Flummery - A Recipe

Flummery was a mainstay of the Nineteenth Century Radnorians diet. It should not be confused with the arty-farty fruit puddings that masquerade under the name today. Here's a recipe provided by Alfred Wallace, the chap who came up with Darwin's theory of natural selection and who worked a good deal in Radnorshire:

"Another delicacy we first became acquainted with here was the true Welsh flummery, called here sucan blawd (steeped meal), in other places Llumruwd (sour sediment), whence our English word "flummery." It is formed of the husks of the oatmeal roughly sifted out, soaked in water till it becomes sour, then strained and boiled, when it forms a pale brown sub-gelatinous mass, usually eaten with abundance of new milk. It is a very delicious and very nourishing food, and frequently forms the supper in farmhouses. Most people get very fond of it, and there is no dish known to English cookery that is at all like it."

Miss Penn-Hughes

In the 50 years up to and including the First World War South Wales was the Persian Gulf of its day. Great fortunes were made in and around the coal, steel and tinplate industries of the valleys and it was hardly surprising when some of the heirs to this wealth decided to spend it on the racing tracks of 1930s Europe.

Welsh born toffs such as Charley Martin, Tim Rose-Richards, the Eccles brothers, Dudley Folland, Owen Saunders Davies, Clifford Penn-Hughes, as well as plausible rogues such as Donald Marendaz and Philip Turner were amongst the leading racers at Brooklands and beyond.

The pre-war period was also a time when women drivers often competed on equal terms with the men, Kay Petre and Gwenda Stewart for example were amongst the sixteen drivers who lapped Brooklands at more than 130mph. So surely there must have been plenty of Welsh born lasses amongst the fast ladies of the period. Well actually no ...... one I did find was 21 year old Elizabeth Penn-Hughes (don't worry that's her brother pictured) who co-drove Clifford's Frazer-Nash in the 1930 Double Twelve Hour race at Brooklands. A hairy moment later in the year at Shelsey Walsh seems to have ended her short-lived career behind the wheel.

Were there any more Welsh born girl racers on the pre-war tracks?

Welsh in Presteigne

How much Welsh was spoken in Presteigne in 1670, at the time of the Hearth Tax Return? Mr Howse thought that the language disappeared from the streets of the town soon after it became the administrative centre of the new county of Radnorshire in 1542. It is certainly the place in the county most likely to be anglicised. The town was close to historically English speaking parishes* and the 1670 return shows that more than half the population had English surnames. The English were particulary strong amongst the middle class:

Social Class based on Surnames and Hearths

Hearths	% of total	% Welsh	% English
+ 5 Hearths	5.5	57	43
4-5 Hearths	16.5	43	57
2-3 Hearths	19.7	32	68
1 Hearth Charged	13.4	41	59
1 Hearth Uncharged	44.9	59	41
Total population		49	51

Mr Howse offers no evidence for his view and admits that sixteenth century wills from the town are "full of Welsh names, with their aps to the second and third generation back." Likewise the town's other historian Mr Parker notes that even in 1620 some 18% of Presteigne landowners were still using the patronymic system rather than surnames.

Even as late as 1675 there is a record of forty of "the poorest Welsh children" of the town being put to school to learn English. This would be around a third of the school age population and interestingly around a third of the town's population in the Hearth tax were poor and with Welsh surnames.

By 1800 the Welsh language was certainly gone from Presteigne, this would suggest that it finally disappeared from the lips of townsfolk during the first half of the eighteenth century, maybe 200 years after the demise accorded it by Mr Howse.

* Elsewhere along the border many parishes in England continued to be Welsh speaking long after the border between Wales and England was drawn in 1536, in Herefordshire south of the Wye for example or in the Oswestry district. The parishes east of Presteigne were nearly all English speaking and so Presteigne was truly a border town.

Book of the Month

I'm currently re-reading Keith Parker's Radnorshire Civil War book. It was originally published in 2000, by the excellent Logaston Press, but is still on sale in local bookshops.

This is a proper history book, lucidly written with a masterful command of primary sources. It essentially covers the period 1640 to 1660 - the dawn of the modern age as far as Radnorshire is concerned, with the bard Sion Cain's elegy for James Phillips of Llanddewi in 1633 perhaps marking the final death knell of the traditional society of the medieval period.

There is a great deal of interest here, the fact that 22% of Radnorians of military age were pressed into the King's service for example, although doubtless a good many had the sense to desert at the earliest opportunity. Mr Parker concedes the likelihood that Charles Price of Pilleth, the local MP and the major figure in Radnorshire military and political life of the day, was not killed in a duel on the streets of Presteigne. as previously believed. More likely he was killed in the ethnically inspired massacre following the surrender of Priors Hill Fort in Bristol in 1645. The troops slaughtered there were long thought to be Irish, although more recent research indicates they were Welsh, maybe some of the 400 Radnorshire men pressed into service at Bristol that summer.

No doubt most folk interested in Radnorshire history will have already have bought this book and be well acquainted with characters such as that local Boadicea, Lady Brilliana Harley and the roundhead colonel Howell Jones of Nantmel. Would that other periods of Radnorian history were as well served as this one.

Musical Interlude

Wonder if Phil would have been better off employing a decent barber rather than those expensive lawyers

Nothing on the Telly

Much innocent fun to be had exploring Radnorian wills on the National Archives site.

Last example of a traditional patronym being used in a Radnorshire will seems to be James ap John of Llandeilo Graban in 1749 ...... last female patronym in a will is also from the same parish Anne vch Thomas in 1677.

Berwyn Baxter - Welshman?

Berwyn Baxter (1920-2005) was a secondline sportscar driver of the 1950s who made the occasional foray into open-wheel racing. A number of motor sport sites list Baxter as a Welshman, presumably because of his Welsh sounding forename and his close association with Kieft cars - Cyril Kieft, who was indeed Welsh - having sold the Kieft Sports Car Company to Baxter in 1954.

The fact is that Baxter was born in Kings Norton and his parents and grandparents were all from the Staffordshire/Warwickshire/Worcestershire area. That forename seems to be Baxter's only connection with Wales and using the same flawed logic, perhaps we should be claiming Lewis Hamilton as our first Welsh world champion, well the first since Alan Jones anyway.

Welsh in Llandrindod

In 1827 the correspondent of the monthly magazine Y Gwyliedydd left us an interesting description of the position of the Welsh language in and around Llandrindod - this was of course before the present-day spa town was inflicted on the county. Here's a translation of what he wrote:

"If it would be suitable for the writer to venture an opinion on a controversial topic which so many learned literary critics have long argued over, namely the districts where the purest and most beautiful Welsh is spoken, then I would say that Radnorshire can rightly take pride in its native tongue, one of the most splendid of the Welsh dialects. It appears that in this venerable dialect the peculiar elegances of Powys and the South are both encountered. On hearing the Welsh sayings of the Radnorshire elders in the neighbourhood of Llandrindod, the patriotic Welshman feels both enormous pleasure and sorrow. Pleasure because he is always happy to encounter the venerable, sparkling old language with some trace of its youthful beauty. But with sorrow when he thinks that English alone is spoken by the youth of this district, and after another generation passes there will be none of the natives who will understand the splendid language of their ancestors."

In a footnote the author asks readers to speculate as to the reason for the recent retreat of the language - he says it has retreated 20 miles in living memory. His own speculation is a lack of poets and literary figures.

Never Mind Llandegley International

Talking of planes, here are a couple of Innes Ireland snippets from the days when he was flying in and out of Radnorshire. The Beech Bonanza is still flying.

That Dam Consarn!

Back in April 1912 two aviation pioneers Leslie Allen and Corbett Wilson decided to fly their machines from Hendon to Dublin. This, of course, involved crossing the Irish Sea, something which had never been successfully completed by plane.

The trip ended in tragedy for Allen. He was seen flying over Holyhead but was never heard from again. Wilson landed in Crewe, Almeley in Herefordshire before touching down in the Radnorshire parish of Colva. On enquiring of a local farmer where exactly he was, Wilson was reportedly told "thee bist in my fild, by my reckoning, so be pleased to take thyself and that dam consarn out of it!"

As it happened Wilson spent the night in Colva, taking off for Fishguard the next morning, by which time a crowd of 500 had gathered at Pentwyn to witness the event. From Fishguard Wilson's Bleriot succeeded in reaching Ireland, landing near Enniscorthy, County Wexford. The world was becoming a smaller place. You can read some more about Corbett Wilson in this book review.

Behind the Wire

Here's an atmospheric snap of Mid Wales motor cycle legends J A Bates (crouched) and J E Lewis (standing) chatting with a member of the American team - actor Steve McQueen - at the 1964 International Six Day Trial in Erfurt, East Germany.

Read some more about the event here.

Of course McQueen, a buddy of Radnorshire resident Innes Ireland, was also a fine performer on four wheels, taking second place with Peter Revson in the 1970 Sebring 12 Hour Race, a round of the World Sportscar Championship.

Radnorshire Surnames, Part Two

The map shows the distribution of the surname Bufton in 1881. You can check out other names here.

In our sample of surnames taken from Radnorshire marriages 1813-1822, around 24% do not derive from the traditional patronym system*. Not all these names are of English origin, some come from local placenames, Dyke and Hergest for example; while others are what were Welsh speaking families of French origin from Breconshire like Havard and Awbery.

This leaves some 728 individuals with names of English origin. In every parish Welsh names are in the majority , even in the traditionally ethnically mixed border towns of Presteigne and Knighton. At the same time in 25 parishes more than a quarter of the names are English. The most frequent names in our sample are 24 Hamers, 23 Buftons, 16 Bounds, 15 Worthings, 12 Wildings and Ingrams and 10 Sheens.

It would be wrong to think that this English element maintained any separate identity, at least away from the Presteigne area. Indeed we find examples of Buftons, Ingrams, Hamers, Bounds, Bywaters, Hopes etc among the last generations of traditionally Welsh-speaking Radnorshire folk detailed in the early 20C censuses. Over 300 of the 728 individuals have surnames that had been established in the county by the time of the 1670 Hearth tax or even a century before. They had long ago intermarried and integrated with the local population. The same is true of that group of surnames originating in the sixteenth century English plantations in Montgomeryshire.

Whilst the English families moving into Radnorshire integrated with the local Welsh-speaking population, they must surely have helped to increase the extent of bilingualism and bilingualism was the first necessary step in the process of language shift. Later arrivals - by which I mean arrivals in the second half of the eighteenth century and more especially those who looked towards Knighton and Presteigne as commercial centres - would not have needed to learn Welsh to converse with their neighbours.

* Of course the occasional Watson, Wilcox and Moore might have had a traditional patronymic origin just as the odd Jones or Williams might have arrived from England.

Filthy to Eat.

Has the curlew disappeared from the skies of Radnorshire or don't I get out and about as much as I should do? Time was the curlew's song was the herald of spring and you could hear it everywhere. I guess the doom-sayers will blame it's disappearance on global warming, but it was getting rarer when they were still worrying about the next ice age. Anyway here's a virtual curlew, if like me you miss the bird's song.

Oh and if any hungry Radnorians should come across a curlew they would do well to remember the wise words of motor-racing toff John Clotworthy Talbot Foster Whyte-Melville Skeffington, 13th Viscount Massereene and 6th Viscount Ferrard, Baron of Lough Neagh and Baron Oriel - I don't make this stuff up by the way - in one of his rare, but eagerly awaited speeches to the House of Lords - "curlews are" he advised his fellow peers "filthy to eat."

Radnorshire Surnames, Part One

Now and again I do some research on the development of surnames in Radnorshire: based on sixteenth century wills - when the traditional patronym system was still widespread; the 1670 Hearth Tax - when English style surnames exist side by side with patronyms and hidden patronyms*; and finally a sample of 3110 individuals who married in Radnorshire between 1813 and 1822 - when the modern surname system was more or less in place.

Looking at the 1813-1822 figures we find that the ten most popular surnames in the county are Jones (10.5%), Davies (7.2%), Price (6.6%), Evans (4.8%), Williams (4.7%), Lewis (3%), Griffiths (2.7%), Morgan(s) (2.5%), Powell (2.2%) and Lloyd (2%). Of course, all these names are derived from the old Welsh patronymic system and if we take the most obvious of these we find that that they account for 83% of the surnames in Rhayader Hundred, 80% in both Colwyn and Painscastle, 75% in Cefnllys Hundred, 70% in Knighton and 62% in Radnor.

The figures highlight some interesting differences between the six Radnorshire Hundreds. These Hundreds, which continued to exist as District Councils until Heath's disastrous local government re-organisation of 1973, were based on the traditional cantrefs and commotes of independent Wales - an organic structure rather than one imposed by dim-witted bureaucrats. The name Watkins, for example is the 4th most common in Painscastle and is also common in Colwyn and Radnor, elsewhere it is found only infrequently. The name Edwards is an exact opposite, common in Rhayader, Knighton and Cefnllys but hardly found in the old Elfael (Colwyn and Painscastle). The name Powell is infrequent in the old Maelienydd (Cefnllys and Knighton) while Prosser is common in Painscastle but absent elsewhere. A final example, Williams is found everywhere, although infrequently in Cefnllys, but in Painscastle Hundred it is far and away the most popular surname of all.

I wonder if these naming traditions reflect an ancient cultural difference between the more South East Wales orientated hundreds of Colwyn, Painscastle and Radnor and the north of the county.

*By hidden patronyms I mean how what appears at first glance to be a settled surname actually changes in each generation, so John Davies might have a son called David Jones etc.

A Radnorshire Murder

Mary Ann Hathaway's mistake was not to go to chapel on the evening of 8th June 1884. Instead, she stayed on to help with the chores at the Nantmel farmhouse where she had commenced service just a few days before. Mary Ann's surname is not one you normally associate with Radnorshire, her father being an Oxfordshire born labourer, although her mother Mary Evans came from a local family. The girl, she was seventeen years old at the time, had lost her mother five years before, while her father had subsequently left the district for the South Wales coalfield.

Mary Ann's master and mistress had, perhaps, enjoyed an easier life than Mary Ann. Both came from a wealthier than average background and now, in their thirties, were farming a substantial 280 acre holding. There was a worm in the bud however, for the mistress, Margaret Jane, had been acting strangely and her husband, John, had taken to hiding his shotgun away from the house in an outbuilding.

At around 9pm Margaret called for Mary Ann to come upstairs and as she appeared on the landing, shot the young maid servant dead with her husband's shotgun, which she had seemingly found and smuggled into the house. Why did she kill Mary Ann, the police asked, had she done anything to upset her mistress? "Nothing whatsoever, I merely did it to be hanged."

Margaret wasn't hanged, she was sent to Broadmoor, while her husband moved away from Nantmel and took a farm in Herefordshire. By the turn of the century his wife had been released and joined him there, they lived on well into the twentieth century. Mary Ann Hathaway was buried in an unmarked grave at Dolau chapel. She might have lived long enough to see the first episodes of Coronation Street on the television, but that was not to be.

Motor Sport History

MotorSport magazine have finally got around to publishing a CD covering all the issues of the magazine from 1924 to 1949. At £39.99 that's got to be a bargain, since the original magazines would cost a small fortune to purchase second hand.

It's hardly surprising that much of motor sport history is concerned with rivet-counting, after all the cars are where the money is. Prove that a certain machine, or at least part of it, won Le Mans and you are on to a nice little earner. Given that, I was somewhat taken aback to read the opinion of one well-respected author that time could profitably be spent discovering "did he beat his wife?" or "was he a drunkard?. Now I don't disagree with this, as I think the human aspects of racing are too easily overlooked. Of course my anonymous expert was actually saying that this was more profitable than spending time finding out dates of birth and death etc. Here I disagree because these basic details provide the framework on which the story needs to be built.

Take Jarrott, the first British motor racing star. Everyone assumes that he was a toff, after all he married the wife of an earl. How much more interesting he becomes when you discover that he was born the son of a blacksmith's labourer. I've harped on too much of late about Miss Levitt, but the truth is that no-one knows where she appeared from or what became of her. She might just as well be a Martian. Motoring racing historians assume too much, that 50s car owner the Vicomtesse de Walckiers for instance, you'll find plenty of references to her on google but only on motor-sport sites. Who was she? I'm sure there's an interesting story to tell. No those boring dates of birth and death do matter.

Now I'm going to be first in line to pick up the 1924-1949 CD, but really a digital archive of the News of the World would probably be just as valuable in getting to grips with the lives of many of the motor racing crowd.

The London Monster

Scares are nothing new, you know the hue and cry whipped up by axe grinders, newspapers and latched on to by politicians, who rush out laws to meet problems that, a few years down the line prove to have been nothing very much at all.

Back at the start of the 1790s London was beset by a fine panic concerning a fellow who went about the city stabbing fashionable ladies in the buttocks . He was christened the London Monster.

Eventually the finger of suspicion fell upon an unfortunate Welshman called Rhynwick Williams. Despite having some perfectly sound alibis, Williams stood trial twice and was eventually sentenced to six years in jail. Interestingly in the first trial he was charged with damaging clothing, which in those property obsessed days carried a heavier sentence than wounding.

The published accounts stress that Rhynwick was a Welshman, although they seem to have missed the Rhynwick Williams who was christened in Westminster in 1767. Whatever, both Rhynwicks had a father called Thomas and what is certain is that the Monster's family did indeed come from Wales, from Bugeildy in Radnorshire to be exact. Yes, the notorious London Monster was a Radnorian.

Rhayader Man Wins Sweepstake

Another Radnorian actress was Mary Jones (1915-1990), details of her career can be found here. Mary was born in Rhayader, the daughter of Captain Alban Jones of Dolgerddon Hall and his wife, local chemist's daughter Anne Elizabeth Roberts.

Alban Jones hit headlines around the world in 1921 when he won £69000 on the Calcutta Derby Sweepstake - perhaps £3 million in today's devalued currency. The Captain disapproved of gambling and claimed that he had been pressurised into the purchase by colleagues. He promptly lost the ticket, finding it later clipped to some office papers. Among other achievements, including being High Sheriff of the county in 1927, Alban Jones was the author of that 1906 page turner, Courses (true and Magnetic) Distances and Maritime Positions Round the British Isles, Norwegian Fiords, Baltic, the Continent Mediterranean, and Black Sea

A Forgotten Radnorian - Curigwen Lewis

I'm sure that everyone in the country over a certain age will remember the actor Andrew Cruickshank, who played Dr Cameron in the long-running BBC television programme Dr Finlay's Casebook. But when he married in 1939 in the little Radnorshire church of Evancoyd, it was his bride Curigwen who was the better know of the two actors, a leading lady with the Royal Shakespeare Company no less.

Curigwen was born in Llandrindod in 1905 and her grand-daughter has provided some illuminating biographical detail about this talented lady and her family here.

Unfortunately the 1911 census for Wales is still not available, although at the time of the 1901 census her parents lived at the Glansevern Arms, Llangurig. One remarkable thing about Miss Lewis, she appeared as Elizabeth Bennett in a BBC television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice as early as 1938!

Gone West

Pennsylvanian townships such as East and West Nantmeal and Radnor are a reminder that Radnorians were early migrants to North America. The Quaker and Baptist migrations from Radnorshire, for example, occurred as early as the 1680s.

This early presence means that many millions of Americans can no doubt claim some Radnorian ancestry. Let us look at the name Price for instance, the 76th most popular American surname with over 270,000 examples in the US census. In their important little book The Surnames of Wales, John and Sheila Rowlands show how even the most ubiquitous of Welsh surnames are subject to regional variation. There are districts in Wales, for example, where 30% of the population were called Jones but others where the name was virtually absent. Price is one of a group of names that is overwhelmingly centered on Radnorshire and North Breconshire, so that a goodly proportion of those American Prices will have their origin here in Mid Wales. Of course there will be just as many Americans with a mother called Price, so that 270,000 will be more like 540,000. Throw in one Price grandparent and the figure is over a million and so on up the generations. Do the math as our North American cousins would say.

Yes, millions of Americans will have Radnorian ancestry, which sounds a better bet for targeting tourism than Twm Sion Cati, the Western Mail's latest wheeze.