145 Gladys Aylward

145 Gladys Aylward
One might expect that the people who Sir Ranulph Fiennes include in his book “My Heroes” would all be macho-SAS types.  After all, the author, the oldest man to conquer Everest, is described as “the world’s greatest explorer”, and has crossed the Antarctic continent unsupported.  But surprisingly his eleven heroes include a woman who had worked in Swansea as a parlour maid before the actions that made her famous.  She is Gladys Aylward, the diminutive missionary to China, portrayed in the 1958 film “The Inn of the Sixth Happiness”, which was filmed around Beddgelert in Snowdonia.
Born in 1902 in Edmonton, London, where a school has been re-named after her, Gladys Aylward was small and lacked the advantages of being clever or pretty.  After leaving school aged 14, she did shop work before becoming a parlour maid in Swansea.  She would attend meetings at Snelling’s Gospel Mission, which had been founded by Oscar Snelling in 1865, and after whose death in 1916 was continued in Orchard Street under his son Basil, celebrating its Diamond Jubilee in 1925.  Gladys described herself as a “rescue sister”, going each night to the Strand, which then was a “no go” dockland area of drunkenness, crime, fighting and brothels, where she sought to rescue women from prostitution.  Beneath yellow gas lamps she would speak to women and girls about Christ Jesus, persuading some to move out of pubs into a hostel and to attend the Gospel Mission. 
However she felt that God was leading her to serve in China, and that might have been confirmed by hearing of the 50 years’ service there of Dr Griffith John, to whom there is a blue plaque outside Ebenezer Church, near the railway station.  She returned to London, but the China Inland Mission rejected her application, feeling she could not cope with the complexities of the Chinese language, and was too old at 28.  
While doing domestic work for explorer Sir Frances Younghusband, who had travelled extensively in the Far East, Gladys Aylward saved up the cost of the train fare to China.  Without the backing of any missionary society she set out from London in 1932, and crossed Siberia alone on the long overland journey, to assist an elderly missionary who ran an inn for drivers of mule caravans.  Once the tradition of binding Chinese women's feet had been outlawed, she was appointed a “foot inspector” to unbind the feet of girls and young women, which gave her opportunities to share the message of the Bible.  Gladys Aylward became a Chinese citizen in 1936, and during the war with Japan looked after many orphaned children.  When bombardment escalated she courageously led 100 orphaned children from Tsechow over the mountain and across the Yellow River to safety.
But as poet John Donne said, “No man is an island”, and our actions can have unforeseen consequences on others.  Gladys had passed information to the Chinese, and this brought repercussions on a Welsh missionary and his mission.  Rev. David Davies, whose son Murray lives in Bishopston, had warned Gladys that her covert activities could jeopardise the mission’s safety.  After she had led the children to safety, he was imprisoned by the Japanese on suspicion of involvement in espionage.  Having endured two horrendous years which left him emaciated and unwell, he joined his family in a concentration camp until the war ended.  Nonetheless David Davies held no bitterness against Gladys Aylward or his captors. 
A 1957 biography called “The Small Woman” (she was 4 feet 10 inches tall) inspired the film the following year starring Ingrid Bergman, though Gladys was deeply upset by its inaccuracies.  Gladys Aylward, whose Chinese name meant ‘The Virtuous One', died in 1970 at the orphanage she was running in Taiwan, aged 67. 
She was the subject of a “This is your life” TV programme, though surely to be among Sir Ranulph Fiennes’s heroes must be a supreme accolade.  

144 Rebecca in Gower

144 Rebecca in Gower
Anyone eating or drinking at the Poundffald Inn in Three Crosses could hardly imagine they were at the scene of a disturbance which was brought to the attention of the Home Secretary during the mid-nineteenth century.  The unusual name Poundffald was that of the hamlet before it became encompassed within the village of Three Crosses.  It refers in both English and Welsh to a pound for keeping stray animals, like those still visible in Pennard and Penrice.  The pound is preserved within the pub buildings and now used as a cellar.
During the nineteenth century, a toll-house was on the site where the Poundffald Inn now stands, run by the Swansea Turnpike Trust to collect tolls from users of the road to Penclawdd.  Trusts had been set up during the 18^th and 19^th centuries by individual Acts of Parliament, with powers to collect tolls for maintaining the principal roads in Britain.  Members of the Swansea Turnpike Trust included such prominent people as John Henry Vivian MP of Singleton, Major Thomas Penrice of Kilvrough, with as chairman Matthew Moggeridge, brother-in-law of John Dillwyn Llewelyn. 
Local communities resented toll gates being set up, especially with exorbitant charges levied for using routes which had been freely traversed for centuries.  Toll gates could appear along routes to lime kilns, catching farmers on their way to collect lime for use as fertiliser.  Opposition was particularly intense in mountainous regions where alternative good routes were scarce.  Levying tolls on old routes sparked the protests known as the Rebecca Riots, which began in South-West Wales in 1839.  One night in May 1839 a gang of armed men disguised in women’s clothing demolished the newly constructed tollgate in Efailwen, on the border between Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire, and burned the adjoining toll-house.  Rioters were called Merched Beca (Rebecca’s Daughters) - taking the name from a verse in the book of Genesis that stated “they blessed Rebekah and said unto her let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them”. 
Sporadic outbursts of vandalism and violent confrontation involved gangs of 50 or more local men, threatening gatekeepers with violence if they resisted.  In Carmarthen the following month a protest against how the Poor Law was administered turned into a major riot when 1,800 persons stormed the workhouse, releasing inmates and wreaking havoc.  Magistrates dispatched letters to the Home Secretary in Sir Robert Peel’s government requesting that a company of infantry be dispatched to restore order.
On the outskirts of Pontardulais at midnight on 6th July 1843 nearly 200 men destroyed the Bolgoed toll gate near the Fountain Inn.  Just over a week later, on 14th July, the Poundffald gate was destroyed by a gang of about 60 people with blackened faces, and the toll collector sent inside the toll-house and warned to keep out of the way.  The attack raised concern for the safety of toll gates at Cartersford and Kilvrough, the latter being on the corner of Vennaway Lane, where the Round House stands.  Police and special constables were engaged to patrol there at night-time, and the Home Secretary was kept informed of developments in South-West Wales.
Magistrates had powers to punish those who damaged turnpike property, broke gates, avoided tolls, or defaced milestones.  With financial inducements to provide information, many people were convicted of riot and transported to penal colonies in Tasmania.  The Commission of Inquiry in March 1844 recommended that county boards take over management from Turnpike Trusts, and tolls were reduced and simplified by the 1844 Toll Gates Act, which amended the laws relating to the South Wales trusts.  To some extent the Rebecca Riots achieved their aims, for the Poundffald, Bolgoed and Rhydypandy gates were removed permanently.
A Cartersford toll gate killing in January 1845 was unconnected with the Rebecca Riots, so the Poundffald toll gate attack in July 1843 was the final Rebecca incident in Gower - enabling Home Secretaries to concentrate on matters elsewhere.      

             

143 The Underground Chapels

The Underground Chapels
Mynydd Newydd road runs past Penlan Comprehensive School’s playing fields and takes its name from the colliery that was once on that site.  It was opened in 1843, and taken over by Vivian and Sons in 1866.  What makes it unique is that it contained in total three underground chapels.
Mining coal has always been a hazardous occupation, often in dangerous and cramped working conditions to extract coal from the seams.  If injury or death occurred, there was no expectation of receiving compensation.  Men would climb down ladders to the level where they were working, as there was no cage for them to go up and down until 1888.  Even some women and young children might work in the mines, and after a day’s shift, long before pithead baths, the miner would wash off the coal dust in a bath in front of the kitchen fire.
Yet it was work, and miners of Christian faith sought to follow the Biblical instruction to serve their masters to the best of their ability.  Several miners at Mynydd Newydd colliery worshipped at Mynyddbâch or Caersalem Newydd Chapels, and permission was sought from the colliery manager to hold a prayer meeting on Monday mornings before the week’s shift.  The suggestion was approved, and from August 1845 a group of miners would meet to pray at 6.30 a.m., while the pit ponies were kept in the stables.  A rough chapel was formed underground in the 5ft seam at a depth of 348ft; the ceiling was low but pit props were used to form benches.  Candles provided limited lighting, and the walls were whitewashed to make it brighter - the chapel measured about 16 by 6 yards (14m x 5m).  Instead of a liturgy, prayers would be extemporary, as at many nonconformist chapels today, and in Welsh, with two or three hymns being sung, the words of which would be familiar to most miners present.  There was usually a reading from the Bible, with perhaps a short comment or exhortation. 
At first, meetings took place irregularly, until an explosion in 1846 killed four teenage lads - prompting prayer meetings every Monday morning before the working week commenced.  Community spirit was fostered by the meetings, and after two years an all-day preaching festival (Cymanfa Bregethu) was held one Sunday near the pithead.
A second chapel was opened in 1867 in the 6ft seam - a depth of 774ft.  But by 1904 the original chapel had to be abandoned since the roof was cracking, so a new chapel was opened the following year in the 5ft seam.  In total there were three underground chapels in Mynydd Newydd colliery.
These underground chapels were featured in November 1916 in an article in the South Wales Daily Post (now the Evening Post), and the 80 years since the first underground chapel opened were marked with a preaching festival - Cymanfa Bregethu in 1924.
The late Mr John Hayman had fond memories of the meetings, recalling, “It was a simple, Welsh prayer service - just hymns and readings.  There was a great religious fervour at the time.  One of the readers was the oldest man in the pit - he was 69 years old and still working underground.  The service normally lasted about half an hour, at 6.30 in the morning.”             
In 1896, 311 men worked at Mynydd Newydd, and the workforce increased to 419 by 1908.  But the Vivian family relinquished the colliery in 1926, and the 6ft seam was closed through rising water the following year.  BBC radio broadcast a service from the 5ft seam at a depth of 350ft in October 1929, but the colliery closed a few years later. 
Most readers may not have worked underground, but the privilege of starting the day with prayer and praise to God in any language need not be the prerogative of miners of Mynydd Newydd colliery.    

142 Penlle'r Castell

142 Penlle'r Castell
The Gower Way is a 56km (35 mile) linear footpath that runs from Rhossili in the south-west of the peninsula to Penlle'r Castell in upland Gower, north of Swansea.  It was set up by the Gower Society as a millennium project, inaugurated twenty years ago when H.R.H. Prince Charles unveiled the Gower Way stone on Cefn Bryn in July 1998, marking also the Society’s 50^th birthday.  Pennant sandstone blocks originally from Cwmrhydyceirw Quarry near Morriston were donated by Welsh Water/Dŵr Cymru having been used as coping stones at Townhill Service Reservoir.  Carved with the Gower Society’s portcullis logo, these were placed as marker stones approximately every kilometre along the route.  The first marker stone is by the look-out station on Rhossili cliffs, and the fiftieth is in upland Gower (Gower Wallicana), at remote Penlle’r Castell, near the Clydach to Ammanford road.
Wales has a considerable number of castles throughout the land, several having been built in North Wales during the thirteenth century to reinforce Edward I’s conquests, such as the impressive Caernarfon, Harlech and Conway Castles.  Peninsular Gower contains notable stone castles at Pennard, Oxwich and Penrice in the south, and Weobley in the north, as well as earlier sites of motte and bailey castles.  One might assume that to the north of Swansea upland Gower lacks such symbols of strife and conquest, until one finds the remote earthen Penlle'r Castell, meaning literally “the summit of the place of the castle”.  This earthwork is in a commanding position standing 1,213ft (370 metres) above sea level, the highest point in Gower on Mynydd y Betws.  It consists of a rectangular mound over 100ft long, divided unequally by a broad ditch, with traces of three dry stone huts on top, which were probably intended for only temporary occupation.  There could have been two stone towers of dry stone walls, since there is no evidence of mortar having been used.  The entire monument is surrounded by a V-shaped ditch, though any thoughts of Iron Age or Roman origins can be discounted.  From Penlle'r Castell there are fine views in each direction of the Black Mountain, the Amman Valley, the Lliw Valley reservoirs and peninsular Gower, with Carreg Cennan castle prominent eight miles away. 
In his 1899 Antiquarian Survey of East Gower, W. Llewellyn Morgan gave his opinion that “absolutely nothing is known about this Castle, when or by whom erected, or what it was called”.  However, Penlle'r Castell is documented in historian Rice Merrick’s 1584 Booke of Glamorganshire Antiquities, where he mentions the “old castle…now in utter ruin”.  It may have been the “novum castra de Gower” (new castle of Gower) that was attacked and destroyed in 1252, and possibly called Castell Meurig.  It would have been a purely military fortification, rather than a permanently manned settlement - possibly the earthwork was hurriedly erected in the late thirteenth century by William de Breos II, the Norman Lord of Gower, as a defence against the Welsh.  Rhys ap Maredydd, descendant of the Lord Rhys, had sided with the Normans when Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was slain near Cilmeri in mid-Wales in 1282, only to rebel against the English King Edward I five years later.  After a large army was mobilised to crush this uprising, Rhys was defeated and captured, sharing the brutal fate of many of Edward I’s victims - being hung, drawn and quartered, in York in 1292.  Penlle'r Castell is unusual because of its assumed limited purpose - that of sheltering a detachment of mounted men engaged in policing the disputed border area.
By contrast with such violent events linked to marker stone number 50 of the Gower Way, events near stone number 1 at Rhossili might appear far more civilised, although that stone is in shipwreck country - with the possibility that deliberate wrecking occurred!

141 Mannheim Twinning

141 Mannheim Twinning
Why is Mannheim Quay in Swansea’s Maritime Quarter so called, and why does it contain a scale-model replica of that German city’s water-tower?  The 5-metre high replica, designed by Robin Campbell and carved by Philip Chatfield, is one tenth the size of the original.  An inscription states that it was unveiled on 9^th August 1985, to mark the twinning in 1957 of the city of Swansea with that of Mannheim in south-western Germany. 
After the Second World War, Winston Churchill encouraged the custom of twinning towns in order to foster friendship and understanding between different cultures and former foes.  One notable example, as an act of peace and reconciliation, was when Coventry, having been heavily bombed during the war, was twinned with the German city of Dresden that had also suffered terribly. 
Mannheim is downstream from Heidelberg, at the confluence of the rivers Neckar and Rhine.  Unusually for German cities, Mannheim is built on a grid pattern, as New York City, hence its nickname “The City of Squares”, and instead of street names, letters and numbers are used.  The city’s civic symbol is the Mannheimer Wasserturm, a distinctive Romanesque water tower, which was completed in 1886.  It rises to 60 metres (200 feet), and stands in a park facing fountains and statues; having served as a reservoir and held the city’s drinking water, it is now merely a monument.  Though partially destroyed during the Second World War, it was subsequently rebuilt.  Mannheim’s most impressive building is the enormous Barockschloss, modelled on the palace of Versailles.  It was commissioned in 1720 and built in a horseshoe layout with a 440m-long façade.  Out of over 400 rooms, only the rococo library on the ground floor escaped serious war damage, and since rebuilding, the palace houses the University.
Mannheim is the starting point and the finish of the Bertha Benz Memorial Route of 194km (121 miles), which was opened in February 2008.  This scenic route commemorates the drive undertaken in 1888 by Karl Benz’s entrepreneurial wife Bertha (apparently without her husband's knowledge), in his newly constructed Patent Motorwagen, from Mannheim to her birthplace Pforzheim.  The one-way distance of 104km (65 miles) was far greater than any automobile had been driven at that time.  Karl Benz had a factory in Mannheim and is credited with producing the first petrol-driven automobile, before his company merged with that of Daimler in 1926 to form Mercedes-Benz.
In September 1982, members of the Swansea Skydiving Club were invited to take part in an air show to celebrate the 375^th anniversary of the city of Mannheim.  Thousands of spectators gathered to watch parachutists from the twinned cities of Swansea, Mannheim and Toulon in France attempt to set a world record for the largest joined circle of free-falling skydivers.  But tragedy struck when a Chinook helicopter attempting an emergency landing crashed into a motorway: nine Swansea skydivers and another five people from South Wales were among the 46 killed.
The tragedy is not forgotten, for example Swansea Council’s January 2002 minutes report Gerald Clement, who had visited Mannheim for the New Year Festival, stating “11th September 2002 would mark the 20^th anniversary of the helicopter accident in Mannheim when nine members of a Swansea Helicopter Club had been killed, and it was proposed that Swansea be represented at the ceremonies marking the anniversary”.    
Wales is a musical nation, and in 2007 a German newspaper reported that “the twinning of two towns is celebrated with a display of powerful singing” after a Gwalia Singers’ concert in Mannheim.  The twinning association chairman, a former prisoner of war in Britain, said “harmony and friendship are always positive whatever the circumstances”, and the newspaper added, “It was evident from the performance of the Gwalia Singers on stage that music in a united Europe really does surpass boundaries.” 
That replica water tower in Mannheim Quay is a reminder of the links with Swansea’s first “twin town”.                                                                                                            

                                   

 

 

140 Public Executions

140 Public Executions
Swansea has many distinctions, such as being where the first weekly English language newspaper in Wales - The Cambrian - was published in 1804, and likewise the first Welsh language newspaper in Wales - Seren Gomer - in 1816.  It would hardly be a distinction, but Swansea is also where the last public execution in Wales took place.  This was not such a violent occasion as mentioned last week - the burning of Bishop Robert Ferrar in Nott Square, Carmarthen, in March 1555 - but it was a hanging in April 1866 outside Swansea prison, witnessed by a crowd of thousands.  This inspired a poem by Harri Webb, while Ferrar’s execution had inspired a poem by Ted Hughes, who was related to the bishop on his mother’s side.  Disorderly scenes at the hanging in Swansea contributed to future executions being carried out within prison walls.
Swansea’s most notorious public execution - also a hanging - was that in 1290 of William (Gwilym) Cragh of Llanrhidian, sentenced to hang by William de Breos, with the execution carried out on Gibbet Hill (by today’s North End Road).  Bizarrely an apparently dead Cragh later recovered, and this was regarded as a miracle.
The last person to be publicly executed in Wales was Robert Coe, aged 18, from the Midlands.  He worked in a blacksmith’s shop as a striker at the Powell Dyffryn Works, and in September 1865 in Mountain Ash’s Graig Dyffryn Wood he murdered fellow-worker John Davies with a hatchet, severing his head.  The motive was murder - Coe took 33 shillings from the dead man and hid the body.  But Coe and Davies had been noticed drinking together in an inn on the day of the murder, and were seen by a stile leading to the woods.  Some months later Davies’s body was discovered, and when the borrowed hatchet was found to contain traces of blood, Coe was arrested.  He did admit to his crime just before his execution, for which crowds poured in to Swansea, with special trains laid on: around 15,000 people were present at 7am, including women and children.  Street vendors had set up stalls near the scaffold, with some even driving their carts right up to the gallows, then removing and hiding the wheels, so that the police could not move them on.  They would charge exorbitant fees for people to witness the execution from the carts.  Essex-born William Calcraft, then in his sixties, was the hangman, a role he performed about 450 times.  But as the crowd pushed and jostled, scores were injured and many trampled on.
The Cambrian commented, “We are far from believing that any salutary effect is produced upon the minds of the spectators by the exhibition presented them, by seeing a poor wretch deliberately and publicly strangled, and would gladly welcome the alteration in the law.”                                                                           
Public executions were often held on market days to enable the largest number of people to see them, with school parties attending as a moral lesson, and public houses and gin shops doing a very brisk trade on a hanging day.  Sometimes executions were carried out around midday to give people time to get there.  Death masks might be made of famous criminals after their execution and put on display - that of body-snatcher William Burke, executed in Edinburgh in 1829, shows the indentation in his neck left by the noose.  In London, Madame Tussaud’s waxworks might purchase a prisoner’s clothes and other objects from the hangman to display, to add authenticity to wax figures in the “Chamber of Horrors”.  Throughout the nineteenth century Quakers and such authors as Dickens and Thackeray were prominent in calling for an end to all this.  
The last public execution in mainland Britain was in May 1868, just before the Capital Punishment (Amendment) Act came into force to end public hanging, two years after Robert Coe was hanged outside Swansea prison.                                                        

 

139 Fr Charles Kavanagh

139 Father Charles Kavanagh
In 1555 Bishop Robert Farrar was burned at the stake in Carmarthen’s Nott Square during the post-Reformation attempts of Henry VIII’s eldest daughter Queen Mary to restore Roman Catholicism.  In reaction against that time, and against the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, Catholics were viewed with deep suspicion and endured centuries of persecution in Britain.  Excluded from public life and university education (as were Nonconformists), they faced prejudice and discrimination, even after the 1829 Emancipation Act had removed many barriers to their holding public office.  One man who did much to break down anti-Catholic prejudice in Swansea was the priest Charles Kavanagh, after whom a residential property in the Marina is named. 

Born in Denbighshire, Charles Kavanagh studied for the priesthood in Lisbon, before in 1838 being sent to Swansea to take responsibility for an extensive area which then included Llanelli, Aberafan and Neath.  In some areas anti-Catholic feeling even meant that a priest needed a bodyguard when going to say Mass.  From around 1797 Swansea had a Catholic place of worship, while by the 1840s most of the town’s three hundred Catholics were Irish, even before migration because of the Irish potato famines.  

A few years later, for the first time since the Reformation, a Roman Catholic bishop was made responsible for the whole of Wales, with in 1850 dioceses established in Newport and Wrexham.  Father Kavanagh witnessed the extensive growth of Swansea’s Irish community - from 1,369 in 1851 to 2,800 by 1859 - and he opened St David's Church in Rutland Place to replace the ruined chapel in Nelson Place near the docks.  Four years later a school was built nearby, and then another (aptly named after St Patrick) in the district of Greenhill, known as “Little Ireland”.  Father Kavanagh conducted a Sunday school in Gaelic in premises at the corner of Brook Street and Well Street.

The Irish in Swansea were concentrated in industrial areas to the north of the town, especially between Carmarthen Road and Neath Road, many in squalid living conditions.  The 1849 cholera epidemic was particularly virulent in the vicinity of Greenhill, where Father Kavanagh rented a room to be among the needy, and made himself available to assist Dr Long in visiting the sick, washing them and combing their hair (regardless of whether or not they were Catholics).  One account states, “Day and night he spent his time among the stricken, ministering to every want, and performing the most menial tasks for the sick and the dying.”  He also acted as interpreter, since many spoke only Gaelic.  In just two months he conducted as many as 170 funerals, and for his selfless service among cholera victims was awarded a testimonial purse of fifty sovereigns at the Town Hall.  

A man of wit and humour, Father Kavanagh was secretary to the Mechanics Institute, and served on the Council of the Royal Institution of South Wales.  He was instrumental in establishing the municipal graveyards at Oystermouth and Danygraig, and following his sudden death in 1856 aged forty-seven, he was the first person to be buried at Danygraig.  His funeral was virtually a civic occasion, with the Mayor and Corporation attending, while a plaque inside St David’s Church states that “he deservedly won the esteem of Catholics and non-Catholics alike”.

Before his death he had applied for the lease of land at Greenhill, where several years later what was then St Joseph’s Church was built at a cost of £10,000, designed by Peter Paul Pugin, son of the notable architect Augustus Pugin, who designed the Palace of Westminster.  St Joseph’s was opened in 1888, while still under construction, and became a Cathedral in 1987 when the Diocese of Menevia (the Roman name for St David’s) was re-defined.  

Could Father Kavanagh have ever envisaged that in Greenhill, where in 1849 he had ministered among the suffering of cholera victims, a Roman Catholic Cathedral would one day stand?