Abel Thomas QC, the Liberal MP for East Carmarthenshire, representing a Radnorshire farmer in a paternity dispute before the Merthyr Tydfil magistrates in 1895. After all the farmer, let's call him Mr D, was a Liberal member of Radnorshire County Council, a Justice of the Peace and Chairman of the local Board of Guardians. No doubt party honour needed to be upheld.
Mary Ann, a farmer's daughter in her early 20s, had accused the councillor of fathering her illegitimate daughter. The case had already been thrown out in Builth but perhaps the Merthyr court would take the opportunity of avoiding any financial charge to their ratepayers, the girl and her child now living in that town.
The councillor, a married man aged 35, was accused of familiarities - witnesses confirmed that he had once lifted the girl on to the cratch and kissed her during a sheep washing - though some declared that Mary Ann had removed his pipe to facilitate this intrusion. On another occasion there had been a similar incident witnessed in Minton's shop. There were no witnesses, it was true, to the "familiarities" which had left her "enceinte." Mr D insisted that he was blameless and that his waggoner was the father of the child. Yes, he admitted, another paternity suit had recently been brought against him, it was opportunistic, and in the 25 years he had lived on his father's farm only two servants had left "in the family way." After six hours of such testimony it was the lack of any corroborative evidence which led the court to dismiss the case.
So was this a Victorian melodrama featuring a poor unfortunate and a rouge? Well perhaps, although within two years Mary Ann had indeed married Mr D's waggoner. They would go on to have 12 children together..
Incidentally Abel Thomas QC was involved in another case of shenanigans involving a prominent Radnorshire politician, see here.
The novel Gwen Penri - A Welsh Idyll published in London in 1899 - a tale of a Denbighshire banker's daughter attending college in Aberystwyth - can't have been a great success, indeed a reviewer in the Welsh newspaper Y Goluead complained that the author, who had migrated to Australia due to ill-health, must have forgotten everything he ever knew about Wales - if he knew anything in the first place!
So who was this Congregationalist minister and novelist with the Radnorian name of John Bufton? According to this site Bufton was born in Llandrindod and died in Hobart, Tasmania in 1911, but it is the pseudonym Brynithon which gives a clue to his actual identity. John was the son of James Bufton and his wife Mary Bowen, who at the time of the novelist's birth were farming Bryneithin in Llanbister parish.
Today Bufton is remembered for his 1905 opus Tasmanians in the Transvaal War, good copies of which sell for over £500. A book of interest, no doubt, to Tasmanians and those interested in Australian participation in the Second Boer War, the background to the film Breaker Morant.
"All is safely gathered in, except the rakings at Ty Gwyn"
Well that, according to the old people, was what the less respectful farm boys would sing at harvest festivals in Howey's Providence Baptist chapel. Nowadays Ty Gwyn, which is found on the backroad between Howey and Llandrindod, takes paying guests and has a website, but in 1841 it was home to a young lad called John Lewis, the five year old son of an elderly farmer and his much younger wife.
I first noticed John, a carpenter, in the 1901 census when he was lodging at 1 Springfield Cottage ... the return said he had been born at Ty Gwyn and that, unusually, he spoke both Welsh and English. He was a lodger at the home of his nephew James Lloyd, as he had been in 1891. Indeed John Lewis seems to have been something of a sitting lodger since he was still there in 1911, although by then his nephew's family had moved on. In all three census returns John's bilingualism was recorded.
The 1841 Census showed that both his parents were locals - from Llandrindod and Diserth - and in subsequent returns Builth, in 1861, was the furthest he'd strayed away from Radnorshire. In 1851 he'd been a farm servant at Brynhir, the neighbouring farm to Ty Gwyn, his father having died the previous year. In 1871 and 1881 he was living at Cwmhowey with his step-father, he never seems to have married.
I suppose John Lewis could have learnt Welsh when his mother and step-father opened a grocer's shop in Llanfihangel Fechan in Breconshire - they were there in 1861 - but I like to think that it was the language he spoke to his father (born in Llandrindod c1776) as a child at Ty Gwyn and that he was just too old-fashioned and guileless to pretend he couldn't. Llandrindod's very own Ned Maddrell* perhaps?
* Of course in John Lewis's day Llandrindod would have had other locally born people who could speak Welsh but they would have been returnees from the industrial south or the children of incomers.
Two subjects which seem to fascinate amateur historians are Jack the Ripper and the sinking of the Titanic. There are websites and forums examining those events in mind-boggling detail. Now, with the centenary of the sinking of the White Star flagship, the mainstream media has also gone overboard with numerous television programmes and books about the ill-fated liner.
The Western Mail's Lefi Gruffudd quite rightly complains about Welsh television's rather pathetic desire to join in this festival of remembrance while ignoring historical events of far more significance to Wales. Will Senghenydd, he asks, be remembered in 2013? Well perhaps not, but then Kate Winslet hasn't starred in a film about the Glamorgan mining tragedy.
If some of the Welsh connections to the Titanic story are ridiculous - according to the Western Mail the first class passengers ate off silverware made in Wales - at least Radnorshire can claim a more substantial link with the aftermath.
I wonder if the legal representative of the Dockers' Union and stout defender of the working class Clement Edwards took a particular pleasure in cross-examining Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon and his wife Lady Lucile at the Board of Trade Inquiry into the sinking of the doomed vessel. Through their links to the Lewis family - their father was a first cousin of George Cornewall Lewis - Cosmo's brother Henry had recently taken possession of Harpton Court near New Radnor, a locality that Edwards, the son of a Knighton draper,* knew well.
According to the popular press the lifeboat in which Duff-Gordon and his wife had escaped the Titanic was know as "the money boat." It was suggested that the crew had been bribed to get away from the sinking vessel rather than pick up survivors, even though there were just 12 occupants in the 40 seater craft. Despite some obvious inconsistencies in their evidence highlighted by Edwards, the Board of Inquiry found the couple quite blameless. They would suffer from the gossip of less generous sections of the public for the rest of their days.
Within a year Clement Edwards - he was the MP for the East Glamorgan constituency which contained the village of Senghenydd - would be representing the bereaved families at the inquest into the Universal pit explosion.
* Clem Edwards' Llangynllo born mother Sarah bore the fine old Radnorshire surname of Tudge - it dates back in the county until at least the 1690s. At the time of the 1911 Census and by then a widow, Mrs Edwards was keeping a boarding house, Penithon, in Llandrindod.
