In 1971, having established a reputation as a Tutor Officer, I was very much involved in the training of students from various universities, and the P.P.O, Albin Crook, was anxious to set up a Training Unit in the county, and was trying to persuade the Home Office to choose Glamorgan for its next one.

However, after several years of arguing with the Home Office, he decided he would open one of his own. The Port Talbot office was on the first and second floors of a building on the main road of the town, but had never actually made use of the second floor, so this seemed a convenient place to put it. Having got approval from the Probation Committee, and presumably from the Home Office, to appoint an extra Senior Probation Officer to undertake the project, he set about it, and invited me to apply for the job. This I did and was interviewed, duly appointed, and became the Senior Probation Officer in charge of the Port Talbot Office and Training Centre. Meirion Lewis who had been the Senior was relieved, I think, when I took over from him, and he was left with only the Neath and the Gorseinon offices to worry about. I set about furnishing the top floor, and settling into a new role, and learning to work in a completely different capacity with three main grade officers, and the following September, welcomed my first little group of students to the Unit upstairs. One of my students, Margaret Daniels, subsequently was appointed as a Probation Officer in my office, and was with us for a few years, and proved to be a very good officer. She told me once that she always thought of me as The Absentminded Professor!

Port Talbot Victim Support Scheme

She came to me one day in 1975 to tell me she had heard about a new scheme set up by the Bristol Probation Service to provide advice and help to the victims of crimes, using volunteers to see, comfort and advise the victims. We talked about it for a time and decided we would like to set one up in Port Talbot, and set about bringing a Management Committee together, and recruiting volunteers. There was another idea floating about at the time and that was to bring criminals and their victims face to face, so that the offender could see the effect of his actions in the hope that this would bring about a change in his attitudes. When I told Peter Bibby about the scheme we were intending to set up he tried to persuade us to set up a Client/Victim confrontation scheme instead, “because no one else had done it” and we ought to do something original. I told him that I thought the Victim Support Scheme was more essential, that the confrontation idea was something that individual officers could use in the course of their normal work with clients, and we were going ahead with the Victim Scheme, which we did. The Port Talbot Victim Support Scheme, set up in 1976, was the first one in Wales, and about fifth in Britain, and was promptly copied by other areas, as was happening in England. It was very successful and much appreciated by victims and, oddly enough, the courts, who were often concerned that they could make order to help offenders, but were powerless to do much to help their victims. It meant, however, that I found myself with a lot of extra work, advertising the scheme, explaining to magistrates, and recruiting and training volunteers. Margaret Daniels eventually left the Probation Service and her husband and children, and went to live with a female Social Services Social Worker with whom she said she was in love

Being Chairman of the Victim Support Scheme in addition to running a very busy office and a training unit kept me pretty well occupied, but at least, now being part of Management, I was able to get home at a reasonable time every evening. But, being an SPO, I had to take my turn of being the Probation Liaison Officer to what were then the County Assizes, and the Glamorgan Quarter Sessions, held alternately at Cardiff and Swansea. In the west half of Glamorgan, this duty was shared between Ben Davies (Bridgend), Meirion Lewis (Neath) and myself (Port Talbot). This involved receiving the Social Enquiry Reports on defendants from other Probation Officers, and formally presenting them to the Recorder, as the Chairman of the Quarter Sessions court, or to the Judge in the Assizes, and if necessary, calling the author to attend so that he or she could present it, on oath from the witness box, and be available to be cross-examined by the barristers and /or the Recorder or Judge himself. I was in that position one day, presenting a report on one of my own clients, and the barrister defending him questioned me at length and became more and more abusive to me because I would not agree with his suggestions. Eventually, the Chairman, Mr. Griff Owen George, intervened and told the barrister to moderate his questioning, as he would not allow “his Probation Officer” to be spoken to in that way. On a previous occasion, as a Probation Officer in Bridgend, I was at the Quarter Sessions in Swansea and the defending counsel was Diana’s brother, David. I had written the report on a client who had been put on Probation a number of times and he always broke the conditions of the order and had to be taken back to court. On this occasion he had committed another offence, and the jury had found him guilty. David was trying to get him off with the lightest sentence possible, and was suggesting to me that a further period of probation would be the correct way forward. I kept repeating that I had been supervising him for a number of years, and he always ignored any advice and persisted in continuing with the behaviour that brought him back to court time and time again, that he had never cooperated and had no intention of doing so, and prison seemed the only sentence left for him. The sentence of the court was imprisonment, and David, later, told the family that I was one of the most stubborn Probation Officers he had had to deal with when defending his clients in court. This same client had earlier had to appear in the Maesteg Court while he was on Probation, and his father had told me that in desperation he had gone to see the local Catholic priest about him. This was Father Reidy, a very stout Irishman, who was well known and respected for miles around. I asked if I could speak to Fr Reidy about the boy and his father agreed. I went to see the priest and found him in his shirtsleeves, braces dangling at his side, digging his garden. I explained that this boy’s father had told me that he had taken him to the priest, who was taking him in hand. Fr Reidy replied that he had spoken to the boy. In a very pronounced Irish accent he said: “Yes. I took him behind the church there, and t’umped him hard. He’ll be alright now!”

An incident which has stuck in my mind about my time in Port Talbot, was taking John, as a little lad, to my office for a day because he was unwell or something and Diana was working, and I had to look after him for the day. I sat him in a corner of my office with a table and plenty of paper and pencils, while I got on with some writing for the day, instead of going out on visits. On the way home, John told me that he wanted to be a Probation Officer when he grew up. I asked him why, and he said: “Because all they do is sit at a desk and write.” Good lad!

Glamorgan County Split

On another occasion, while John was still in Laleston Junior school, I was driving home from Port Talbot, before the Motorway was built, and as I drove through Groes village, (alas now buried under the Motorway), and approaching the entrance to Margam Abbey, I saw a little lad with a satchel over his shoulder, looking very forlorn and sad, and as I passed, I saw it was John. I swung around at the gates of the abbey and went back for him and asked what he was doing there. He said he was running away from home. I asked where he was heading for, and he said he was making his way to my office, because I was the only one he could think of going to talk to. He said he wanted to run away because he thought he was not wanted at home, so I gave him a big hug and talked to him for a long while, before bringing him home. He settled down again but it was a very disturbing incident and made one re-assess how one treated one’s children. A few years later, Glamorgan was split into three smaller counties, South Glamorgan, (which was Cardiff and its surrounds), Mid Glamorgan (Merthyr, Rhondda and Aberdare, Pontypridd and Bridgend) and West Glamorgan, (Port Talbot, Neath and Swansea), so I was now in a new county with a new Chief Officer, Peter Bibby, an Englishman, who thought his whole purpose in life was to revolutionise Probation practice in Britain, and thought that any officers who trained before he did were way out of date and needed to be brought to think like he did, i.e., according to Management Theory! While I was in Port Talbot, the Senior Probation Officers in Glamorgan felt that it would be beneficial if we could all meet with other SPOs in Wales for discussion and comparing of practices and ideas. This was duly set up and I ended up as Secretary of it, and organised meetings, usually in Llandrindod Wells, because that was the most central place to which we could all travel most easily. These were great occasions, and I also organised weekend conferences with visiting speakers, etc. One of the speakers I invited was Laurie Taylor, who was professor of Sociology in one of the universities at that time, but now a radio broadcaster. I remember a group of us drinking with him in the lounge of the hotel after dinner on the Saturday night. He gave me the impression that he was more of a socialiser than a sociologist.

On one occasion, I drove up to Llandrindod, and it started to snow on the way up. We held our meeting, but after lunch decided to cut the afternoon session short because it was now snowing lightly there as well. Before leaving I enquired with the police and they suggested that the Brecon Beacons had had a lot of snow and it would probably not be possible to drive over them, and I would have to go via Swansea, but I should check in Brecon. In Brecon I called at the police station and was told that the Beacons road was closed, but consult the Police Officer at the road junction and take his advice. He told me that he was advising everybody to go around Swansea or Neath, but the road was, in fact, passable with difficulty, and provided I took care, I should be all right. I set off, and the snow was blowing horizontally across the road all the way, and the temperature would have frightened brass monkeys to death, but I stopped at several places to take fantastic photographs of the snow scene, especially one waterfall, and another of a lone tree silhouetted against the snow. Then I arrived home safely, as usual. With the re-defining of the counties, eventually the Wales Senior Probation Officers Group fell into disuse, and ceased to exist. There was a Senior Officers of Probation group, which included Chief Officers and Assistant Chiefs, of which I became the Conference Organiser.

Dolygaer

I had also been the Secretary of the Glamorgan Probation Voluntary Committee, whatever that was. All I remember of it was that I arranged for the Bridgend Folk Club to do a concert in The Reardon Smith Lecture Theatre in Cardiff to raise money for it! Soon after becoming a Senior Probation Officer, an issue was raised at the County Management Meeting, that some officers had requested permission to take some of their clients for a week to Dolygaer Outdoor Pursuits Centre, just off the Heads of the Valleys Road above Merthyr. It was decided that the County would pay for twenty young offenders to go, but one officer should go for every five clients. One officer had to be a Senior. As my connection with the Scouts and Youth Clubs was well known they all assumed that I was the one qualified to go.

The activities at Dolygaer consisted of Sailing, Canoeing, Rock Climbing and Caving. I had done some rock climbing and had taken the youth club caving at Porth-yr-Ogof, but the thought of going sailing and canoeing on water with the obvious possibility of ending up in the water scared the hair off me, but with assurances that I would not have to take part in those activities, I agreed to go. I took two clients from Bridgend in my car, and on arrival immediately sought out Clive Roberts, the Leader at Dolygaer, and explained to him that I was terrified of water, so sailing and canoeing was out for me. He brushed it aside and said there was no problem, that on the days when my group was on water, I could join another group, because he had enough staff to cover my absence. My heart sank when he immediately called everyone together to go to collect kit, and we all trooped off to the Boat House, and then gathered on the side of the lake, where we given instructions on how to rig a 15ft sailing boat. When he was satisfied that we all knew how to do it, we had to board two of these craft and were taken for a ride around lake, each taking a turn at the rudder and the sails. This was all before we had taken our personal kit to our dormitories. After a quick meal we were taken back to the lake, and his assistants had brought twelve little Mirror dinghies to the lakeside, and we all had to climb in, two to a boat. I and one of the Probation Officers, David Brill, later a Senior Probation Officer, set off, taking it in turns to control the boat, but my companion soon tired of it, and left it all to me, so we went up and down, back and fro, on the lake and ended up at the bottom near the dam, from where we had to tack back up to the landing place, against the wind. Naturally, we got stuck on the wrong side of a spit of land sticking out into the lake, which denied us a wind to move us, so it took us a long time to manoeuvre ourselves around the little point, and we were the last boat to arrive back. But I felt quite invigorated. My group of five offenders, plus two Centre staff, spent a day at Porth-yr-Ogof Cave, with which I was already familiar, having taken the Wick Youth Club there, in my innocence, but this time, instead of walking in along the river bed, we had to climb to a crack in the cliff face, onto a ledge, and then drop down a “chimney”, only to land just inside the main entrance, which was big enough to take a small bus. We were led to parts of the cave to which I had not been before, including a narrow, low passage down which a river was running very fast, and we had to crawl along it on hands and knees against the current until we came to a small hole through which we climbed back out to the bottom of the cliff face in the field outside. There was a white line under the water running down the middle of this passageway, which gave the route the nickname of “The M1”.

Another day, we went to a rock face where we were shown how to climb to the top, and one little lad, who was a bit of a show-off and bully got stuck half way up insisting he could not move, and refusing to climb up or down. Eventually we persuaded him to the top and then ropes were produced and we were taught the technique of abseiling. When that was done satisfactorily on this little rock face, only about 30ft high, we were whisked off to a viaduct across a deep valley, and had to abseil down one of the pillars, which was, I think, about 150ft or more high. Having all abseiled down the pillar, we were then invited to abseil down over the centre of the arch, so that after going down about 8ft with our feet on the wall, we had to simply slide down the rope to get to the bottom. Then came the day when we were all piled into the Centre bus and taken to Llangorse Lake, where the canoes awaited us. I said I would stay in the safety boat, with an outboard motor, which kept an eye on everybody in case someone overturned or fell into the lake. Everyone was then taught how to manoeuvre forward and backward, and to turn left and right, and how to prevent the canoe from tipping over sideways, while I looked on. When we stopped for a packed lunch on the bank, I finished mine, and stood contemplating the canoes, and then decided to try one out while waiting for the others. The Leader of the party agreed to this, so I borrowed the canoe of one of the Probation Officers and climbed in. I did all the manoeuvres I had seen the others being taught, and was enjoying this leisurely moving about just off the bank. Before I realised it, everyone else was back in their canoes about to set off across the length of Llangorse Lake. I rushed to give the canoe back to the Officer whose canoe I was using, a very large lady from the Aberdare office, but she decided she had had enough of canoeing and would go in the Safety boat, so I was stuck in the canoe and everyone else was heading at a rate of knots across the lake. I had no option but to follow them, and did, in fact, arrive safely, but aching, at the other end. There the Leader announced that we would now have a game of “tag” chasing each other through the tall reed beds for a while, which was fun. The lad who refused to climb the rock face, stubbornly refused to paddle all the way back across the lake. The PO whose boat I was in tried to coerce him, and finally challenged him to a race across the lake, and promised him a packet of cigarettes if he beat her. I gladly gave the canoe back to her and settled into the safety boat, for a relaxing trip back, only to find that the engine would not start and we had to row the thing all the way.

The last day before coming home was taken up going to Symond’s Yat, where some went climbing the cliffs and some of us walked along beautiful paths until we met up with the others at the top, piled into the vehicles and back to Dolygaer. It had been a most enlightening trip, and there was a possibility of a bonus for me. I had noticed a sailing boat on the bank of the lake. It was covered with tarpaulin, nestling on a trailer, and surrounded by long grass and nettles. It had obviously not been used for a long long time. I asked Clive Roberts about it and was informed that it belonged to a man in the nearby village, but it was the wrong size for the Yachting Club on the lake, whose races demanded the next size up and the next size down. The boat was for sale, complete with sails, trailer, oars and everything needed and he only wanted £50 for it to get rid of it. I decided that this would be ideal to teach Susan, John and Bryan how to sail, and it would be fun to play with, so we tried to contact the owner, but he was out of the country. Clive Roberts promised to make contact with him when he returned and try to negotiate the sale for me. Weeks went by and I visited Dolygaer several times but could not make contact with the owner, and eventually, after long discussions with Diana, decided that a caravan would be a much better prospect, because we could all go in that at the same time, and not have some of us sitting on the bank of a lake waiting for others to come back to shore for a turn in the boat. I had also, while gazing out of my Port Talbot office window at the back of the YMCA, seen three rather battered canoes sitting on the roof of one the outhouses. I asked the Secretary of the YM, whom I knew very well, about them. He said they had been there for years, no one used them, and if I was interested I could have them, for a small donation. I think I gave him £5, and carried them home on my roof rack, intending to make at least one good one out of the three. I subsequently sold one to Meirion Lewis for £5 and scrapped one and kept one myself. Susan, John and I had a lot of fun on the River Ogmore in Merthyr Mawr, and under the Dipping Bridge, and on the large pools that appeared amongst the sand dunes at Kenfig Burroughs every winter.

One day, in the car, I was driving past Kenfig Burroughs with Bryan in the car, and commented about the fun we had had in the canoe, and Bryan reminded me that he never went on these outings because he had been too young. We no longer had the canoe, which had long since disintegrated, but we had an inflatable that we used on the beach on holidays. So, one Saturday, Bryan and I went down to sail the sand dune slacks again. The day was fine, and there was a lot of water in between the dunes. We pumped the boat up, and launched it into a large lake, and we rowed gently across it. We hauled it out the other sided and over to the next pond, and so we proceeded down towards the beach. I had noticed a man away to our left walking on a parallel course to us, and he kept looking over towards us. We had almost reached the beach, when he approached and told us that he was a warden of the Kenfig Burrows Nature Reserve, and we were not allowed to sail boats on the Reserve as it could damage the wild life. I told him it was to observe the wild life quietly from the boat that we had come, and we were careful not to do any damage. He said he knew that was true because he had been watching us all the way down, but others might also see us, and then they would have loads of people coming and paddling boats all over the reserve and ruining it. We agreed with that, and he watched us deflate the boat, and watched us carry it and the oars all the way back to Kenfig Church where we had parked the car. Never again did we go sailing on the sand dunes.

Caravan & Caravan Club

We were still contemplating getting a caravan and, Meirion Lewis, the SPO in Neath, who was an enthusiastic caravaner told me of a friend in Morriston who had a caravan for sale identical to his, in which I had spent a night when we went to the retirement do of a colleague in Pembrokeshire some months earlier. He wanted £500 for the van, so we went to see it. Mum like it, so we agreed to buy it. I had a tow bar fitted to car, and went to fetch it, which was the start of a number of years of enjoyable camping, rallying, and touring for the whole family. Meirion was a member of the Caravan Club, and had invited me a few years earlier to go down to Llangenith for the Welsh National Rally, which was a five night affair, with caravaners from all over Britain and even Ireland attending. He wanted me to entertain in the concert in a large marquee on the Saturday night with my guitar and folk songs for half an hour or so. I had done this, and imbibed somewhat during the afternoon and evening, and on the way home late that night, was stopped at a Police checkpoint just before the Briton Ferry bridge. In the queue, I lit my pipe, but when the police officer got to my car, it was to ask if I had travelled this road twelve months earlier, when two young girls had been murdered in the area. I said I had not, and he just waved me on. He seemed bored to death and fed up with all the same answers. With our new caravan, we joined the Caravan Club, which is divided into Centres. We lived in the South Wales Centre area, but the Gower Peninsular, which has a tight restriction on caravans on its land, and Swansea were in the West Wales Centre, so, with the Gower in mind, and knowing Meirion and a few other members, who were colleagues of mine, we joined the West Wales Centre.

Our first rally was in Amroth, where we learned the procedures and practices of rallying. Every Sunday morning, everyone gathers around the Flag about 10 o’clock for coffee and biscuits. Announcements are made and prizes handed out to the winners of the competitions, which we had tackled (or not) over the weekend, one for adults, one for teenagers and one for the small children. This particular weekend, the competition for the children was to make a musical instrument out of anything natural they had gathered over the weekend. We had found a lot of dead Japanese knotweed, from which I had made a little set of pipes, like the Peruvians use, and played a sort of tune on it. Susan entered the pipes and won. She had to go up to collect her prize, and was asked if she could play it. She was very shy, but under persuasion from the Rally Marshal, she tried and failed to get a note out of it, but she got her prize. After that we rallied about every fortnight, all over South Wales, and occasionally further afield. We went to Hereford to pick apples and pears, etc., and down west, and of course, the Gower. Some time later, Ronnie and Pam Thomas, who lived four doors up from us, had joined with their children, and then Yvonne and Richard Dyke next door to him, with their children joined, so we all used to go off together on Friday evenings. One weekend the rally was in Monk Nash, about six miles away. I left the office in Penygraig early and drove home in brilliant sunshine, only to find when I came over the hill at Gilfach Goch, that the coast was shrouded in mist and fog. The rally was in the field right next to the Lighthouse on Nash Point, which was blowing its foghorn. After a couple of hours, Ronnie decided he could not stand it, so drove back to Bridgend and slept the night at home. About half an hour after he had left, the foghorn stopped.

The Welsh National Rallies were really something. They were for five nights instead of two with all sorts of competitions connected with caravans, like reversing out of one imaginary garage and into another, racing over a set distance, turning around a bollard, the best kept van, etc., as well as sports, concerts, as well as looking at other people’s vans and either envying them or glad we had our own. A Church Service on Sunday morning was usually taken by a minister from Cardiff, who was also a caravaner, and most of his sermon, or address, consisted of jokes and funnies which had everyone in stitches, but always with a message. When West Wales was organising the National, we all had to buckle in and help. We were even persuaded to be Rally Marshals at one weekend rally in Llangenith. My main recollection of that rally was a chap from England attending before going on to the Welsh National which followed on. He came every year, and as he left the site on the Saturday afternoon, he stopped to tell me, as Marshal, that he was going out and when he expected to be back. He also said that he was going to call in Penclawdd because he knew someone there from whom he bought cockles every year. I explained to him that all the cockles now went through the factory, not as they used to be, when the women of Penclawdd collected and sold them. He winked and said these did not go through the factory, and would I like some, so I said I would. When he returned he handed me a bag of the largest, juiciest, sweetest cockles I had seen since I was a child in Gowerton, when cockles were part of the staple diet. But he would not tell me from whom he had bought them so that he would not get her into trouble.

Eventually as the children got older and developed other interests, we gradually gave up rallying, but used the van for holidaying and went for occasional weekends in it. John borrowed it after he was married, and had it for a while, but eventually it came back onto our drive, and in the end I sold it to an Irish tinker who called wanting to re-tarmac our drive. He and his mates were working the area and needed it to sleep in. I had been trying to sell it for the £500 I had paid for it, because the price of caravans had escalated considerably by then, but I only managed to get £150 from the tinker. Still, we had had far more that £350 worth of enjoyment out it over the years. Diana had also had several jobs while the children were growing, apart from running a Mothers and Toddlers Group in Cefn Glas Community Centre. She trained for the Samaritans, and did day duties and occasionally night duties, at their centre, taking phone calls from people desperate with their conditions and wanting to commit suicide but who try to get help. This is where she met Ingeborg Engler, another volunteer, who became a close friend with whom she has kept up contact ever since. She had also worked as a Psychiatric Social Worker for a time at what was then the Parc Hospital, where her main task was to try to trace the families of long term patients, whom the authorities wanted to discharge to make room in the hospital and with the long term objective of closing the hospital altogether. They did eventually close Parc Hospital and Penyfai Hospital, but kept Glanrhyd Hospital open, because they set up a secure department for the treatment of seriously ill patients and those with criminal convictions. Gradually the other patients were released into the community to be supervised by Social Workers.

When the children were older and all settled at school, Diana decided to return to her original career of being a nurse. She became a District Nurse for the Oldcastle Surgery, which was our surgery. Dr. Brian Price who had had a surgery in a house in Park Street, had been our doctor since we came to Bridgend, but had taken on more partners as the town and his practice had grown, and eventually built a new surgery by Oldcastle school. Diana became the nurse who allocated the work to the other nurses, as well as her own, and worked there until she retired. The surgery later moved to Brackla as the Oaktree Surgery, and is now much larger than it was, but it is still difficult to get an appointment to see a doctor there. She was well respected as a nurse and manager and enjoyed an excellent reputation in the area.

Hysterectomy

After Bryan was born, she became so low-spirited, and anaemic, that she went to the doctor herself, something she rarely did. Various tests were carried out, and it just happened that that doctor she saw lived immediately opposite us in No. 43. She came rushing across one morning while Diana was in work, and told me to tell her to come to see her as soon as possible. Diana saw her and was told that she was so anaemic that she needed immediate attention. The outcome was that Diana had to have a hysterectomy operation, which meant that she would no longer be able to have children, and her idea of having “two pigeon pairs” went out the window. The operation was carried out on Christmas Eve. However, she recovered and was right as rain for years afterwards, until she decided, after she had retired, that her thyroid was greatly enlarged, and she was aware of the possible consequences of this if it was not seen to. She consulted the doctor who referred her to a throat specialist at the hospital, whom she eventually persuaded to remove at least part of her thyroid gland. He did, in fact, remove just about all of it, which has left her with a permanent cough and a dependency on tablets, and regular check-ups to monitor her position.

Diana back to work & Aromatherapy

She also, perhaps through her yoga connections, became interested in Aromatherapy, and underwent training. Part of this training was to do three treatments on patients, a write up a diagnosis and prescription of what oils she used to treat the condition. I was one of the guinea-pigs, which was very pleasant. She eventually qualified, and branched out into Reiki and other similar practices, and started treating patients professionally. She rapidly earned a reputation as a therapist, and had quite a large number of regular patients. By the time she retired from nursing, she had virtually another full time job, and converted what, since all the children had left home, was now the spare bedroom into a treatment room, complete with couch and a cabinet full of aromatherapy oils. As she kept her prices lower than the other therapists, who were growing in number, she soon developed a reputation as being the best and the cheapest in the area, and did well. She still retains a small number of patients, which brings in a useful income for her, as her state pension in small anyway.

Diana's Degree

She was also invited to attend a course in Cardiff for a new Degree – Master of Nursing. It was a part time course which lasted two years and involved a lot of reading, studying and writing. There were nine nurses on the course, and I think only one failed. Mum was awarded her Master of Nursing Degree, so I suppose she could, if she wished be called Dr. Diana Davies. She never did, and was content just to know that she had passed the course and awarded the Degree. Clever girl !

The Bridgend Folk Club decided to leave the Crossways Country Club for its meetings, and transferred to Caeffatri House, a public house just off Coety Road, in Bridgend.

One advantage of this was that beer, which was 3/6d (15.5p) a pint in Crossways, was only 1/9d (just under 10 pence) a pint. The cheaper beer, and the convenience of being in town, encouraged more people to attend and the club thrived. It was basically a club for members to perform to each other, but occasionally we would have a guest artist, usually semi-professionals touring the country, to come along to entertain us. There was one small clique in the club, however, who wanted to have guest artists every other week, and make it more of a Listeners’ Club rather than a Performers’ Club, and they got more insistent and demanding until there was practically open warfare. It came to a head when these people had a secret meeting of their supporters, called it the Annual General Meeting of the Club, appointed new officers, and notified the Bank of the change of signatories and in this way stole the club from under the noses of John Francis, John Thomas and the other leading lights of the club. John Francis immediately took all his supporters to a venue, I think in Ogmore-by-Sea, and some of us just packed in. After a few months, I was approached by a small group, Brian Lingley, Ted Bugler, Bernard Kenny, Neil Lewis and a couple of others who felt aggrieved that they no longer had a convenient Club in which to perform. Between them they had a County and Western singer (Brian), a shanty man (Ted), a Flamenco guitar player who sang in Spanish and Portuguese (Bernard), and a modern folksong singer (Neil), and they wanted me to join them to sing Old English Traditional country songs, and form a little performers club to meet upstairs in the Coach and Horses pub in Cowbridge Road. I was delighted to comply and we started as a small group. As soon as word got around, others came along to listen and friends came to support us, and it was soon a flourishing little club. This was when Folk singing was very popular and almost every town had such a club.

One night, John Francis and a few of his followers came in to see how we were running our little club, decided they liked it and asked if they could join us on Wednesday nights instead of going it alone, and so our membership suddenly doubled. Later, we learned that the breakaway group, which was still meeting in the Caeffatri pub, were suffering smaller audiences, partly because there were not enough local singers to fill in the time when the professional was not singing. There were only a few singers in the club, and eventually it folded, and some joined us, and we became one of the biggest clubs in South Wales. We did not have a formal committee, but I was regarded as the Chairman as well as the compére, who always opened the evening with a couple of songs, and then ended the evening with a chorus song. The upstairs room in what was then called the Coach and Horses and now simply The Coach, was only small and had an apparently unused bar taking up quite a bit of room in the corner, but we used to get as many as ninety sitting on the floor, window sills, the bar, and the chairs and tables and standing around. We would be closed down today in these “Elf ‘n Safety” days. It was the unwritten rule of the club, which no one had defined or announced, that when a singer was on his feet, no one got up to leave, or to come in. During applause, anyone wishing a get another drink would slip out, go downstairs, and when he came back, would listen at the door and if someone were singing, would wait outside until the applause, and then come in. For such a bunch of drinkers, they were very well behaved and considerate of other people. The locals, mainly older men, who drank in the bar and the snug downstairs, always spoke highly of the Folk Club and how well behaved all the members were, and guest artists, the professionals who came from far and wide, always asked for a return visit. We did concerts all over South Wales, especially in Glamorgan, and in quite prestigious venues and raised a lot of money for various deserving charities. When I was Secretary of the Glamorgan Probation Voluntary Committee, which we set up to raise money for various charities, I arranged to do a concert in the Reardon Smith Hall in Cardiff together with an exhibition of some 50 paintings and jewellery all painted or made by Cardiff Prison inmates. This was in 1977 and was our first venture as a Committee, and raised quite a bit of money for the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders (NACRO)

One of the regular visitors to the Folk Club was a chap from Pontneathvaughan, near Glyn Neath, who wrote his own songs and sang them in the Pontardawe, and Bridgend Folk Clubs, as well as further afield. His best-known song at that time was “Hymns and Areas”, which he was asked to sing every time he came to us. He worked in the Metal Box Factory in Neath, so his attendance always depended on his shifts. His name was Max Boyce, and was known to one of our members, who was also originally from Pontardawe. When discussing in Committee who to invite as guest artists, we considered several local singers and some nationally known ones, and Max’s name was mentioned. We agreed to invite him, but were advised that he was now so popular in all the South Wales clubs that our little room might not hold all those wanting to come and hear him, so it was decided to hire a room in the Sealawns Hotel in Ogmore-by-Sea. I was not in favour of this because it was so far out of town, but the committee went ahead. I wrote to Max, but was away the week he came as Guest Artist, so I did not hear him that night. What in fact happened was that only about 12 or 15 people made their way out to Ogmore-by-Sea. Normally the guest would sing for half an hour in the first half and about 45 minutes in the second half. Max decided on this occasion, very wisely, that he would do his two halves in the first half, collect his £8 fee, and get back to Neath in time to do his night shift in Metal Box, which he did. I had a great little letter from him a week later, saying how much he had appreciated the Club’s gesture, ending his letter with “Duw, it’s hard! Max”. Shortly after that, we would not have been able to afford to book him for the Club. He went off on tour taking one of our members, Neil Lewis, a very good guitar player, with him to provide “backing”, and his career took off.

At some stage, I am not sure when it was, some of us used to meet, either at Bernard Kenny’s house or mine, just to make music and enjoy ourselves. Bernard played guitar, John Francis played his fiddle, Bryan Lingley the banjo and me on mandolin. When we met at Bernard’s house, he always had a supply of home made beer on hand. He had perfected his making of beer to two weeks, which was the length of time it took him to drink two gallons, so he always had new beer by the time he had finished the previous lot. I asked him for details and the next time he sent off to Birkenhead, where he was brought up, he ordered double the quantity of malt, both light and dark, hops and yeast, and I had half of it, with the details of how to brew beer. I set to and made two gallons, and one night when they all turned up at my house for a music session, while Diana was out, I think on a Monday night, I proudly served them with my new beer. They all said how good it tasted, but the next time I saw them, they wanted to know what was in it because they all had difficulty driving home that night. After discussion with Bernard, we decided that I had put the quantity of sugar for five gallons, and only brewed two, so my beer had two and a half times the amount of alcohol than it should have done. However, I brewed beer for quite a time after that, and cannot think now why I stopped doing it. There was a woman in Llangynwyd who also used to come to the Folk Club from time to time. She wrote poetry of a sort, and often used to ask to perform some of them. One evening she showed me a poem, which she said was written while she was under the dryer in a hairdresser’s in Bridgend and she thought that I could perform it better than she could. It was called “Timothy”, and in my mind was not only her best, but the only good poem of hers that I had heard. I read it out to the club, and it went very well, and I was repeatedly asked to recite it thereafter, in all sorts of places. Unfortunately, some years later it became almost an offence to be sexist and make comments about homosexuals, and I had to be careful where I recited it, and eventually stopped doing it altogether. I still think it was a good one, though!

There was another fellow in the club who sang from time to time. I cannot remember his name, nor any of the songs that he sang, except one that sticks in my mind. I cannot remember the name of it or any of the verses. It was around the time that motorways were first being built, along with service stations, which were something new. Along the motorways were huge signs advertising them and the other services which they offered, mainly a restaurant, a café, toilets and parking. The road signs illustrated these with symbols, presumably for non-English speaking drivers. The last line of the chorus of this lad’s song was:- “Petrol pump, knife and folk, cup of tea and a P”.

At one stage, when I was stumped for new songs to sing, I decided to try and write one myself. I wrote one, which I called “The Hedger and Ditcher”, which was, not surprisingly about a hedger and ditcher who seduced the squire’s daughter, and refused to marry her, but promised that he would “hedge and ditch” for her any time she wanted. There were country songs about all manner of farm workers, but I had never come across one about the hedger and ditcher, so I tried to fill the gap. Another song I wrote while sitting in the Magistrates Court in Port Talbot waiting for a case to come up, was “Platform Shoes.” I had noticed in the folk club that week a girl wearing the tallest platform shoes I had ever seen. Platform shoes were all the fashion then, but these were at least six inches high. I was thinking about this in court, and wrote this song without stopping. It just flowed, and told the story of a young bare-footed country girl who came into some money and went to visit London. The only things that impressed her were the platform shoes, so she bought a pair. When she got home, her boyfriend came to see her and in order to kiss her had to climb up her shoes, with ice axe and pitons. He climbed, taking two days to get to the top, and then fell off and was killed when he hit the floor. She burst out crying, slipped on a tear and also fell over the side of her shoes and died beside her lover. I was invited one night to sing at a little concert in Bridgend Rugby Club with some professionals from the BBC and John Jones, a local head teacher, who was well known for his recitals of Dylan Thomas’ work. He could not get to this concert but recommended me to the BBC lads. I went along, and one of the songs I sang, thinking to impress these professionals and perhaps get some BBC bookings, was Platform Shoes, which always went down very well. Half way through it, I forgot the words and had to stop, and that was the end of my hopes to impress the BBC. I did get another chance, again by accident, replacing someone else who wanted to get in with the BBC, which I shall mention later.

Bridgend Con Club

One night, at the Bridgend Club, we learned that the Brewery Draymen had gone on strike that day, and were not delivering beer supplies, and the Coach and Horses was due for a delivery the next day. By the time Folk Club finished at 11.o’clock, there was no draught or bottled beer left in the pub. This created a problem. No one would come to the Club the next week if there were no beer there. As the strike showed no sign of ending, arrangements were hastily made by someone for us to go to the concert room in the Conservative Club, which is where we went the following Wednesday. The only condition imposed by the Con Club was that their members could come in to listen without payment because it was their club, and we agreed. We were there for six weeks before the strike ended, beer was restored in the Coach, and we returned to our spiritual home. Meanwhile, I became very friendly with the Chairman of the Con Club, Ted Evans, and in gratitude to him for his help during this difficult time, I asked if I could join the club. He proposed me, spoke on my behalf to the Committee and I became a member, and am now a Life Member, having spent many very happy hours there with some very good friends and good company. I used to call in about 9.00. or 9.30., nearly every night, and always sat with Ted. He learned of my connection with Gowerton, and insisted I call in to the Con Club there to give his regards to their Chairman, because he and Ted were very close friends. On one of my frequent visits to Gowerton to see Mam, I called in to the Con Club, only to find that nearly all my cousins and more distant relatives, who were all devoted Labour voters, some even Labour councillors, were members and regular users of the Con Club. I met the Chairman, and also an old school friend, Morley Howells a very good and fanatical cricket player, who was Secretary of the club. Through him, I became a member, spent many pleasant hours there from time to time, and even took The Burma Star Choir there to do a concert, which was packed by people from Gowerton whom I had known for years, and even Mam came to hear the choir. I was so relieved when they sang really well on that occasion.

Ted Evans Died

In May 1983, however, Ted Evans, who worked at the police headquarters as a civilian driver, delivering things to police stations etc., one morning, on his way to work on his little auto cycle, was knocked off his bike by a car. The driver had pulled out from a long queue of traffic stopped at temporary traffic lights in Cowbridge Road and Ted was knocked unconscious. He was taken to hospital and then transferred to Morriston hospital where they specialised in such cases, but in four days, he quietly died. His wife had died only a two weeks earlier, and although while I was sitting with him at the hospital with his son, Gwyn, he appeared to be beginning to stir and come out of his coma, I think he recovered enough to realise the situation, remembered that Bess was gone, and he just let go and went to join her. He was a great friend. I had always refused nomination for the Club Committee, because people would only say I was there because I was Ted’s friend, but after his death I stood and was elected to the committee and served for several years. I resigned when I was adjudicating the Annual Talent Competition in the Pavilion, Porthcawl, which was always held on a Thursday, the same night as the Club Committee meetings. Although the Club meant a lot to me, the job of adjudicating at the Talent Competition was, after all, a paid job. In the Bridgend Con Club, I realised that most of the older members were also members of the Bridgend United Services Club, just across the square in Tondu Road, and spent some evenings over there, and some evenings visited both, so in July 1981, I applied for membership over there also, knowing that I would have to find my Army discharge papers to prove my qualification to join as a full member. Search as I might, I could not find them anywhere, although I had seen them some time before, but could not remember where.

Mam's move to Clos Morgan Owen

By sheer chance, Mam decided in 1981 that she could no longer climb the stairs to her flat, and was becoming homebound. She applied for other accommodation and with support from the doctor, she was granted a bungalow in Clos Morgan Owen (named after our now retired doctor) at the end of Gurnos Road. The little cluster of bungalows was brand new, built in a square with a lawn in the centre. She was given the one next to Mrs. Daniels, who had also lived in Mount Pleasant, and in the flat below Mam in Heol y Gog.. Just across the lawn was my Auntie Dinah, who had lived in Mount Street, opposite her sister, Auntie May, and their mother, Auntie Mary, who was of my grandmother’s generation, and who had visited Mam regularly when she lived in Mount Pleasant. So Mam knew most of the new neighbours and would be amongst friends and relatives. So it seemed a good plan for Mam to go there. Marion took leave and came down to help with the move as she had done before, and we decided that our first job was to clear out all the rubbish that Mam had collected over the years in the flat. We lit a fire in the garden to burn all the papers that had accumulated. Mam was in the habit of keeping the old paper carrier bags, and saving newer paper carrier bags in them, and there were loads of them. Marion took them down to the fire in the garden and was about to throw them all on, when I stopped her and explained that we aught to check them first, because Mam put all sorts of things into her carrier bags. Despite Marion’s protests, I started to empty the bags and go through their contents, and lo and behold, there, amongst other things Mam would want to keep, were all my Army Discharge papers, my Pay Book and Record of Service, my Master at Arms records and everything that I needed to prove I had served in the Army for three years.

Joined BUSC

This was about two weeks before I had to appear before the committee of the United Services Club for membership and had to produce these very documents. So, in due course, I was interviewed, and granted membership of the club, and was given the number 830, which by sheer coincidence, had been my grandfather’s Regimental Number in the Welsh Regiment at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries.

We moved Mam down to Clos Morgan Owen, and, as usual, she accepted it as though it was the most natural thing in the world. She was very happy there for several years and had plenty of company. Mrs. Daniels came in from next door every day, Dinah visited often although she was still busy with the local council and the Labour Party, and we visited regularly. So Mam knew most of the new neighbours and was amongst friends and relatives.

Bridgend Folk Club & BBC

Meanwhile, in the Folk Club, I was approached one day by Michael Powell, who had been a member, and chairman of the members’ committee of the Wick Youth Club, and was also a very active member of the Folk Club. He did quite a bit of entertaining by himself and with a little group of friends. He now wanted an audition with the BBC, but wanted a few others, including me, to go with him. We got a little group of, I think five, and we practised singing the choruses of some of his songs. He got his audition, and we all went off to BBC Wales studios in Cardiff. We piled into a little office anticipating an interview before going somewhere to be auditioned, but as soon as we were all crowded in, the woman who had greeted us sat at her desk and said: “Right. Let’s hear you.” So Mike started up with a song, and we joined in the chorus, and when he finished, she said: “What else do you do?” Mike sang all the songs he had prepared, about four or five, and she wanted to hear more. He thought a moment and then suggested “The Barley Mow” from me, so I sang it with the others joining in a chorus, which we had practised a few times, just in case, and when I finished, she said to me: “That’s it. That’s the one I want. It would open the show.” I asked if she wanted us all in it, thinking of Mike who was desperate to get on the BBC, and she said: “No. Just you. That is just what I am looking for.” She took my particulars and dismissed us. Mike was very disappointed but was very sporting about it, congratulated me, and went looking for other avenues to explore.

Some months after our audition, the BBC invited me to take part in a programme called The Folk Club, with me singing the Barley Mow. A gang of us from the club went to the studios in a big ex-chapel in Newport Road, Cardiff, where we sat around in almost a circle, on benches, “to create a ‘Folk Club’ atmosphere”. In the recording, I fluffed one line. I thought they would want to re-record it, but they left it as it was because until then the audience were like dummies, but broke into laughter when they heard me make a mistake. They relaxed and were a very responsive audience for the rest of the show. I actually opened the programme on Television singing unseen, over the opening captions, and then emerging towards the end of the song into the light. We had run through it earlier for Sound and Lighting purposes, and I sang it without a hitch as usual, but with my little hiccough in the recording, it made the show. However, they never invited me back! I have thought for years that I did not record the programme while watching it and it is now lost, but recently, I came across a sound recording of the whole show. Some years later, Mike went into politics, became a Conservative Councillor and later the Mayor of Bridgend Town. He also got married, which surprised most who knew him, and later still, was prosecuted for downloading pornographic photographs from the Internet and possessing thousands of such photographs in the house. Fortunately both his mother, and his father who had been a very respected lawyer in the town, (I nearly said ‘solicitor’) had passed away and did not suffer the shame. He served a long term in prison, his wife divorced him and I have not seen him in Bridgend since.

The Folk Club continued for a number of years, and then the landlord of the Coach and Horses was taken ill and died, but his wife carried on with the pub, until one of the regulars paid court to her, and eventually married her, and then tried to run the pub himself. He put in a jukebox and made all sort of rules, and made things very difficult for the Folk Club, so we decided to leave. Meanwhile, we had a lot of bits and pieces, including quite a good guitar, which people could borrow if they wanted to sing. I found the bottom drawer of an old wardrobe. I upholstered the top, and put a clasp and lock on the draw and that served us as a seat as well as a cupboard for our things. When we decided to leave and go to the Cambrian Pub, (now The Roof), we had to carry this thing out at the end of our last evening. We got it down the stairs and out onto the pavement, across the road to the next street to my car. It was like a funeral with us as bearers carrying the coffin. We got to my car in the dark, and my key would not open the boot door. We struggled for a while, and then I saw my car about two cars further down the road, identical to the one we were trying to break in to. Hey Ho, those were the days! I do not remember what happened to that old box eventually.

I had been, however, rather unsettled in the new set up at work, and working in Port Talbot. I wanted to return to my old County, which was now called Mid Glamorgan, and Albin Crook was still the CPO.

I was, of course, aware of all that was going on in Mid Glam, and knew that they were considering appointing an extra Senior Officer for the Penygraig Office, to take charge of some new schemes for Intermediate Treatment, which was the new technical term for introducing young offenders to new experiences and activities they might never have access to otherwise, such as hiking, caving, mountain climbing, camping, etc. One of the activities being considered in Penygraig was motorbike riding! I applied for the job, was appointed on 19th December 1974, and welcomed back into the staff whom I already knew, with Albin Crook as the CPO, a kindly, gentlemanly, fair and considerate man, who wanted me back in his team anyway.

All the time I had been in the Port Talbot, I had been plagued by the road works every day as I travelled to and from work, because the M4 Motorway was being built, and this meant hold-ups and delays, which were an aggravation. What good could be said about travelling to and from work was that in the morning I had the sun on my back and in the evening I had the setting sun on my back. When I moved to Penygraig, I had the sun, when there was any, in my eyes going to work and again in my eyes on the way home. And, it had been easier to get to Gowerton from Port Talbot to see Mam, when I wanted to, or had to! To cap it all, the M4 Motorway was opened just after I left the Port Talbot Office. Anyway, I left Port Talbot and West Glamorgan, replaced by one of my own team, Hector Price, and joined Harold Phillips who had been the SPO in Penygraig for several years, but was in no way interested in IT. He had been in the Glamorgan Police Force during the war, like his father, who had been the Sergeant in the Rhondda. Harold, perhaps feeling guilty that he was not in the Armed Forces and fighting for his country, left the Force and joined the RAF. He trained as a pilot in Canada and had just qualified and got his wings, when the war ended, and he came home. He applied for the Probation Service, and served in the Rhondda, where he was born, and ultimately became the SPO for the area. Another kind, gentle, considerate and friendly man, whose main hobby was photography.

The main Intermediate Treatment project under consideration in the office, by a young officer who was committed to IT, was motorcycle racing, or at least, riding on the mountains, which surrounded us. He negotiated with various people to give him their unwanted motorbikes, which the youngsters then rebuilt. He arranged with local landowners to allow the riding of these bikes on their land, and on the mountains themselves. I negotiated with the Railway people for an old railway truck to be brought up for free, and established in our car park, so that we did not have to keep the bikes in the cellar, which was now being used as a repair and maintenance workshop. The scheme worked well, with remarkably few complaints from local residents about the noise. Harold and I got on like a house on fire, but it was a drag driving all the way through Blackmill, up over Gilfach Goch to Tonyrefail, and then on to Penygraig. It was bad enough at the best of times, but on one occasion we had a heavy fall of snow, and I got as far as almost to the top of the hill at Gilfach Goch, where I could see the flat surface of the road ahead, before my wheels started spinning on the snow. Do what I might, I could not get the car to go forward, and eventually had to turn round, and return to Bridgend and drive up to Llantrisant and from there to Penygraig, arriving just before lunch. If I remember rightly, I dealt with all the mail, looked at the situation and sent home those who had managed to get in, closed the office, and returned home myself. The next day, there were no problems and the roads were more or less useable again.

On another occasion, I was driving in torrential rain, up the same hill to Gilfach Coch, behind another car. When we reached the top of the hill, the road was flooded, with water pouring down the mountainside on the left, and into a ditch on the right. The car in front, going fairly fast, hit this big pool and began to hydroplane, still going forward, but the car was slowly turning right. The driver appeared to be revving his engine trying to regain control, when suddenly his wheels reached the road surface and the car shot off the road, smashing a wooden farm gate, and hurtling over the common, before disappearing into a large dip in the ground. I stopped and rushed across to them wondering what I was going to find in the car, which was on its side. I pulled open the door and could see a man and a woman and a little boy all piled up at the bottom. They were unhurt, fortunately, and only needed help to pull themselves out. I took them to Tonyrefail, which is where they were heading anyway, and dropped them off at a garage where he knew the owner, and where he arranged for his car to be towed back for repairs. He said he could get transport to get back to Pontycymer, where he was the local Postmaster. A little while later, he delivered to the office in Penygraig a beautiful pen and pencil stand for my office desk, so I called at the post office in Ponty on my way home to thank them and was glad to see that they were all fine, and had only been shaken by their adventure in the rain of Gilfach Goch. My team served the Magistrates’ Court in Ton Pentre, and our area was the Rhondda Fawr, from Blaenrhondda, Treherbet and Treorchy down to Porth, and Harold’s served the court in Porth, and the area of the Rhondda Fach, from Maerdy down to Porth. Both teams covered the large council estate on the top of the mountain at Penrhys, which was reputed to be the worst council estate on the whole of Glamorgan, probably of South Wales. I was surprised to find when I first visited the estate that one side of the estate was virtually a rubbish dump, filthy dirty and unruly, and from where most of our clients came, but the other half of the estate was clean, tidy, with lawns and flower beds and respectable people. In fact, one of my team lived in that part of Penrhys.

I enjoyed being in Penygraig, and decided that what the Rhondda Valley needed was accommodation for homeless clients. Despite the reputation of the Rhondda people for their friendliness, hospitality and helpfulness to everyone, trying to find accommodation for a client who had a criminal record was virtually impossible, and we had to send them to Pontypridd or Cardiff to find somewhere to live. There was an old chapel, long since deconsecrated, in Ystrad. It had been a furniture shop and a timber storehouse, and was now empty, and with the help of an organisation which specialised in finding, adapting and providing accommodation for the homeless, we set about trying to raise the money to buy it and adapt it to our needs. We planned to convert it into twelve flats, in pairs, each of which would have a living room, a bedroom and a toilet and shared a kitchen with the flat next to it, with a key to the kitchen door on its own side, but not to the other flat. Such an arrangement would also be appropriate to a married couple for whom one room would be the living room and the other the bedroom and a kitchen in between. It seemed perfect. One of the senior magistrates was the chairman of our committee and we had a solicitor, police inspector and various other dignitaries supporting us We were doing well until the people in the neighbouring houses cottoned on to what we were doing and objected. Ironically, the leader of the opposition, who objected to having murderers and violent drunken offenders living in their immediate neighbourhood, had a record as long as your arm for violence, theft, burglary and GBH. The opposition was so strong, they called a public meeting to oppose the scheme and had their MP present. Albin Crook and the two Assistance Chief Officers said that I had to deal with it, and did not even attend the meeting. A church hall had been booked for the meeting, and the vicar had to rig up microphones with speakers on posts outside, because the hall was full and there was a huge crown outside on the pavement. The representative of the Housing Association which was negotiating the purchase and alteration of the chapel, with whom I had been dealing all along, could not attend, but sent a young inexperience lad in his place. The leader of the opponents spoke, Mr. Bill Edwards, JP (our Chairman) spoke, I spoke, and the MP spoke (supporting his constituents) and the young lad spoke on behalf of his organisation. He upset the MP who was offended by something the lad said about him, and I had to apologise, tempers flared and things started getting nasty, but eventually we agreed to a meeting of those directly involved in the project and a small group of opponents to discuss our proposals and try to reach a compromise. I wondered about how safe it was to leave the hall with all these angry people wanting blood. As I left, without incident, I noticed that one of the Assistant Chief Probation Officers, Ken Keen, was at the back of the hall observing all that was going on, but never made his presence or identity known, which I thought was pretty sneaky. Eventually the matter was resolved by our committee agreeing to hand the project over to the local council, and opening the eventual accommodation to anyone on the council waiting list as well as homeless Probation clients. Long after I had left the Penygraig office, I learned that the hostel was in use, and most of the occupants were, in fact, Probation Service clients!

Marion Died

While I was still working in Penygraig, Marion was taken ill in Nottingham, and was ill for a long time, but eventually she was pronounced cured, and was back at work, but later, she admitted to me that she had had cancer. A year of so later, in 1983, she told me that it had now returned, and she was again having treatment. I went up to visit her, and when I walked into her sitting room, she was sitting in a high backed chair with her back to me. When I moved around the chair and saw her drawn features, I knew how ill she really was. I spent the weekend with her and Laurie, and promised when I left that I would bring Diana and the children up to see her as soon as possible. We did just that a week or so later, on 26th July 1983, when she was looking considerably better. We took the caravan and found a site for the weekend some way out of Nottingham, but in easy reach of Marion’s house. On the Friday, we went to visit her, and after lunch, prepared by Laurie, with help from us, Marion suggested we went out to one of the large parks in Nottingham, so off we went. Marion drove her car, with Laurie and his sister Christine, and we followed behind. We sat in the park, watching the deer strolling around grazing, and visited the large house, while Marion sat by the cars with Christine and Diana. We went back to her place for a cuppa, before the sun went down, and arranged for her to come to the caravan on the Saturday, 28th, for us to provide her with a barbecue meal. She drove out to us with Laurie while Christine stayed at home because the previous day’s outing had tired her. We got the barbecue going and we had a great meal, with Marion eating some meat and a few little potatoes with a glass of wine and enjoying the company of Susan and John and little Bryan. Eventually, late afternoon, she announced that she was feeling tired and asked Laurie to drive her home. I said we would come up again as soon as we could, but she hugged me and cried and cried before getting into the car and Laurie drove off. We had to return home the next morning, but I rang to see how she was and said we would come into Nottingham to say cheerio before leaving, but Laurie said she was very tired and wanted to sleep, and she had told him to tell us to go on home and come up again another time. We drove home, and in the evening, I went down to the Con Club to have a quiet drink and think of Marion, and while there, Doug came running in to say Laurie had just telephoned, to tell us that Marion had passed away quietly in her sleep.

The date was the 29th July 1983. Our next visit was to attend her funeral on 5th August. She was cremated and I never learned from Laurie whether he had erected a stone or any sort of memorial to her. I later put her name on the gravestone when Mam died and we sealed my family grave in Kingsbridge Cemetery near Gowerton. The announcement of her retirement had been reported in the local paper, and so was her death and funeral. Some weeks later, a young woman knocked on Laurie’s door, and introduced herself as the wife of Laurie’s son, whom he had not seen for many years, because his first wife would not allow him or his sister to have anything to do with their father. Subsequently, his son went to see him, and started visiting on a regular basis. I visited Laurie a few times but he had difficulty coping on his own, and his son arranged for him to go into a home, where I went several times to see him and take him out for runs in the car, etc.

Laurie Died

However, his health deteriorated and on 18th March, 1995, he passed away. Then I discovered that he had named me as an executor of his will, together with his solicitor. Marion had never made a will, so all her money and property had passed to Laurie. When the solicitor sent me a copy of the will and arranged for me to meet him, I discovered that, presumably on the advice of his son, he had left £500 each to Susan, John and Bryan, and £7000 to me. The balance of some £85,000 went to his son. We went to the funeral, and my friend Alex Mullins from Cardiff, who had accompanied me on visits to Laurie several times, came as well. We went to see Laurie in the Undertaker’s offices with his daughter and his son, and we could hardly recognise him.

David Died

Just four months later, David, Diana’s brother, now a QC, was sitting as a judge in a case in Swansea Law Courts, when he suddenly collapsed. The case was stopped and he was carried from the court. It turned out that he had suffered a stroke, and was rushed off to Swansea Hospital. We were notified and immediately went down to visit. By the time we arrived he had had another stroke, and was unconscious, and breathing with difficulty. Shortly afterwards, he passed away and was cremated in Cardiff on 21st July 1995 in Cardiff.

Meanwhile, life went on in the Penygraig office. Harold Philips and I got on so well together. He even took me on a tour of the building that was our offices. Originally a private house, owned by a doctor and used in part as his surgery, it later became the Penygraig Police Station, complete with cells. When the Probation Service took it over, it was spacious, and the cells were used as the stationery cupboard. Ours must have been the only stationery cupboard with iron gates and a huge set of keys for its locks. Some of the offices on the first floor had been bedrooms for the single police officers, who had to live in in those days. He even took me up into the attic, which was a maze of rooms with all sorts of articles left there by previous occupants, even a brass fender and fire tongs which probably belonged to the original owner of the house. The fire tongs are now in my garage. The place was broken into while I was working there, and the matter reported to the police. Nothing much was taken, but some damage was done to doors, etc., and the only action taken by the Probation Committee and the County Council was to order us to a leave all internal doors open at night, because of the damage done by the intruders smashing these doors open to get into individual offices, which then cost the county money to repair. Some months later, it was broken into again, but again it was only damage that had to be attended to. When it was broken into a third time, the police were asked to investigate and advise on security. They came, and Harold and I took them all over the building. Their recommendation was to put floodlights on the lawns, and switch them on when the office closed in the evening and switch them off in the morning when we returned to work. No part of the outside of the building should be left in darkness, as that was what attracted intruders, and a floodlit building was rarely attractive to burglars. During this process it was noticed that there was a large crack in the front wall, running from the roof down to one of the first floor bay windows, then continuing below it to the ground floor bay window, and then to the ground. Council officials came to examine it, and decided the building was unsafe, and we ought to look for alternative accommodation. I was told that the building was virtually un-sellable because of the structural conditions and because the entrance and exit from the car park was too steep, and right on a bend on a hill, that it was dangerous. It had been all right for the Police Station, but I suppose traffic was a lot lighter in those days. However, after we had left the building, it was sold and became a very successful Social Club.

Harold retired and died

Harold retired, and decided to move to Devon to be near his son and his daughter who both lived in that area. He and his wife found a lovely little bungalow in Barnstable, North Devon, and put their own bungalow on the market. They had just found a buyer, and agreed to buy the one in Devon, when Harold was taken ill and rushed into hospital, and both deals were cancelled. He was in hospital for some time, but eventually got better. They found their original house sale arrangements could be restored so they bought and sold as planned Unfortunately, on the way down to Barnstable in the car, following behind the furniture van with their home in it, Harold was taken ill again, and on arrival was taken straight to the hospital, where he was admitted straightaway. His wife had to oversee the unloading of their home, and the settling in, and the redecoration, etc., while Harold remained in hospital for some three months. Eventually he was sent home, and it was then revealed that he had cancer, and only a short time to live. I visited him regularly for the few months he had left, and on my last visit, he told his wife that all his photographic equipment was to come to me. Two weeks later he died. She did, in fact, let me have all his equipment, including his enlarger and all his cameras and attachments, but I had to pay for them! We negotiated and finally settled on £50 the lot. She did, however, show me a poem that their 11-year old granddaughter had written to Harold shortly before he died, and asked me if I would read it at his funeral. I agreed, but when I got home and tried reading it aloud, I was so overcome my voice would not work. When the funeral was arranged, all the senior staff of the Mid Glamorgan Probation Service were at a Management Course in Dyffryn Gardens. Albin Crook had retired and we had a new Chief Officer, who had to consider whether he would allow the three-day course to end early so that we could all go, or send a selected few. Eventually, he announced that Francis Holland, ACPO and I were to go to represent the Service. We went on the Friday, but were held up, and got to Barnstable too late for the service in the house, and only with difficulty found the church in time for the service there. Harold’s son, Geof, read the poem in the house, but I read it in the church. I only succeeded in doing it without faltering by treating it as another public performance on stage, and it worked. But Harold was greatly missed. He was a lovely man.

Bridgend Office Again

I was now the only SPO in the Rhondda and I searched around for alternative accommodation for the office and found a building that had belonged to the local railway offices, was up for sale or rent. I reported this to Central Office, and within weeks of my leaving Penygraig to return to the Bridgend Office, the whole office moved to the upper floor of the railway buildings. The management of the original Railway Company in the Rhondda, incidentally, was of the opinion that windows were for letting light and air in, and not for employees to use for flowerpots, files, and pictures, so all window sills sloped at an angle of 45 degrees!

Later, a vacancy for a SPO arose in Bridgend, when Ben Davies retired. Ben had been my Senior when I came to Bridgend first.

Ken Roberts, had been appointed as an additional SPO in the office, and Ben played pop with me for not applying for that vacancy, because he and Roberts never got on together. I could not tell him that the reason that I did not apply then was because I did not think I could work with him either. I started back in the Bridgend Office on 2nd April, 1962. Sharing the running of the office with Roberts was difficult enough, but Ben would have just sat back and let me do all the work. Roberts wanted to do it all his way, but as we were set up as two separate teams, he could not really interfere with how I ran my team. Eventually, Albin Crook negotiated an early retirement scheme for all officers, which allowed officers with 30 years service to be credited with an extra 10 years service so that they could retire on full pension instead of three quarters of a pension. I decided that as soon as I had thirty years service in, I would apply. There were so many things happening in the Service with which I disagreed that it was no longer the Service that I had joined back in 1958 and of which I had loved being a part. The service was now being influenced by young left-wingers with fanciful ideas that did not work, but were adopted by the higher echelons of the service and the Home Office itself, which was also becoming more left-wing, despite being, supposedly, non-political, and politicians were now not only telling us what we should be doing but also how to be doing it. As a fully trained and experienced officer, I could not agree with some of the directions that were constantly being thrown at us by people who had no experience in this field, which included some of the top people in the Service, some of whom were appointed with no experience of the Service, but good degrees. It was difficult to wait to complete my 30 years service and get out. I, meanwhile, was back in the Bridgend Office, with Ken Roberts as the other.

We had a team each, and took it in turns to take the chair at joint team meetings. He was not the easiest of colleagues to get on with. He always wanted to be top man, and the only way he could appear to be that was to try to make everyone else appear incompetent, and his usual tactic was to get in first with ideas that we had discussed together, and make them sound like his own. What he did not realise was that all the rest of the senior staff thought he was an insensitive charlatan. His team supported him because they were afraid of the repercussion from him if they did not appear to do so. But I had plenty to occupy my time and got on well with my team, as well as developing numerous outside interests, like the Folk Club, and the Burma Star Choir, and did not let Roberts get me down. All the rest of the Seniors, as well as the Assistant Chiefs and the Chief simply tolerated him, which seemed to be a feature of the Glamorgan Service.

Bridgend VSS

I was also approached by a Mrs. Susanne Jones, who wanted to set up a Victim Support Scheme in Bridgend, which we duly did in 1985. I had met her before, when she was a local councillor, and had involved herself in that capacity with the Bridgend Festival in which I was involved as Chairman of the Folk Club. She impressed me then as a typical young councillor who knew everything about everything and felt that only councillors were capable of organising anything. She had now made enquiries about Victim Support and been told of my involvement in the Port Talbot Scheme, and so came seeking my help and support. We set up the scheme, which started operating on 25th June 1984, and we sought financial support from the Bridgend Urban District Council, and the five town councils in that area, namely, Porthcawl, Bridgend, Maesteg, Ogmore & Garw, and Pencoed. They all agreed to give us grants with the usual condition that one of their councillors should be on our committee. The only ones who did send representatives were the Maesteg Town Council and the Bridgend Urban District Council, which later became the Ogwr Borough Council. The two representative councillors were, in fact, husband and wife living in Maesteg, and between them caused more trouble, delays and hindrance than all the other committee members put together. Nothing could be decided in the meeting in which it was introduced, and had to be referred to subsequent meeting, with requests for site meetings, and the calling in of so called experts to advise us. We managed to over rule them most of the time, and they went on claiming expenses from two councils for attending the same meetings together. I, however, still had an aversion to working with councillors, and eventually stepped down as chairman, and when my place was taken by one of these councillors, I left the Committee. The Scheme continued to operate and I believe still does. I was called in to lecture to new volunteers on the training courses which I had insisted had to be run for them to make sure they knew what they were doing and why. Initially all the Victim Support Schemes were individual and independent, but as they increased in number, a county structure was set up, and eventually, a National Association of Victim Support Schemes came into being and a Welsh Development Officer appointed, and is now an official part of the Court structure.

Meanwhile, I was becoming more and more concerned with the politicians interfering with our Probation work. There had been many changes in criminal law and its administration, and some of them, it seemed to me, were not for the better. In my time in the service, I had seen the removal of Approved Schools, and later, the Remand Homes, which were taken over as Children’s Homes and hostels. I had seen the introduction of the Detention Centres with their harsh, but effective, treatment of teenage offenders, and their misuse by the courts, and seen them discontinued. Borstals Institutions also were closed down and Young Offenders Prisons introduced, but very often they were in the same buildings as the adult prisons. Then we were told that we were not to recommend custody as a disposal of a case, but could only tell Magistrates and Judges what the alternatives were. This meant our hands were tied when we had someone who had exhausted all the alternatives and had failed to respond, and we could not tell the court that custody was now the only alternative. Prisons were also now said to be involved more in reforming rather than deterring prisoners. We were restricted in the new circumstances to telling the court that we, as a Service, had nothing to offer this particular offender. I have been told by ex-colleagues more recently that this is now accepted by the courts as code for “send him to prison”. With the introduction of the Social Services Department, which absorbed the Children’s Department, and all the other social work departments of the local authorities, attitudes to young offenders also changed. We were concerned that the Probation Service, which had always been independent of the Local Authorities and their councillors, would also be absorbed into this new monolith. This had happened in Scotland, where the Social Services Department had already been introduced “as an experiment”, which everyone knew would be deemed to be successful whatever happened, as no Government, of any persuasion, would admit that it had done the wrong thing. However, after seeing how things had gone in Scotland, and the protestations of the Magistrates and Judges in England and Wales, the Probation Service remained autonomous here, controlled still by committees of magistrates and lawyers, and its only connection to the Local Authorities was that they administered our finance and salaries.

The preparation of Social Enquiry Reports on juveniles was shared by us and the Social Workers. If a juvenile was already “in care”, or the family was “known” to the Social Services Department, they would do the report for the court, but magistrates, given the choice, tended to ask “their” Probation Officers to do the reports. Gradually, we became less and less involved with juveniles, and when the court made a Supervision Order, it was increasingly the Social Services that were given the task of supervising. It soon became evident, however, that when such an order was made, the local Social Services team would hold one of their meetings to decide how to proceed, and very often decided to take no further action, so the offender was not actually supervised. As time went by, it seemed that the decision ceased to be which cases would not be supervised, but which ones would, and so Supervision Orders seemed to become meaningless in most cases. The Probation Service, when a Supervision Order or a Probation Order was made, immediately established weekly interviews in the office and home visits as needed, but certainly not less than once a month to consult and advise the family. Only when a firm relationship with the youngster and the family and the “treatment” was under way, that office reporting was reduced to every fortnight, and as the order continued and progress was seen to be made, with the behaviour and attitudes of the offender improving, contact would be lessened and he would be weaned off. In some cases, we would ask the court to terminate the order if supervision seemed no longer necessary, or, if the offender offended again while under supervision, the court might look for an alternative disposal instead of supervision. Consequently, children or young offenders were usually deterred from re-offending after a first or second offence, and we never saw them in court again. Then the Home Office, in its wisdom, decided that as most first offenders did not re-offend, there was no need to involve the Probation Service, and we should concentrate on recidivists. Consequently, it was no surprise that more young offenders went on to commit more offences, and made repeated visits to the court. To counteract the increase in court cases, the politicians decided that alternative courses of action should be found to avoid even bringing young people to court. We now have a society terrorised by unruly youths, starting a life of crime at a much younger age, and because they now also feel they are protected by Human Rights legislation and government attitudes, feel themselves to be immune from prosecution.

Meanwhile, the training process for Probation Officers had changed. When I trained, all training was done by the Probation Department of the Home Office, and Social Workers had their own training system. However, the Central Council for the Education and Training of Social Workers, (CCETSW) was set up, and Probation training was taken over by them. So, everybody, including Psychiatric Social Workers, now received the same basic training, which was usually, it seemed to me, provided by failed Social Workers, who could not cope in the field. I hope I was wrong! As I could see the way things were going, I decided that I should get out as soon as possible, and when the Chief Probation officer, Albin Crook, managed to persuade the Committee to grant early retirement with ten years enhancement of service, I decided that was for me. There were so many Probation Officers coming out of training under the new system, there were not enough vacancies for them all, so Home Office was encouraging older, experienced and well trained officers to retire to create vacancies for them.

Consequently, as soon as I had 30years service under my belt, I applied for early retirement, and got out. Which is where I started these random ramblings.

Pets

Before Diana went into hospital for her hysterectomy operation, she had ordered a kitten from a woman up in Bryn Golau, who bred cats. We no longer had a dog at that time. If I remember correctly, Scamp, who was a lovely dog most of the time, could never resist chasing after children and jumping up at them, and became so embarrassing that we took her to the kennels. We acquired another dog whom we called Laddie, who used to play with Bryan and his mates on the street. If one of us took him out he was well behaved and would come back into the house with no trouble. But, if he ran out on his own when someone came to the door or anything, he simply would not come back in. He would walk or run about three or four yards in front but would never let me, or anyone else catch him. If I turned and walked the other way, he would run around and get in front again. I tried all sorts of tricks to get him in, including putting food on the doorstep, even hot food so that the aroma would perhaps entice him, but it was only by accident that I would eventually get him back into the house. He used to go out and play with Bryan and all the children thought the world of him, but one Saturday morning, one of Ronnie Thomas’ boys came to the door to say the dog had had an accident on Bryntirion Hill, the main road into town. I went off to find all the lads on one pavement, looking lost, and they, and a friend of ours who lived in a nearby house, told me the dog was on the opposite verge, dead. He had been knocked down by a car, which did not stop. The car behind did stop, and a policeman got out and saw to Laddie. He laid him on the wide grassy verge on the other side of the road and our friend had wrapped him in an old towel, so I put him in my boot and brought him home. I dug a hole in the top of the lawn, which was difficult, because the ground is so stony, but I got it deep enough and went to fetch the dog from the boot. He still felt warm, and there was no way I could bring myself to bury him. Later that evening, when he was cold and stiff, I buried him, with a marker over him with his name, and that was that. Eventually the marker disappeared, but he is still there.

Sally & Sooty

After that, Diana decided that she wanted a cat, but there were none available at the time, so she left her name, just in case. After her operation, as no kitten had been forthcoming she agreed to my looking for a dog. I went to the kennels in Tondu Road, because I knew the owner, known to everyone as ‘Jack the Dogs’, and he had only two bitches but lots of dogs. One bitch was the scruffiest creature I had ever seen, and the other was the most pretty and handsome looking dog, so I duly reported this to Diana. We had decided that we would try to find a bitch rather than a dog, because generally they were less trouble. Diana was now more mobile recovering from her operation, so we both went to see the dogs on the Saturday afternoon, and were talking to the kennel maid in the bitches’ compound, when bedlam broke out in the dogs’ section. There was a young puppy there, and suddenly they had all turned on it. The kennel maid went rushing in, kicking and throwing the dogs out of the way, grabbed the pup and brought it out to the bitches’ compound, where it stood, frightened, in the corner. While we went on considering whether to take the very attractive bitch, she suddenly made a dash at the pup, and the scruffy one leapt in front of her and snarled, warning her to keep off, and then went and licked the pup. I made up my mind immediately and decided to take the scruffy one, and Diana, fortunately, agreed. We took her home and called her Sally. We had had a dog called Laddie, and Sally seemed to be the right name for our new dog. She was the nicest, friendliest and most intelligent dog that I had come across. We put up a bed in the kitchen for her over night and she soon settled down. The next day, I had a phone call from the woman who bred cats, to tell us there was a kitten for Diana ready for collection, so I had to go to get it. I brought him home in a big cardboard box, and put it on Diana’s lap on the settee. Sally immediately came running up to see what was happening. As I slowly opened the lid of the box and the kitten put his tiny head out, Sally poked her head forward and the kitten made a screech such as I had never heard a cat, let alone a kitten, make before. Sally leapt backwards, and the kitten leapt out of the box and under the settee, from where we could not persuade him to emerge.

I put Sally in the kitchen and eventually the kitten came out, and settled on Diana’s lap. Sally soon learned to keep her distance, but in the evening, we were confronted with the problem of where the two animals were going to sleep. Sally was still very inquisitive, and the kitten was still very wary, so we kept them apart while we decided how we were going to cope. Sally had slept on her bed in the kitchen on her first night, but Diana was afraid that if the kitten, which was black, and whom we had christened ‘Sooty’, were left to sleep in the sitting room, he would probably make a mess on our fairly new carpet. Eventually, when Diana, who was still very weak, had gone to bed, I decided that I was not going to sit up all night, so I put the kitten in the kitchen with Sally, went upstairs and waited for the rumpus.. Nothing happened, so I eventually got into bed. Next morning, I went down wondering what I was going to find, and found Sally curled up in her bed and Sooty curled up against her tummy. From then on, they were the best of friends and lived happily together for many years, and the children thought they were wonderful. Sally became Bryan’s favourite, and accompanied him everywhere. When he took on a paper round, with which he continued for many years, ending up putting the papers up for other boys to deliver and also running the shop when the owner went out, Sally always went with him, and became a favourite of the customers on his round, some of whom left biscuits and milk out for her each morning. Eventually she developed a lump on her side, and was having treatment from Shepherds the Vet, and her walking slowed down. It must have been developing for a long time but had not been very noticeable.

On 24th March 1995, six days after Laurie, Marion’s widower, had died, I took Sally down to Newbridge Fields for her walk, and stopped to talk to Nell from Greenfields Avenue, and noticed that Sally was breathing very heavily. I took her immediately back to the vet’s where they X-Rayed her and diagnosed that one lung was full of water and the other about three quarters full, and she was liable to die in great pain at any moment. There was only one solution and it had to be done straight away. So we sadly lost poor old Sally.

Susie & Robbie

I decided I did not want another dog for a long time. I was, however, persuaded by Diana to go and look at a young Westie for whom a friend of hers was looking for a new home. Her friend was moving away to a new job where she could not have dogs. She was not supposed to have a dog in the job she had, in charge of a home for the elderly, but she got away with it. I eventually went to see this dog, only to find that there were two, the Westie called Robbie, and a Jack Russell bitch called Susie. Inevitably, I ended up taking them both out for walks each day in Newbridge Fields, but only once a day. They had been used to going out five times a day, starting about 6.30.am!! I walked them around the fields near their home for a day or so, then brought them over to our side of the fields a couple of times, then brought them to the house and let them play in the garden. After a week, I collected their beds, dishes, and food from their previous, and now very tearful owner, took them home and they were ours.

Sooty, however, had other ideas. The two dogs got very excited when they saw Sooty, who simply walked out and would not come into the house again. I had to put food out for him and he settled down on the front lawn, spending most of his time curled up on top of the hedge. I had a large box, which I covered with a rubber sheet, and put a folded blanket in it for him to sleep at night or during rain, but he would not use it. I thought one day, as I was cutting the hedge, that he seemed to be quite comfortable in his favourite spot, on top of the hedge, so I removed the blanket and put a layer of hedge trimmings in instead. Sooty promptly moved in, and that was his home from then on. He was getting on in years by this time, and he spent nearly all his time either in his little den, or sleeping on top of the hedge or on a large flower pot. He only came into the house to eat when the dogs were out. Then, one weekend, I was away, and when I came home Diana was very tearful, because a little boy who was walking down the road, stopped to watch Sooty walking from his box across to his flowerpot, and saw him suddenly keel over sideways and lie still. The little lad knocked the door and told Diana about it, but poor old Sooty was dead, presumably from a heart attack, and Diana had had to bury him in the garden in my absence. It was sad, but he was very old for a cat, - and we still had Robbie and Susie.

Susie, being a Jack Russell, was lively, active and adventurous. Robbie in contrast was a staid, solemn, and almost studious. If one threw a ball, Susie would be after it, pick it up and be back waiting for it to be thrown again before Robbie got half way after the ball had gone. After about two or three throws, he would lose interest and go sniffing and exploring his own. Susie found a way out of the garden, although it was supposed to be completely sealed to prevent them wandering off, but if we called them to come in, Robbie would stroll in and Susie would arrive, all out of breath, some minutes later. How she got out or where she went, I never learned, but they were good company and behaved when we were out on walks in the country, or on the banks of the River Ogmore down at Portobello, or wherever we went. We had them for several years, but one weekend, Susie went very quiet, and did not want to do much. On the Saturday she was very lethargic, and on Sunday stayed under the table most of the day, and tried to get into cupboards. I took her to the vet on Monday morning where she was examined and found to have cancer all through her, so she had to be put to sleep immediately. On the way home, I wondered how Robbie would react to not having Susie bossing him about. When I got home I found Robbie a changed dog. Suddenly he was friendly, playful, would run after a ball, as though he knew that Susie was no longer with us to bully him and surpass him in everything they did. He lived on for about nine or ten months, when one Friday I noticed he was slowing down walking up a gently slope down at Portobello, where we walked most days, in company with a friend of mine, Leighton, who had a very old and ponderous bulldog. I watched Robbie and he stopped, as though he was catching his breath and resting before tackling the rest of the gently slope. I realised something was wrong, and picked him up. I told Leighton I was taking him to the vet’s and rushed straight to Shepherd’s surgery, where they examined him and said he had an enlarged heart. They gave me some tablets for him and told me to bring him back on Monday to see how he had got through the weekend. On Monday he seemed a little better and they gave me two weeks supply of tablets for him. The next day, however, he would not leave my side, and kept falling. I rang the surgery and was told to bring him down immediately. Another examination and then I was told was having heart attacks and it would be wiser to put him to sleep without delay, and that is what we did.

We had several holidays planned for the next few months, including a 17-day holiday in Peru and the Amazon Rain Forest, so we did not look for another dog immediately.

The English Cong

When we came to Bridgend, Diana and I had to decide which church or chapel we were going to attend. All Diana’s family, on both sides, were Welsh Congregationalists, Annibynwyr in Welsh. In fact, her mother’s brother, Uncle Glyn, was a well-known Congregational Minister in a chapel in England, and I, too, had been brought up in Tabernacle, the Welsh Congregational Chapel in Gowerton. Diana’s grandfather, Tom John, was also a celebrated lay preacher. He had been preaching since the age of fourteen. For some reason, Diana had been educated in a Church of England Boarding School, and so was far more familiar with the Anglican form of Service. While in the Army, I had attended English Congregational chapels, and had found that their services were not very much different from the Anglican services, and sufficiently like the Welsh services with which I was familiar, so we compromised and joined the “English Cong” in Bridgend. I attended regularly and, although not a deacon, or an elder, I frequently did duty on the door, welcoming people to the services and handing out hymn books, etc., and seeing to the lighting. All the lights in the chapel, except one, were connected to a dimmer switch on a board at the back of the chapel. The exception was the light hanging from the high ceiling on a long cable with a wooden lampshade. On the side facing the congregation, was cut out the shape of a cross, and on the other side, facing the pulpit, was a panel missing. When we got to the start of the sermon, as was the practice, I would bring down the dimmer switch very slowly, so that no one noticed the chapel getting slightly darker, but the light shining on the pulpit and the minister remained bright. No one seemed to notice this change, but when the sermon was over, and the dimmer switch was flicked quickly back up, the chapel suddenly became bright and light again. It was a remarkable effect. The minister was a Mr. Lloyd Woodhouse, from North Wales and welsh-speaking, who was a good preacher and a good minister. The church consisted of a large room with the pulpit and Big Seat, pews each side of the two aisles and a magnificent pipe organ behind the pulpit. Behind the pulpit and the back wall was a large room, known as the vestry or schoolroom. Upstairs there was a balcony around three sides of the chapel and at the back was a corridor with, I think, three or four rooms for the Sunday School classes. There may have been five.

I made sure that I took Susan to Sunday School as soon as she was old enough to understand what was going on and later also took John, and they were regular attenders. When Bryan was old enough, I took him also, and Susan, who was now in a class for older children, used to take him in to his class, and stayed to see that he was settled before going to her own class. I had also been persuaded to teach guitar to some of the older children, so was also always there. Every year, the children of the Sunday School were presented with books for good attendance, and Susan and John always got one of the larger books because they hardly ever missed. Then one year, after Bryan had started, we went to the presentation of books and everyone got a book, except Susan. When I queried this with the new Superintendent of the Sunday School, I was told it was because she had not been attending. I told him that this was nonsense because she was there every week, as were John and Bryan. He said he would check the registers again, but the next week he told me he had done so and the registers confirmed that she had rarely attended Sunday School. I pointed out that she always took Bryan to his class, before going to hers, and therefore was probably not there when they marked the register, but he insisted that if she was not marked present, she was not there. I was left with the problem of explaining to poor Susan that although she was entitled to it, she was not going to get a book that year. I bought her a book instead, but it was not the same and did not undo the damage. After that, I tended to lose interest in the Sunday School, especially when the new minister at the time would not intervene, and as Susan and John got older they also lost interest, and therefore, Bryan did not go either.

When Susan was studying for what were then called O Levels, her favourite subject was Scripture, now called Religious Education, and she announced that she would like to go to chapel to the adult services. Diana, who had never been enthusiastic about the English Cong, promptly promised to take her, and the two of them became regular attenders. Mr. Woodhouse had retired and a new minister had been appointed, a Mr John Humphries, for whom this was his first church. He was new, and thought he was going to change the world. He certainly changed the Bridgend chapel. He removed about four rows of pews from the front of the chapel, took away the ‘Big Seat’ and was left with a platform, like a low stage instead, and he always conducted the Services from there, never using the pulpit. He also had some very strange young men going to his house, and one assumed that he was working with down-and-outs.

He also started a Wednesday evening youth club in the manse in Oaklands Drive for older members, which Susan and John attended, until one dark, stormy winter night, John came home just after 10 o’clock as usual, but without Susan. It transpired that there had been a discussion about ‘families’, during which John and Susan became involved in an argument, which became very heated. Something was said which upset Susan so much that she left in a very distressed state. John said he thought she had headed for Newbridge Fields, but no one, not even the minister, made any attempt to stop her or try to ease her distress, and she had now been gone for over an hour. I, and Doug, her boyfriend, who was waiting at our house to see her, went off in our cars and searched the fields, the woods and the town centre. I don’t know which area was the worst place for a young teenage girl to be alone at that time of night. However, she returned home, still very distressed, after 11 o’clock, and would not tell us what had upset her. John, also, would not tell us what the argument had been about. I asked John Humphreys about the incident, and he just shrugged it off as though it was not important, and said what went on in his group meetings was confidential. I told him what I thought of him and his total disregard for the safety of a young girl whom he had allowed to get so distressed in a meeting which he was conducting, and did not even have the courtesy to tell her parents that she had walked off into the night very distressed. I decided to leave that chapel, and transferred my membership to Tabernacle, the Welsh Congregational church, where I am still a member, and in 2005 was elected a Deacon.

Diana, however, still thought John Humphries was wonderful, and continued to attend the English Cong. The ambitious John Humphries, later got himself appointed to a District post covering the whole of Wales, I believe. Susan and John who had been very close as they had grown up, there being only 20 months between them in age, were naturally competitive with each other, especially in school work, but whatever happened that night in John Humphries’ manse, drove them apart for a long, long time, and it was only after they were both married that they were again able to meet on friendly terms.

The minister in Tabernacl, Y Parchedig (the Reverend) Cyril Bowen retired and was replaced in 1991 by Y Parch.Wyn Samuel, with whom I became very friendly. Although he could not be counted amongst the greatest of preachers, he was a good minister and a good friend. He left after a few years to take up a post with Christian Aid, where he is very dedicated and very successful at raising money. He was followed in 2004 by Y Parchedig Hywel Richards, who had been minister for a number of years of chapels in North Wales. Because of the shortage of ministers in North Wales he had had to help out at chapels of other denominations as well as Congregationalists. He and I immediately hit it off, and we are fine friends. He is not only a marvellous preacher, but is well liked and respected in the church and the Christian community as a whole, and has brightened the chapel up considerably. The old Tabernacle Chapel in Adare Street, had been sold to developers who wanted to build new shops on the site, so the deacons negotiated a price including the building of a new chapel in Derwen Road, retaining its corridors connecting it to the School Room in Elder Lane. It is a beautiful, large chapel, with a large congregation and is used for concerts, and all sorts of things. One of the first concerts held in the new building was organised by me and the Burma Star Choir for the Montreal Welsh Choir during their tour of Wales in about 1986. The English Cong later merged with the Presbyterian Church to become the United Reformed Church, continuing to use the chapel in Wyndham Street. Diana, I learned much later, had become an ordained Elder, and very active in the church, which later merged with the local Methodist Church to become the Bridgend United Church. They sold the chapel in Wyndham Street, which became a pub, but the organ went to a good home, and services were then held in the Tondu Road chapel, where Diana continues to be a leading light. She was also involved in trying to build a new church in the new estate at Broadlands, but the cost of the land was too high and the scheme eventually fell through.

Meanwhile, I had come into contact with the Conservative Association through my membership of the Conservative Club, which I joined after the club had allowed the Folk Club to hold its meetings there during the strike by the brewer's draymen.

I was eventually persuaded to join the party, and attended meetings of the West Ward in the Laleston Country Club. Keith Rowe, who was Vice Chairman of the Club, had persuaded me to join this small group, of which he was the Chairman and also got me elected to be Vice Chairman. I chaired several meeting in his absence, and in the next AGM, he thanked me but added that I had not actually had to do anything, because he had done it all! The wider Party in the area did arrange various functions, one of which was a Barn Dance in John Preston’s barn in St. Brides. Susan, while at the Junior School, and, I think, when she was in the junior forms of the comprehensive school, had been very keen on ballet dancing, and went to lessons every week, but as she grew taller she lost interest in it and went for other interests, like Keep Fit, training and so on. She and some of her friends who had all joined the Young Conservatives came along to the barn dance, and we all had a great time. I had done a lot of barn dancing in my earlier years, when in school and the youth club, and also while at the War Office, and so thoroughly enjoyed the evening. I tried, at one point, to take a photograph of Susan chatting with her friends, and as I took the photo, one of the young boys who were hovering around them leapt out, pulling a face and waving his hands, right in front of the camera. He was Doug de Ivey, who started courting Susan and eventually became her husband and a very welcome member of the family.

Susan

Susan did very well in school, being always determined to succeed at anything she undertook. She and her friend from Laleston were constant rivals in who would be top or second in every subject. Over all, honours were about equal. Susan did extremely well in her exams and went off to Warwick University to study Classics and came away with a very good Batchelor of Arts degree. Doug, meanwhile, had gone off to Leeds University to study Systems Analysis, and ended up with a very good degree and to be a wizard in Computer programming.

While at University in Warwick, Susan joined a Christian Club, where she met a young lad who at least professed to be very religious. He, however, was over-attentive towards Susan, who became very distressed and although I tended not to interfere too much in how the children conducted their lives, not wanting to be considered “over-protective”, when Susan told me very tearfully about this young lad, I went to Warwick and spoke with him, telling him to stop interfering with Susan’s studies. He took the view that it was none of my business, and he was entitled to do as he wished. I ended up grabbing his throat and pinning him to the wall of his room and threatening to ensure that he was expelled from University, and that he would never get a degree or a decent job, if he ever went near Susan again. I even surprised myself over that, but it seemed to penetrate his thick skull, and he stopped bothering Susan after that.

When she returned home with her BA, she and Doug resumed their courtship, and Doug got a job in Brighton. Once settled in with the firm, and they had recognised his talents, he had to take his turn to be sent to South Africa for twelve months to look after an office they had there. Susan decided to go and visit him there for a month and stayed there for some nine months until he returned. They became engaged, and on 21st September 1985 they were married in Newcastle Church, Bridgend. I was so proud taking her to the church. She looked absolutely gorgeous. They bought a lovely little bungalow in Telscombe Cliffs, between Brighton and Newhaven, and settled down to married life. It was there, or rather in the Brighton Hospital that Diana and I were introduced to our third grandson, Benjamin, who was born on 4th March, 1994.

Ben, however, had a rare blood condition, was in isolation, and had to have a complete blood transfusion. He and Susan were kept in the hospital for a time until Ben’s condition settled down after the transfusion, before they were allowed to go home. Diana and I spent quite a bit of time up there then until things got back to normal so that Doug could get back to work. It had been a worrying time for us all, especially Susan and Doug, but gradually everything got back to as normal as anything is when there is a new first baby in the home. Unfortunately, however, she has not been able to carry another child to full term, which is a shame, because she is a marvellous mother. Later, Doug decided to become self-employed, and sought private contracts. He was successful and they moved to Western-super-Mare, and then to Cheddar, where they still live. Ben is doing extremely well in school, not only academically but also with acting and singing, which is very pleasing.

A couple of years ago, we had a phone call from Doug to tell us that while on holiday touring around Cornwall, they had been involved in an accident. On a narrow country road, the drove around a bend and were confronted by a large lorry coming in the opposite direction. Despite braking almost to a standstill the vehicles collided, and the front of the car was smashed right in. The dogs on the back seat were thrown off the seat, as was Ben who suffered only slight bruising. Doug in the driving seat severely bruised his chest on the steering wheel, but Susan to the main brunt of the collision and broke both legs, one of them in two places, and had to be rushed off to Plymouth Hospital. Diana and I rushed down to see them and found a Bed and Breakfast place just off the Hoe for several days to visit Susan every day. She was sent home a week later, but still in a lot of pain and it was nearly twelve months before she was again able to move around without pain, and even longer before she could get back to her beloved garden again.

John

John, despite his undoubted intelligence, had given up trying to compete with Susan in school, and took an interest in the Air Training Corps, mainly because of the exercises and mock battles they fought at weekends. He even made an imitation rifle, which looked very realistic, and is now hanging up in my garage. He did very well with the ATC and reached the dizzy height of corporal. Scholastically, however, although extremely bright, he made very little effort and appeared to deliberately fail all his O level exams. He left school and got a job with Senator Windows in Oystermouth, selling Double Glazing, at which he turned out to be very good. He was also spending a lot of time with a young girl from Wildmill, Gina Evans, the granddaughter of Ted Evans, my old friend in the Con Club. She suddenly found herself pregnant and claimed it was by him. She, in due course, gave birth on 13th September 1983 to a little boy, whom they called Jonathan. She and John were married in the Registry Office on 12th January 1984 and they went to live first in Brackla, and then moved to a house in South Cornelly, where their second son, Jason was born on 14th August 1985. They naturally spent most of their leisure time visiting Gina’s parents in Wildmill.

John was very friendly with an ex-paratrooper, William, who had trained in the Parachute Regiment, but was discharged with some health problem and told to re-apply when he was fit again. He persuaded John to join up with him, but before they did anything about it, they discovered a Territorial Army unit in Newport, a unit of 22 SAS Regiment, and they decided to join that instead. Both were accepted for a Selection Process, which was tough, strict, and very time consuming. The training was extremely hard, and if anyone hesitated, gave up, or refused to do any task, he was immediately told to pack his kit and go, and his career in SAS was finished for good. This was a challenge to John, who was determined to do well, and both of them completed Selection and started the training proper, which was even tougher. Both completed their parachute training and got their “wings” and enjoyed exiting weekends parachuting into Germany, fighting the German “TA” or the Police, and then flying back home. Some years later, I learned that he had had a bad landing on a parachute drop, landing on a tractor in the wrong field, and injured his leg, which resulted in his being hospitalised for a couple of weeks. He still suffers as a result of that accident.

John changed jobs several times and for a time was selling telephone systems, at which he was also very successful, and got himself a job in Milton Keynes. He found digs there but eventually found a house, and Gina moved there with the children, and, of course, he resigned from SAS.

Some time later, expressing concern that the house in Cornelly was vulnerable, although their friend, William, lived in the house opposite, Gina moved back with the children, but after a short time, moved back to Milton Keynes, where she gave birth to a third son, Jordan, who was so like William that it startled everybody, although Gina said the baby was very like her mother’s father!

Eventually, there was an almighty row and they split up, and some nasty scenes followed over the custody of the children. She tried to kidnap them on one occasion after taking all their clothes and toys from the house and John chased her back to Penyfai. I received a frantic phone call from John asking me to bring the camper van up to Cefn Glas to secure Jonathan and Jason, whom he had got into his car, while he tried to get Jordan. She had brought them back to Penyfai, to join her and her girlfriend with whom she was now living, and had left no toys, and no clothes in the house back in Milton Keynes. In fact, when John managed to get them into my campervan for me to bring them back to our house, they were in only their Gymnastics kit. John also later discovered that she had not paid any bills for a long time and he was faced with threats of court action for payment of all the household bills. That was when he discovered that she had also emptied the bank account and he had no money.

Eventually John and the boys settled down again in their home, and started a new life, while Jordan, (who was so like John’s friend, William, that everybody commented,) remained with his mother and her girlfriend on a farm in Penyfai. Because they had horses at their farm Jordan took up riding and some time ago there was a photo of him in the local paper, The Glamorgan Gazette, because he had won a prize in a local horse show, but we have never seen anything of them since the break-up.

John later met up with Josie Kaal and her two children, who moved in and they have been extremely happy ever since. Jonathan has no desire to see his mother again, but Jason still visits her in order, I think, to keep in touch with his half-brother, Jordan.

In 2008, it being a Leap Year, Josie took advantage and invoked an old tradition and proposed to John, and in due course, we received the invitation to their wedding. Josie’s parents were retired and decided to move to Cape Town in South Africa, where her father was born. So Josie and John decided to marry on her birthday, 21st November, 2009 in Cape Town where all Josie’s family now live. More of that later.

Bryan

Bryan, who also did very well in school, in his turn, decided to go in for carpentry, so transferred from Bryntirion Comprehensive to the Bridgend Technical College. To do carpentry, he had to join the Building Department, starting off with bricklaying for a term, which came in useful later on when my car mysteriously rolled across the road while I was indoors, and knocked down the garden wall of a house on the other side. Bryan came to visit that weekend, and I was given a load of sand and a bag of cement by John, the son of John Reape, the builder who used to live next door in No.34, so Bryan did the bricklaying while I did the labouring for him. And an excellent job he did too. The wall is still standing and looks better than the old one. He had, while at the Tech, laid a brick border to the front lawn of our house, which was also very well done and is still standing up to the weather and me clambering along it when I am weeding the borders. While he was on his course, he had got interested in their Computer Course. I had bought him a little Dragon Computer with which he had played for several years, mainly playing games, and writing programmes, but he now decided he wanted more serious stuff, so joined the Computer Course. He learned Computer Assisted Design and became a wizard at it. His teacher in the Computer department was a friend of mine, Gerald Baker, who told me some years later that he knew so little about computers when he was put in charge of the course that he had to learn what he was to teach in his next lesson the night before. Bryan has told me since that his teacher and the class used to get into a huddle and sort it out between them, which is probably the best way to learn, I suppose. Bryan left the Tech, however, with an incredible grasp of the computer and its uses, about the same time that I retired, which is why I started these ramblings with the two of us going to the Social Security Office together to sign on the Dole. He eventually found a job with a small company of Draughtsmen in Park Street, who worked his socks off. Often, he would go to work in the morning and be given information to be entered into a computer to produce plans of a new building or something, and he would be there for 24 or 36 hours until it was completed, because his boss wanted the drawings in time for another meeting with his clients. I frequently had to take food to him because he had no time to go out for food. He eventually left there, and went into business with a friend and set up a company in Reading, and was very successful.

While in Reading, he felt unwell one day, with violent pains in his stomach. The pains got worse over night, and the next day were so bad he took himself off to Reading hospital, where he was left sitting in a chair for a long time until a doctor examined him, and decided he had peritonitis. He underwent a very long operation because it had all burst while he was waiting, and was in hospital for quite a time. There he got friendly with his nurse, Isabel, and they continued to see each other long after he was discharged and were very happy in each other’s company.

Eventually, however, there was a bit of a recession, and no one was building or developing, so work was slow coming in. He and his partner decided to call it a day, and go to America. He was away for a month and then rang home to ask me to pick him up from Heathrow airport, where he was sitting with no money. He told me when we got home: “Dad, you have heard of people going to America with £1 in their pocket and coming home as millionaires. Well, we did it the other way round.” They had run out of money, but still had their return tickets, and made their way to New York airport on a Friday, but could not get a plane until Monday, so spent the whole weekend on the airport seats, with one Mars Bar between them.

Some time later they decided to go to Australia backpacking for a year. Despite the protestations and appeals from Isabel, on 18th December 1994, he and Kieran left for America, which they crossed from coast to coast, and on 30th December, flew to Sydney in time for the New Year Celebrations with friends who had already gone out there looking for work. Hitch-hiking across America from East to West, he told me, they only paid for accommodation for one night, because his Irish friend had relatives, or friends of relatives everywhere, and they were entertained with free accommodation all the way to the west coast, stopping to see all the sights as they went. They finally flew from there to Sydney, Australia to arrive in time for the New Year Celebrations. The year stretched out to several, during which he travelled not only the whole of Australia, but just about every country the Far East as well. He came home unexpectedly on one occasion because a friend of his was getting married. He arrived at our house on the Friday night, in time to go to the stag night on the Saturday, and stayed home for a week, during which we persuaded him to wear a suit for the wedding, and took him out to buy one. After the wedding the following Saturday, he flew off back to Australia. When he finally returned home he entrusted me with the daily journal he had kept all the time he was travelling, and I typed them all up for him. They are material for at least one, but probably several, fascinating travel books.

He had kept in touch with Isabel from time to time during the nine years or so he was away, and on his return they arranged to meet up again and they have been together ever since. Isabel was now divorced, with two gorgeous children, who took to Bryan immediately.

They decided to marry and chose to do so on safari on the Serengeti Plain! More of that also later.

The Camper Van

When visiting Susan and Doug who went to live in Telscombe Cliffs between Brighton and Newhaven, I stopped to look at some campervans in a garage on my way to the shop for bread. Amongst all these second hand campers I spotted a Mitsubishi van which had been converted to a camper by someone who was regarded as a genius in campervan circles for the way he could use space so economically and effectively. It was not very old and reasonably priced. I took Diana to see it, and persuaded her that it was a good buy. I wanted to change my car anyway, and eventually I bought it. A friend of ours from Laleston, Gareth Richards, came with me to collect it, and drove my car back to Bridgend. The front seats did not swivel around as they do in bigger purpose-built camper vans, but the backs folded down to meet the seat behind, and with a board between the seats converted into a double bed taking up all the front half of the van. At the back end were the kitchen, stove, wardrobe and worktop. I sold my car and used the van instead. We even bought an awning to fit on the side, which remained standing, with four sides, when we drove away from the campsite to go sightseeing, and we still had the toilet tent from our caravanning days.

It was so useful for so many things, and so convenient at weekends and on holiday, until one year we went to Brittany, and the clutch started slipping on the way to Plymouth. Fortunately we did not have to drive up a ramp to an upper deck on the ferry, and we got safely to a campsite not far from Roscoff. I set up the awning and emptied the van and we went for a trial run, but the slipping clutch only got worse, so I phoned the AA, who sent a local garage to have a look it. He diagnosed that I needed a new clutch, loaded the van onto the back of his lorry and we took out all that we would need for the next few days, and off he went. It did not help that he did not speak English, and we did not have sufficient French to converse sensibly with him about the van. He had his little boy with him, who was learning English in school, so he helped out with his dictionary. It was only when we came to cook a meal that we realised we had all the saucepans, food, bedding, etc., but the stove was a fixture in the van. Fortunately, an English couple, who lived over in Eastern France but on holiday on the site, hearing of our plight, loaned us primus stove, so we were able to eat and make tea. We had the van back a few days later, and were able to continue our exploration of Brittany. We had brought our two bicycles with us, so I was able to cycle into town every day for food, milk, etc., and we went for a ride around the beautiful lake on the campsite. That was one of the only two occasions that Diana actually ever rode her bicycle. Eventually, we discovered that the metal floor of the van was rusting away, and we had to have it repaired. The prices we were quoted for this were horrendous, but eventually Diana’s friend, Diana Roberts, had a son who looked after our cars for us, and he said he could do it. It meant stripping out all the fittings in the van, taking up the floorboards, and welding a new sheet of metal over the hole. That worked well, but we never got all the furniture back in exactly the right position again. I had by this time recognised that it only did about 19 miles to the gallon, and we decided to get rid of it. I sold it to some chap for a respectable price, and tried unsuccessfully to sell him the awning as well.. However, that put an end to our just throwing things in the van and going off gallivanting. From now on it was hotels and guesthouses, etc., until we bought our timeshare, and, of course, we could no longer take the dog with us. But they were very happy days.

Bridgend Festival Concerts

I was recently looking at papers and old office diaries, in which I had entered the concerts that we did, and was surprised at the number of them, the standard of them and the places and the people we did them for. We did major concerts all over South Wales. When Prince Charles was to be invested as Prince of Wales in Caernarfon Castle, most towns celebrated the occasion in various ways. The Town Clerk of Bridgend called a meeting of representatives of all the societies and organisations in the town, and suggested we did a week of concerts and events to celebrate the Investiture. Bernard Kenny and I attended for the Folk Club. The Castle Players agreed to do a play, the Music Society to do a concert, and so on, and we said we would put on a Folk Club concert. The Technical College in those days had a very good stage and concert hall with partitions that could be opened or closed to provide halls of different sizes. I was the compere and we put on a great show. Later in the week, David Kossoff did his one-man-show on the same stage, and was superb. Some weeks later there was a “mopping-up” meeting of all the societies who contributed, and it was announced that the week had been very successful, but had run at a loss. The only two groups who had made a profit were the Castle Players and the Folk Club. They then talked about repeating the event the next year, but suggested we spread it over two weeks, as expecting people to turn out five or six times in one week was not a good idea. Then there was talk of which artists would be invited. The Music Society talked of inviting Yehudi Menuhin to come to sing and others were talking about big stars, , so Bernard Kenny and I, after a quick whispered conference, said we would try to get The Spinners, one of the top folk groups in the country at the time. The committee agreed, so I rang the Spinners’ Agent and booked them for, if I remember rightly, £200 or two thirds of the takings, whichever was the bigger. I eventually sent them a cheque for £420 !! We put on our best performers (including me!) in the first half and the Spinners did the second half, and we did it in the Embassy Cinema. We had tickets printed, priced from £1 at the back to £4 in the front and the gallery, and they were sold out within a week. Then we discovered, a few days before the show, that the owner of the Embassy, thinking this was going to be a big concert, planned to take out the front four rows of seats and extend the stage. When we explained that we only needed room for a person with a microphone to stand by the footlights and the Spinners would be standing in a straight line, and there was sufficient room in front of the cinema screen to do that with the screen curtain closed. He agreed, and we had the extra tickets printed overnight, and they were sold the next day.

The next year, we had The Seekers and the following year The Settlers, another top group and then the Spinners again. This time, the Spinners wanted to do the whole show and £2000. It still made money. Each year the Festival as a whole made more money. The second year we nearly broke even, the third year we did, and the fourth year we made a large profit and it seemed certain that the Bridgend Festival would develop into a big, big annual event. Sadly, the councillors decided, now that it was making a profit, that if they were the financial backers, they wanted to be on the committee. They were supposed to be on the Committee from the beginning, but had never bothered to attend. As soon as the Festival started making a profit and likely to become a big event, they assumed that being important people, they knew best which artists to engage and how to run all the events. Immediately, all the local societies objected to having councillors telling them what to do and how to do it, and they started pulling out, and sadly the year or so after the councillors took over, there was no Bridgend Festival!

Mayor's Charity Committee

But I found myself on the Mayor’s Charity Committee, arranging concerts and events for him in addition to the Folk Club. I also found myself being asked to be the Master of Ceremonies at the Mayor’s Lunches, a big local charity event to which all the important people and business people of the town were invited, in order to raise money.

On one occasion, I was MC and the guest speaker was Roy Noble. The Mayor that year was Margaret Bertorelli, who owned and ran the Old People’s Home where Mam spent her last few years. Margaret said she wanted to introduce Roy because she had written a poem about him, so at the appropriate time after the meal, I introduced her. She made a little speech of welcome to him and then introduced him. He got to his feet, and thanked her for inviting him and his wife to her Dinner, and then apologised that his wife had not been able to attend, and said, “I’m sorry she could not come, but a load of coal arrived just as we were about to leave.” In case you do not understand that reference, I should explain that in the South Wales coalmining areas, all colliers had their coal free, as part of their wages, and it was always delivered by the half ton on the back of a lorry. Once a month or so, half a ton of coal would be delivered and dumped on the pavement, and all the family rushed out with buckets, and tin baths, or anything to shovel the coal in and carry it round to the coalhouse at the back of the house before anyone stole it.

On another occasion, the speaker failed to turn up. Just before the meal started, I telephoned his home, and was told he had gone to Birmingham because he had a speaking engagement there. I spent the whole of the meal, between bites, remembering various routines I had used, and had to introduce myself. I spoke for about an hour, and was well received. The next year, the new Mayor had one of her own friends to act as MC and invited her own speaker, and then the system changed altogether. The Charity Committee ceased to exist for several years, so I never did the MC-ing after that.

Folk Club Closes

When the Folk Club left the Coach and Horses, and moved into the upper room of the Cambrian Hotel, we continued there for a while. But the great days of Folk Clubs were coming to an end, and although we carried on for quite a time, attendances were dropping off as fashions changed and people became interested in other activities, until we were just a few meeting for a chat and the occasional song. Then someone came in one night and said he wanted to start a folk club in Bridgend and he had been told to come and see us. We gave the club to him and he moved it to the Railway Inn. He ran it for some time, but it was more a club for listening to professionals, and he became more interested in playing music for the folk dancers in Penyfai, who formed their own music group, which eventually itself became a profession group. Eventually the Folk Club just ceased to exist, and the chap who had taken it on, started a Folk Festival in Porthcawl, trying to emulate the huge Celtic Folk Festival in Lorient, Brittany. The Lorient Festival advertise having 4,000 performers, lasts for ten days, and attracts performers and audiences from all over the Celtic world. I cannot see Porthcawl growing to that size. It usually lasted one weekend. I was asked to take part in that one year, to do 20 minutes or so of traditional country songs. I agreed, but while waiting to have a date for it, I asked the organiser, whose group had by now turned professional, if they would come and perform at my Choirs In The Castle event in Coety, but he said they normally charged about £800. He then told me the group had agreed to do it for £500, and I told him we never paid performers at Choirs In The Castle. I did not pursue it with him, and I never heard any more about taking part in his Folk Festival!

After the Bridgend Club folded, the girl from Llangynwyd, who had written the poem “Timothy”, tried to get a Folk Club going in the Four Sevens in Llangynwyd, with me as compére, and later moved it to the Corner House in the village, where it earned a good reputation and developed a good large following. It ran for several years, but then the local singers started going to a pub down in the valley for singsongs, and eventually, the only regular performers were from Bridgend and Porthcawl, so we moved the club to Aberkenfig, but it never took off there and eventually we just closed it down

One of the members, Dennis Rose, did telephone me a few years later, to say that he was organising a Folk Evening in Blaengarw, and hoped to hold a monthly concert in Valley towns, and asked if I would take part. He said he had advertised all over the area, including local radio, and expected a good crowd and hopefully a revival of Folk singing in the area. When the evening arrived, I went off with my guitar, found the hall, and Dennis, and a couple of ex-members, so we set out chairs for the audience and arranged the stage to suit ourselves, and settled down to wait for the audience to arrive. The only other person in the building was the caretaker. By 8.o’clock we decided no one else was going to come, so six of us, plus three wives sat in a circle on stage, and decided to sing to ourselves. Dennis insisted that I should take over as Compere, as I had always compered the Folk Club, and so I started off with two songs, and then invited Bernard Kenny sitting next to me to do two songs. Then Calib Jones (Porthcawl) gave a couple, then Dennis himself and two others whose names I have forgotten, and when we had all sung, I decided to have an interval. During the interval, Dennis asked me to sing “that children’s song you used to sing”. I said I never sang children’s songs, but he insisted that I did, but he could not remember the name of the one he wanted me to sing. All he could say was that it was about children. I still insisted that I had never sung a song about children, but he said I had sung this one so often in the old club, that he had learned it, had sung it to his children who learned it, and are now singing it to their children. I told him that if he knew it, he should sing it. He protested that he could not remember all the chords, but he picked up his guitar and started, and immediately I recognised it as Val Doonigan’s song, which I think was called Mysterious People. I sang it to myself in the car going home, and could not remember two lines in the second verse. I rang Dennis the next day, and he had forgotten them as well, but singing the song in the car later, I suddenly remembered them all, and have sung it several times since in public. I also took the precaution of writing it all out.

On another occasion, I was sorting out some papers and came across a list of the songs I used to sing in the Folk Club, and there was one called “The Bold Grenadier”, which was one of my favourites, one of the earliest I had started singing, and had to sing it frequently because it was a favourite with the club members. But, I could not remember the tune, or the words, or even what the song was about. I rang Bernard Kenny, who, I knew, frequently wrote down the words of songs he heard in the club, but he, although he remembered the name, could not remember the words, tune or subject matter of the song.

Some months later, I was watching Far From The Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, on television, and subconsciously hearing the background music, and found myself humming it. I suddenly found myself singing the words to myself. It was “The Bold Grenadier”, the words of which told basically the same story as Thomas Hardy’s novel. I did, sometime or other, start writing the words of the folksongs I used to sing in a large book in case Susan or John or Bryan wanted to continue with them. I wrote the words, and to some of them the music also. Then much later, when I had the computer and a very good music programme, I started typing in the music and the words, printing them off and putting them in the book in order to attach them all in a folder to give to the children. It is still awaiting completion.

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