Jubilee

My maternal grandmother was born in 1880 at the Clywedog Arms in Llanddewi Ystradenni.  Within a few months the family had moved to Fochriw in the industrial South.  Her subsequent movements were fairly typical of the Welsh working class - various mining villages, a return to Radnorshire in the 1930s, then on to Harrow and Watford during the wartime years.  Unlike the majority of her grandchildren she never made it to Australia, dying in Weston Super Mare in 1960.

You'd have a difficult job finding the Clywedog Arms in Llanddewi today, and not just because it lost its licence in 1910. It was actually located in a tiny, detached part of that parish, located where the Gravel Road meets the A44, between Crossgates and Gwystre.  Sixty years ago the good citizens of Llanbadarn Fawr were certainly aware that these few acres were not in their parish, they suggested Nantmel.  The burghers of Nantmel were equally convinced that it was part of Llanbadarn.  The end result was that your blogger was one of the few infants in Radnorshire publicly denied a Coronation mug.  An event which no doubt contributed to my agreeing with Ronnie Reagan's opinion that the most beautiful word in the English language is the word Republic.