SUMMARY AND PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT
NOTE – THIS IS NOT A VERBATIM TRANSCRIPTION BUT ALL IN-QUOTATION MARKS IS VERBATIM.
DOB: 22 February 1921
‘I was born in Taff Street in Ferndale, 75 Taff Street... and my father died at thirty nine… we were eight children, seven girls and one boy… I was the youngest girl, my brother was younger than I.’
Q – WHERE WAS YOUR FATHER WORKING?
‘He was working in the wagon sheds in Ferndale… I believe it was, blacksmith he was, doing repairs for the railway… I grew up in Blaenllechau… when my father died, my mother tried various things. She opened a shop in Taff Street first, so then we lived in Taff Street. What can I say then, she was made this offer of a place in Maerdy, a house and a shop. The shop was already established in Maerdy, so, the people were leaving so we lived in Maerdy for a small amount of time, because the people decided to come back so my mother had to leave so then we lived in number one Princess Street in Blaenllechau with, with a lady that, when my mother came, she lived in Ebbw Vale and at fourteen she was sent to Blaenllechau to help this lady because she had a shop, so I suppose she had the idea from her experience of a shop because she’d been in a shop… so when she had nowhere to go from Maerdy we went back to this lady in number one Princess Street… and when number two became vacant we moved into number two. So, we lived in number two for a number of years, and in number sixteen Middle Row it was a house but there was an extension shall we say that they were letting out, so my mother opened a shop there, we were living at number two but the business was at number sixteen middle row…’
04:14 ‘…so as my younger sisters were growing up er, they had to , once they became fourteen, they had to go away to service. And so when it became my turn then, the whole class was going away into service and I wanted to go…’
Q – BEFORE WE GET ONTO THAT, WHAT SCHOOL?
04:40 ‘I went to the Lower school in Ferndale – burned down now… loved it yes… I remember Miss Brown. We didn’t, they didn’t change the teachers like they do now, they erm, Miss Brown I remember very well because we had her mostly all the time I was in school. So with the result that when I become fourteen I wanted to go to service, so my mother refused, she said she’d had enough trouble with the others, getting poor jobs and having to send for them to come home and one thing or another so she said, they have to, but you don’t have to go, so you’re not going to service. But if I’d have come out of school then, at fourteen she would’ve lost two shillings for my brother, so I stayed in school til I was fifteen and so what we done then we went in in the morning to assembly… we called it prayers and that, for the first half hour and then I was on making wool rugs. So at fifteen I come out of school, and although my mother had her business at sixteen, Middle Row there was another room going vacant in another street, Commercial Street, so she set that up and she said to me, ‘this is yours, if you make a go of it, it’s yours and if you fail you can go into service so I had the shop in Commercial Street.’
ON RUNNING HER OWN SHOP AT FIFTEEN
06:50 ‘So she did all the buying, but I used to tell her what I wanted, and then when the travellers went up to her then whatever I wanted they dropped in for me so I didn’t do any of the buying or selling…’
Q – SO WHAT WERE YOU SELLING?
‘General store it was so everything, veg, all groceries, sweets… and you know these little general stores they sold everything…’
Q – LOT OF WORK FOR A FIFTEEN YEAR OLD?
‘Yeah, I loved it though, I loved it… I was there then until – when the war broke out in 1939, if you were 21 then, you went, because you didn’t have to have the consent of your parents. So two years later I became twenty-one so I had to go register, so I told them about, that I was in business.’
Q – GOING BACK TO THE START OF THE WAR – HOW DID THAT AFFECT YOU?
08:08 ‘It didn’t affect me in any way, I still run the shop, stuff was getting scarce… this is the point you see, when I was 21, I went in front of a tribunal and because I didn’t sell rationed goods they give me six months to close the shop and do war work… so then it was um, going training then.
After the six months I went training down Treforest Estate, training for all machine work, anything from using an electric saw up to operating machines… I was in Simmonds Air Accessories in the tool room, repairing tools that the factory used.’
Q – HOW DID YOU FIND IT? DID YOU ENJOY IT?
‘Well, [PAUSE] it was a big change, and so much work for my mother, er, I was more worried about her, but as I say I go from work and find that she had fainted or something like that. So anyway there was this fella and he was training us how to use an electric saw, and I was thinking, I’m stood here watching this saw go back and forth and there’s my mother at home rushed off her feet…’
Q – SHE WAS FAINTING WITH EXHAUSTION, WAS SHE?
‘Yes yes so er, [PAUSE] – anyway, our tutor or whatever they call ‘em, he says ‘are you listening to what I said?’ and I said yes I am listening and I told him what I just told you and he said ‘You take me’ he said ‘of all the knowledge I’ve got I could be earning big money somewhere,’ he said, ‘and instead of that I am here training you. When you lot go…’ it’s the repetition of that all the time so I suddenly thought to myself, ‘you’ve got to knuckle down to it, you know – it’s the future, it’s war work, and so you’ve got to knuckle down to it’, so I was a bit more settled after that yeah, but it was all work, because it was twelve hour days, a fortnight days and a fortnight nights.’
11:25 ‘If you started at eight, I had to leave Ferndale station at twenty to seven in the morning and arrive back home at ten past nine at night… long day… and then there were no buses or anything from the station walking up to Blaen, all weathers and everything, and back and fore like that… no social life at all.
Weekends when everyone was out enjoying themselves I’d be minding the shop so I had no social life at all…
When I had the shop when I was younger before the war work I used to have the Tuesday night off when I used to go to the Rink dancing… in Ferndale, it was originally a builder’s yard underneath and on the top of that was this other building that they called the dance hall you know, they called that the rink… every Tuesday night.
And every other Sunday, where we just went Ferndale walking, up and down the street, girls one side, boys the other until you fancied somebody and all the couples went off together.’
Q – THAT WAS THE WAY OF CHOOSING WAS IT?
‘Yeah yeah, Sunday night walking up and down the street…’
13:05 SO DID YOU SPEND THE ENTIRE WAR WORKING DOWN IN TREFOREST?
‘Yes, yes…I remember the blackout –’
Q – HOW DID THAT AFFECT YOU GOING OUT TO WORK?
‘Well you got used to it! You got used to it going out in the dark, you seemed to get used to it.
I suppose if they put you in a strange area… but knowing the route, you just become accustomed to the dark.’
(DOESN’T RECALL THERE BEING ANY ACCIDENTS, NOT MUCH TRAFFIC ON THE ROADS ANYWAY)
14:00 ON HOME GUARD IN BLAEN
‘I remember one night one of ‘em knocking us all up, and us all scurrying under the stairs, one thing and another, because he could see, he thought they were dropping flares, but it turned out they were only the tail lights of aeroplanes going over…’
(NO BOMBINGS, NO NEED FOR GAS MASKS EVER ALTHOUGH CARRIED THEM ALL THE TIME)
15:10 ‘My mother was in such poor health that I applied for, what would you call it? Like an exemption, tried for exemption in the May, and it came through in December, that was 1944, so then I was released and then I could, instead of going to work then I was back in the shop… yeah.’
ON IMPACT OF LOCAL LADS LEAVING FOR ARMY
‘Quite a few of the lads went… it was only a village so pretty much the same apart from the blackout and the shortages… and one minute you’re in the shop competing for business and then things start to get rationed and you get a sweet delivery, a month’s supply from Atkins of Pontypridd and instantly when they saw the van there the queue would start and you could sell out in two hours, straight away, gone. Same with bananas… bananas were very, very, very scarce but my mother did, because she was in business for a very long time, and the unfortunate part of it was – she decided to open a shop in Blaen in 1926 and the General Strike come! So instead of making money she was helping to keep others, because she had been in such a hole herself, so, nobody had any money at all.’
18:10 ‘We all had evacuees yeah, we had one little girl yeah… from London… Jean Streams (sp.?) her name was but where she was from I don’t know… she was about erm…ten?
I suppose it was strange but they adapted… and I had a sister living across the road, my sister had number two Princess Street then when we moved to sixteen Middle Road, and she had a family! And she had to give them the front room to live in but they still had to walk through and use the same tap because there was no facilities in them days like there is now.
There’s one or two people in Blaenllechau that accommodated families, and them families were so grateful they kept coming after the war as well and the people they were staying with went up to stay with them as well.’
Q – HOW LONG DID THEY STOP HERE?
‘…Oh years yeah.’
20:05 Q – REMEMBER VE DAY? ANYTHING CELEBRATED IN BLAEN?
‘Oh yeah definitely, people were up all night the night that… well people just went mad that night just walking the streets, shouting and having a good time, but then afterwards… I do remember that people were like us walking in a crowd to Ferndale, no one wanted to go to bed, up all night walking, celebrating… street parties came afterwards, and a little place like Blaenllechau a very close community so whole place emerged as one big family.’
ENDS