2015 is a very different world in a lot of respects from 1915. 100 years ago the Great War was slaughtering our young men on the Western Front, motor cars were the exception rather than the rule, and the idea of having a telephone in your house, never mind one you might carry around in your pocket, was the stuff of dreams. But the one constant in the passage of time tends to be the contrary human being - men women and children - as the following Aberafan excerpts from old Welsh newspapers illustrate. 

It's fascinating to read the pages of an old paper whether we're checking to see what might have happened on the day we were born (we all imagine, or hope for, great things!) or just leafing through for an impression of an earlier time. If you enjoy this selection then you can search for your own stories at Welsh Newspapers Online. (Click on each image below to enlarge.)

From the Cambrian Daily Leader 19th March 2015.

From the Herald of Wales 22nd May 1915 (I'm 'the hungry writer' so there always has to be something about food!)

From the Cambrian 13th August 1915.

And finally the bizarre story of the walking match that never was from the South Wales Weekly Post 16th October 1915. 

Will I ever really know the mountains behind Port Talbot? I've walked so many parts of them over the last few years but still they seem like undiscovered countries. In 2012 when I was researching the Afan Forest Park for Real Port Talbot Jonathan Price, one of the rangers, took me on an extensive land-rover tour of Forestry territory, past huge tree felling equipment, up to a skyline of wind turbines, to the site of a psalm engraved on slate and clamped to a rock at the head of the Afan Valley, all the time rising and falling across the mountains' faces.

My latest mountain walk was with local family historian, Allen Blethyn, through the back door of Mynydd Margam, from the fairways of the Maesteg Golf Club. 

Just over 3.5 miles up from this point we came to Twmpath Diwlith, a Bronze Age round barrow, and the replica Bodvoc Stone (the original is housed in the Stones Museum next to Margam Abbey Church), a sixth or seventh century monument  marking another Bronze Age burial site. And between the two the surprising, to me, iced over pond that is the source of the River Kenfig.

Surprised is perhaps not the best word. Enthralled. Delighted. Because to meet the source of anything feels like an honour. The stream running out of the pond is slight, little more than a ribbon of water running through a ditch, but deep enough for Allen's little dog, Poppy, to fall in when she tried to clamber across!

If it had been Summer time I might have joined her so I could say I'd stepped into the source, into the place where a river is born, and reborn. 

This is one of my favourite Port Talbot horizons: the three cranes that rise above the small-side, or Little Warren side, of Aberafan beach and beyond them the mostly invisible deep water harbour. I never get tired of 'my' cranes. Or the view of the sea's horizon from the promenade, with its temper-tantrum crash of spume-hurling waves or one of its golden licked sunsets.

But both horizons are more than just visual enjoyment: they link me to my past. The cranes are Dad's years at the Steel Company of Wales, and later British Steel, and all the memories associated with those years. His night shifts, the smell of his donkey jacket, even Vesta's Beef Curry and Rice, that slice of the exotic that penetrated our Sandfields Estate life in the 1960s, reserved as a quick meal for Dad which he'd eat on a stool in front of the TV.

What links to your past arise like sweet ghosts when you stand on the Prom and stare at the line that separates sea from sky?

Horizons can be smaller of course: they can be how far we can see to the end of our street. The curved L of Chrome Avenue is imprinted on my memory from the walk to and from Tirmorfa School between 1963 and 1969. The low brick walls the council built, fracturing my ankle from running with one foot on the kerb and one foot in the gutter. And the drains we feared would give us Scarlet Fever!

In her poem, 'Community', (The Forgotten Country, Gomer Press 1977), Port Talbot author Sally Roberts Jones talks about 'a death in the street' and how 'We are less by that much'. Our horizons change as much with the loss of people as the losses and gains in our natural, urban and industrial landscapes.

Look around you. Notice your physical horizons: land and sea, the road you live on, the people in your life. What anchors you to them? Talk about them. Let's celebrate our connections, these rivets of history.

day of long shadows
how swiftly the deer
cross my horizon

On Page 44 of Real Port Talbot you can read a brief account of Peg Entwistle, born Millicent Lilian Entwistle on 5th February 1908 to English parents at her maternal aunt's house in Broad Street, Port Talbot. 

Peg, who became an actress in the United States, is mostly remembered for committing suicide by throwing herself off the top of the Hollywood(land) sign in 1932.  American writer, James Zeruk Jr. was supposed to be writing a book about her life, from her Welsh birth to her American death, but by the time I'd submitted my MSS to Seren Books in March 2013 there was still no sign of it. 

If I didn't know better I'd have said he was waiting for Real Port Talbot to be published because at the end of October 2013 (2 weeks before the launch of Real Port Talbot!), Peg Entwistle and the Hollywood Sign Suicide: A Biography  went on sale. 

I am sure that Peg's later life, her theatrical ups and downs, her acclaims and disappointments, are well documented but there are a few hiccups in the American 'translations' and omissions of census and family history records from the first 8 years of her life, the lives of her parents and close family, and her links to Port Talbot. Hiccups that propelled me to search more deeply than I had time or space for during the writing of Real Port Talbot.  So, if you're sitting comfortably... 

Peg's father, Robert Symes Entwistle, was born in London in 1872 but by 1901 he was lodging at a house in Barry and working as an actor 'on tour'.

Peg's mother, Emily Stevenson, was born in Yorkshire c.1877 and in 1901 she was living with her family in Middlesborough. Her sister, Laura, older by 10 years, had married Frank R.H. Seaton, of the well known Seaton family* from Margam, in 1888 while she was was living (and presumably working...) in the old Cwmafan parish of Michaelstone Super Avon.

(*Frank R.H. Seaton became the organist and choirmaster at St. Theodore's Church, Taibach; his father, Richard Seaton - originally from Oxford - had been the organist at Margam Abbey.)  

The 1901 census shows Laura and Frank Seaton, their two sons and 7 year old daughter, at Groes Wen Cottages in Margam. So could they have been the cause of Emily and Robert meeting each other? Emily visiting her sister in South Wales while Robert was touring the local theatres? It's seems a likely possibility. They were married on 3rd November 1904 up in Birmingham.

The decades between census returns can make it difficult to know exactly what people were doing and where they were living in the interim years. But we do know though that Peg (or Millicent as she was named at her birth) came into the world at Laura & Frank Seaton's home, at 5 Broad Street, Port Talbot, in February 1908. We also know she was baptised at Swansea on 22nd March, although the section for 'Abode' on the Baptism register reads, 'South Hackney, NE London'.

Is it strange for parents to baptise their first and only child so far away from home? Could her father have been touring the local theatres in South Wales again and the family staying with Laura and Frank? Three years later, the 1911 census lists Robert and Emily Entwistle as Actor and Actress living in Lambeth, London. The census also states that they have one child, living, but little Millicent isn't living with them. The census for South Wales shows her with the Seatons, still at Broad Street in Port Talbot, aged 3 years. 

It is easy to jump to suspicious conclusions and a part of me wants to believe that Emily and Robert wanted the best for their daughter but their mercurial professions prohibited them from being with her all of the time. A newspaper article from 1913 changed my mind. 

She said, 'she never loved him or the child,' the article reports on Robert and Emily's divorce case and her infidelity. Could this be the reason little Peg wasn't living with her parents? But Emily evidently did love the other man, Jules, or Julius, Shaw. She married him in the Autumn of 1913, in Blean, Kent, less that 40 miles from where I am living today. There's no record that she and her daughter were ever in touch again.

Robert Entwistle subsequently met and married his brother's American sister-in-law, Lauretta Ross, in Jacksonville, Michigan in July 1914. But the first record of his passage across the Atlantic that I can find is from 1916 when he embarked The Philadelphia at Liverpool on 11th March and disembarked in New York on 19th. He travelled with his brother's family, his new wife, and his 8 year old daughter, Millicent/Peg. 

Had Laura Seaton been looking after her niece all this time? Did she have to deliver her to her father and his new wife in London? Did they come down to Port Talbot to thank her for her family duty, and take the little girl away? 

Perhaps we'll never know the truth. Zeruk's book suggests that little Millicent/Peg was delighted at the prospect of a new life, a new mother. But I have my reservations about that emotional response, if it is the case that she spent so much of her young life with Laura Seaton, who would cared for her like a mother. Laura Seaton's own daughter, Ada Edith Mary, had died at the age of 9 in 1903. And it is easy to believe that the presence of another baby girl in her home from 1908, and her official presence there again in 1911, and maybe for even longer, would have meant so much to her. 

And there was more sadness to come. Peg's stepmother, Robert's second wife, Lauretta Ross Entwistle, died 5 years later in 1921. Her father was killed by a hit and run driver in 1922. Ten years later Peg would end her life too. 

Recently there's been talk about a film about her life. I wonder what an American director and producer will make of her Port Talbot family roots? 

Sources
findmypast.co.uk
familysearch.org
Hanson, Ivor, Outline of a Welsh Town

In his book, Shifting Sands - Sandfields/Aberavon 1900-2000, Walter T. Perry talks about his experience of growing up in Sandfields in the two decades before World War II. Woodbines, lighting a coal fire, the cheese sandwiches for his father's box and his Sunday dinner, scooped into a small basin, carried in turns by him and his siblings to the 'dingy cabin in the steelworks' where he worked as a Boiler Attendant. He talks about tinned milk, about the pantry's thick heavy stone slab, loaves of bread delivered by the Co-op van, picking dewberries and selling a large jar of them for a penny, and a tradition of calling Stump when one kid was lucky enough to have an apple, the successful caller getting first dibs on the core. 

I grew up in a completely different era but there's an echo of his childhood in mine, from my D'cu's Woodbine habit, to picking dewberries at Kenfig Pool (Walter Perry's dewberry rich warrens having long been built upon) and in the van-men I remember from my childhood: 

The Van-men of Sandfields Estate

They have disappeared now, the van-men of my childhood. They came to us, street by street with ice-cream, chips, milk and bread. I remember the weight of a silver half-crown piece. The smell of a fresh sandwich loaf, and my mother cutting off the crust with a silver knife. The bright yellow butter.  The summers’ heat.

sunlit garden
when did my father grow
an old man’s neck?


At a coffee morning at Taibach Library a few months ago I spoke about the debt I owed to the town's historians and writers from the current and past centuries. Some were, and are, more academic than others, some books were meticulously researched, others were informal but intimate glimpses into lives both different and familiar. Yes, it's good to read about dates and facts but it's equally as enriching to know about the ordinary lives of people caught up in the flow of history. 

Walter Talbot Perry died in March 2008 after publishing two more books - The Turning Tide and High Tide. Search them out, at the local libraries and for sale on various book-selling websites, and enjoy his contributions to our town's story. 'A personal reflection of events and memories influential in my life,' he says in the Introduction to Shifting Sands. 

Oh, and just in case you're wondering what that glass and chrome canister next to his book contains... it's sand. Not any old sand though. It's Aberafan Beach sand. One of my indelible memories of home: it's harsh bite on a windy day along the prom, how I used to herd its salt and peppery grains along the windowsill in my bedroom facing the sea.

What's your memory? What's home for you?

When Lord Nelson was travelling through South Wales in 1802 he called at Thomas Mansel Talbot's Orangery at Margam. Mansel Talbot had completed the Orangery on the site of the partially (at the time) demolished old Margam House by 1793 while in 1800 he'd also erected a Citrus House for the Estate's famous collection of citrus trees. Nelson must have been impressed: he gave the gardener a three shilling tip. I'm sure that saw him through more than a few pints of ale at the Corner Inn at the adjacent old Margam village, though the village itself would also be demolished between 1830 and 1840 when Mansel Talbot's son, CRM Talbot, began the construction of his visionary Gothic Tudor house that we call Margam Castle. 

While all this demolition and building was happening on our doorstep another Talbot, the Irish born Honourable Thomas Talbot (1771 - 1853), who might well be related through some dusty and distant lineage to the Margam Talbots, was building, expanding and defending his own community of Port Talbot on the other side of the Atlantic ocean on the shore of Lake Erie in Ontario, Canada. 

In 1803 he landed at the spot he would call Port Talbot and built a log house, followed by a sawmill, a cooper shop, a blacksmith shop, and a poultry house along with a barn and a water mill. Unfortunately, his Port Talbot was destroyed in raids during the war of 1812 between the United States of America and the United Kingdom and its North American allies. It was never rebuilt but this plaque commemorates its existence as one of the National Historic Sites of Canada. 

Two Talbots, two countries, two towns but there's no historical connection between them that I can trace right now. So why am I blogging about it? Curiosity, maybe. A little like we might check on Google or Facebook for people with the same name as ourselves, we can't help but be curious about towns and communities with the same name. Maybe, one day, I might find myself on the shores of Lake Erie and stand in the spot where the people from the vanished Port Talbot briefly settled, lived and worked. That place was the physical manifestation of one man's vision, just as CRM Talbot envisioned the future of Margam and Aberafan, the building of the docks, the expansion of the railway, the town bearing his name that would officially come into existence in 1921. Thomas Talbot's vision did not have similar success but imagine his pride in that first decade of the 19th century: the first settlers' homes built, the first bushels of corn ground at his mill. 

Sources:
Wikipedia
www.margamcountrypark.co.uk
www.peoplescollectionwales.co.uk

It's one of our old bridges now but it was christened 'new' because this road bridge replaced a previous rail bridge, the wooden stumps of which can still be seen poking up from the river bed at low tide when you hang over (carefully, please!) the up-river side. 

The plate girder bridge, which opened in 1903 following the expansion of Port Talbot docks in 1890, is listed with Cadw:  ...a finely detailed plate-girder bridge which is unusual at this date for carrying a strategic road rather than a railway. The association with the development of Port Talbot docks is of additional historic interest. (Record 23153). The bases of the original gas lamp-posts are still mounted on its large, square stone piers.  It is now closed to traffic and is a link in NPTCBC’s riverside foot and cycle path network. 

Its listing as a heritage site should mean that the bridge is protected but its future is far from secure. The absence of any maintenance over decades means that a considerable amount of money would have to be spent on it and in 2013 the local authority confirmed their long term plan to replace the bridge with a new footbridge subject to funding and Cadw's approval. 

A year later no further progress has been made and I'm currently waiting to hear back from the Heritage Officer at NPTCBC. 

I'd like to believe that Port Talbot can hold on to Newbridge, one of the few physical traces that remains of our industrial past. But that hope may have to be supported by the community's protective voice.

I only blogged about Ivor J. Hanson a couple of months ago but the significance of today's date, when Britain declared itself at war with Germany in 1914, brings me back to him and his astonishing war diaries that were collected and edited by Alan Wakefield and published by Haynes in 2009.

Plough & Scatter, The Diary-Journal of a First World War Gunner  begins on 18th July 1914 and ends on 4th March 1919. The entries are pragmatic, informative and without any trace of sentimentality or self-pity: the words of an articulate young man who loved his Welsh home, his family and his books, but whose boyish enthusiasm to 'do his bit' was culled by the reality of war. 

My Dad's father, Grampa Evan Rees, served in WWI, either in the Royal Field Artliiery or the Royal Horse Artillery. There were medals in a drawer in the sideboard, or there weren't any. The memories of the remaining sons vary and we cannot be sure of his story. Perhaps that's why Hanson's diary feels so important: it records one man's story in detail for us to read, share and remember. His story is also, in part, our grandads' and great-granddads' stories, the ones who came home but didn't talk about what happened, what they saw, who they lost. And it is also, in part, the story of the boys and men who never came home.

There's a copy of the book at Taibach Community Library. You'll read the following on page 228:

Hell cannot be much worse than this, for everything contrives to break our spirits. 

So difficult for us to know and understand what these men went through. So important that we should try. 

I came across them by accident while scanning 19th century newspapers for my own Carmarthenshire family history research. They appeared in The Cambrian, the first newspaper to be published in Wales and launched in Swansea in 1804. 

30th July 1814
On Saturday last, two brothers, who were promising youths, the one 15 and the other 18 years of age, were unfortunately drowned in Aberavon river.  They had lately arrived  from the interior of Brecknockshire, for the purpose of sea bathing, but going into the river on the reflux of the tide, they were overpowered and borne off by the stream. 

The article does not give the name of the local lad who risked his own life and plunged in once, then twice, in an attempt to save one, then the other. But it was too late. And we do not learn the brothers' names either only that they were buried in Margam churchyard on Monday evening: 25th July 1814.

Rosser Thomas and Isaac Thomas from Llanelly: they close one page and open another. And thanks to local family historian, Allen Blethyn, we know there was no stone erected over their grave. But why? 

The Glamorgan Parish Registers helped me find Rosser's baptism record in January 1796 in Llansamlet, named for his father. Isaac was baptised in October 1798. Their mother was Jane Morris, who married Rosser Thomas, also at Llansamlet, in 1790. 

Wouldn't a mother and a father want to bring their young sons home, bury them well, these young men who could never have anticipated the end of their lives that warm summer's day? 

I have no doubt they would have wanted to. But Rosser Thomas, the elder, had died in 1797. Jane Thomas  was buried in 1804. It seems there was no-one to remember the boys, to have their names carved into a stone. 

The 200th anniversary of their death falls this month. I'll be home in Port Talbot and will remember the two lost boys by reading this story at Taibach Community Library at their coffee morning on Friday, July 25th.  

It was hot, they would have been laughing, jostling each other at the river bank, imagining the first cool splash. Brothers looking out for each other. 

Many of you will be familiar with J Ivor Hanson's books about Port Talbot. Profile of a Welsh Town was published in 1968 and followed in 1971 by Outline of a Welsh Town. Both can be found in the town's libraries.

Hanson was born in 1898. His father was from Groes, Margam, his mother from Taibach. In the 1911 census, when Hanson was 12, he was living with his parents, his older sister, Nellie, and his maternal grandfather, Daniel Harris, at 7, High Street, Taibach. And it's an event at that house that he remembers in Chapter 2 of Profile, 'Miss Emily Charlotte Talbot (1840-1918)' in which he discusses the fate of 99 year (or three lives) leasehold properties, built on Margam Estate land, when the lease was about to expire:

'I was a very young lad when an agent drove up in a horse-drawn trap, marched through our house in High Street (now Commercial Road) without first knocking, and plunged a jacknife into the sash of our kitchen window. When I sought an explanation from my grandfather he told me that under the terms of the lease, his house had not only to go to the landowner, but it had to go in good condition, and that henceforth he would have to pay rent for his own house, to which he had added at his own expense gas installations and a shop window. It was the first time I ever saw a man shed tears...'

To read the words of someone who was alive and old enough at the time to clearly recall the Talbots, and the feudal system that was accepted as the norm, feels like a gift. This is history, vivid and charged with emotion, conjured into the present moment for us. Hanson died in 1993: he was truly the story teller of a century.

Both of Hanson's books were never far from my reach when I was researching and writing Real Port Talbot: invaluable repositories of information about our town, they cover both wars, the lives of the people who lived and worked here,  the things they loved and feared, what they lost, what they laughed at and celebrated. 

Search them out for yourselves. Enjoy them. And think about the stories you hold inside you too. Why not write them down, or record them, or ask someone to help you with one or the other. We are living the history that people in the future may want to read about. Let's preserve it and keep it safe for them.