One of the other outcomes of learning to play guitar, and having been the chairman and compere of the Folk Club and the public concerts that we gave, was that I became quite well known as an entertainer.

One day a neighbour, Bill Evans, an ex-Royal Marine, living a few doors down the road came to me and asked if I would come and entertain at the annual dinner and dance of the Bridgend Branch of the Burma Star Association to be held in the Conservative Club. I agreed and duly turned up to do a half hour spot. When the Burma Star people had finished eating, and were preparing to be entertained before the dancing started, Bill approached me and said that one of their members wanted to read some poems, so would I mind if he put him on first. I had no objection, and stood around while this white-haired follow read two very funny poems, one of which was called “Whatever Happened To Phipps?” The other was the words of a well-known Irish song about the builder and the barrel of bricks.

I was then introduced and did my 30 or so minutes, came off and went to the bar in the corner of the room for a pint. The white haired chap was standing there, and I asked him if I could have a copy of the Phipps poem because I had enjoyed it so much. He became very exited and said how much he had enjoyed my performance, and would I like to join his choir because they could do with a soloist, especially as they were going on tour next October and I would be welcome. He was Gerwyn Miles, the Chairman of the choir. I was flattered, of course, and was interested in becoming soloist in a choir and widening my horizons, and asked him where they were going on tour. He said it was Canada, which I thought was very exiting. I was still teaching guitar at the Adult Education Classes at that time but they were due to finish in March, so I agreed I would give it a go in March, because I had a class on Tuesday evenings, which was also when the choir practiced.

I met Bill Evans a number of times subsequently, because I was asked to adjudicate in the Talent Competition, which was held every summer in the Grand Pavilion, Porthcawl, and ran for eight to ten heats, and then the Finals. The other adjudicators for the heats were also well-known local entertainers, some professionals, and performers’ agents, but the Finals were always adjudicated by local dignitaries. Bill, having served in the Royal Marines Band, played the Clarinet and Saxophone, and every year he entered the competition, always coming on stage when introduced carrying his clarinet on his shoulder like a rifle, and marching across the stage, doing a smart about-turn, marching back to centre stage, a smart right turn, and a military salute. He was always very good, especially playing “Stranger On The Shore”, which he always played, but he never won. I notified Orwig Owen, the Principal of the Evening Classes that I would not be doing a First Year guitar course the next year, and in February 1982, I joined the Bottom Bass Section of the South Wales Burma Star Choir in The Ponderosa Club in North Cornelly. Everyone was very friendly, and Jack Hopkins made me sit next to him and took me under his wing. He was a retired painter and decorator, cantankerous and very outspoken, but we got on like a house on fire. Our conductor was Cliff Goss, who had taken over when the original conductor, Bill Ellis, gave up. Bill subsequently became the President of the choir. Both were, of course, holders of the Burma Star, having served in the Far East during WWII, when Britain and America were fighting the Japanese – and beat them by dropping two Atomic Bombs on them. The choir was about 40 strong, but not all were Burma Star holders. The choir was formed originally in 1970 by members of the Burma Star Association, who had been going to the Association Re-unions each year at the Royal Albert Hall, and after the formal bits, plus the entertainment, they all retired to the numerous bars set up for various regiments, units, divisions, etc., so that they could meet up with old comrades from the war days. Inevitably, so the story goes, the Welsh contingent would start singing after a pint or two, and the others nagged them to form a proper choir and come and entertain everybody from the stage during the Re-union. A meeting was arranged in Swansea, and the choir was duly formed, with members from as far afield as Llanelly, Swansea, Bridgend and Cardiff, and they practiced in Landore. Gradually, members from the more distant places dropped out and eventually, they moved the practices to the Pondorosa Club in North Cornelly, and welcomed brothers, sons, friends, etc., to join and enlarge the choir. The members were then from Swansea, Morriston, Bridgend, Porthcawl and a few outlying areas, and it was here that I joined them, to help raise money to pay for the forthcoming tour to Canada in the November, and learn all their songs. Shortly after I had joined, the choir moved again, this time to the Welfare Hall at Pyle, which was owned by the local Council, and the choir was not charged rent, and we practiced there for a number of years. Eventually the Council decided to give the Welfare Halls and recreation centres greater autonomy, and Pyle Welfare realised that we were not paying rent, and decided to charge us some extortionate weekly fee, so we moved to the Pyle Royal British Legion Club, where we could practice for nothing, but spent a lot more on cheaper beer in the bar after practices.

Show on a Shoestring

One of the consequences of joining the Choir was that I met Terry Griffiths, another Bottom Bass, who entertained by doing marvellous impersonations of Al Jolson, complete with black face and white gloves. He was also a member of an amateur variety group in Porthcawl, who did shows in the Grand Pavilion each year, usually called Show on a Shoestring or some such name. He persuaded me to come to meet them and told them of some of my performances with the guitar, including a song I used to sing called Whistle, Daughter, Whistle. This was a conversation between a girl and her mother, the girl wanting a man to marry and her mother offering her a sheep or a cow, etc., instead if she whistled. When singing this song, I used two female wigs, one for the daughter and one for the mother, which was chaotic, but usually considered hilarious by the audience. When offered a man, the girl whistles. I was invited to sing it in one of their shows, and subsequently was persuaded to do other items. One year, I did the Lavender Cowboy, a song about a cowboy who wore Chanel No.5, and rode side-saddle, and for this I was kitted our with a farcical cowboy outfit with a huge cowboy hat.

Another year, I was told by the producer that she wanted me to do a music hall number called “Why Do All The Boys Run After Me?” which used to be sung in Music Hall by a man who dressed up as a dowdy woman with hair done in a bun, a straight black dress and big boots. I agreed to do this, but when I went to the outfitters to collect my costume, the one ordered for me was a voluminous pink creation that looked like a huge wedding cake, a blonde wig with long curls hanging down, and high heel shoes. It took me days to get used to walking in those shoes, and then she told me I had to step over the footlights, down a ramp and perform on a platform set up in front of the stage, almost amongst the audience. I never got nervous before going on stage to perform, because in Folk Club concerts I was usually so busy seeing that everyone else was in place in the wings ready to go on, which was a great advantage, not having time to worry too long about performing myself. The company was run by two women, both performers, one very tall and thin and the other short and plump. Then a young man from Port Talbot joined them. There was the inevitable friction and the company packed in. One of the women set up another company, but I went to see one of their shows, and it was all filth, so I never bothered to join them.

Talent Competition Adjudicator

I also, as a consequence of all this, became friendly with Roger Price, who was the man in the council’s Leisure Services Department who arranged all the concerts etc., for the Pavilion. I also knew him from the United Services Club and it was he who invited me to be an Adjudicator for the Annual Talent Competition in the Pavilion. I did this for several years with two other adjudicators, one of whom ran a theatrical agency in Swansea, and supplied artists for theatres all over South Wales. I also became very friendly with the Manager of the Pavilion, with whom I adjudicated the talent competition in a workingmen’s Club in Tonyrefail. He always drove and we usually arrived while the audience was still playing Bingo. On arrival, we were given a pint of beer while we waited. When we went in to take our places for the contest, we were given another pint. The audience were seated around the sides of the dance floor, in the middle of which we, along with their local pianist, who was the third adjudicator, sat in splendid isolation. As our glasses got near to empty, one of the committee members brought along another refill, and so it went on. How he drove back to Porthcawl safely, I shall never know.

I had many happy hours at the Pavilion Talent Competitions, and one year compéred the Senior Citizens’ Talent competition, introducing the competitors and then entertaining the audience while the adjudicators retired and made their decisions. I had also adjudicated at this competition for several years, but was never invited to compére it again!

SWBSC Trips to Canada

The trip to Canada with the Burma Star Choir for which I was conscripted into the choir was a great success. We flew to Toronto, and our first destination was North York, one of its suburbs, where I stayed with a man who had been handed over to Dr. Barnardos at the age of six, by his mother, who was single and could no longer look after him. He did not know where his mother was taking him, or why, but he remembered going to an office where his mother spoke with a man, and eventually left, leaving him there with the man, who took him to a Children’s Home, where he stayed. He did as he was told and did not get into trouble, until he was persuaded by another little lad to run away. He reluctantly agreed eventually, and off they went, but were soon caught and taken back, but he was now branded “a runner”, so he was transferred to a Home on the Isle of Wight, from which presumably it was thought that he could not run away. He was later sent, with thousands of other Barnardo boys, to Canada, where they were looking for young boys to work on farms. He ended up on a farm where he was given only a pair of trousers and boots and a shirt, given only enough food to keep him working, and treated as a skivvey. He told me that on Sundays, he had to go to church, but while the family rode in the horse and trap, he had to run across the fields to get there the same time as they did. Although Barnardos had supplied him with clothes, the farmer gave those to his own son, and Charlie only wore them when the Bardados officer came to see how he was getting on, and had to take them off again as soon as the officer had left. He stuck it for a number of years, and finally ran away with another boy, who wanted to go to USA to start a new life, but Charlie wanted to stay in Canada, so he went North and the other boy went South. He found work on another farm, where he was well treated, but eventually a Barnardos’ officer tracked him down about two weeks before Charlie’s 18th birthday. The officer told him he had other enquiries to make and would be back to fetch him. He came back on Charlie’s birthday, and feigned surprise to find that Charlie was now 18 and free from Barnardos. He eventually married and lived a very happy life, but never lost his cockney accent. I had notified my cousin Edna and her husband of the concert, and as they lived only a short distance from Toronto, they were able to come and hear us, and have a mini re-union, which was great. From Toronto we went to Niagara Falls, where I met an old gent in his eighties, who had tugged on my sleeve after the concert we did there, and asked if there was anyone from Gowerton in the choir. Bearing in mind that the choir was based in Pyle with a catchment area of a few miles, it is amazing that he picked on me, who was born in Gowerton. He asked about a number of people whom I knew and I was able to bring him up-to-date.

His family had emigrated to Canada when he was about 12 years old, and he had lived in the large house in the middle of Gowerton, now occupied by the Piper family, to whom his father had sold it before emigrating. When we returned home I went to Gowerton and took photographs of the house and other parts of the village and sent him them, and we communicated until the choir went back to Niagara Falls two years later, when he showed me the Bible he had been given by Bethania Baptist Chapel in Gowerton, signed by all the deacons and the minister when he left for Canada. He also produced a huge pile of photographs from when he was a small boy in the village, and expected me to recognise all his old friends. We continued to correspond for a few years further, and then I heard nothing more from him. Presumably, he had passed away. After all, he was well into his eighties when I first met him. I stayed with a delightful family in Niagara Falls who took me around to see all the sights, and with whom Diana and I stayed when we went out with the choir again in 1984. From there, we went to Syracuse in America, where I met up with Peggy Thomas, who was the same age as Marion. She had married an America soldier during, or just after World War II, and moved to America with him. When we arrived at the hall where we were to do the concert, we found the place locked up because the caretaker had forgotten about the concert, so a large crowd collected on the pavement, and along came this woman shouting, “Where is Ifor Davies?” and then wrapped me in her arms and told me that her mother, known to everyone as Auntie Mag, and who was still living opposite my mother in Mount Pleasant had written to tell her that I was coming with the choir. She proceeded to tell the assembled crowd how, when I was born, she was with Marion, then aged 8yrs, in our house, when the midwife came down stairs with me in her arms to show me to Marion, but being afraid that Marion would be too exited and would drop me, she gave me to Peggy to hold, minutes after I was born, so she was the first person to hold me after the midwife. The caretaker eventually arrived and finally we did the concert there, and then moved on through the Adirondack Mountains, stopping at Lake Placid for lunch. There I ate the largest sandwich we had ever seen, about 4 inches high, so I had to start at a corner and nibble my way into it. I also found a tobacconist shop from which I came away with a plastic carrier bag full of tobacco and cigars of various sizes, for which I had paid the equivalent of about £5. We carried on from there to return into Canada at Montreal, where I became very friendly with the chairman of the Montreal Welsh Male Voice Choir in the Welsh Chapel, but I lodged with Leslie West and her husband, David, with whom I kept in touch for several years, but who stayed with Norman John when they visited Wales with their Choir. Leslie was a very attractive, lovely lady, studying English Literature at the university, while her husband was a drunken, rude, uncouth man, half Indian, and who worked in a glass bottle factory. He took me to a local Indian reservation and introduced me to some of his Indian friends there, who lived in very smart houses and drank very heavily, and he also gave me two glass bottles made at his factory as a parting gift when we left.

Leslie heard me reciting “Timothy”, the poem written by Jan Smith of Maesteg. Leslie decided the way I recited it, it sounded like Dylan Thomas’ work, and she was doing a dissertation on Dylan at University, so she got me to recite Timothy in the Dylan Thomas style, and she would take it and try to kid her class it was a newly discovered work by him, and, what is more, recorded by him. To get the sound right, I had to stand in the kitchen and she stood with the tape recorder in the living room. When we left, she presented me with a new lavatory brush on which she had drawn what was supposed to be my face. As I did not have room in my suitcase, and we had to go to Ottawa before returning home, she agreed to keep it for me until the choir came again.

On our next choir visit to Canada, Diana came with us and we stayed with them again, and she still had the lavatory brush, but again, I left it there. By the time the Montreal choir came to Wales a few years later, she had left and divorced her husband and was now shacked up with a coloured man who sang in the choir and treated her properly The conductor of the Montreal Welsh Male Voice Choir was Twm Edmunds, from Pontardawe who had arranged a Canadian folk song, which we had learned in order to sing it while in Canada, “Farewell to Nova Scotia”. He stayed with us in Bridgend several years later when his choir came to Bridgend. He had only two ambitions in life, one being to sing in the Royal Albert Hall, London, and to be buried in Pontardawe. Sadly, when they left Bridgend for London, he was very unwell, but did stand to sing with the choir in the Albert Hall, but after two songs had to remain seated. After the concert he was taken directly to his sisters’ home in Pontardawe, where he died two weeks later, and was buried there, thus achieving both his ambitions. From Montreal we went to Ottawa, to another Welsh community, and then back to Toronto for the flight home. Everywhere we had stayed, the people thought we were tremendous, just, I suppose, because we were Welsh and they were all Welsh Ex-patriots, but they all said we had to come back again, and we told everyone we would be back in about two years

We talked so much about this incredible experience, for about six months, when I reminded the committee we had promised to return in two years, and that was only eighteen months away. As we would have to raise a lot of money to make it possible, we had better start work now, if not sooner. Everyone immediately buckled down to fund raising again. One event we organised was one of the first Car Boot Sales in the area. Bill Goss announced that he was getting too old and he would not be able to manage another trip to Canada, so he resigned as Musical Director in favour of David Davies, who played brass wind instruments, knew his music, and was our Deputy Conductor

When, in 1984, we went back to Canada the second time, we met up with our friends in Niagara Falls, Montreal, and Ottawa, but also visited a town near Lake Huron and drove through part of the huge Algonquin National Park, through which there is only one road, but covers most of Quebec. We saw a beaver dam in a river alongside the road. I had told Diana about the incredible autumn colours in Canada, which I had seen on the first trip, and she was looking forward to seeing them for herself. Unfortunately, there had been a short icy-cold snap about a fortnight before we arrived and, apart from a quick run from Niagara Falls to Lake Eyrie with the family we were staying with, where we did see some lovely colours on the trees, the rest of Canada had no leaves at all. All the way through Algonquin National Park, the trees were completely bare. The first really magnificent autumn colours we saw on trees on this trip were on the M4, on the way from Heathrow back to Bridgend. The Montreal Choir came to Wales for two tours subsequently and our Choir made all the arrangements, and hosted them while in Bridgend. We, however, never went back to tour in Canada.

After our second visit to Canada, the Chairman, Gerwyn Miles, suddenly resigned as Chairman, and as he had insisted on electing me Vice Chairman before our second visit to Canada, I had to take over as Chairman until the next AGM. The Secretary of the choir was Joe Fisher, who was not the easiest of men to get on with, and friction had developed between them, because they could never agree on anything. The situation became more difficult until they would no longer speak to each other, and Gerwyn told me he was considering resigning as Chairman. I tried to persuade him not to do so, because I spoke to both of them and knew that Joe was also planning to not stand for Secretary at the AGM if Gerwyn was re-elected as Chairman. During this trip to Canada, there were several decisions that could not be made until we arrived at a destination and knew the local situation. Because of the rift between the chairman and the secretary, I, as vice-chairman, when a decision had to be made about anything, had to go and ask Gerwyn for his views up the front of the coach, and then go and speak to Joe sitting at the back of the coach and then consult with the Treasurer in the middle of the coach, establish a decision and then announce to the choir what we were going to do. Gerwyn finally told me that he had made up his mind to resign, and I advised him that as we always elected the Chairman first at the AGM, then the Vice Chairman, the Secretary and Treasurer, in that order, and that I knew that as soon as he was re-elected as Chairman, Joe would refuse to stand as Secretary, and the problem was solved. After all, Gerwyn was a founder member of the choir, had been elected as its second chairman after the first chairman left the choir, and had virtually run the choir ever since. Within two weeks of returning home, Gerwyn gave me his letter of resignation, and I had to take over as Chairman. At the next AGM, in May 1985 I was elected Chairman and remained so until I also resigned in a huff, in 1999.

Lorient Festival

One of the first exiting things to happen when I became chairman of the Choir was that one of our members from Port Talbot told us about a huge Celtic Festival in Lorient , Brittany, and he knew someone from Port Talbot who was on the committee, so we might be able to go there. We contacted this man, who said Lorient was looking for a choir of about 200, so we, at 45 strong, were too small, but he would enquire. He then told us that he had offered the trip to Côr Meibion De Cymru, the South Wales Male Choir who numbered about 500. Weeks later he told us that De Cymru could not agree on which 200 would go, because they all wanted to go. Eventually he came back to us and said he was fed up waiting for De Cymru to decide and we could go.

So, in 1986, we failed to get 200, but by contacting choirs in an ever-widening area until we got as far as Cardiff and Swansea, we assembled a choir of 120 singers to go to the Lorient Celtic Folk Festival, where we excelled ourselves, and established strong ties with Kanerian an Oriant, (the Lorient Singers,) a large mixed choir conducted by Jean-Marie Airault, a bank official in Lorient, who became a close personal friend, and with whom we have kept in close touch ever since, arranging tours in Wales for him and doing tours arranged by him for us in Brittany. When we arrived in Lorient, we were met by Jean-Marie, who asked how we had got on learning “Ymadawiad Artur”. We asked what that was and were told it was the song we were supposed to be singing together in a big concert the next Saturday. The chap who had invited us to come had told us there was a song that had been suggested we sing, but it was long and not very cheerful, and he did not think it was worth learning, so he didn’t give it to us. The result was that most of our time that week was spent in rehearsal with Jean-Marie’s concert learning this and another little Breton folk song.

Although we had a marvellous time at the Festival, especially in the evenings sitting outside a particular café in the town centre, we in fact saw very little of the rest of the festival. We had to do concerts in various places, and one memorable one was in Nantes Cathedral, where David Davies, then our conductor, insisted that I read the Twenty-third Psalm while the choir hummed the tune Crimond, which made the hairs of one’s head stand up. The acoustics in the cathedral were tremendous, but it may be that because the sound echoed and re-echoed around all the huge pillars, our singing might have ended up as just a jumble of noise for the audience. They all enjoyed and complimented us, anyway. We spent most evenings when free at our little café, where a glass of beer was 7fr at the early part of the evening and increased in price as time wore on, and by midnight was about 14fr, but for us, because we were singing and drawing in the crowds, it remained at 7fr. We later discovered that the concert in Nantes was not at the request of the Festival Committee, but it had been arranged by the man from Port Talbot who had led us to believe he was on the Festival Committee, and so there was an almighty row, in which we, fortunately, were not involved. We did become involved, however, when this man went to the Festival Committee towards the end of the week, asking for money to pay hotel bills for the numerous hangers on whom he had invited, especially from Côr Meibion De Cymru, including its Chairman, President, a soloist, a doctor and many others, plus their wives, all of whom had nothing to do with our choir. He had charged us £40 each to go, £90 for wives and £120 for others who wanted to come. Although the choir was only 120 strong, we had four large coaches to take us there. When the Committee objected, he blamed it all on Ogwyn Lewis and myself, who had done most of the actual organisation as far as the choir was concerned but not the booking of accommodation, travelling, etc. The Festival Committee asked us both to meet them, and Ogwyn was able to produce his immaculate records of what everyone had paid and how much we had given this man. They asked us to come to a Committee meeting and tell the whole committee in his presence, which we agreed to do, but he refused to attend if we were to be there. It was arranged for us to be in the room well in advance of the meeting, and he thought we would not be there. When he arrived and saw us there, he turned and walked out, and the Committee was left to meet all the bills. We learned later that no Welsh choirs were to be invited to attend the Festival in future, and this, in fact, was so for several years, and the man involved has been banned for life.

One of the consequences of visiting the Lorient Festival was remarkable. We were in the huge parade, which officially opens the Festival on the first Sunday morning, when all the participants parade through the town and past the Palais de Congres opposite the harbour. The parade took two hours to pass any particular point and the pavements were packed with sightseers. Every hundred yards or so we would have to sing, in competition with all the Breton pipe bands which were also scattered throughout the parade, and even a 120 strong choir had no chance against the piercing sound of bombards and pipes. The rest of the time we were either singing in concerts in Lorient or in surrounding towns. On the last Saturday of the Festival, we were assembled on the grass bank surrounding a small amphitheatre at the Yacht Club together with Kanarian an Oriant, and watched other groups, dancers, musicians and singers being televised and eventually we did our bit. Most of the time we were sitting in the sun in our places while the TV programme, going out live that night, was broadcasting interviews, views of Lorient, and all sorts of other things for this three hour broadcast. We did later receive a copy of it from Jean-Marie Airault, whose wife had recorded it from the television. Unfortunately, French television uses a different system from ours, so the copies of our recording came out in black and white, although we did watch the original colour copy. Because we had seen so little of the Festival itself, I decided to go again the next year, simply to watch the Festival and take no part, but more of that later on. Amongst the extra choristers whom we had recruited for this trip were several choristers from the Fairwater Conservative Male Choir, as well as from other Cardiff choirs. Among those from the Fairwater choir was one Alex Mullins, a Cardiff magistrate, and treasurer of the St. David’s Hospital in Cardiff, 6’8” tall. big built, and a widower, living alone. He had a remarkable voice and when he joined our big choir he asked me where I wanted him to sing, Top Tenor or Bottom Bass, because his range was such that he could sing all four voices. He settled for Bottom Bass, which was where I sang, and we became close friends. When the Lorient event was all over and dusted, he continued to come to sing with us along with a few of his friends from Cardiff, presumably because we did such exiting concerts in places other choirs could not get to, like singing in the Burma Star Association Annual Conferences in the Royal Albert Hall. Most of them eventually gave up travelling to Pyle every week, and dropped out, but Alex remained a faithful devoted member of the choir until the choir eventually folded. We became great friends, and, not being able to drive, he travelled to Bridgend by bus or train every Tuesday night, and I would pick him up and take him to practice, getting him back to Bridgend station again in time for the last train to Cardiff at 11.05.pm. Wherever the choir went, Alex was always there, and when I fell in love with Brittany and went over there exploring and meeting up with Breton friends, Alex always came too, unless I was going with Diana on a family holiday. He was, and still is, a great, generous and loyal friend.

Alex and I went again to the Lorient Festival with the Penarth Male Voice Choir in 1993. They were only a small choir although it was nearly 100 years old, and although they thought they were the world’s best, they were not very good singers, and very undisciplined. On one occasion, we had to go to sing in La Roche Bernard, some miles South of orient. The Chairman of the Choir and his wife said they would join us there instead of coming on the coach. When we arrived at our destination we learned we had to march in a parade around the town to open their little festival. On the way through the town we passed the chairman and his wife in holiday garb sitting outside a café and later sunbathing on the beach!

Sir Bernard as Pres

The South Wales Burma Star Choir went on from strength to strength, and because we were a choir whose roots were in the Burma Star Association, we had close contact with the Association, and were frequently, every three or four years, invited to sing at their Annual Reunion at the Royal Albert Hall. When Bill Ellis passed away, the Chairman of the Burma Star Association, Air Vice Marshal Sir Bernard Chacksfield, KBE, CB, C.Eng, FRAES, RAF(Rtd), accepted our invitation to be our new President. No one realised how seriously he would take the position. In fact, he attended almost all our Annual Concerts in the Grand Pavilion, Porthcawl, and stayed in the Seabank Hotel for the night. He always brought his wife, Betty, who turned out to be from Gorseinon, and had attended Gowerton County Grammar School for Girls at the same time that I was in the boys’ Grammar School.

Sir Bernard, as President, made sure that the choir sang at his Annual Reunion as frequently as he could arrange it, and was very proud of “his choir”, although we never received any payment from him or the Association, for all the concerts we gave to raise money for them. The Secretary of the Association was from Aberystwyth, an ex-Sergeant in the Royal Engineers, and he frequently called on our services for regional functions of the Association, in Aberystwyth, Bristol, Cheltenham and all sorts of odd places, and also to raise money for the Retired Gurkhas Association. Sir Bernard would ring me up and ask if and when the Annual Concert was to be held, and ask me to book a room in “that little pub up the road”, meaning the Seabank Hotel, Porthcawl. Every year I would instruct the hotel not to give him the bill, and that the choir would pay it, but every year, when I went for the bill, Sir Bernard had already paid it.

Meeting H.M. The Queen

He also was instrumental in getting me, as Chairman of the choir, to be invited to the Royal Retiring Room in the Albert Hall at the end of the concerts, despite my protests that this invitation should be to the Musical Director. In this way I met, and chatted to the Duke of Edinburgh one year. It was the year that we sang “The Burma Star Soldier” for the first time, the last line of which was “Here in the old Burma Star” and I asked him and Sir Bernard what they thought of it. Prince Philip said he thought we were singing about a pub.

Another year I met and spoke to HM The Queen, and wished her a Happy Birthday on behalf of the boys in the choir.

Introduced to H.M. the Queen, Royal Albert Hall, 1995

She smiled and asked me to thank them for her. I also spent time in the Green Room with people like Vera Lynn who sang at the Reunion most years as “The Forces’ Sweetheart” and who visited the Far East during the war to entertain the troops, and they all worshipped her. There was also a tenor who sang in all these Reunions with whom I became friendly. He turned out to be from Waunarlwydd. He would stand by the entrance to the stage waiting his turn to go on with another man standing with him. When his music started, he would stride out onto the stage and acknowledge the huge applause from all parts of the hall, turn to the choir and wave, and at the end of his turn he would turn, waving and stride off the stage where he was met by the other man. It was several years before I learned that he was totally blind

Other Great Times with SWBSC

John joined the choir and I was proud to have him in the bottom bass with me, especially as he had such a good bass voice. He came with us to the Albert Hall and was in what I consider to be the best photograph of the choir we ever had taken. It was taken inside Coety Castle, with us sitting and standing on the stumps of walls inside the castle, and the photographer standing high up on the outer wall.

'sErtogenbosch & Arnhem

The choir also formed an association with a choir in s’Hertogenbosch, Holland, because the town was liberated from German occupation by the 53rd Welsh Division in 1944, and every year invites a Welsh choir to come to take part in their Remembrance Service and concerts. We went several times and saw quite a bit of Holland in the process, and have entertained their choir in Porthcawl and Bridgend several times. On one of these visits to s’Hertogenbosch, of course we had to go to the Memorial of the Liberation of the town, and our conductor at the time decided that we would sing a rather complicated arrangement of Ar Hyd Y Nos, despite our protests that there was no piano at the Memorial and we would have to sing it unaccompanied. He, however, insisted that that was what we were going to sing. He gave a toot on his tuner, and we all started in different keys, and made such a hideous mess of that beautiful song, which was probably why we never went there again.

One year, we decided it would be a good idea to go on the Arnhem Pilgrimage, the annual event for survivors of the attack on Arnhem Bridge by Allied paratroopers, and after quite some difficulty I managed to get an invitation. We watched the Silent March, when all the veterans marched silently through the town to the bridge and back again, all without a command being given or a word spoken, except for the memorial service on the bridge for those who fell in the battle. A young Boy Scout marched about twenty yards ahead of the parade carrying a placard with the words “Silence Please” in large letters. The pavements were crowded with people and not a sound was to be heard, not even the sound of the marching men. It was very moving. We also attended the Memorial Service in the huge cemetery in Arnhem on the Saturday morning. Hundred and thousands of little white memorial stones, some bearing names, and some simply marked “Unknown”, stood in long straight rows around a large open space in the centre of the cemetery. This space was now filled with chairs, for the hundreds of relatives, survivors, and friends who attended the service. The Chaplain of the Airborne Forces conducted the service, and an address was given by the local priest, who then spoke to the schoolchildren who had marched in carrying little bunches of flowers and taken their places, one to each grave in the cemetery. The local priest told them that when he gave the order, they were to turn around and face the headstone at which they stood and as they laid the flowers they were to look at and remember the name on the stone. If there was no name they were to invent one for the person buried there, and remember that name for the rest of their lives. They were then told to turn and lay the flowers. It was a most astonishing and moving moment, and I was quite overcome, and still am every time I relate the story to others. On the way out of the cemetery after the service, there was a man standing silently and alone outside the gates holding up a placard saying, “Veterans, We Thank You.” We also watched a large scale parachute drop, and went to the old church at Oosterbeek, where the survivors held out against the Germans, and those who could escaped in torrential rain through the woods and across the river in rubber boats, which had been brought up for them, while the injured who could not get away held off the German troops. In this church, which still bore the bullet holes and marks where shells had hit it, we performed a concert, which was well attended, although it was only a tiny church, and in this way, we paid tribute to the brave forces who were sent to take “The Bridge Too Far.”

1944-1994 Celebrations

We were also invited by Porthcawl Town Council to take part in a celebration of the 40th anniversary of 1944. This puzzled me at first, because it seemed a strange thing to celebrate. It turned out that Porthcawl was crowded with troops, especially Americans, but also Dutch and Polish, who were here preparing for the Invasion of Normandy, which was to end World War II. Ogwyn and I attended a committee meeting of councillors, along with the Chairman and Secretary of the Porthcawl Male Voice, and we all agreed to do a joint concert at the end of this special week. During the week there were to be parades, and various other events, and displays, and all of Porthcawl put brown sticky tapes on their windows, as in wartime, sandbags were filled and set up around doorways, and so on, and the whole town made to look as it was thought it looked in 1944. Porthcawl Choir and we agreed to do a joint concert, Porthcawl doing the first half and Burma Star doing the second half. Then it was suggested that the concert ought to end with the whole audience joining in a sing-song, singing war time songs. I suggested that if they were to do that, they would need someone to lead the singing, because the audience would not do it spontaneously and would need someone to get them going. The chairman asked if I knew anyone who could do it, and I thought of Gareth Daniels, the colleague of mine from Merthyr who was getting well known as a comedian and after-dinner speaker, but I said I would think about it and come up with some suggestions. While I was making enquiries later, I had a phone call from the chairman of the committee to say they had decided who was to lead the singing – ME. I protested, but they insisted. So it was that I and a well-known pianist in Porthcawl got together and chose a number of songs for the audience to sing. I suggested that, to take us back from 1994 to 1944 we needed a special song to set the atmosphere, and I thought of the Dad’s Army Signature tune, “Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr. Hitler?” Although written specially for the TV programme, Dad’s Army, and recorded by Bud Flanagan, who died about two weeks after recording it, it would take us right back to the days of the Home Guard and the Wartime Britain. The pianist had not heard the song and did not know it, but I sang it to him in his home and he promptly played it and it sounded right.

A few days later, I was passing a charity shop in Bridgend and went in to see what they had and saw a white tuxedo on a rack. I tried it on, and it seemed to fit, and they only wanted £2 for it, so I bought it especially to wear for this concert. As soon as the Burma Star choir had finished singing, I dashed off stage, while the compére was thanking everybody and explaining what was to happen next, and I changed into black trousers and this jacket and a bow tie, and a huge conductor’s baton made out of a thick rod painted white that I though would raise a laugh, which it did. It was some months later, when Alex Mullins asked me to compère an Annual concert of the Fairwater Male Choir, and I wore that white jacket again that I realised that it was miles too big for me. It raised a laugh in Porthcawl, but in Fairwater it was embarrassing! So my first attempt of conducting in public was on the stage of the Grand Pavilion, Porthcawl, with a packed audience, two male voice choirs, and no rehearsals.

Conducting a packed audience in the Pavilion Porthcawl 1994. The first time I conducted in public!

It was a huge success, and the committee decided that this event was to be repeated the following year, and this community singing was to be part of it. We did it for, I think, about three years, and then, with changes in the Council and so on, the whole week was abandoned.

The choir has sung in so many places and for so many charities and causes, and with so many other choirs from all over the UK and from abroad. I had a great time with the choir, and have very many happy memories, and also became rather well known in my capacity as chairman, compére and general entertainer.

In about 1993 or 1994, we had appointed a young girl as our Musical Director, who claimed to have a music degree, specialising in conducting. She was the worst conductor we had ever had, and the performance of the choir went steadily downhill, until we had to sack her, but not before she had arranged for us to go to her home town of Goudhurst, Kent, where her father was a hop farmer, and we were all accommodated by the villagers. Our singing was far from First Class, but the villagers, probably because our conductor’s father was the largest employer in the area, thought we were absolutely fabulous.

Festival of Remembrance

In 1994, I received a phone call from Bob Reader, son of Ralph Reader of Gang Show Fame to ask if I could bring the Burma Star Choir to sing at the National Festival of Remembrance in the Royal Albert Hall in the November, because it was to have a Burma flavour. For this we had to be on top form to sing on BBC Television in a concert that virtually everyone in the country watched the night before the Remembrance Service at the Cenotaph in Whitehall. Singing at the Festival of Remembrance concert was a very moving occasion, especially when we stood in the Hall when all the poppies were falling over us. Then, Sir Bernard rang me to say he wanted us in the Burma Reunion because it would be the Fiftieth Reunion, and he wanted “his choir” to be in it. Because of this, I knew we had to get rid of our conductor and find someone to get us back up to scratch in time for these important functions, realising, of course, that during the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, and especially the war in the Far East, we were going to be busy singing for various branches of the Burma Star Association and regimental associations and so on. The only conductor I knew of and who might be available, was Ron Howells, who had conducted the choir some 15 years earlier, but had been sacked at the instigation of Gerwyn Miles after a dispute between them over an issue that had nothing whatsoever to do with the choir.

Ron agreed to come temporarily until we could find someone more permanent. We, therefore, disposed of the services of our young girl, and Ron took over. Our singing immediately improved and we sang magnificently at the Royal Albert Hall, and at remembrance services around this area for the anniversary of VJ Day, and then at the Special Burma Reunion also in Royal Albert Hall. With Sir Bernard as President our visits to sing at the Burma Reunions increased, and I therefore, at Sir Bernard’s instigation, I went to the Royal Retiring Room several times and was introduced to Prince Philip on one occasion and to H.M. The Queen on another. However, as soon as word got around that Ron was back, Gerwyn, suddenly started coming to choir practices again and began a campaign to discredit Ron. Gerwyn had now retired from his work as an architect with the local council, and had virtually left the choir. He had learned to speak Welsh, and then started making a lot of money teaching other people to speak it in classes all over the area. He poisoned the minds of several choristers, and made life so unbearable for him, that Ron, who had stood his ground and brought the choir up to standard for our commitments that year, handed me his resignation immediately after our last VJ concert. I was so angry, not only that Gerwyn had manipulated this situation, but he had persuaded other prominent members of the choir to join his campaign, that I, too, resigned and walked out of the choir myself. The Vice-Chairman, Viv Morris, had to take over until the next AGM a few months later.

Ogwyn, who had surprised me by joining in Gerwyn’s campaign, continued with the choir, but his wife, Mona, had a very severe stroke on our way to a concert in Port Talbot, and although he tried to nurse her at home, eventually she had to go into a nursing home in Neath, near their son. Ogwyn visited her every day, travelling from Porthcawl, but being unwell himself, soon found this too much and applied for admission to the same nursing home. He was accepted but was not allowed to share a bedroom with Mona, so they only saw each other in the day. Mona was unable to speak, except a few words, and although she could use a spoon sometimes, she usually had to be fed by hand. The choir went down there one night to sing to the residents and I went with them. It was the last time I heard Ogwyn singing “In The Garden” as a duet with Ryland Jones. It had always been their party piece in choir Afterglows and such. Then Ogwyn suddenly died 2007, and Mona, gave up the will to live and also died in March 2008. Gerwyn also died in, I think, 2007. The choir’s last tour was to Blackpool to sing at an Annual Conference of the B.S.Association, in the Tower Ballroom. Alex and Russ and I shared a room in a crummy hotel and I spent all my time looking after them.

However, when I left the Burma Star Choir in the Autumn of 1994, I then had to consider which other choir to join, and decided that as Alex Mullins from Cardiff had remained so loyal to the Burma Star Choir ever since he joined the large Cor Meibion Morganwg in 1986, and had been a close and loyal friend to me for the same length of time, I should return the compliment and join his choir, the Fairwater Conservative Male Choir, several of whose members I already knew from 1986.

So, in February 1996, I turned up one Monday night and asked to join their choir, and Bill Johnson, their chairman, (originally from Swansea) whom I also already knew, welcomed me, and said I could be their Deputy Conductor! I protested that I was not a conductor, I just wanted to sing Bottom Bass with them, but he insisted I could do it. I said I would need some time to think about that, but in the interval, he welcomed me to the choir, and announced that I was to be their Deputy Conductor, despite my protestations. The only conducting I had done before this was to conduct the audience and two choirs singing war time songs in the Pavilion, Porthcawl, to help celebrate the 50th Anniversary of 1944.

I thought, however, that after I had been with the Fairwater Choir for a while, perhaps their conductor, Monica, would let me have a try at conducting, let me in gently and perhaps even teach me, and see what happens. However, as soon as Bill had finished his announcements, Monica came across to me, and explained that she had a parent/teacher meeting at her school next Monday, and could not arrive until about 8.o’clock, so could I take the first hour of the practice. I frantically studied the pieces the choir was working on and practised conducting them all the week and prepared what I was going to do for that hour. I actually, in my anxiety, prepared enough for about three hours of practice, and it was a good job that I did, because the next week, only my second evening with the choir, she did not turn up at all and I had to take the whole two hours. I found that I enjoyed every minute of it, and so did not mind taking over for her from time to time afterwards. Then she explained to me that the choir was due to sing in the “1000 Voices” concert in the Royal Albert Hall in the coming October, and as I spoke Welsh and she did not, and I knew the Welsh songs in the programme, she wanted me to teach the choir the Welsh ones and she would teach them the English ones. I agreed, and only then discovered that most of the programme for 1000 Voices consisted of Welsh songs and they were going to have fewer solists, because the Conductor, Owen Arwel Hughes, felt that people came to these concerts to hear the huge choir, and not listen to soloists. He had also chosen a programme consisting of a number of large heavy old Welsh classics, like Nidaros and such.

However, I also discovered that none of the choristers spoke Welsh, or had any idea about Welsh pronunciations etc., but every week, after the half time interval, I had to try to teach them the music and the Welsh words. Time eventually ran out on us before we had covered all the music, and I had to tell them that they would have to pretend to sing the ones they did not know, and the audience would not notice when they were scattered around in a choir of almost 1000 men. I then learned that only about five of the choristers were going anyway.

On 15th March 1996, a month after I had started with the Fairwater choir I had to conduct the choir, together with the Canton RFC choir, which Monica also conducted, at her grandfather’s funeral, because she had to be sitting with the family.

I shall always remember the first public concert I conducted, on 27th June 1996, four months after joining the Choir. The Accompanist of the Choir was unable to be with us, and Monica said she would play and I could conduct. It was a charity concert organised by Beryl Morgan, a Soprano soloist, (whom I later helped to become a professional singer and member of Equity, the Performers’ Union) and her husband who had worked all his life on the studio floor of both BBC and ITV studios. The proceeds were to go to some African Charity for which an African woman from Cardiff was fund-raiser. It was to be held in the Norwegian Church down in Cardiff Bay, which had only recently been redeveloped, and the Church renovated. It was no longer a church but was used by various charities for their activities and for performances. Being a studio technician, he was going to record the concert and sell the records. The concert went off well, and the audience thoroughly enjoyed it, and Monica was full of praise for the way I had conducted. The recording, however, was a disaster, because the “Studio Engineer” set up his recording equipment in a small room at the back of the hall, where it picked up a small guitar group practising in the room above better than it did our concert. However, I still have great affection for the Norwegian Church in Cardiff Bay.

Then, as March was approaching, in 1997, and with it our Annual Concert, I kept asking Monica what programme she had chosen for it, but she kept putting off her answer. When I pressed her at the beginning of February, she said there was plenty of time as the Annual was not until the end of March. She was amazed when I reminded her that it was on St. David’s Day, 1st March, she panicked and said she would sort it out by next week. Instead, however, she brought her letter of resignation from the choir, explaining that she had realised that she was doing too much, being the music teacher in her school and conductor of the school choir, the Canton Rugby Club Male Voice and her Church choir, and having two children and no husband. Then she left and I had to take over as Musical Director. The choir, when I joined it was about 24-25 strong, and after I took over, we managed to increase that to 32, mainly because the Cardiff Police Choir folded, and several of its members came to us, but also we attracted past members of Fairwater to return, and we had a pretty good choir. I gained confidence in conducting, but for a while I was so concerned with working on a song until they were singing it to my satisfaction, that very often the practice was entirely a learning process with very little singing for the enjoyment of it. I realised what I was doing when the accompanist resigned, but we had to find another pianist, after which I always made sure that we sang songs we enjoyed in every practice as well as putting some time aside for learning new material. We did a lot of concerts, as far away as Salisbury, and at the National Botanical Gardens in Carmarthen, when a few of the Burma Star boys came with us to sing while the visitors strolled around looking at the plants. I also arranged with Jean-Marie Airault in Brittany for us to do a tour there for a week or ten days. While there, we took part in a local Breton Folk Festival in a school in Quimper, and sang in the oldest church in Brittany, which was at the other end of Quimper. We sang in Lorient and several other places, but most of our time was taken up sight-seeing. On one occasion Jean-Marie asked his eldest son, Gwenael, to accompany us, because he could not get away from work himself. Gwenael was uncertain about doing it because he felt he did not know enough about the history and features of the places we were to visit that day, but his father told him not to worry, because I knew Brittany better than he did. We visited places like St. Bridget’s church, half way down a cliff face and another now disused church with a magnificent reredos. Gwenael was useful, acting as a translator for us. He later told his Dad that he was right - I did know that part of Brittany better than he knew it.

We stayed at the Conservatoire at Ploumeur again, just outside Lorient, but some choristers who had brought their wives, preferred to stay at an hotel in Lorient where they did not have to use communal washrooms and toilets. This meant we had to go into town to collect them before setting out anywhere each day, and returning them there each night. We also had to do a concert on a little island on a large lake, to which we had to be ferried, a few at a time, in a little rowing boat, which frightened our pianist out of her mind, but it was a great concert. We also did a concert in a Church, which I have never found open on subsequent visits, which is strange in Brittany. As we all trooped out for a breath of air in the interval, an elderly gentleman followed me to tell me that his father or grandfather, had translated the Welsh National Anthem into Breton, thereby giving Brittany its own National Anthem. The Welsh try to say what they want to say in poetry with as few words as possible. The Bretons, however, are far more verbose in their literature, so whereas the Welsh Anthem has only two verses, the Breton runs to about five. The only other memorable event of the trip was when the coach driver, instead of letting us all off at the front door of the conservatoire, drove around to a large car park which he had discovered at the back of the building to discharge us there. He had not noticed the large low overhang of the roof at the back of the building, and drove under it, smashing the front of the roof of his coach, and covering me with broken glass in the front seat. Still, we made a good impression as a choir and had a great time.

However, we were still an elderly choir. I took Russ Brown, who was then in his 80’s, every week from Porthcawl, and most of the choristers were in their 70s and 80s, and slowly they found it more difficult to attend regularly or became ill.

The choir chairman, an ex-serviceman who also ran the Cardiff Mess of the Fellowship of Ex-Servicemen, never missed a practice with his friend Eric, until one evening he failed to turn up. I was told that he had been taken to hospital with stomach pains, so Alex Mullins and I went to visit him. He was a huge, overweight man, but what we found in his bed was a small, wizened chap with an oxygen mask on his face. He told us he had been having stomach pains for a long time and had been taking Aspirins to kill the pain but they no longer worked, but he was now getting proper treatment, and would soon be back in choir practice. Two weeks later, we learned that he had died of Cancer, from which he had been suffering for years without telling anyone, not even his wife. I was unable to attend the funeral, as I was away on holiday, but his wife had told us what she wanted us to sing, so I had drilled the choir to sing without a conductor. One of the songs she asked for was the Spiritual, “Steal Away to Jesus”, and the choir also decided to sing “Softly As I Leave You”. Apparently there was not a dry eye in the crematorium when the choir sang both those songs, and we sang “Softly” in several funerals after that. I learned later that the Burma Star Choir, under the conductership of Roy Davies, were also doing the same.

More and more choristers found their health deteriorating, and eventually we were not getting enough in practice to make it worthwhile, and I had to, reluctantly, advise them that we would have to give up. We had already come to an arrangement with the Penarth Male Choir to sing at each other’s concerts, because they were low in numbers also, even though the Penarth choir was 100 years old. They, however, tended to sing ‘popular’ songs that were not normally sung by choirs and sang them in unison instead of in harmony, and were completely undisciplined. Some of us from Fairwater, and also from the Burma Star Choir had gone with them in August, 1993 to the International Celtic Festival in Brittany, where they thought they were going to bring Welsh Culture to the French. The Burma Star Choir had been out there a few years earlier, so we knew what to expect. Little did the Penarth Choir know, nor would they listen when we tried to advise them, and they were just as ill disciplined on that trip as they always were. I made it a condition of our arrangement with Penarth that if we were to sing at one of their concerts, we had to attend their practices for at least two or three weeks, and they were to do the same if coming to sing at one of ours. At one concert we did in Barry, although only their conductor, John Davies, and one other had turned up to my practices, and we had learned a new song we were going to sing that night, about 14 of them suddenly turned up at the concert. I told them about the new song and that they were not to sing it as they had not been to practices and did not know the harmonies of my arrangement of it. They agreed, but on stage, when they recognised the song, they joined in with gusto, all singing the melody, even the bottom basses, and ruined the song.

When the Fairwater Choir packed in, several of the choristers joined the Penarth choir, and some joined Canton Rugby Club choir, conducted by Monica, and of which Alex was also already a member. I learned some time later that the Penarth Choir had lost some of its less disciplined choristers, and were now singing a lot better. I was glad, because the Choir was 100 years old after all.

Back to SWBSC

After that, I was persuaded to re-join the Burma Star Choir, with whom Alex and I had sung several times when they were short of singers while I was with Fairwater, and at their next AGM, they insisted I become Chairman again, which I reluctantly did. They had also called on me to become their regular compere, filling out the programmes with gags and items to make the audience laugh, relax and enjoy the concert. They had been conducted by Roy Davies, who had formed and conducted the Maesteg Gleemen for many years, until they had a quarrel and they sacked him. He then formed the Maesteg Ladies’ Choir, but after twelve months, they too sacked him, and he was persuaded by some ex-members of the Gleemen to form another Choir, which they called Côr yr Hen Blwyf, (The Old Parish Choir). The Burma Star Choir were asked while I was with Fairwater Choir to join a local professional Tenor Soloist, who was arranging to go on tour singing David Alexander songs, and he wanted a backing male voice choir, and the Burma Star invited Hen Blwyf to join them, so the two choirs combined and shared the fees between them. They did several tours in South Wales and further afield, but then, when another tour was in the offing, Hen Blwyf arranged to do it on their own and left Burma Star out. By this time several Burma Star Choristers had joined Hen Blwyf anyway, but I thought it was wrong of Hen Blwyf to treat Burma Star in that way. I also thought it odd that so many of the old stalwarts of Burma Star should then transfer their allegiances to Hen Blwyf, especially Gerwyn Miles, a founder member of the Burma Star Choir and a Burma Star holder himself, and Ogwyn Lewis, who had been a devoted member of Burma Star Choir for years. I do remember, however, that he similarly left the Porthcawl Choir to join us!

When I returned to the choir, there were only some 18 choristers and they and Hen Blwyf had both needed to help each other to do concerts, and as they both had Roy as conductor, there was little problem, but Hen Blwyf had recruited a few more members, and felt they were now independent. Roy accepted me back in the Burma Star, and even used me as his Deputy if he was unable to attend, but, although I was persuaded to compére some of their Hen Blwyf’s concerts, I refused to join them as a member.

In 2008, however, the Burma Star Choir was much reduced in numbers, and practices were often a travesty as there were so few there. It only needed one or two to be ill or away and practice was a waste of time, although, admittedly, a very enjoyable waste of time. Roy had trouble with his knees and was waiting for an operation to replace his knee caps, so he was usually late coming to practice and regularly had to leave by 8.15.pm to return home to his wife who was also quite ill and needed someone in attendance most of the time, so practices were actually only an hour or less long. The choristers became restless, and numbers dropped to 10, which made it more difficult. We were already booked to sing at the third Veterans’ Day service in 2008 outside the United Services Club in Bridgend as we had for the previous two, and were due to be paid £150 for singing three or four songs and augmenting the general singing of the hymns. Norman John, the secretary, and I managed to stave off the inevitable meeting to discuss closing the choir until after that event. He was going back and fro to the USA to his new American girlfriend, but his presence as secretary was essential at this meeting. When Veterans’ Day arrived, Roy had just left hospital after an operation on his knees, so I had to conduct the choir for the last occasion public performance. Norman John was rushed into hospital the day before with heart trouble and had to have a pacemaker fitted, so was unable to be with us.

So, it was not until 15th July, we finally held the meeting and they all voted for the choir to close, so, sadly, The South Wales Burma Star Choir, (Côr-y-Seren) ceased to exist. I managed to take a photograph of all of us, except Charles Blackwell who was ill, and each of the 14 remaining members was given a copy, and one has been framed and put up in the Pyle British Legion Club, where we had practised all those years. Some of us still meet at the Legion once a month for a chinwag, and talk over our adventures with the choir. Even that little group was reduced to four because of illness. They asked me to take them to Brittany because they had not been there with the choir, so in September 2010, I arranged for the four of us to go there for five days. At the last minute, one of them even withdrew from that, but three of us went and I enjoyed showing them some of the more spectacular parts of the country that I fell in love with after my first visit.

Brittany, family trips

Because we had seen so little of the Festival Interceltique, the huge Celtic Festival in Lorient, in 1988, I decided I would like to go again the next year, simply as a spectator to see the rest of it properly. I booked a Gite in Baud, a small town about 15 miles from Lorient, for Diana and me, and Susan and Doug, for two weeks. My plan was that as the Festival was always the first week in August, except in certain circumstances, we could spend the first week seeing the Festival and talking to Stewards and Interpreters who spoke English and find out what there was to see in the rest of Brittany for the second week. Unfortunately, Susan and Doug had to pull out of the trip, but two friends of ours, Sam and Maureen Chilvers, decided that they would come in their place. What I did not know was that Sam suffers from seasickness, and is also unwell in a car if he is not driving. Half way to Plymouth for the boat, I had to let him take over the wheel, and he drove so slowly and carefully that I thought we were going to miss the boat, and I had to take over the wheel again to ensure that we did. When we arrived in Baud in 1989, on the Saturday that the Festival was to start, we settled in and then drove into Lorient, because I wanted to find the best places to park and the best place to stand to watch the parade on Sunday morning.

We arrived in Lorient, and instead of a main square packed with stalls, bands, dancers, and all the confusion of the Festival, the place was deserted, because they do not spend Saturday nights as we do. We found a poster advertising the festival and found that it was starting the following Saturday. So here we were in Brittany for a week and no idea where to go sightseeing, except I knew Nantes, and wanted to see the place properly. We just had to wander about the country, exploring. We found some fascinating towns and villages, as well as so many prehistoric remains, Cromlechs, stone circles, and famous Alignments at Carnac, and I fell in love with Brittany. We became so absorbed in exploring Brittany, that we saw very little of the Festival the second week also. We did go to see the parade, and wandered around the town, but as neither Diana, nor Maureen and Sam enjoyed just sitting outside a café drinking beer, we did not even do that or watch the festival happening all around us. I think the persistent sound of bagpipes from every Celtic nation except Wales and the Isle of Man, blasted in our ears all the time we were in the town contributed to their anxiety to avoid the festival. However, despite all that, it was a successful trip and we had found some fascinating places and learned a lot about Breton history and customs, and, more especially, had made a lot of friends, in addition to Jean Marie Airault and his lovely wife, Rozenne, and the manageress of the Conservatoire in Ploumeur, just outside Lorient, and her husband, all of whom I had met the previous year in the festival. The choir stayed at the Conservatoire several times in subsequent years.

The Gite was on a little farm just outside Baud. The owner was a lovely little old lady who tended her small herd of cattle, and milked them, as well as looking after the five gites, which were technically owned by Brittany Ferries, but after ten years would revert to her entirely. There was a large living room on two levels, and a kitchen on the ground floor, with a large balcony above on the first floor plus a double bedroom. To get to the bedroom, one had to cross the balcony, which also contained a double bed and bedroom furniture and where Sam and Maureen slept, which was a bit inconvenient, but nobody minded. We booked a gite on the same farm for the following year, when Susan and Doug came with us, a gite with separate bedrooms and Diana and I went two more years after that, until one year, we booked one in Finistere instead of Morbihan for one week and then another in Normandy for the second week. Over those few years we explored nearly all of Brittany and found an extraordinary country with exquisite customs and traditions, and a history and a language so similar to the Welsh. In fact, at one stage in history, we were one country, sharing the same language. Breton, although now much influenced by French, is still very similar to Welsh. And the Bretons are as fervent in their wish to be independent from France, as the Welsh Nationalists are to be free from England. Every town had its war memorial to “les enfants de France”, and also in odd corners we found war memorials to Bretons who died in the war, and frequently to Bretons “shot by the Germans”. These were Bretons who did not want to fight with France, or were on the side of the Allies We found some fantastic and interesting places, especially standing stones, cromlechs and ancient, prehistoric stone structures whose purposes are still not fully understood, and I fell in love with the whole place, and we have visited several times, touring with the campervan. We visited the Carnac Allignements, parallel lines of huge standing stones stretching about a mile or so across the land, with numerous ancient burial chambers in the same area. No one has yet established who erected them or for what purpose, although there are numerous guesses and suggestions.

I also maintained contact and friendship with Jean-Marie, and have taken choirs over to Brittany and have entertained his choirs by arranging tours for them in Wales, and there were close links between Kanerian an Oriant and The South Wales Burma Star Choir. We are still in touch, although Jean-Marie, suddenly, left his wife and three sons to live on his own, and concentrate on his music. He subsequently collected together male singers from other Breton choirs to form a Male Voice Choir to join “The World Choir” set up by a solicitor from Cardiff for a tour of America. Burma Star choir had also joined this, but it soon became evident that taking a choir of several thousand men, plus some wives, to tour in America was impractical, and a number of choirs were asked to withdraw from the trip, and most of us never got our £50 deposits back. This solicitor subsequently suddenly booked all the hotel rooms in Cardiff for one particular weekend at their normal charges. Only later it was announced that there was a big international boxing tournament to be held in Cardiff that weekend, to which the whole world would be coming, and he had all the hotel rooms for which he charged the earth and made a packet. He was subsequently sent to prison for some such malpractice, and I have not heard of him since On their return from America, Jean-Marie asked his choristers if they wanted to disband, or continue as a Male Voice Choir, and they decided to continue, and became one of, if not the, first Male Voice Choir in Brittany, Mouezh Paotred Breizh, (The Brittany Male Voice Choir). He later started a Ladies Choir and another Mixed Choir, but gave up Kanerian an Oriant after he left his wife and sons. I never got to the bottom of that break-up, but the ladies of Kanerian also broke off their association with Rozenne, which I also never understood. I have kept in touch with both of them ever since, and exchange Christmas Cards, and also see both whenever I go to Brittany.

Mam's Ear Operation

Mam was by now very forgetful and vague, and she had a little spot on one ear, which she kept scratching, and making it bleed. The doctor called fairly regularly, and if there were anything wrong with Mam, Mrs. Daniels would call him. On one visit the doctor noticed the blood on the lobe of her ear dripping onto her neck and examined it. He gave her cream to clear it up, but it did no good. In fact he tried numerous treatments, but none worked, and we happened to be there when he called one day, and he discussed it with us, suggesting that she should see a specialist. He arranged for a specialist from Morriston Hospital to call, and I went down to be there when he did. He decided that the only answer was to cut out that part of the ear lobe, but could not be certain until he had her on the operating table under the very bright lights. Mam agreed to it, so I had to fall in with them. I mentioned to the doctor that I was surprised that he wanted to operate because she was in her eighties. He said he frequently does similar operations on people well into their nineties, and we had nothing to fear. He said he may just cut out the offending sore, or he might take out a triangular section for her ear and simply stitch the two edges together again!

When the time came, Susan came with me to take Mam to Chepstow Hospital where the operation was to be performed. We got her there just before lunch, because we had to go to Gowerton to fetch her first. The ward sister told Susan and me to go for lunch while they went through the formalities of signing her in and putting her to bed, etc., and come back later. We had a quick lunch in Chepstow town, and went back, to find Mam settled into a bed in a ward full of very elderly ladies like herself. She proceeded to thank us for coming to visit her, and told us that the woman in the next bed kept calling out and had kept her awake all night, so she had not had a wink of sleep, but everyone in the ward was very nice and very friendly. She talked as though she had been there for days. The operation was scheduled for the following morning and we were to go back to take her home in the afternoon. We did this, and found her like a button, quite happy, and dressed ready to go home, with a huge pad of lint on her ear. When the doctor came to remove the dressing and examine the wound, there was no sign of it – no scar, no mark, nothing!

But she continued to get more forgetful and vague, and the Home Helps commented on it. The ladies who brought her Meals on Wheels several times a week would ask if she had enjoyed the last meal, and she would say how delicious it was, especially the gravy, etc., etc., and then they would find it untouched in the kitchen. They reported this and the doctor called and arranged for her to go into Hill House Hospital in Swansea for a thorough check-up because she had lost so much weight. They pumped her full of something to feed her up and she became much more “with-it”. I visited nearly every day, and the doctors told me that she could not return to her bungalow and live alone. She had to be somewhere where she had 24 hour care and proper meals, etc.

Mam's move to Oaklands

Knowing that she would never agree to come and live with us, as she had refused to live with Marion, because she was convinced that this would break up our marriages, so we looked around for a good place for her and found a Old People’s Home in Porthcawl which had a good reputation. Diana and I went to see it and were both very impressed. They agreed to take Mam, but would not have a vacancy for another two weeks. I notified the hospital, but the doctors insisted that if they kept her in hospital any longer, she would deteriorate again, and they wanted her to go out while she was on top form. I went to see a friend of mine, who had recently opened a Home in Oaklands House, just around the corner from us, and she agreed that Mam could go there for the two weeks or so before she went to Porthcawl. Mam therefore came out of hospital and we collected clothes etc from Gowerton and took her to Oaklands House, where Margaret Bertorelli and her husband, Frank, welcomed her and made a tremendous fuss of her. She had to share with another woman for a short while until more rooms were made ready but Mam did not seem to mind. The woman she shared a room with was very nice and friendly but did not impose herself on Mam, but she also always wore trousers. When I went to visit Mam one day, as I did every day on my way home from work, she asked me in a whisper who the man who slept in the next bed was! By the end of the two weeks, she had settled in so well, especially when she saw all Frank’s silver cups and trophies that he had won for his shooting skills. She was passionately fond of cleaning silver. Frank was a keen rifle shooter, and won cups and trophies all over the place. Mam offered to clean them, and that became one of her absorbing pastimes. Her time became occupied with two of her favourite occupations, washing and drying dishes and cleaning silver, and she was as happy as a sandboy. She was so contented and settled there, that I seemed cruel to uproot her again and make her adapt to yet another new place after all the upheaval of going into hospital and so on. Margaret and Frank agreed to let her stay because they had grown fond of her, and the place in Porthcawl did not seem to mind if she did not come there, so there she stayed. I was able to call and see her every day on the way home from work, and was able to bring her round to us for Sunday lunch and a change of scenery and all worked out well. I borrowed a wheel chair, but was a bit worried how she would take to being wheeled along our sloping bumpy pavements, because it was a bit hair-raising pushing her along, but she thought it was exciting and looked forward to going in the wheel chair.

Her memory became worse, however, and often I would call just after she had had her hair done by a lady who called there every week to perm or set their hair. I would walk in to find Mam looking gorgeous, and I would comment that she had just had her hair done, and she would insist that she hadn’t, because she had forgotten all about it. Several times she commented that Marion had not telephoned or been down for a long time, and initially I would tell her that Marion had died, but each time that was news to her and she would then become upset. I then used to tell her Marion was busy at work or something but she would ring when she had a chance. On one occasion when she was round with us for the Sunday, Diana went into the kitchen, and Mam asked me who “that lady” was. I told her it was Diana, my wife, and she was quiet for a while, but it passed. I suddenly realised that she now thought that I was my father. The staff at Oaklands House were talking about me to her one afternoon and told me later that they had asked if I looked like my father and she replied that she did not know because she had never met my father. I know she had never met my grandfather, and this confirmed that she did, in fact, think I was my father.

I was still visiting Mam every day. We watched her deteriorating and she had taken to her bed and was sleeping most of the time. On 11th July 1990, I and two of the staff were sitting with her, while she slept, when she suddenly became very restless and agitated. She kept trying to say something but could only call out and could not tell us what the trouble was. Suddenly, I realised what had happened, and told Margaret Bertorelli, who had joined us, that I thought she needed changing, and this was what was agitating her. They agreed and I left the room while they stripped her, cleaned her up and dressed her again in a clean nightie, upon which she immediately relaxed and went back into a peaceful sleep.

Mam Passed Away

I was again adjudicating in the Annual Talent Competition at the Pavilion, Porthcawl every Thursday night. In fact, I had resigned from the Management Committee of the Con. Club because that also met on Thursday evenings, and I had had to keep sending my apologies for absence. The next day, 12th July, she was still sleeping and I decided that I had to apologise to Roger Price and ask him to find someone else to take my place at the Talent competition that night. However, Margaret Bertorelli and the other members of staff eventually persuaded me to go and that they would send for me if Mam got worse, so reluctantly I went off to Porthcawl, and told Roger what the position was. During the interval I was sitting making some notes about the contestants we had already seen in the first half, when Roger came running over, about a quarter past eight, to tell me Mam had got worse, that he would take over from me and I should go at once to Oaklands.

I rushed back to be told on arrival that Mam had passed away quietly five minutes earlier, at about five to nine. I went up to see her and she looked so peaceful. I had already made arrangements for this moment with an undertaker from Loughor as there was no longer one in Gowerton, but this man was in fact from Gowerton and known to me. I had arranged that when the time came, he would come immediately to collect her and make all the arrangements for the funeral. She was to be buried in the family grave with my father. He came that night, and all the arrangements had been made for a service at the Gospel Temple, the English Congregation Chapel in Gowerton and burial at Kingsbridge. On the day of the funeral, we all went down to Gowerton, and met the retired minister who only did weddings and funerals. We walked in to the chapel and there, all formed up was the entire Burma Star Choir and David Davies the conductor waiting for us. During the service, the Minister, whose name I have now forgotten, spoke about Mam as though he had known her all her life. He was from Swansea, but had been all around the village meeting friends and relatives of ours, and spoke with such feeling. It was very moving.

And in the middle of the service, the choir rose and sang “Going Home” the music of which was the Largo from the New World Symphony. The words are most moving:

After the service, we proceeded to the cemetery in Kingsbridge, and the choir came as well. They formed up around the grave and sang Gwahoddiad, if I remember rightly. Again the Welsh words were so appropriate, “Lord, here am I, coming at your call.”

I gave one of the committee members some £25 to buy a drink for each of the boys in the pub just down the road, where they were going to go before going home. At the next choir practice, he gave it back to me, because the choristers said they were doing it for me, which was very moving.

Diana and I collected what few belongings she had in Oaklands so that the room could be used by someone else, and I also had a wooden seat made with a little plaque saying: “From Lilian, who was so happy here”. The seat was put in the garden so that residents could sit out in the sun as Mam used to like to do. Frank looked after it and repaired it when necessary, but some years later, Frank himself died, so I do not know who looks after it now. And I was now the last member of the little family that had lived in Gowerton.

Diana's mother passed away

After Diana’s father died, her mother stayed on in the bungalow in Sully where they moved after he retired, and we visited her regularly, and brought her down to Bridgend quite a lot, as we had done with Mam. Eventually, however, the bungalow got too much for her, and she finally decided she would go into a nursing home and sell the bungalow. There was a couple of whom she had heard, who were both nurses, and had two ladies living in their house and room for another one. Diana and I visited, and David also went to check it out, and it was arranged for her to go there. One of the other ladies moved out to live with friends shortly after, and some time later the other one moved out, leaving Mother as the only one. She seemed quite contented there and they looked after her well, even arranging a wheelchair for her when she became unsteady on her feet, and used to take her for walks around Penarth. Eventually, however, the couple had disagreements and decided to separate, and go back to nursing again, so Mother had to find another place to live. We persuaded her to go to Oaklands, where Mam had been, and she settled in there quite well, and we brought her around to us frequently, as we had done with Mam.

Eventually, however, she became ill and had to be admitted to hospital, where she deteriorated and on 19th April, 2001, she passed away peacefully in her sleep. Born on 9th November 1904, she was 97 years old when she died. After the cremation, we arranged for a tree in the grounds to be dedicated to her and Dad and David, with a plaque to that effect, which will remain ours for fifty years. Every Spring, it is a mass of blossom and looks beautiful.

Her passing, and Angela’s, meant that Diana and I are now the last two senior members of the family.

I waited patiently to reach 65 years of age to get my State Pension. On my 65th birthday, I was in fact on holiday in Mesa del Mar, on the Canary Island of Tenerife.

Time Share

I had received a phone call one day, and a nice young lady’s voice asked me to answer five questions, and if I got them all right, I could win a free holiday. Intrigued, I agreed. The questions were simple: What was my date of birth, was I married, did I have children, was I working, and my income more than £500 a year, or something like that. I answered “Yes” to all the questions and she told me excitedly that I had won a free holiday. To claim it I had to go, with my wife, to Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, on a certain date at a certain time, and speak to someone at the Seasons Holiday Centre. Intrigued, we went. We had to listen to presentations by several people on the advantages of buying a Seasons Timeshare. We learned all about Seasons, were told the advantages of having a week’s free holiday accommodation anywhere in the world, which could be shared with our children, and left to them in our will, or sold at any time, and we were taken around the complex and shown the accommodation available there, and photos of the accommodation in their other establishments. They also explained our right to swap our Season’s holiday with other timeshare companies, and so take advantage of a choice of thousands of places all over the world. One of them had outlined how much we spend on holidays abroad each year, and assuming that each holiday cost £2000, if our timeshare cost £10,000, after five years, all our holidays would be free. We were quite impressed with what we saw and heard, but waited for the final presentation, when we were seen privately instead of in a large group, to discuss the cost of what we might be interested in.

The cost actually seemed very reasonable, and was considerably less than £10,000 that had been mentioned, and so we agreed to buy in. One of our first holidays was in a huge white and pink building on the top of an isolated hill in Estepona, on the Costa del Sol. From the motorway, it looked like a very ornate wedding cake, with numerous towers and spires. The road leading to it was only partly surfaced and in some places full of potholes, but the accommodation was really great. Another holiday was on the Algarve, in southern Portugal, which introduced us to a fantastic coastline.

I mentioned all this, because on my 65th birthday, we were on holiday in a country club type hotel in Mesa del Mar on the north end of Tenerife. On the morning of 20th January, we were pottering around in our pyjamas, getting breakfast and deciding where to go in our hire car that day, when there was a ring at the doorbell of our little chalet. I opened the door and there was lovely young maid, in black dress with white cuffs and collar and apron, bearing a silver salver on which was a bucket of ice containing a bottle of champagne, two champagne glasses, a red rose in a tall glass, and a birthday card from the management. I was to celebrate my 65th birthday in style!

When we arrived home, I expected to find a letter from the Benefits Office, giving me details of my Old Age Pension, but there was nothing. I waited a week or so, and nothing came, so I went to the Pensions Office to enquire. I was immediately asked if I had applied for my pension. When I said I did not think that I had to apply for it, I was asked how I thought they would know when my 65th birthday was, if I did not tell them. I told them that they knew when my 55th birthday was when they stopped my unemployment benefit, and the hotel I was at in Tenerife knew when my 65th birthday was, and the pensions office has all my personal details. I was told I still had to apply, or they would think I did not want my pension. I was given an application form, which ran to several pages in booklet form. It even had a cover, and I was given one for Mum as well, although she was not due for another two years. The man who was dealing with me even said that he would do what he could to get my several weeks back pension because I was so late applying for it, because my pension should only be paid from the date of application. I told him I wanted my pension from my 65th birthday, because that was what I had paid in for all these years. And so, I became an Old Age Pensioner and able to take full advantage of our newly acquired timeshare facilities.

Holidays

Since then we have been to all sorts of fascinating places, and even looked for places in Sydney, Australia, to use when we went to visit Bryan for two weeks. Although the ones we found were all in Sydney, they were miles away from where Bryan was living, so Bryan fixed us up with Bed and Breakfast around the corner from where he was living in a tiny one-bedroom bungalow. We have had some wonderful holidays with our Time Share, and others we have arranged apart from with Seasons. It was not until after Diana and I married that I started going on holiday again. Until then I had been busy getting qualified and settling into work, and keeping in contact with Mam and Dad and Marion. Soon after we got married, however, we started going on holiday, but the first one I remember was, I think, to Pontins somewhere near Christchurch in Hampshire, from which we explored along the coast and the New Forest. I remember the New Forest, because we parked the car and wandered through the woods and came to a fence with a door, which was one of the entrances to the New Forest Show, the one to the Dog Show section. Across the poster outside, someone had written “No Dogs Admitted”. We visited Bournemouth, Southampton and Portsmouth, but although we considered it, we did not go across to the Isle of Wight. I think we found it too expensive on my meagre salary.

Diana’s father, when she was in her teens, had bought her a £1 share in the Holiday Fellowship, which entitled her to go on any of their holidays. We decided to take advantage of this and went to Glencoe for a week, during which we were taken out each day in a minibus to all the spectacular places in that region. We had spent a week in a cottage in the Lake District on the way up North, and promised ourselves we would go to that area again. From Glencoe we visited all sorts of places, including Scotland’s highest mountain, and islands, all with an incredible running commentary from our aged driver. We did not revisit the Lake District, however, until 2009, but we did go with the Holiday Fellowship to Bourton-on-the-Water for a “Singing for Pleasure” course of four days in January 2010, and got snowed-in.

When the children were young, we also went to a holiday camp over on the East Coast, but I cannot remember where. What I do remember is the plague of greenfly which came across the channel and covered everything, including the swimming pool with a layer of them about an inch thick. Before driving anywhere we had to clean the windows and windscreen of the car, and have to stop from time to time, to clean it again, because it was so bad. But the children were taken off each day to play games and Susan and John, who were very small then, had a marvellous time. Another holiday when the children were small was at the invitation of Laurie’s sister, Marion’s sister-in-law, who wanted to take us all to Skegness. On, I think, the second day, we went to a playground where there was a rope with a pulley on which children aged 8yrs and above could hang on and slide down, from a platform about 6 – 8 feet high, along the rope to land about fifteen or twenty yards away. Susan was old enough and went on it and enjoyed it. John then wanted a go, but was only about seven and a half. He made such a fuss, we agreed to let him have a go, with care, which he did, but fell off just before the end of the ride, landed on his face, and split it upper lip very badly. So badly, in fact, that we decided to take him to the hospital for attention. The doctor put a stitch in his lip and dressed it, and we had to return to the hospital every morning for the rest of the holiday for the dressing to be changed, and were given a letter to take to our own doctor, Dr. Bryan Price, in Bridgend when we got home.

We also had some good holidays in a caravan down in Llangenith, on the Gower Peninsular. Diana’s mother wanted to take us all on holiday, and rented this caravan. The main event for me on that holiday was the result of meeting a policeman whom I knew from Bridgend, who was staying in his brother’s caravan on the same site. We got talking on the beach, watching the mackerel shoaling in the bay, and he commented that he had his brother’s fishing tackle in his van, but no rods. We had a plastic inflatable boat, and I suggested we used that to get out amongst the fish, so that is what we did. I rowed out to where we had seen the fish, and we waited for them to appear again. When they did, I rowed gently up-wind of them, and we drifted over the area – and caught nothing. This was repeated each time we saw them all leaping, and eventually realised that we were now far out in the estuary, and had probably crossed the river, as we were now nearer the Carmarthen coast than the Gower. We made our way back, fishless, having been out in the boat for about 3 – 4 hours. When we beached the boat, Roy commented that he was glad we had not punctured the boat when we were so far out, when one of my hooks had caught in the plastic skin as he doubted if he could have swum so far back. When I told him I could not swim at all, he nearly had a blue fit and died upwards. And we did not catch any fish!! To add insult to injury, while I was sitting on the step of the caravan smoking my pipe later that evening, a little lad about ten years old walked past with a stick with string on it and a bucket full of mackerel. I still meet Roy in town from time to time, and he always mentions our fishing adventure in Llangenith. When we bought our own caravan, as I have already mentioned, we toured all sorts of places as well as going almost every weekend to rallies with the West Wales Centre of the Caravan Club.

Apart from our trips to Brittany after my visit to the Lorient Folk Festival with the Choir, we did go on some major holidays, the first being the trip to Canada in 1986. Edna and Walter, living near Toronto, had been over to visit, and a few years later, I felt we had to go to visit them. Diana, however, decided it was a long way to go just to visit the family, and we ought to make it a bigger holiday. We ended up in a local travel agent’s office, putting together a tour of Canada starting in Vancouver where we also booked into a local tour of the town, then a tour to Vancouver Island, followed by a coach tour over the Rockies to Calgary. The trip over the Rockies was stupendous, especially when we saw a huge porcupine wandering around the grounds of one hotel in Kamloops. We also visited a glacier at Mount Dawson, and stayed at Lake Louise, Banff and finally spent a night at Calgary before flying to Toronto, to be met by Edna, Walter and Dorrie with whom we stayed for several days, visiting Niagara Falls, Gloria and her family, and Edna’s favourite picnic site near Lake Huron. While in Vancouver, we went on a boat trip up a river to a timber mill in Squamish returning on a train down alongside the river back to Vancouver. Standing at the rail on the boat watching the scenery drift past, we got talking to a couple from New Zealand, and continued chatting on the train back. She was of Welsh descent, from Treorchy but was brought up in New Zealand. They were also going on the Rockies tour, so we continued to see them until Calgary. We exchanged addresses, as one does, and have exchanged calendars and Annual Christmas Letters ever since, and now keep in touch by Email. They are both rugby fans and enjoy Welsh Male Voice singing. Also in Vancouver, we found a Toby House pub, and a dirty, filthy, almost naked Indian selling lucky charts for $1. His English was very poor, but we bought one of his charts. Later that afternoon, down by the harbour we stopped to listen to a young woman singing and playing her guitar, and along came the Indian. She greeted him and he replied in a very cultured voice and said that he had done very well that day. He then climbed in to a huge limousine, and drove away. When we parted at the airport to come home, Edna, who was a very large woman, kissed and nearly crushed me, and cried uncontrollably when we had to go through to the departure lounge. A few years later, Edna, sadly, died suddenly of a heart attack while her family were setting up their campervan at the start of a holiday at their favourite site.

In 1994, the year Ben was born, I was invited to join the Bridgend Town Twinning Committee visit to Villenave d’Ornon, for the signing of a town-twinning agreement. Gerwyn Miles had designed and inscribed the Twinning documents, and was going out for the signing and invited Ogwyn, Alex and myself to go also. When the accommodation was being sorted out in Villenave, I was allocated on my own to a family, Guy and Francoise Grenerau-Vanooston, who took me around showing me the local sites and taking me to all the functions of the Town Twinning Committee while we were there. It turned out that their daughter had just given birth to a baby girl, about the same time that Susan had given birth to Ben, which gave us something in common. We kept in touch with Christmas and birthday presents between Ben and Lisiane until their fifteenth birthday.

The next year, Diana decided she wanted to go to the Vendee area of France instead of going again to Brittany. We spent three or four days on a campsite run by a Yorkshire family, and then set off wandering deeper into France, visiting the site of the execution by the Nazis of 18 men as a reprisal for the shooting of a German officer in Nantes. Those chosen were all in prison because of their anti-Nazi views, and the horrible thing about it was that they made the prisoners decide who was to be shot. The site was in a quarry, now a well kept Garden of Remembrance with the execution posts still in place. It was a very moving and disturbing site. We rang Francoise and Guy and arranged to visit them as we were not very far away. As we arrived in Bordeaux, the nearest large town to Villenave, by sheer chance we saw Guy driving past us, and fortunately, he also saw us, and stopped. We waited for him to return from wherever he was going and he led us to the house. We intended finding a campsite for the night, but they insisted we slept there, (in the same bed in which I had slept on my first visit,) before moving off next day to get back to Roscoff to get the ferry back home. On the way back, we did a detour to visit a town I had been told about, namely, Oradour-sur-Glane. This town, on the morning of Saturday 10th June, 1944, was visited by a large detachment of German soldiers, who rounded up all the inhabitants, took the women and children to the church, and put the men in barns and sheds around the town. Then at Midday, at a given signal, they machine gunned all the women and children and set fire to the church, and machine gunned all the men and set fire to them also and systematically destroyed to entire town. Then they continued their journey to the north because they were needed to resist the Allied forces who had invaded Normandy and were heading for Berlin. Walking around this town, left exactly as it was after this attack, seeing the destruction and learning about the incident was a most disturbing experience. Instead of rebuilding the town, they built a new one along side old, which is now a memorial to all the dead. We have kept in touch with Francoise and Guy by letter and Emails, and every year we exchange Christmas and Birthday presents, especially for Priscilla, who was born within a few days of Ben’s birth but we have not visited since. They did plan to come to Wales for a short holiday, and we found accommodation for them, but they had to cancel because the old lady, Mami, who I think is Francoise’s mother was unwell. Mami was a celebrity in Villenave because of her activities in the Resistance against the Nazis in World War II. I went with them on my first visit when they took her to a reunion dinner, and as she entered the room, everyone rose to their feet and applauded her. I never learned any details of her wartime escapades, but she was a heroine to the people of Villenave

One year, we decided to holiday on the Llangollen Canal. It was surprising how quickly one got used to handling the barge, and to travelling everywhere at 4mph. The beauty of the scenery, and the ability to stop when and wherever we wished was so restful and relaxing. Then, we came to the Broncysyllte aqueduct over the River Dee. This consisted of a steel trough about a foot wider than the boat resting on pillars 180 feet above the River Dee. On one side was a stone footpath with a light railing, but on the other, nothing but the side of the trough, which appeared to be about one inch thick. Standing at the helm on most barges, when one looks down at the side of the deck all one sees is the deck, the water drifting past, and the bank with either a footpath, a hedge or a field going off to the side. Here one looked down at the deck and tiny sheep in a field 180 feet below. Before entering the aqueduct, one had to check that there was not another boat already on its way from the other end or entering the channel, in which case, one had to pull back and wait for him, and any others coming behind him to complete the crossing, before setting out oneself to cross. Once on bridge, everyone else on the other side had to wait for you, and any others behind you, to complete the crossing. Once over, one breathed a sigh of relief and tried to put away thoughts of crossing again on the way back. Then one discovered that the canal from there to Llangollen itself ran high up along the side of the mountain, and through several tunnels in the rock. Here again, one was expected to send another member of the crew ahead on foot to see if anyone else was coming the other way, because the tunnels also were too narrow to allow two boats to pass. On our way to Broncysyllte, I had got our bow stuck on a sand bank, and another boat coming up behind us stopped, threw me a rope, and pulled me off, and we then followed him to Llangollen, where we chatted and became friends. He and his wife lived on their boat on a canal that passed through the town where they both worked. We spent a few days in Llangollen, and then were going to follow this couple back down the canal. He was just moving off, and we were ready to go, when Diana, pushing the bow of the boat away from the quay, pushed too far and the inevitable happened. She went straight into the filthy green water, and had to be pulled out and go and have a shower. We set off to catch up with the other boat, only to find that he was now wedged tight on a sand bank, and I, the novice, had to throw him a rope and pull him free. You have no idea how proud that made me feel. However, we eventually got back to where we started our holiday. They went on their way up North, and we spent a disturbed night moored near a hill where some people were suddenly switching on very bright floodlights, which caused the resident rabbits to freeze momentarily and be shot. This kept us awake for a couple of hours, but the next day we returned the boat, and made our way up to a camp site near Caernarfon where we parked the campervan and spent a few days exploring that part of North Wales and Anglesey before driving back down the west coast and home.

We had several holidays on the canals, including the Grand Union, where we had to go through the longest tunnel. John, Joff and Jason joined us before we set off through the tunnel, and the two boys came through with us, while John drove around to the other side to meet us. We also learned that this tunnel passed under a field next to their estate. They left and we were then joined by Susan and Doug, who were holidaying in the area. They put their bicycles on the roof of the barge, and sailed with us for a few miles before cycling back to their car to continue their holiday. We stopped for a coffee break at one point, after which we continued around a bend in the canal and found the prettiest pub right on the bank. I determined that on the way back we would stop there instead. We continued to Market Harborough, before turning around and making our way back. We did stop at the pub, which had a long curved bar with a long row of beer pumps, the first of which to catch one’s eye on entering was for Brains Beer, of Cardiff. A few months after this trip we went with the Thursday Nighters for a meal in a pub in the Vale, only to find that the new landlord had been the landlord of the pub on the canal until a few weeks earlier.

Our next big holiday came in the year 2000. Bryan was still in Australia, and only occasionally was able to come home for a visit. We decided if Mohamed could not go to the mountain, the mountain must go to Mohamed, so we decided we would go to Australia to see him. We tried to find a place through our Time Share, and found some fifty places in Sydney, but the nearest to where Bryan was, also in Sydney, was 50 miles away from him. Bryan found us a Bed and Breakfast place just around the corner from where he was staying, so we flew off to Singapore, where we stayed two or three days before flying on to be met by Bryan. He then took us around, showing us all the sights and wonders of New South Wales. We explored Sydney, of course, and a lot of the gorgeous surrounding countryside, and also went up into the Blue Mountains, from which I brought a piece of stone, which I incorporated into a little ornament, which still sits on the table in the hall at home. Bryan had discovered that the Railway Company that ran the train service from Sydney to Perth was celebrating its 30th anniversary, and was taking 30% off its fares, so he had booked us onto it for the last few days of our stay in Australia. We left Sydney on the Monday, right on time, (two minutes to 2.0’clock) and arrived in Perth, right on time, (9.25.am) on the Thursday, having stopped to explore the towns where the train stayed to re-fuel and re-victual, and change its crew. These coach trips took us to the Flying Doctor depot, the Gold Mines, and a few other interesting places, and we also stopped at Cook, which at one time was the largest railway town in Australia, building and repairing engines and wagons, etc, but now a small village of about 22 people alongside the longest absolutely straight length of railway line in the world. The train itself consisted of 22 carriages, including three car carriers, had three engines and was 496.39 metres in length, about 400 yards, which is nearly a quarter of a mile. I cannot remember how long the straight length of track was – and still is. It was certainly several miles. Arriving in Perth we were taken on a tour of the area in a coach, before dropping off all the passengers who were to stay in various hotels and then took us back to the railway station where we had left our luggage. We wandered around Perth and then took a train to Freemantle, which is very, very British. We returned to Perth, sat around for a while, but by 8.o’clock were fed up with sitting around, so we got our luggage and a taxi and went to the Airport, to await our 2.0.am. flight back to Blighty. When we arrived at this international Airport, it was completely deserted, so we sat around in a huge concourse until a member of staff arrived and suggested we went upstairs where there were more comfortable upholstered chairs. I had been up there to explore, but all the shops and cafes were closed. However, we went up, found comfortable seats and went to sleep. When I woke about midnight, the place was heaving with people, and we finally caught our plane home. It was a long and tiring flight from the other side of the globe, but it had all been worth it

In 2002, William Meredith announced that he intended to go to China for a holiday because the Yangtze River was to be dammed to provide electricity. Work had started on the construction of a huge dam, which would raise the height of the water by 138 metres, and millions of people living on the present sides of the river were being evacuated to higher ground. There was a tour advertised that took in all the main tourist sights of China and also included a cruise up the Yangtze to see the Three Gorges and the new Dam being built, and he wanted to go. He asked if anyone else wanted to come as well. It was too good a chance to miss, so Diana and I, and Bill Shepherd and Pat said we would go. William arranged it all, and so on 23th May, we all flew off. The tour included a stay in Peking for a visit to Tiananman Square where the famous uprising was so violently quelled a few years earlier, and a tour through The Forbidden City, the home of the Emperors of China until the revolution. That was incredible, as was the running commentary of our young lady guide. We also went to walk on the Great Wall, and to see the First Emperor’s tomb, and the Terracotta Army. The cruise up the Yangtze through the Three Gorges took several days on quite a large old rusty boat, and provided a wide range of entertainment, including the ancient pastime of the Chinese, namely kite flying. We had visits ashore each day to see shows, and the work in progress to clear the people away from the riverbanks, which were quite high in places and usually involved climbing up huge flights of steps. At one stop we saw the houses which had been emptied, and the previous residents stripping woodwork, windows, doors and anything else that was portable and going to be useful in their new home. We were told that when a peasant moved house, he always took the roof with him for the new hut he would build at the new site. In this way, whatever happened, he always slept under his own roof! We were told that in one area, the government was building huge high-rise flats for the people being moved, but because the Chinese are used to walking up and down steps, the lifts did not start until the twelfth floor. We visited theatres to see all sorts of popular entertainment in China, including traditional bands, conjurors, dancers and acrobats. We also, of course visited the site of the new dam and saw models of the finished article, which was very impressive. We also had a trip up the Three Lesser Gorges in small boats each rowed by two men. It was strange, looking at the wonderful scenery as we passed it, to think that in a very short time, the high mountain peaks rising up from the river will just be little islands in the middle of a huge expanse of water.

Some weeks later, I suddenly had terrible pains in my lower abdomen, together with violent shaking, which continued all night. The following morning, being a Saturday, Diana and I went off to the surgery to see the duty doctor, who gave me a prescription for pain killers, and referred me to the hospital. By the end of that course I still had some pain, but much reduced. The doctor then gave me a repeat prescription and then a third, which I could take if necessary, or destroy. By the end of the second course, all the pain had gone, but I kept the third prescription just in case. I was eventually called to the hospital for some rather embarrassing tests and examinations, of which I had several at roughly fortnightly intervals, and nothing was found to be wrong with me, but I was given a prescription for Tamsulosin tablets for me to take. I asked for how long I had to take them, and was told “For the rest of your life.” I will never understand doctors!

Two years later, in September 2004, Diana and I went off on a tour of Peru, of all places. We started taking anti-malaria tablets two weeks before we went, and then flew in the early hours of the morning to Amsterdam for another plane to take us to South America. On arrival there we were told the plane was delayed until the afternoon. In the afternoon we were told it was delayed until the evening, and after some argument at the desk we were given, I think, ten euros to buy some lunch. In the evening we were told it would not now fly until the next morning. After another long argument, we were given a small thin sheet such as are used on planes on night flights, and another ten euros to buy an evening meal. Eventually we took off the next morning, 24 hours late, and it was not until the end of the holiday that we learned that some of our party had been sent by taxi into Amsterdam and put up in a very nice hotel where they had a marvellous meal, all at the expense of the airline. The reason for the delay of the plane was a hurricane heading for Florida. We finally arrived at Lima, after a short stop to refuel and let off a few passengers on a small island off the north coast of the South America. On arrival, a whole day late, we were taken to our hotel and told to go to bed until lunchtime, when we would go for a walking tour of the town. The next day, we moved off to Cusco, where we spent a few days being shown the sites, ancient and modern. One day we went by train to Machu Pitchu which was fascinating, and sometimes hair-raising as the guide would stop us on a little platform with no railings, but a drop of many hundreds of feet alongside us. Another day we went to an ancient site where the Incas had had their main fortifications, which also involved climbing up steep steps for several hundred feet. We then moved out and went to Lake Titicaca, which was even higher than Cusco, and spent a day visiting one of the inhabited reed islands, which float around on the lake, and were taken into the school for the children to sing to us. The guides who take sightseers to these islands also take lots of sweets and chocolates for the children. These are the only treats they get, but they all seemed very happy. From there we went by coach even higher to visit a farm on land that appeared to have no vegetation on it at all. Only the bedrooms were indoors and the kitchen was against a small wall outside. Their toilet was like a little sentry box with no door and a hole in the ground, a few yards away, but they were happy people and laughed a lot. They showed us the hole in the ground where they stand small babies all wrapped up in warm clothes, where they can be seen, but cannot wander off while everyone is working. They did not appear to carry the little ones around as we do. Finally the coach took us on to an airport, from which we flew back to Lima, where most of the party flew back to Europe. Six of us, however, flew to a little airport in the Amazon Rainforest, from where we were taken down River Amazon to a little settlement where we spent three days, visiting Amazon Indian villages, fishing for piranha in a little tributary, looking for blue porpoises, and conducted tours of a small area of the huge rainforest. It was fantastic, meeting the people and the school children. When we got home, we still felt rather hung over, and put it down to the altitude and travelling, but after a couple of days, Diana suddenly announced that it was more likely the anti-malaria tablets we were still taking, so we stopped taking them. The condition cleared within hours

It was when we went to stock up with food again on the Saturday, because we had not eaten much since we had arrived home, that we called into the Dog Trust Rescue Centre at Court Colman to look for another dog. The only ones available were all older dogs, and they were all behind glass panels, so we could only look at their doleful faces as they stared back at us. We could not talk to them, play with them or smell them, and they could not smell us, so we went back to the office and told them there was nothing we fancied there. The girl in charge asked us what we were looking for and when we said we wanted a younger dog, she rushed off and brought us a small black Labrador type mongrel bitch, which she said was 18 months old, who clambered all over us, licking us and wagging her tail. We were invited to take her for a walk to see if we liked her, but after only 100 yards or so, Diana announced: “We’ll take this one”. So that is what we did, and Gypsy came to live with us on the Wednesday, after we had been inspected by a little girl to see if our accommodation was up to Dog Trust standards. Apart from Sally, whom we had had for years, she is the nicest dog we have ever had. She was, in fact, two years old. She has the same temperament as Sally, and could be a reincarnation of her, although a totally different breed, or rather, mixture of breeds.

Weddings (Joff, Jason, Bryan, John)

Our next exceptional trip was to Slovakia in August 2005, to attend Jonathan’s wedding to Maria in the town of Humene, which was an incredible weekend. We flew to Bratislava, and explored it while we waited for Bryan to arrive later that day, then the next morning drove from the west of Slovakia to the East, for a fantastic few days and the most amazing local marriage traditions we had ever come across. When we arrived at the village hall, Jonathan had to knock on the door to be let in and asked for Maria. Her friends brought a number of other girls, including a very small child and a very elderly lady, saying that they were Maria, but eventually they brought the real one, and we were allowed in. After a fantastic lunch, a small alter was set up and the priest said a few words and then there was the Blessing of Jonathan and Maria with a loaf of bread, by the priest and then by both sets of parents, and all the grand parents, in the village hall. Jonathan was then expected to take Maria into the Church, but he insisted it be done our way, and Maria’s father brought her into church and handed her over to him there. During the ceremony, which was in English and Slovakian, I suddenly started perspiring and passed out. I came to on the grass outside the church some moments later, so not only I, but Diana and several other guests missed the important part of the service. After the service, I was taken back to the hotel and bed for a few hours before going to the Reception, which went on till the early hours, and continued for the next two days.

In 2007, we had to go up to North Wales, to Ruthin Castle for the wedding of Jason and Leanne, in which Bryan was the Best Man. We were booked in to a nice hotel in the town, and then spent the day at the castle for the wedding and the reception, which all went off very well. Leanne arrived with her father in one of the longest stretch limos I had seen, but late, because they had told the driver to take them to Ruthin Castle, and he took them to Ruthin town instead, and had to drive all the way back.

Then came another milestone in our life, and that was the birth of our first Great Grandson, Michael Iestyn, on 29th September 2007, and he has grown to be a most charming child. Jason and Leanne have settled in North Wales where Jason has set up a business designing websites, and is doing very well, except that we do not see them as often as we do the others.

Two years later, in September 2008, we accompanied Bryan and Isabel, her parents and two children, Ewan and Rhiannon, to Zanzibar for a week where we lazed around a magnificent swimming pool in scorching sun, just relaxing on the shores of the Indian Ocean. Then we flew up to the Serengeti National Park to go on safari to see the African animals in the wild, and also the wedding of Bryan and Isabel out on the plain. The people in the Lodge where we were staying helped Bryan chose a site under some trees where they set up an alter and chairs, and a table with a Wedding Cake and bottles of champagne for the toast. The ceremony was conducted out on the plain with giraffes, buffalo and zebras wandering around in the distance, and a Massai choir singing and dancing before and after the service, half the staff of the Lodge including a soldier armed with an automatic rifle in attendance. The weather was fine, but after cutting the cake and opening a few bottles for toasts, as we started our way back to the lodge, we had a slight shower of rain, but the driver assured us that if it rained during a wedding, the marriage will last forever. Back at the lodge, the staff on duty there went crazy and insisted singing to the bride and groom, before we made our way to the open-air area for the Breakfast. Just as we started the dessert, the heavens opened and we all, including the staff, dived for cover and completed the meal indoors. Next day we flew back to Zanzibar, and the pilot diverted slightly so that Rhiannon and Ewan could look down into the volcano that had erupted only a few weeks previously. Having circled the crater once, he called back to ask if they wanted to go round again, which they did, so we circled the crater again and then continued to Zanzibar. We even squeezed in a trip by boat to a little island so that everyone could go snorkelling in the Indian Ocean. A wonderful trip.

The reception was eventually held in Newquay, Cornwall, on 29th November, when everyone could get there as some consolation for not having been able to attend the wedding itself. It was a great weekend, especially as we could take Gypsy with us and she slept in her own bed in our bedroom.

Our next great adventure was going to South Africa for John and Josie’s wedding in November 2009. It seemed a long way to go just for a weekend, but Diana, while ploughing through various holiday catalogues, came across a Page & Moy tour, starting with a taxi at the door to take us to Heathrow, all part of the tour and then the flight to Johannesburg. We had a tour of Johannesburg and Soweto, where the friction between Blacks and Whites was eventually sorted out, and the Blacks took their rightful place in the government of the country. We stayed for a few days in Hazyview from where we visited Kruger National Park, which, I was surprised to learn, is the same size as Wales. We moved southwards, visiting several Zulu communities. Then down through Swaziland, where we had to present passports at the national border, had lunch, and then presented passports again on the way out the other side. We also visited a Wild Life Park where we saw, and were delayed by a herd of some 160 elephants crossing the road in front of us. From Durban we flew to Port Elizabeth, and then toured on along the south coast to Cape Town, stopping at the highest bungie jump in the world. We also visited the Cape of Good Hope and went up Table Mountain on the famous cable car. On the Thursday, after being out sightseeing all day, we returned to the hotel to find John and Josie waiting for us, so we took them to our hotel room, the largest apartment we had ever stayed in on holiday. It consisted of a sitting room/dining room/kitchen, two huge bedrooms, and two bathrooms and toilets. The floor space of the whole apartment was, I am sure, larger than the floor space of our entire house. We waited there for Bryan to arrive and then took them all out to dinner. The next day, Friday, Bryan arrived with his hire-car, and we toured around Cape Town and coast before going up to Stellenbosch to meet and join the rest of the family for the wedding. Saturday, we sat in the front row of a beautiful open air chapel erected and furnished on the lawn by the lake on a huge vineyard, and witnessed the marriage of John and Josie, and caroused into the early hours. The wedding was a magnificent affair with all Josie’s family there plus friends, and most of John’s family. Unfortunately, Susan, Doug and Ben, and Jason could not make it. Bryan was Best Man and made a magnificent speech at the end of the Wedding Breakfast, which started with the 1st course at 1. o’clock, followed by the 2nd at 2 o’clock, the 3rd at 3 o’clock and 4th at 4 o’clock, with strolling around with drinks in between. Then the dancing went on until the early hours. It was a magnificent climax to a wonderful holiday in South Africa. The next day, Sunday, we drove around with Bryan sightseeing, and photographing whales, (or trying to!) in temperatures around the forties, before going to the airport to fly home. What a wonderful end to a magnificent two weeks. Then we arrived at Heathrow, to be met by a taxi driver to drive us back to Oaklands Road, in temperatures below 10 degrees, torrential rain and wicked winds!!

Spare time jobs

To supplement my Pensions, I applied one year, to serve in a polling station for one of the elections, and was appointed as a Polling Clerk in a polling station in a Retirement Home in Ogmore-by-Sea. Apart from having to be there by 6.30.am and stuck there until 10.00.pm, it was quite an experience. The polling clerk was a young woman employed full time as a clerk in the council offices, and I only had to do what she told me to do. We sat in comfort in one of the lounges in the Home, and were given lunch and dinner, and numerous cups of tea or coffee all day, and the dutiful residents of Ogmore-by-Sea came in a gentle trickle all day, so there was never any panic or rush. Simple, and I got paid for it! Then they even took Income Tax out of my pay. The next year, they asked me if I was prepared to be the Polling Clerk, which I was, and so got more money for the day’s work, and had a clerk to help me in the Laleston polling station. Being known in the Electoral Office, I was offered a job as Electoral Roll Canvasser, which involved calling at every house in St Brides and Southerndown, with a copy of the electoral roll, and checking if it was still correct, and changing it if it was wrong. Deaths and members of the family who had arrived at the age of 17 had to be recorded, as well as changes in occupiers of every house in that area. It involved calling at every house, most of which were empty during the day and had to be visited several times before the forms could be signed. Fortunately, I was paid travelling expenses, so as well as the exercise and getting to meet and know lots of lovely people, it was quite lucrative. I did that area for several years, and then, one year, they asked if I could do Ogmore-by-Sea as well, as the person who normally did it suddenly found he could not do it that year. I knew Ogmore to be quite a small village, so I agreed. Only when I started on it did I realised that there were more houses in Ogmore than in St. Brides and Southerndown together, so I only did it for two years. Diana helped me when she could, and again, it was quite lucrative and paid for our already cheap holidays. Later I was asked to do the canvass in part of the new Brackla Estate, which was much more compact than the spread out area of St. Brides and Southerndown. With Diana’s help I did that for several years, and then, perhaps as a reward for long and faithful service, I was asked to do the area from the top of Bryntirion Hill and Oaklands, including Heol y Bardd, as far as the river, and all the houses around Tondu Road as far as Penyfai, and also, for some strange reason, Island Farm area and Merthyr Mawr. That was quite easy, but there was far less travelling involved and therefore very little Travelling Expenses. Still, it kept me off the streets, and I got to know a lot of people in the lovely little hamlet of Merthyr Mawr, especially the village “odd-job man” who was employed by the owner of the village to keep it in good repair, clean and tidy, and was a useful person to know, especially when one wanted to park in the village car park, for which he took the parking fees! Eventually, however, there were changes in the council offices, when the two women in charge of the Electoral Office staff, with whom I had become very friendly, were sacked and narrowly escaped prosecution for discrepancies in the Polling Office finances, and the Chief Executive was retired early with a golden handshake and a large pension. The whole system was changed and the Electoral Roll forms were then sent by post to every house, to be completed, signed and sent back to the office, so another lucrative little job was lost.

PROBUS

In 1993, I was approached by one of the Magistrates, Mr Geoff Hopkins, who used to live in Oaklands Road, just across the brook from our bungalow in Greenfields Ave, and with whom we used to chat over the brook and the fence. I had come to know him as a Magistrate on the Bridgend Bench, and we were friends. He asked if I was interested in forming a Probus Club in Bridgend. I said I did not know what a Probus Club was, and he explained that it was a club for retired Professional and Businessmen, hence the name Probus. I explained that the only men’s organisation I had ever joined voluntarily was the Army, and had turned down invitations to join Roundtable, the Masons and Rotary, and similar organisations, but as it was he who had asked me, I would come to his meeting to see if there was sufficient support, and to lend mine. I went to the meeting, in the upstairs room in the Rugby Club, and found the meeting had already started when I arrived, and that the Chairman was my old colleague, Ken Roberts, who was Chairman of Rotary for that year, and that Rotary always promotes and sponsors new Probus clubs. I quietly opened the door, and Roberts was holding forth very importantly, and when he spotted me, he called out in his officious voice, “Come in, Ifor Davies,” to which I replied, equally loudly and officiously. “I already have, Ken Roberts”, which caused a laugh, if nothing else. The purpose and functions of a Probus Club were explained, that is, that it was simply an organisation to bring retired Business and Professional men together to socialise and listen to speakers on all sorts of topics, and generally give them something interesting to do in retirement. About twenty men were there and they agreed that we should set one up and seek more members. A week or so later, we had another meeting with Roberts, and proceeded to look at the matter in detail and then agreed to ask Rotary to set one up for us.

The Club was formally set up, and Roberts presented Geoff with a ribbon and pendant to wear around his neck as the Leader of the new Probus Club, and gave him a bag of what he called the “official Probus lapel badge.” It turned out that we were now the only Probus Club in the country, if not the world, who had a badge like that one. The only thing about it that resembled a Probus lapel badge was a great big “P” in the middle, but ours stuck out of the top as well. Roberts and his entourage left and we then proceeded to elect the officers. Obviously, the instigator of the project, Geoff Hopkins, was elected Chairman, and we then set out to elect a Secretary, Treasurer, and one committeeman, known as the “Other Member”, and still had to appoint a Programme Secretary, whose job it would be to find speakers for all our meetings, or arrange a visit to somewhere interesting instead of having a speaker. This turned out to be more difficult, because no one wanted to do that job. Geoff kept looking at me, and asking for a volunteer, and finally asked me directly if I would agree to do it. We had already decided that all officers would be elected annually, so I would only have to do one year, and by then hopefully, someone else would be prepared to take it on, so I agreed to do it. We therefore had a complete Committee, and decided to meet fortnightly, and to confine our membership to 45 men. Anyone wanting to join after that would have to wait until there was a vacancy.

My first problem soon became apparent. Our first meeting was to be in two weeks’ time, and I had to find a speaker. We had ended our inaugural meeting with members standing up and telling the group who they were, what their job had been before they retired, and a little about themselves. By the time we had elected our committee, agreed a rough draft of a constitution and all the rest of it, there was time for only a few to speak, so I announced that at the next meeting, those who had not done so, would introduce themselves. That gave me four weeks to find my first speaker. I cannot now remember who I found to come and speak to us in those initial months, but I arranged a visit to the Bridgend Paper Mills for one Thursday, and several other similar visits during my year of office. We had, however, not elected a Vice Chairman, deliberately, as it was felt that we should all get to know each other before we did that, because the Vice Chairman, after one year in office would automatically become the new Chairman the following year, so we aught to know who we were electing. The titles later, somehow or other, became President and Vice President.

Time drifted by, and before we knew where we were, it was nearly time for our first AGM, and we still did not have a Vice President. Geoff agreed to carry on as President for a second year, and at the AGM, he nominated me as Vice President, which everyone accepted, so we had to find a new Programme Secretary, and that job was taken by Bernard Doheney of Laleston, much to my relief. I had an easy time as Vice President, because Geoff hardly ever missed a meeting, and at the end of the second year of the Club’s life, I became President for a year. Bernard was nominated to be Vice President, and it looked as if this was to be a pattern to follow each year. This seemed fair, because being Programme Secretary was not always easy, having to find speakers or an activity every fortnight, but it was central to the life of the club, and becoming Vice President seemed to be considered a suitable reward. Unfortunately, two weeks after the AGM, poor Bernard died suddenly, and we had to find a new Vice President. I believe it was John Jones, of Coety, a retired Civil Engineer, who agreed to take on the job. One of our main concerns in the first year, of course was find new members to bring the club up to the 45 member limit. I had seen a chap in the United Services Club from time to time, who stood out because he was always immaculately and smartly dressed. I spoke to him and told him about the Probus Club and invited him to join, so William Meredith became a member. Shortly after that, still trying to think of people to invite to come and speak to the club, I thought of Bill Shepherd, the Vet who had treated all our dogs and the cat, and on one occasion had come to the house to deal with a fox who had tried to jump over the wire fence in the garden, had caught one of his back legs in the gaps which had twisted and held him fast. The fox had struggled a long time to release himself, but had only succeeded in breaking his leg, and scrabbling on the earth until it was polished smooth. Susan had told me that there was a dog up the garden barking and stuck to the fence. When I saw it was a fox I had called the Vet. He got a noose around its neck and pulled him in tight to the fence and then administered an injection and within one or two seconds he was dead, and we buried it in the garden. Bill had now retired, and the surgery would not give me his address, but agreed to pass on a letter. Before I had got round to writing it, however, I saw Bill coming out of what was then called the Midland Bank, and approached him. He stood deep in thought for a few moments, and then said, “Yes. I can come and speak, but tell me about this Probus Club. It may be what I am looking for”. So I invited him to come along and join, which he did. I also told Bernard Kenny, whom I had known for years, from the Folk Club, and made the mistake of telling him that Probus was not the sort of organisation in which you had to dress up. I was thinking of the Masons, and organisations like that, who always wear dress suits and regalia at meetings. He turned up at the next meeting in jeans and a tatty shirt, because he had come straight from working on his car or something. Not learning from this mistake, I also told Sam Chilvers about Probus, and said the same to him, and he also turned up in jeans and ragged shirt, straight from the garden. They are both still members, but have always come dressed in lounge suits after their first visit.

We stayed in the Rugby Club for about nine years, and then it was taken over by somebody who wanted to posh it all up a bit. He did away with the snacks with chips and basic “home cooked” type meals prepared by the groundsman’s wife, and started charging the earth for room rentals. All the organisations that held meetings there and patronised the bar and the meals, left and found other venues. We went to the Caeffatri pub, the Two Brewers, the Tir Isha, and a few other places, but eventually went back to the Caeffatri. Now, the Rugby Club is again under new management and trying to attract all the old organisations back. We considered it, but quite a few members preferred to stay where we are, despite the occasional interference of noise from the kitchen while our speaker is on his feet. As Programme Secretary, then Vice President, President and Past President, I was on the Committee for the first four years of the Club’s existence. I started organising trips and weekends in London to see shows, and was eventually formally referred to as the Social Secretary, although the Constitution had no mention of such a creature, and I have remained on the Committee in that capacity every since. I am the only member who has been on the Committee since the very beginning, and am still there as Social Secretary. Every few months, I would arrange a trip to a theatre show, either in London or Bristol or Bath. The London visits, of course, involved at least one overnight stay in an hotel.

PROBUS Holidays

One day someone asked why we could not go on holiday as some other Probus Clubs did and someone else suggested we could go abroad for a holiday. Then someone asked why we could not go to Brittany, because “Ifor could take us; he knows Brittany like the back of his hand.” So, I made a visit to Brittany with William Meredith and Bill Shepherd, ostensibly to find an hotel. I already knew of an hotel in Concarneau, where an old colleague of mine, Francis Holland, had spent a holiday and recommended it to me, so we visited that one last, after a very pleasant few days drifting around some of my favourite places and looking at hotels. We chose the Concarneau hotel, which was around the coast from the main town, and overlooked a huge estuary, over which the sun set spectacularly every evening. So, I set up our first Probus Holiday, in 1998, which the older members still talk about. I took them to places I knew, like Quimper, Lorient, Pont-Aven, and visited cromlechs, spectacular churches, and glorious scenery, etc. It was a splendid week, with glorious sunshine, and every evening we sat down to dinner and watched the sun set across the bay. After dinner we would all go out and sit on the wall opposite the hotel, overlooking the beach until the sun disappeared, and then go back to the lounge for a sing-song. When we got back home, they could not stop talking about it, and immediately started asking, “Where are we going next year?” They wanted to go back to Brittany, but I did not think it a good idea to go back to the same place again, so the next year we went to Vannes for a week, staying at an hotel right on the shores of the Morbihan. We visited Auray, and the Carnac stones, an ancient Breton village, and did a cruise around the Little Sea, which is what Morbihan means, the same as Môr Bychan in Welsh. I had asked the Treasurer of Probus for an amount of cash from the money the members had paid for the trip, so that I could give the driver his tip on the way out, and be able to pay for entrance to various places I intended we should visit and to do the cruise around the islands. He refused to give me cash, but agreed to give me a cheque for the driver’s tip. I insisted that I needed the money in cash but he finally gave me a cheque for the driver post dated to the day of our return, and still refused to give me the money for everything else, saying I could use my Credit Cards, and when he saw the receipts, he would repay me the money I had spent, and that is what I ended up doing. The day we returned, I had my accounts already made out, and telephoned him that evening to say I wanted the money the next morning. He said he was going on holiday and I would have to wait until he came back. The next morning I was on his doorstep with my bill, and refused to move until he had written me a cheque for the full amount. He argued that he had to have another signature on the cheque, but I said I would get that with no problem, and eventually he wrote the cheque for something like £380 pounds, and at the next AGM, we elected a new Treasurer for the Probus Club, after members who had been on the holiday made it known what he had done.

In 2000, we went to Dinard, and visited places of interest on the east side of Brittany, including a very ancient little church with a “Danse Macabre” painted all around the inside walls, with men, women, soldiers, judges, priests, etc, alternating with skeletons dancing in a huge circle. We also spent a day on Mont San Michel, which was similar to, but much bigger than, St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall. On the way back from there, Joe White brought to my attention some rock carvings just up the coast from Dinard. We found the place and on the path to the beach we spotted a huge head carved in the rock. Someone else spotted a scene carved on the flat rocks, and I stood on a rock jutting up to take a photo of it, and discovered I was standing on another head. Wherever one looked there were magnificent carvings in the rock. Apparently, a priest in the village had been friendly with the dominant family of the area, sort of minor aristocracy, but also the top gang of thieves, robbers and pirates a century or two ago, and the priest had carved the history of the family and all the main characters in the rocks as a hobby. Sadly, Joe died after a prolonged illness just a few years later.

In 2001, we flew to Fuengirola in Spain, which I had visited with the Burma Star Choir and had made friends there who could arrange for us to visit Gibraltar, the Alhambra Palace, and the incredible little town of Ronda, way up in the mountains. John Jones (Coity) had bought a place just off the road to Ronda, where they stayed for several months at a time. I told him we would call in for a cup of tea when we went to Ronda, and he said OK, so a whole coach load of us turned up and enjoyed tea, wine and a stroll in his lawns overlooking the golf course and the sea. Bill Shepherd, William Meredith, and I, went to a spectacular cable car lift to the top of a mountain, just north of Fuengirola. Pat Shepherd wanted to go shopping and Jan Meredith, who was also a compulsive shopper, offered to stay with her, but really wanted to go up the chairlift. Eventually Diana offered to stay with Pat. We took the chairlift to the very top of the mountain with glorious views over the sea and across to the snow clad Sierra Nevada. I have tried to take Diana up the chairlift on subsequent visits, but she has never agreed to come. In 2002, we went back to Concarneau to the same hotel, which was a risk, because there was a danger that it would not appear as good as the first visit, but it worked and we had a fabulous week there again.

As the Social Secretary of the Probus Club, one of my main functions was, and still is, to arrange the Anniversary and Christmas Lunches every year. After the first few lunches, I recognised that several of our members had died, and I suggested that we should always drink a toast “To Absent Friends” at our lunches. Of course, I ended up having to propose the toast, which I have done ever since. They always follow the same pattern, that is that I stand and tell some funny stories, make them laugh, and then we drink to “our absent friends.” Sadly, the list gets longer every year.

Thursday Nighters

Another offshoot of the Probus Club was the development of what came to be known to us as The Thursday Nighters. In the first year of its existence, Probus was recruiting members to reach its 45 ceiling. One morning at a meeting, I suggested to William that we took Bill out for a drink, because he did not seem to do that sort of thing. We took him to the United Services Club, and he was furious because we would not let him buy a round of drinks, insisting that he was not a member and therefore it was not permitted. As we left he said how much he had enjoyed the evening, and said that we should do it again, but next time in a place where he could buy a round. We settled on the Six Bells in Coity, where he lived, and we started meeting there regularly every Thursday night. The group got larger as other friends of Bill from the village joined us, and I started taking Ken Jones, an elderly friend of mine from the United Services Club, who was now finding difficulty walking. He had been a plumber all his life and had never put anything away for his Old Age, so now lived entirely on his state pension. He got more and more angry that whenever he tried to buy a round, and there were now about six or seven of us in the group, he was too late because someone else had signalled to the barmaid and got another round in. I quietly explained to the others about his situation and he the occasionally bought a round, but we decided to have a kitty instead, and that satisfied everyone, including Ken. William kept the kitty and slowly it grew, until he announced that there was so much in the kitty, we could take our wives out for a meal with it, which we did that and have done so every few months since. Ken eventually had a bad stroke and was rushed off to hospital, where William and I visited him the next day, on our way to the Six Bells to meet the others. We arrived at the hospital in time to see Ken being wheeled up the passageway to another ward, but his eyes were closed and I do not know if he saw us, or was aware of us. Unfortunately, he had another stroke that night and died the following morning. Another member, who had also been persuaded to join Probus, died suddenly and the membership of the Thursday night group seemed to be constantly changing. Then the landlord of the Six Bells sold out and a new landlord took over and changed the whole nature of the pub, so we started meeting in the Tir Isha pub above Litchard. The kitty was increased gradually from 10/-d a week and is now £10 a week, and membership settled at six, William, Bill, Alan Jenkins, John Price, myself, all Probus members, plus Charlie Mansell from Coity, a friend of Bill’s.

Allan Jenkins Died

Sadly, Alan also suffered a bad stroke while visiting family in London in February 2008, and after several months unable to move or talk, he died there. Then, Bill Shepherd fell over in his garden and smashed his thighbone, and was in plaster for a couple of months, so he was absent for a while. When he was really mobile again, he fell over a second time and smashed the same thighbone. This time, the surgeon managed to put all the pieces back together, like a jigsaw, but Bill was confined to a wheel chair for some three months. The surgeon warned him before he left the hospital that if he broke it again, there would be no alternative but to remove the leg. He eventually was able to walk with a frame or crutches and finally a walking stick, and returned to the Thursday night fold.

During Bill’s absence, some Thursdays Charles would be working, and as William, John and I all lived in Bridgend, we started going to the Bridgend United Services Club. This turned out to be too noisy, with all the shouting, instead of talking, as was the custom of the other members, so we moved to the Conservative Club. When Charles was not working, we met again in the Six Bells, but when Bill was mobile again we met there regularly, except that the price of a pint of beer has suddenly rocketed to city prices, so we are considering whether to go elsewhere. Charlie is still working for good money and also lives only a few minutes walk from the Six, whereas William, John and I are all from Bridgend and have to drive out there and are only on pensions. In September 2009, however, the Six Bells closed, so we decided to go to the Caeffatri, where the Probus Club meets, and which is much more central for us all, although Bill Shepherd queried why we had chosen a venue so far from Coety! This had been a bone of contention for me for some time, and when William suddenly got angry about it, I left. A short time later, Bill was prescribed the wrong tablets by a locum doctor, and was suddenly rushed off to hospital for blood transfusions and dialysis three times a day. He has lost one kidney and still has to have dialysis three days a week, so whether the others still meet, I do not know. It is a shame, because we had some great times.

Fuengirola Choirs

Because Howard John and I had remained friends since we had met when The Burma Star and Hen Blwyf took me with them for the St. David’s Day concerts, to compere the St David's day concerts, he asked me a year or so later if I could find another choir and I arranged for the Cardiff Male Choir to go out in, I think, 2006 and went with them. The Chairman and Secretary booked some 38 seats on an aeroplane, and rooms for 38 people in an hotel in Fuengirola and then, believe it or not, went to the choir and said: “Right! Who wants to come?” They then found they had places still empty, so the invited me to go with them. I still had to pay, but I did insist that if I went I would want to be on stage with them and should come to their practices. This they agreed. Their conductor, Guy Harbottle, MD, was an excellent conductor and the choir was singing well. However, his wife was due to give birth to their first child about the time the choir would be in Spain, so he said he could not go. He did, instead, set about training the Chairman during practices to conduct in his place. This seemed all right, until we got to Fuengirola, and he was faced with conducting in front of an audience for the first time, and panicked. He called practices several times a day, and by the time of the first concert on March 1st, he was in a right state, and consequently, the concert was a disaster on both nights.

To make it up to Howard, I promised to find a better choir for the next year, and arranged for the Maesteg Gleemen to go out, which was a great success, and I was saddled with the problem of finding choirs for future years.

Roy Davies had cobbled together a large choir to sing in Bournemouth consisting of Côr yr Hen Blwyf and Port Talbot Cymric, together with some of the Burma Star Choir boys who had not joined Hen Blwyf. A friend of his from London, had arranged the concert with mainly Welsh, but professional performers from London, and wanted a Welsh Male Voice Choir. I did not go, but when they returned home they were all talking about this fantastic performance they had given. I asked Roy if he could take this same choir to Fuengirola the next March, and he said he would arrange it. I thought it was all going well, until I discovered that the chorister who really ran Hen Blwyf, Stewart Davies, was left to organise it, and had been in touch with Howard, but in October rang him to tell him that he could not get enough choristers to go and they had to pull out. I rang Port Talbot Cymric to see if enough of their choir could go and do it on their own, only to discover that they knew nothing about it. They did, however, have another tour planned on the Continent for the end of March, but would see if they could persuade them to do Spain as well. They subsequently told me that they had a choir and were making arrangements with Howard, but in December, only two months before the concerts, they also pulled out because of lack of numbers and an unbalanced choir. I rang around other choirs, but no one could do it at such short notice, but some offered to do it in future years. Cymric then agreed to do it in the following year, 2008, and Tonna agreed to do 2009, so I could relax. Howard cobbled together a little concert party to do 2007, but was not satisfied with the result.

Cymric invited me to join them in 2008, and I agreed provided I could come to practices and sing with them, which I did. They practiced on two nights a week, however, as also did Porthcawl Choir with whom they shared a Musical Director, Mair Jones. Two nights a week was a bit of a strain, but I managed at least one practice a week, and went with them. This time, the choir sang extremely well, and Howard was very pleased. I also learned later that Tonna Choir did very well in 2009. I chased Howard regarding a choir for 2010, but he informed me that he had The London Welsh Male Voice going out. It turns out that his wife had a bad accident in 2009, and as she was recovering, he had a nasty accident on his motor bike, but both are now doing well. Then, he rang me again in September 2010, because a new choir, Bois Coytra-Hen, formed by a breakaway group from Maesteg Gleemen, had arranged to do the 2011 concert, but had now rung him to say they could not get enough choristers to go, so could I find him another choir. Frantic telephone calls to every choir I could contact proved fruitless, until Llantrisant agreed to go and all is well again, but it was a worrying six weeks.

Choirs in the Castle

In celebration of the New Millennium as well as the New Year, Coety village association held a Dinner and Dance in the big barn of a farm on the outskirts of the village, to which Diana and I were invited, because I had been so involved in various activities in the village, arranging concerts to raise money, conducting carol singing around the streets several Christmases, and helping Bill Shepherd in the village fetes, etc.

In June, 2000, the village association arranged a Re-enactment of the Siege of Coety Castle by Owen Glyndwr in 1404, and I got involved filming the whole weekend activities, which included a living medieval village, shops selling armour, weapons, books and all sorts of medieval things, an Ale House, (The Monk’s Tavern), displays of Welsh Traditional Folk Dancing by local school children, jousting and hawking displays etc., and ending each day with the re-enactment of the Siege of the castle being held by an English Lord. The fighting in the siege, as with all the displays of fifteenth century life and fighting was so realistic, and the re-enactors, from all over the country were outstanding, making everything look so realistic and natural. After editing all the film, creating a Title Page and a “The End”, with music, I produced and sold about 35 copies at, if I remember rightly, £7 each.

Shortly after all the hooha of the Re-enactment had died down, Bill Shepherd and I were walking our dogs together one afternoon, talking about the event, and he commented that the village aught to be using the Castle for many more events, and asked if I had any ideas about what they could put on in a ruined, roofless castle. I suggested the first thing that came into my mind, which, being involved with choirs and arranging concerts, was, of course, “Why don’t you put on a concert?” He asked what sort of concert, and I said, “Any sort of concert. Why not a brass band, or an orchestra, or a choir?” His response was that as I was so involved with Male Voice Choirs, why could I not set something up. From this casual conversation came the first Choirs In The Castle concert in September, 2001. Porthcawl, Garw Valley, Ogmore Valley, Maesteg Gleemen, Bridgend, Maesteg Ladies, and, of course, The South Wales Burma Star Choir, all agreed to take part. I also contacted the Penyfai Welsh Folk Dance Group, who were excellent, in order to have some relief from seven choirs and they also agreed. The next problem was finding a stage. Someone in the village had contact with a scaffolding company who owed him a few favours, and persuaded them to build us a stage for nothing. I drew up a plan of the shape and size of the stage, so that we had a flat square stage for the dancers and their musicians, and three steps down the front for the choirs to stand on in tiers, which also allowed access to the dancing area and the Village Association covered it all with tarpaulin and put up a little tent for the pianist. Bill contacted someone he knew who could provide microphones and loudspeakers, etc., and found someone who could arrange the electricity supply. The choirs agreed to do 15 minutes each, and the dancers two short dance displays. I arranged to take my (or rather Bryan’s) electric keyboard, and we were all set. I designed and printed off posters, choosing the name “Choirs In The Castle”, and had them put up in shops, halls and libraries throughout the Borough, as it then was, and Roger Price, who was the Borough Leisure Services Officer, arranged for one of his staff to put up posters in all the halls and places of entertainment which they ran. Bill persuaded Dr. John Elved Jones, a local notable, to compère the show and we were off.

The concert started at 6 o’clock on the Saturday night with a good size audience, who had brought blankets or chairs to sit on, sandwiches and flasks of tea or coffee, bottles of wine, cans of beer, and so on. By 8.o’clock, the sun was setting, but we had lights for the pianist and to light the singers and dancers, but it also got very cold, but it turned out that people had anticipated that contingency better than I had. However, the concert finished at 9.0’clock as planned, and it was a tremendous success, everybody asking when we were going to do it again. All the proceeds went to a local charity. I cannot remember which one it was, but they received close on to £800.

The next year was devoted to the Re-enactment again, which was a bit of a disappointment after the huge success of the first one, because fewer re-enactors came and there were less stalls, etc., in the field around the castle, but was well attended and enjoyed by the crowds who came to see it.

Then we were pressured to put on Choirs In The Castle again in 2003, but, learning from our experience in 2001, we moved it to a Saturday as near to, but before, the Summer Solstice in June, to make sure we had sunlight, and warm weather and a bigger audience. Sure enough, we had the fine weather, and a larger audience. And also, it was still light when we finished at 9.00.pm. We had eight choirs, Aberafan, Bridgend, Maesteg Gleemen, South Wales Burma Star, The Peter Singers, Maesteg Ladies, Sounds Familiar, and the Val Manning singers. We also had the Penybont, as well as the Penyfai, Welsh Folk Dancers. How we fitted all those into a three hour programme, I do not know, but we did and we raised a lot of money for the Noah’s Ark Charity.

The Village Association pressured us to do another concert in 2004, and eventually, and very reluctantly, I we agreed. That summer we had a long period of unbroken warm sunshine, and all was set for a great concert. However, on the Thursday before the show, I had a call from someone who asked if I had seen the weather forecast for Saturday, because there was a violent storm making its way westward across Europe and was due here on Saturday morning. I was sceptical because the weather had been so settled for so long, but rang Bill Shepherd, and he also poo-poo-ed the idea. But he, like me, contacted several weather forecasting agencies and they all confirmed that the storm was due here on Saturday, so, on the Friday, Bill and I agreed we had to cancel, and I telephoned all the choirs and then, in tee shirt and shorts, set out to find all my posters to write CANCELLED across them. Everyone thought I was crackers, but I was never so relieved on Saturday morning when I awoke to torrential rain and high winds. By lunchtime, when I visited Coety Castle out of curiosity, the ground was awash.

In 2005, we went ahead, and had an even larger audience, but fewer choirs and no dancers, so each choir had a longer spot which made it more worth their while. We made even more money for our chosen charity, and told the village association that we would only do the concert every two years. We did another concert in 2007 and then 2009. Meanwhile, Gilead chapel, a beautiful old Welsh Chapel, with a marvellous balcony, and wonderful pulpit, had declined in recent years, not only in membership but physically until a chap called Colin Lewis, a Financial Advisor, who had moved into the village decided to take it under his wing. He set about repairing, weatherproofing, and redecorating the building and encouraging people to come back to the church. He started with the chapel hall, which he refurbished and used for money-raising events to help him with the redevelopment of the chapel. He asked Bill and me if we could arrange a choir concert as part of his money raising, because choirs always tend to attract good audiences.

I arranged for the South Wales Burma Star Choir to do a concert for a start, and later, in February, 2004, I had a bright idea to invite two choirs, but as Gilead was only small, with two choirs in the hall as well, there would not be much room for an audience. Then, with what I thought was a stroke of genius, I decided to use the chapel and the hall at the same time advertised it as “Choirs In The Chapel, Two Choirs – Two Venues, One Concert”. We arranged for the audience to use both the hall and the chapel, and each choir would do one half of the concert twice, first in one venue and then in the other, and the audience stayed where they were. On that February night, however, the weather was dreadful, and such a small audience turned up, that at 7.30. I announced to the few people in the hall to go into the chapel and for their choir to sit up in the gallery. After the interval, the choirs swapped over, and every body was delighted, especially as the two choirs were Côr Merched Maesteg (Maesteg Ladies Choir) and the Porthcawl Male Choir, both of which sang superbly.

In 2008, I was persuaded to do another concert, this time in September, when I thought the weather was likely to be better so we would try the same format, this time with Sounds Familiar a tremendous mixed choir from Porthcawl, formed and conducted by a very good friend of mine, Philip Juliff, and the Maesteg Male Voice Choir, who had a deservedly good reputation. Unfortunately, the weather was just as bad on that occasion and again we had only a small audience, so again put everybody in the chapel and one choir in the gallery. Slowly the chapel was restored to its previous condition, and the congregation slowly grew. The last I heard they had something like 45 to 50 members, and very active and still growing. I am told it is very much a hand-clapping, evangelical church, and very popular, but I have had little to do with it since then, except to arrange for Bernard Kenny and his wife to go there to entertain for 20 –30 minutes one Saturday afternoon at a Bring and Buy Sale. Bernard told me later that there were a number of entertainers there, not just him and his wife Sheila.

By this time, I was getting fed up with Bill Shepherd’s dictatorial attitude, his seeming impatience with me because I could not confirm the programme until I had the information and assurance that each choir was taking part. He could not understand why I could not type out the programme until I had the final list of songs that each choir was going to sing, and I had to negotiate with several choirs who wanted to sing the same songs. I had a rule that whichever choir first submitted its list of songs, sang them, and any choir who later submitted a song already accepted had to find a substitute, which had always been accepted by the choirs and there had never been any problem with this. However, in 2009, several choirs submitted songs already approved and a lot of negotiating had to be done, but Bill seemed to think it was all my fault. The programme was eventually finalised, I typed out each of the eight pages, and took them to the prison where they were going to be printed. There was a further delay there because of holidays and other staff tasks, which took priority, but we finally had the programmes, which were to act as tickets, and some 75 posters, only about two weeks before the concert. I had already printed a number of posters and distributed them all over the area in advance, and Bill’s 2’ x 8’ hardboard posters which he painted for every concert had been on display on roundabouts and railings all around the town for some weeks. Bill had had a hip replacement a year or so before all this, and it had taken a long time to heal, and then he had fallen and smashed the femur of the same leg, and had been on crutches for a long time. Just as that damage was healing and he was walking without a stick, he fell again and smashed the same break again. This time, after a lengthy operation to put all the smashed pieces of bone back in place, the surgeon told him he was confined to a wheel chair for three months and then on crutches for even longer, and that if he damaged the leg again, they would have to remove the leg entirely. By the time the Choirs In The Castle concert was a priority on our time, he was walking with two sticks, with some difficulty and in pain, so he was under considerable strain, but his impatience at every delay became intolerable, and I told him I did not want to do another Choirs In The Castle. He told me I was mad, but made no attempt to persuade me to change my mind and denied treating me the way he had, so I confirmed that I would not do another one. Within days, he had agreed with the Village Association to cooperate with them to do the concert every year, and had asked Colin Lewis of Gilead Chapel to take on my role of enlisting choirs to take part. Bill and I are still friends, but he keeps me at a distance now, except to ask me for the addresses etc. of all the choirs in the area so that he can contact them for next year’s concert. He then questioned why there were so few, and looked askance when I said they were the only choirs I considered worth asking to take part in what is now a very prestigious, popular successful event in the area, attracting an audience from all over South Wales. He got very angry when I told him that doing the concert every year would result in it dying out in about three years. Perhaps the choirs will persuade him that I am right. However, that was, for me, the end of a very pleasurable, exiting and satisfying venture in my life. It is unfortunate that I no longer have the Fairwater Choir, and now not even the Burma Star Choir to occupy me. I joined a new choir, Bois Goetra-Hen a’r Cylch, (Coetrahen and District Male Choir) which was started in August 2009, by a breakaway group from the Maesteg Gleemen, where I was just one of the three Bottom Bass singers and nothing more. The Musical Director was a professional musician, who demands perfection in pronunciation and singing, but they moved their practices to Sunday at 7.0.pm., which was unfortunate because the evening service in Tabernacl is from 6.0. – 7.0. I therefore resigned from the Coetrahen choir and approached the Garw Valley Male Voice. I went to their practices for a few weeks, but found they also practiced for 90 minutes two nights a week, and travelling 10 miles each way twice a week was a bit of a drag, so when the time came to go to South Africa for John and Josie’s wedding, I left them as well. I no longer have to take my loyal old friend, Russ Brown, whom I used to take every week to Cardiff to choir practice and later to the Burma Star Choir, and when that also folded, to the Porthcawl United Services Club every Tuesday night., for a drink with his friends, and to talk over old times. Sadly, he died after what appeared to be a very short illness, but was in fact very advanced cancer in January 2009, and is sadly missed by his daughter, who cared for him and the rest of his family.

So, I am now no longer involved in running anything. I am very much a “back seat” man and only rarely do any compèring of shows. My old friend, Philip Juliff asked me to compere the first Annual Concert of Sounds Familiar, which he formed some ten years ago, and is now back as their conducter, and decided at last that it was time they had an annual concert to raise funds for themselves. I joined the Bridgend Male Choir, which is 85-90 strong, and practises only once a week just up the road in the OCLP Club, but I feel lost just singing in such a large choir. I was not too pleased when I was told I had to be ‘on probation’ for three month before I could be accepted as a full member, and found it all rather tiresome. However, when I stopped attending after the Christmas break, the Chairman telephoned me to ask why I was not coming to practices. I told him I thought they did not want me, but he insisted they did, so I returned, was issued with a uniform bit by bit, and am now an established chorister, and at last beginning to enjoy just being a member of Bass section with no responsibilities.

Diana has her Yoga Club on Monday mornings, and Keep Fit on Tuesdays, and still does her Aromatherapy, as well as being very involved with work in the United Church, and lunches with old friends she has made since we came to Bridgend, so she is kept very busy

Apart from the Bridgend Male Choir, I have only the garden to tend, and even that is now very tiring, although satisfying. I take Gypsy for walks every day whatever the weather, and I meet with the three other remaining ex-members of the Burma Star Choir every couple of weeks. In July 2010, we were talking about the trips to Brittany with the choir, and I found that only one of them had been to Brittany and that was to the Celtic Festival, when we were so busy we saw nothing else. They persuaded me to organise a trip for them, so I arranged a five- day trip, and took them to Huelguat, Lorient, Carnac and other places of interest. I found an hotel not far from the Roscoff for the first and last night, and with help from my old friend, Jean-Marie Airault and his new girlfriend, found another at Y Pwlldu for the other two nights. We took him out to dinner one evening as a ‘thank you’, and he took us to his new home for dinner the next night. One of the group had to pull out a week before we went, so there was only the three of us to share the cost, and they have not stopped talking about the trip since.

In February, Diana and I went for a holiday to India and Nepal, which was a fantastic experience, visiting so many elaborate and ancient temples and seeing so many cremations on the banks of the rivers, just as Bryan had described to us when he came back from his wanderings. We also flew over Everest and took photographs through the windows of the plane, and all-in-all, it was an unforgettable holiday.

Sadly, on our return we were greeted with sad news. We arrived home at 2.0.am, on Tuesday 2nd March, and when we arose about 8.0.am, I had a telephone call from Alec Mullins’ friend and neighbour in Cardiff, Barbara Williams, to say that Alex had gone into a coma on the Friday, and died this morning about 4.0.am., without recovering consciousness. As an executor of his will, I had to rush straight off to Cardiff to join Barbara, and Alex’s sister, Mary, who had come down from Kent and was with him for that last weekend until he died. Then started the whole process of arranging the funeral, and starting to sort out the Will. Everybody was so kind and helpful, especially his solicitor, and everything went smoothly. The Canton Rugby Club Choir, of which Alex had been a member for many years, turned out and sang well at the church service, the Catholic priest, who was not only his priest but also a close friend of Alec, spoke well, and invited me to pay a tribute during the service, and then Alec was laid to rest in the grave where his wife was buried a long time ago.

Conclusion

So the last few months have been quite extraordinary, but at last, everything has settled down and now, with all that over, I now have little to do and more time for these reminiscences. I suppose, at long last, I am now what people call “retired.”

Diana and I are the last of our generation; the ‘patriarchs’ (if that is the right word!) of a wonderful, diverse family, with our children, Susan and Doug, John and Josie, Bryan and Isabel; our grandchildren, Jonathan and Maria, Jason and Leanne, Ben, Rhiannon and Ewan, and our great-grandchild, Michael Iestyn (Mikey), and more recently, a great-grand-daughter, Grace Helena, born to Jonathan and Maria on 6th April 2011, and we were able to go to her Christening, where we met Jason’s second child, Amie, born on 19th May, just a week or so earlier. So, there we were, - four generation of the Davies family celebrating another new arrival.

Susan, Doug and Ben are happily settled in Cheddar, Somerset; John and Josie, Jonathan, Maria and Grace Helena are settled in Daventry, Northamptonshire: Jason, Leanne, Mikey and Amie in Wrexham, North Wales: and Bryan, Isabel, Rhiannon, and Ewan in Cambourne, Cornwall. So all are widely spread, but only as far away as a telephone. Diana is still very active with her Aromatherapy, Yoga, Keep Fit classes and with all her church activities, and re-unions with people with whom she has worked or been associated over the years. I have my Chapel responsibilities. I was elected a deacon for a five-year period, which has now expired, and I have to wait another five years, until 2004, before I could be elected again.

Until recently, I had the Thursday Nighters, which I have now left, and I am not sure whether they still meet. There would only be Bill Shepherd, William Meredith and John Price left, and as William and Bill rarely talk to me these days, even in Probus, and I hardly ever see John, I am out of touch. But I still have the Burma Star Choir re-unions every few weeks, and I take Gypsy, the dog, for a walk every day, as well as looking after the garden and, of course, writing these Random Ramblings.

I referred to this project as my “Random Ramblings”, which is what they have been. I have jumped from one subject to another, followed trains of thoughts over long periods, so that the story keeps jumping back and fore in time, which must be quite confusing. I only hope it has been interesting, informative and perhaps of help to anyone trying trace the family history. If I have left anything out, or got anything wrong, please forgive me. It is just as I remember a long and interesting life. I have enjoyed writing it, if only to have actually done what I decided to do. Retirement is like that!

But, Diana and I are enjoying our retirement in Bridgend, and as we both come from long-lived parents, plan to continue to do so for some considerable time yet.