138 The Vivian Hall

138 The Vivian Hall
A village or church hall should be a centre for a community, where various clubs, meetings and activities can take place.  2018 is the centenary of Blackpill’s Vivian Hall, which stands on the Mumbles Road opposite the Lido, and also serves Derwen Fawr and Mayals residents.  It was originally known as the Blackpill Village Institute, built on land owned by the Vivians.
What we know as Clyne Castle was built as Woodlands in 1791, before purchase in 1860 by Graham Vivian, second son of copper master John Henry Vivian.  He transformed it into opulent Clyne Castle, and built up the surrounding estate.
After he died in 1912, his youngest sister, 73-year-old Miss Dulcie Vivian inherited the estate as a life tenant.  She built the Blackpill Village Institute alongside the Village School in 1918, as a meeting place for workers on the estate.
At first the Institute was two separate halls, one behind the other, which were not joined until 1933.  The rear or minor hall was used for billiards, for the village had teams for billiards as well as for darts, football and cricket.  Before the Second World War the Institute was popular for Saturday evening dances, and was also used by the school next door and by Clyne Chapel, opened in 1908.   During the last war the Home Guard was based at the Institute, which was formally renamed the Vivian Hall in March 1947.
Once hostilities ended normal hall usage recommenced, and in 1948 the Blackpill Women's Institute was formed, with a membership of 85.  But four years later the hall faced a crisis on the death of Admiral Walker-Heneage-Vivian, nephew of Graham and Dulcie Vivian, who had inherited the Clyne estate.  To meet the two-thirds death duties, Clyne and the estate, including the Vivian Hall, were to be sold by auction at the Mackworth Hotel.  Protest meetings were held, and eventually the Admiral’s widow removed the hall from sale, and conveyed it to four trustees to hold on behalf of the community.  Terms of the deed mentioned that it was to be used as a “sectarian and non-political place of recreation”, which would exclude use for political gatherings, though not from use as a polling station during elections.  After the billiards club closed in 1958 the table was sold, which with hindsight prevented it re-forming when TV programmes like “Pot Black” stimulated interest in billiards and snooker.
In the early 1970s the hall was brought to the brink of bankruptcy through some poor management, but the crisis was weathered - only for survival to be put in jeopardy through vandalism in February 1979 that caused fire damage in the passage linking the two halls.  Much of the building was out of use for a considerable time.
The turning point came when the Blackpill, Mayals and Derwen Fawr Residents’ Association took over temporary management of the hall in 1982, and Bob Cuthill with a background in local government became chairman.  He later wrote “That Tin Shack”, about the first 70 years of the Hall, in 1990.
From 1985 to 1987 necessary maintenance was undertaken as a community project by the Swansea Council for Voluntary Services, which enabled the Minor Hall to be used again after an eight-year break.
Today the Vivian Hall is on a solid footing, used for a wide range of activities - weekly meetings of St John Ambulance, Bridge and Scrabble Clubs, WEA Literature classes, twice weekly Tae Kwon Do sessions, monthly meetings of the Blackpill Local History Society, twice monthly meetings of Oystermouth Probus Club, as well as a Welsh parent/toddler group three mornings a week, weekly ladies yoga sessions and twice-weekly ladies line dancing, amongst others.  
Like the Ostreme Centre in Mumbles to the west, and the Parish Centre in Sketty to the east, the Vivian Hall, serving Blackpill, Derwen Fawr and Mayals, merits continued support as it enters its second century.

137 Glanmor School

137 Glanmôr School
Swansea’s district of St Thomas has three streets named after Crimean War battles – Inkerman, Balaclava and Sebastopol.  Likewise the housing estate at the top of Glanmôr Hill has four streets named after Oxbridge Colleges - Newnham Crescent and Girton Villas (Cambridge), with Lady Margaret Villas and Somerville Court (Oxford).  These colleges were founded in the 19^th century as women’s colleges (though both Lady Margaret and Somerville now accept male students).  Those street names were chosen because Glanmôr School once stood on that site, and the college names are those of four of the seven “houses” in the Girls’ School.
As Carol Powell points out in “Glanmôr Remembered”, after the First World War Swansea’s Director of Education wanted to cater for children who were “not quite bright enough for Secondary Education, but too bright to languish in Elementary Education until they were fourteen”.  So Glanmôr was built as a “Central School” on the site of Cwmgwyn Farm, and opened in April 1922 for boys and girls, using surplus army billet huts from Codfood Camp on Salisbury Plain.  These wooden huts were arranged around a grassy area in a rectangle, with each linked by an open veranda, and were intended as temporary accommodation, expected to last from ten to fifteen years: in the event they would be in use for over fifty!  The boys’ section had 278 pupils in the eastern part, and the girls’ section had 243 in the western part.
In 1930 Glanmôr received full Secondary School status, becoming on a level with Swansea’s two boys schools, Dynevor in De La Beche Street and the Grammar School on Mount Pleasant Hill, and two girls schools, Llwyn-y-bryn in the Uplands and De La Beche (where the Orchard Centre now stands).  School plays – including Shakespearian dramas - would take place at the YMCA’s Llewelyn Hall or St Gabriel’s Church Hall in Bryn Road. 
During the Second World War pupils were evacuated to Oxford Street School, which was safer, being a solid stone construction; boys used the first floor, and girls the ground floor, while Glanmôr was occupied by American soldiers.  After the war, Butler’s 1944 Education Act raised the school leaving age to 15, and the Glanmôr boys were dispersed among various secondary schools, leaving Glanmôr as a Girls’ School.
The 618 pupils were divided into seven houses – the four mentioned earlier, with St Hilda’s and St Hugh’s, both named after Oxford colleges, and St David’s.  Netball and rounders took place on school premises, but hockey entailed a trek up to the playing fields on Townhill.
New buildings were put up for science, art and music, and following educational reform Glanmôr became a senior comprehensive school in 1970, when pupil numbers reached 898.  School trips were made to such places as Brecon Cathedral, the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, and what was then called St Fagan’s Folk Museum, and to the Continent.
But after 50 years of use, the huts (known both disparagingly and affectionately as “the cowsheds”) were inadequate, especially once the school leaving age was increased to 16.  So Glanmôr School was closed in 1972 - some girls climbed on the roof and painted the words “Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow”, from Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”.  However the buildings continued to be used, in 1974 by second and third year pupils of the new Olchfa Comprehensive School, while high alumina cement that had been used during its construction was removed, and as an annexe by Gorseinon College of Further Education.  When proposals for a Welsh-medium comprehensive school on the site did not materialise, Glanmôr was demolished in August 1989 to make way for housing. 
All that remains of the school is part of the perimeter wall and a stone entrance-Arch, on the corner of Glanmôr Road and Penlan Crescent, but the regular reunions of the Glanmôr Old Girls Association show that it is far from being forgotten.

136 Bethany Chapel, West Cross

136 Bethany Chapel, West Cross
Bethany Baptist Chapel in West Cross appears somewhat hidden, for it stands at the top of Bethany Lane, off Mumbles Road, rather than being in the centre of that area.  It is near what used to be Longfields Day Centre, where there is now private housing.  Bethany’s original building opened nearly 60 years before Mumbles Baptist Church, which opened in 1910 and stands prominently at the corner of Newton Road near Underhill Park.  Bethany’s first chapel was built before the centre of Mumbles developed, and houses and shops began to stretch up Newton Road.  There used to be a Mumbles Railway station at Haroldsmoor, which was conveniently almost opposite Bethany Lane, so to get to the chapel only became difficult once this was closed in 1928 when the line was electrified.
Wales’s first Baptist Church had been founded in peninsular Gower, at Ilston in 1649, by John Miles (also spelt Myles).  During the 17^th century Gower had strong Puritan influences, through ministers like Marmaduke Matthews at Penmaen, Ambrose Mostyn at Pennard, as well as Miles himself at Ilston, and a leading Parliamentarian in Colonel Philip Jones of Llangyfelach.  This tradition of Reformed ministry has been continued at Bethany, which was founded in 1850 by church planter John Pugh, of Wimmerfield Farm in Killay.  He had been converted at Penclawdd’s Mount Hermon Chapel (now a roofless ruin), which became the mother church of Trinity Baptist in Penclawdd and of Tirzah in Llanmorlais.  John Pugh negotiated the lease of land at Longfields in West Cross from the Duke of Beaufort, on which to build Bethany, which he pastored before going on to establish Providence Chapel (now a private house) at Knelston.
The fellowship at Bethany (in what was then called Norton Fields) began in September 1850.  The Cambrian newspaper stated that “a monster tea party took place at the old castle of Oystermouth” in aid of funds for the chapel, and estimated that about 1,100 people participated.  The congregation soon outgrew that building, so that meetings were held in Mumbles, at the school that used to stand in Dunns Lane.  Rather than build on a different site, the present Bethany Chapel was erected adjoining the original one, which became the schoolroom, as with Trinity Presbyterian in Glanmor Park Road or Moriah Chapel in Loughor, among others.  It opened in September 1867, with the Cambrian commenting, “They have converted a small and unsightly chapel into one of the most commodious and pretty in the district, and they now have a house of God worthy of this rapidly rising watering place.” 
A manse was acquired in Lundy Drive in 1983, and the mortgage was paid off within a few years – a considerable achievement when the fellowship rarely numbered more than 50 members.  The congregation has reaped benefits from periods of long ministry – Rev. Thomas Davis ministered for 24 years until 1909, Rev. William Ham for 25 years to 1945, and current pastor Rev. Michael Leaves for 24 years to date.   Principal organist since 1983 has been Mr Robert Barnes, who serves as a deacon, and updated his 2001 history of the church for the recent anniversary.
The congregation has been outward looking, for example supporting a Morriston family engaged in mission work in Japan, and welcoming several Korean families when Derek Earl lectured at the Bible College of Wales in Derwen Fawr.  The 150^th anniversary of the present building echoed the 1850 occasion by holding a Victorian Tea Party (though not a monster one) last November, raising funds for the Mumbles food bank rather than for the chapel.   
Bethany seeks to continue to proclaim God’s sovereignty amid a cynical age, without diluting the message that the Puritans proclaimed into one more acceptable to what many call a post-Christian society.  The chapel itself may not be as visible as some places of worship, but the influence and witness of its congregation is certainly not hidden.      

135 Lliw Valley reservoirs

Lliw Valley reservoirs
Constructing reservoirs in Wales can be an emotive subject, especially when villages in Welsh-speaking areas are flooded to provide water for English cities.  
Despite high-profile protests, the Llyn Celyn reservoir north of Bala was opened in 1965, which had entailed flooding the Tryweryn Valley, with the loss of Capel Celyn village with 12 farms, a school, Post Office and chapel, to provide water for Liverpool.  Previously that city had relied on Lake Vyrnwy in Powys, opened in 1888 after 10 farms and the village of Llanwddyn were flooded: at the time it was Britain’s largest masonry dam.
Birmingham benefited from the Elan Valley reservoirs, opened in 1904, after 18 cottages and farmhouses, a school, church and two manor houses (one with links to the poet Shelley) had been flooded.   
By contrast the two reservoirs near Felindre in upland Gower, set amid the mountain scenery of the Mawr region, were built to provide water for Swansea and the surrounding area.  The Lower Lliw reservoir (also called the Felindre reservoir) was opened in 1863, at a cost of £160,000.  But it took reconstruction between 1976-78, with a new rockfill dam, overflow spillway and pumping station, to make the dam completely watertight.  To the north 233 men used stone from Darren-fawr quarry to construct a 25m-high dam, so the Upper Lliw reservoir was opened in 1894 at a cost of £116,000.  Yet that reservoir may hold a sinister secret.
Ioan Richard, Mawr ward councillor for over forty years, grew up after the war on the seven-acre smallholding Ty’r Darren, beneath the Upper Lliw reservoir’s quarry.  He was fascinated to hear older neighbours speak about the building of the Upper Lliw reservoir in the 1890s, a boom time for local cottages and farms, who took in construction workers on the site as paying lodgers.  That thinly-populated Welsh-speaking area became a bustling community of navvies during the construction of the Lliw Valley reservoirs. 
Last year this paper reported a tale passed down that during the construction of the Upper Lliw reservoir a navvy had died following a bare-knuckle fight around 1890 - and been buried in the dam.  This oral account was backed up by a book published in Australia by Stuart Morgan, many of whose ancestors had lived around the village of Craig-cefn-parc.  An ancestor Hannah Jones owned and ran the Colliers Arms, a pub with a small brewery in the village.  When a construction workers’ camp had been established for the navvies at the Upper Lliw between 1886 and 1894, she enterprisingly set up a pub on the site, in a shack called the "Black Slant", to quench their thirst.  The 1891 census for the Mawr area of Glamorgan lists many itinerant navvies from Ireland and England who swelled the size of the local population.  Hannah Jones’s sons worked in local coal mines, but would bring beer to the site by horse and cart in barrels from the Colliers Arms brewery in Craig-cefn-parc.  Harsh working conditions and alcohol could lead to violence, and bare-knuckle fist-fights were frequent.  Hannah's son Thomas was sent to deal with one particular navvy who had been causing repeated trouble at the shack.  An ensuing bare-knuckle fight led to the troublemaker’s death, and his body was hastily concealed amid the construction of the dam.  As with navvies working on Brunel’s railway projects, with so many transient labourers one man’s disappearance might not cause comment, for it would be assumed that he had moved on to seek work elsewhere. 
Nonetheless Thomas Jones left the village the next day and sailed to North America, where he settled without ever returning to Wales.  Stuart Morgan was a descendant who, after retiring from business in Western Australia, donated to the Swansea Valley chapels where his ancestors had worshipped, and undertook the family research that supports the oral tale of that fatal fight from the 1890s. 
Not as controversial as Tryweryn, but Upper Lliw reservoir has its dark side.      

134 Severn Princess

134 Severn Princess
In June 1999 a vessel called the Severn Princess being towed from the west coast of Ireland to Chepstow needed to shelter in Swansea Bay.  The significance concerns the alternative route from South Wales to southern England for drivers to avoid the detour around Gloucester before the Severn Bridge was built: this was the Aust car ferry, the last of which was the Severn Princess.
The Beachley to Aust ferries in Gloucestershire were revived by Newport architect Enoch Williams, who formed The Old Passage Severn Ferry Company in 1931.   Passengers with bicycles and motorbikes were transported on a 40ft wooden ferry, until two larger steel ferries were added in 1934 and 1935, each able to carry 17 cars.  Each car had to turn sharply off the ramp onto the ferry, and then be turned by a manually operated turntable before being parked: the process was reversed for unloading.  By 1959 a third ship was ordered from the Yorkshire Dry Dock Company of Hull, and launched as the Severn Princess on 23^rd May 1959.  She was slightly larger than the other car ferries at 77ft x 28ft, with twin Leyland diesel engines to give a better performance.  With three vessels operating, the frequency of ferries was increased from every 30 to every 20 minutes, and it was estimated that up to 25,000 cars could be carried each month.
This could, however, be a challenging undertaking, with a 40ft tidal range and fierce currents, and the ferry could not operate at low tide or very high tides.  Occasionally a car might slither down the muddy slipways into the swirling waters of the Severn, but there were no serious injuries to passengers.  The end for the Aust ferries came with the construction of the first Severn Bridge, opened by the Queen on 8^th September 1966, whereupon the three ferries were laid up on their moorings on the River Wye, and later moved to Cardiff docks.  West of Ireland fisheries bought the Severn Princess, intending to use her as a ferry on the west coast of Ireland, but she was laid up at Limerick until sold in 1975.  She was then used for salvage purposes, carrying cargo across Galway Bay to the Aran Islands, and for engineering projects. 
By the 1990s the ferry was having frequent breakdowns, and when laid up in harbour in Galway in 1994 she was grounded by a severe Boxing Day gale.  Five years later she was discovered wrecked and abandoned by Dr. Richard Jones, grandson of Enoch Williams.  The Severn Princess Restoration Group was formed, and some enthusiasts travelled from Chepstow to the west coast of Ireland to set about cleaning and repairing the ship, and purchased her for a nominal guinea (one pound and one shilling) before the vessel could be scrapped. 
On 21^st June 1999 a tug from Penarth was towing her across the Irish Sea when they encountered conditions bad enough to cause the Fishguard to Rosslare ferry to be cancelled.  With difficulty they managed to reach Mumbles, where the Severn Princess was pumped dry before being towed up the Bristol Channel to Chepstow, and moored on the west bank of the River Wye.  Of course her home-coming was a considerably more low-key event than the 1970 return of SS Great Britain from the Falklands to Bristol!  With a Chepstow shipbuilding yard available, the Severn Princess was floated onto the slipway for a complete survey.  The first phase of restoration was completed in September 2014, with the aim to site the vessel as a permanent heritage display beneath Brunel’s 1852 tubular railway bridge.
The Aust ferry terminal can be seen in the background of a May 1966 photo of Bob Dylan, used as a promotional shot for Martin Scorsese’s film “No Direction Home”, about Dylan’s controversial 1966 tour.  The Nobel prizewinner might comment of the ferry that once sheltered in Swansea Bay “You ain’t goin’ nowhere”.                                                                         

133 Church Bells and ringing

133 Church Bells and ringing 
This aspect of local history may be hidden, but it is certainly not silent!  Bell ringing, where bells are rung through a full 360° circle to carry the sound a considerable distance, originated in Britain, and has spread to parts of the Commonwealth, especially Australia and Canada.
Chiming is where the bell is stationery and just the clapper is moved to strike the bell.  But in bell ringing the bells are rung manually through a full circle, with each person ringing one bell.  The bells are hung in a frame in the belfry, each with a wheel attached, around which ropes run to bell-ringers standing in the ringing chamber below.  That is usually reached by ascending spiral steps inside the church tower, as in Sketty and St Mary’s Swansea, or it may be on the ground floor at the back of a church.  Swansea has churches with eight bells hung for ringing at St Mary’s in the city centre and at St Paul’s, Sketty, with other eight-bell rings at St Catherine’s, Gorseinon, and St Elli’s in Llanelli.  There are rings of six at Cadoxton and at St Thomas’s in Neath.  Llangyfelach’s four bells are rung from the ground floor of the detached tower, as at St David’s Cathedral, where the heavy eight hang in the detached belfry overlooking the Cathedral, not in the central tower.  St John’s in Morriston had six bells that stood idle on the ground for decades, since the movement of the bells had caused too much stress on the tower. 
Bells are usually made in the proportion of four parts copper to one part tin.  At St Paul’s Church in Sketty the ring of eight bells with a tenor (the heaviest bell) weighing 13cwt were cast by Mears and Stainbank of London, and re-hung in 1950 by their successors, the Whitechapel Foundry.  This closed in May 2017 after 250 years on that site.  The country’s principal bell-foundry is now John Taylor of Loughborough, who cast the eight bells with a 20cwt tenor in E for St Mary’s Swansea in 1959.  Older bell-founders were Abraham Rudhall of Gloucester (1684 to 1835), William Evans of Chepstow (1710 to 1767), and there were local small bell-founders like Thomas and David Davies of Oystermouth (1714 to 1722).
Ringing is not a matter of strength, since bells are hung now on ball bearings, rather than on plain bearings, as in the days of John Bunyan.  Children can ring the lighter bells once they develop the necessary hand-eye co-ordination, though the skill of ringing a bell takes time and perseverance to master.  Careful instruction should ensure that no learner is pulled up to the ceiling!  Instead of tunes, what are called “changes” are rung – which alter the order of the bells in prescribed ways, so that 123456 changes to 214365, and to 241635, etc.  Besides being rung for Sunday services and for weddings, church bells are rung for special occasions like the 70^th wedding anniversary of the Queen and Prince Philip, when a peal was rung on Westminster Abbey’s 12 bells.  A peal is high-quality ringing of 5,040 changes that usually takes three or more hours, rather like a marathon in running terms.  Shorter lengths such as quarter-peals can be rung, similar to a 10k run, taking about 45 minutes.  Ringing chambers in many towers display boards that detail occasions on which particular peals have been rung, and listing the ringers.  In Sketty the name of former railwayman J. Arthur Hoare is prominent as conductor of several peals in the 1960s.  Dorothy L Sayers’ detective novel “The Nine Taylors” features bell ringing, though with some inaccuracies. 
Any hymn or carol heard on church bells will not be rung but chimed, probably by one person: when bell ringers are in action the difference is apparent, and many peals will be rung throughout the country at the time of the next royal wedding!                                                                                                                    

132 Dylan Thomas's Swansea

132 Dylan Thomas’s Swansea
Dylan Thomas is hardly “Hidden History” now, although 30 or 40 years ago people might have linked him with Laugharne or Newquay rather than with Swansea.  Once Jeff Towns, dealer in second-hand and antiquarian books, had established Dylan’s Bookshop in Salubrious Passage, he galvanized the city into appreciating what an asset it had as the cradle of this major poet.  When Swansea hosted the Year of Literature in 1995, the Old Guildhall in Somerset Place was transformed into first Tŷ Llen and then into the Dylan Thomas Centre, where Jeff’s extensive collection of Dylan Thomas memorabilia formed the basis for what was intended to be a permanent exhibition.  Subsequently Dylan’s birthplace in Cwmdonkin Drive has been opened to visitors, John Doubleday’s bronze statue stands in the Marina, with a statue of Captain Cat nearby, the Eli Jenkins pub in Oxford Street, the Dylan Thomas Theatre in the Maritime Quarter, a refurbished Cwmdonkin Park, and much else display Swansea’s connections with Dylan.
Of course over sixty years after his death much of Dylan’s Swansea has gone, like the reservoir in Cwmdonkin Park.  Near the High Street terminus of what used to be the Great Western Railway, at 60 Alexandra Road stood the second-hand bookshop run by Ralph Wishart (“Ralph the books”), in a row of buildings long demolished to make way for the open-air car park.  On Mount Pleasant Hill much of Swansea Grammar School, which Dylan attended and where his father taught, was destroyed during the war: what remains is now part of University of Wales Trinity St David’s.  Walter Road Congregational Church, to whose Sunday School Mrs Florrie Thomas would take her young son, stood at the junction with Humphrey Street, where the Brunel Court flats now stand. 
During his brief employment in 1931/32 as a junior reporter with the Evening Post and the Herald of Wales, the newspaper offices stood on the green in front of the Castle ruins, convenient for the Three Lamps Hotel in Temple Street, which following bombardment was rebuilt on the opposite side and re-named The Office.  Adjacent in Castle Street was the Kardomah Café, formerly Castle Street Congregational Church where Dylan’s parents were married in 1903.  In what had been the chapel’s gallery, Dylan presided over a group of Swansea’s gifted young men in the 1930s – at various times including composer Dan Jones, artists Alfred Janes and Mervyn Levy, writer Charles Fisher and poet Vernon Watkins.  In High Street opposite the King’s Arms was the Bush Hotel, which might yet re-emerge from behind hoardings.  Dylan drank there in October 1953 with Dan Jones, Vernon Watkins and others before catching the London train for his final visit to New York. 
In Mumbles, across the car park behind All Saints Church, are the church rooms, formerly the church hall - where Swansea Little Theatre rehearsed when Dylan was involved with the company.  Of the nearby pubs visited unofficially during rehearsals, the Antelope at the corner of Village Lane is no more, while the Mermaid has been extensively rebuilt following fire damage.  
In pre-television days, when cinemas were prominent centres of entertainment, a young Dylan in the 1920s enjoyed Saturday afternoon matinees which serialised the silent-film adventures of Pearl White, at the Uplands Cinema, where until recently a branch of Lloyds Bank stood.  That “flea-pit” had been frequented a few years earlier by a young Vernon Watkins.  The large Oceana building has been demolished in what is now the Kingsway, having stood on the site of the Plaza cinema in Northampton Lane, opened in 1931 as the largest cinema in Wales.  Though not a political animal, Dylan accompanied Bert Trick to a political rally there on 1^st July 1934, when Rev. Leon Atkin upstaged the right-wing anti-semitic rhetoric of Sir Oswald Moseley, causing the meeting to end in uproar.            
The city of culture for 2021 may be Coventry - but Swansea has Dylan Thomas!