Author Archives: Curious Scribbler

Lady author re-instated after 123 years!

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by The Curious Scribbler

Regular readers may remember that in April I set out on the trail of 19th century local author Dorothea Jones, who wrote under the pen name  “ Gwynfryn”.   She had been a prolific contributor to improving magazines and from these articles her first book Friends in Fur and Feather was published in 1869, and later followed by Sick and in Prison, and  The Otter’s Story.  Always coy about her real identity, Dorothea Jones dropped additional clues in her later books, referring to the titles of her previous publications and dedicating The Otter’s Story to her brother William Basil the Bishop of St David’s.

The otter's story, title

Title page of her second book, a collection of articles, The Otter’s Story Etc.

All Dorothea Jones’s work has subsequently been misattributed to the American nature writer, Olive Thorne Miller, who published in 1880 “Little Folks in Fur and Feather and others in Neither” and the similarity of titles doubtless led to this error.

I am pleased to report that after correspondence with the Bodleian Library, which holds one of the misattributed copies, Dorothea Jones is re-instated in the catalogue and her transatlantic mimic is no longer credited with her book.   The Head of Collections wrote explaining that the error goes back to the 1890s when a Bodleian cataloguer made an incorrect identification based on similarity of title.  Dorothea Jones had died in 1885.

In the ensuing years and especially the recent past, the error has been compounded, for Dorothea’s other two books are also attributed to Olive Thorne Miller in major libraries around the world.  The reproduction out-of print books which can be ordered on the internet these days also all attribute her titles to the American author, and the online scanned original editions displayed by Google Books, Open Library and other sources are similarly mislabelled.

It has taken one hundred and twenty three years to correct the original fault.  It may well take a further century to correct the fan of misinformation which has followed.  I am sure that the Bishop’s sister would be delighted to know that Friends in Fur and Feather is listed on page 2409 of the august modern edition of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature.  However she might be less pleased to find it attributed here too to Olive Thorne Miller!  If the dead really did spin in their graves there would surely be a deep hole at her burial site by now.

A medieval deer park and Bushell’s Well

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by the Curious Scribbler

Not far up the road from Gwynfryn,  birthplace of our forgotten author Dorothea Jones is an area of wooded, rising ground overlooking the Dyfi estuary.  In Dora’s day it would have been predominantly scrubby oak woodland,  – the Sessile oak, Quercus petraea which clothes the Cardiganshire hills.  At its feet, the low lying land towards the estuary was pasture, for in the early 19th century much of the salt marsh had been drained by a system of dykes and embankments. Today the surviving salt marsh habitat is best seen in the ribbon of land cut off by the railway line which snakes northwards from Aberystwyth to Machynlleth, and through mid Wales to Shrewsbury and the wider world.

This high ground woodland had long been part of the lands of the Pryses of Gogerddan and was known as Parc Bodvage, later Lodge Park.  In 1637 a lease of Park Bodvage granted  by Richard Pryse of Gogerddan reserved to himself and his heirs “the pasture of three horses, nags geldings or mares at all times during the said terme within the said parke, and common of pasture for his and their deare [deer] within the said parke, with free access egresse and regresse thereunto to hunt course chase or kill the same at his or their pleasure…”  By the 19th century the deer were gone, but the Pryses remained indefatigable sportsmen and their game books in the National Library of Wales list the yield of the hunt.  In addition to foxes, otters and pine marten, rabbits and hares, the woodland and the marshes yielded pheasant, partridge, geese and duck in season, snipe, woodcock and even the odd corn crake.  In the 20th century, the family fortunes became extinct, and the estate broke up.  The Forestry Commission soon enrobed the high ground in conifers and the dwelling at the centre, which by 1800 had become a substantial gentleman’s residence was sold off with less than half its garden.  The pasture land became separate holdings with its former tenant farms.

It is through this divided patchwork of history that a group of Welsh Historic Gardens Trust  enthusiasts sought, last week, to unravel the traces of the original land-use, for Lodge Park is thought to have been the only medieval deerpark in the county. Like the many better known parks in England it is a lozenge shaped area of woodland grazing, around 100 acres in size, which had at its centre a lodge, a building used by the parkers in managing the deer and possibly as a place of refreshment when deer hunting became less of a larder activity and more of a gentleman’s sport.  Like other parks it retains on parts of its circumference the characteristic ditch and bank construction, which would originally have been topped by a palisade.  The ditch is on the inner side of the park, while the outer side of the bank is constructed of carefully placed vertical stones set into the earth bank, quite unlike the traditional herringbone arrangement of diagonal stones seen reinforcing field banks throughout the county.

Vertically placed stones hold back the bank and ditch boundary of the deer park

Vertically placed stones hold back the bank and ditch boundary of the deer park

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The park wall construction is distinctive

Some interesting people occupied the enlarged parker’s lodge in the 17th century.  This was the time of great mineral exploitation in the area and much of the British coinage of the time comes from Cardiganshire silver, minted at the Tower of London, and later at Aberystwyth Mint.  The leases of mining rights were granted by the Crown, first the Hugh Myddleton of Chirk Castle (1620-31), and later to Thomas Bushell (1637-42) and both men leased the house at Lodge Park from the Pryse landowners.  It must have been galling for the Pryses of Gogerddan to receive only their rent, while riches in lead and silver were extracted on behalf of the king.  Eventually Sir Carbery Pryse, 4th baronet, was influential in bringing to the statute book the Mines Royal Act of 1693.  Thereafter Cardiganshire experienced its own “gold rush” as landowners could exploit and profit from their lead and silver mines themselves. One of the great legends of the county is Sir Carbery’s ride, virtually non-stop and at a gallop from London to Gogerddan to bring the news home and commence the exploitation of his lands. Mining villages sprang up to meet the demand and a great influx of Cornish migrants brought their expertise from the tin mines of home.

Another legend perhaps arises from the hasty disappearance from Wales, during the Civil War, of the royalist mining engineer, Thomas Bushell.  Later he made peace with Oliver Cromwell, and also mined in England for the protectorate and for Charles II.  But his name remains linked in local folklore with a rock cut spring on the north flank of Lodge Park, “Bushell’s Well”.  Considering the number of mines which Bushell opened, driving adits into the hills and retrieving others from flooding, this seems a very slight structure to bear his name.  But in Bushell’s Well, the oral history goes, Bushell drowned a woman, variously a maid servant or his wife.   It is a tidy drinking place, cut into the living rock in the manner of a mine entrance, the clear water pooled by an 18 inch lip of rock at the entrance to the recess.  No one could drown in such a well unless they were held down in the water.

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The shallow drinking pool in which Bushell is alleged to have drowned a woman

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The well is rock cut in the manner of a mining adit and probably dates from the mid 17th

 

Join the Welsh Historic Gardens Trust http://www.whgt.org.uk/

 

 

 

Otter Hunting on Cors Fochno

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by The Curious Scribbler

It is difficult to engage with the mindset of the past, but my recent reading of The Otter’s Story by Dorothea Jones has given me a some fascinating insights on a now distasteful topic.  It is otter hunting, a pursuit which was not fully abandoned in rural Cardiganshire until the mid 20th century.  There are nice, cultured people alive today who will admit to having taken part in otter hunts in their youth.   Otters heads – the mask – turn up mounted in country houses and salerooms and their paws still surface as Victorian jewellery.   Not too long ago otter hunting was an accepted part of rural life and most people do not readily question what is normal in the society in which they grow up.

The cover of The Otter’s Story Etc by Gwynfryn
Published in London in 1880

The Otter’s Story was published in 1880 by Dorothea Jones, sister of the Bishop of St David’s, and author of a campaigning tract dedicated to the reform of British workhouses.  She was by then aged 52, an established author of articles in The Monthly packet of Evening Readings for Members of the English Church, and of two books.  Her pen name was Gwynfryn. She is an adept writer, well able to conjure up the beauty of a day or the drama of a scene in prose. It is perhaps the more shocking then, that from such an unimpeachable middle-class Victorian should come such a piece of writing.  Prose which is by turns cosy, lyrical, bloodthirsty and sexually charged.

If you want to understand what previous generations got out of pursuing a small cute fish-eating mustelid this is a remarkably good place to begin.  It can be read online via Open Library http://openlibrary.org/      (search for The Otter’s Story, Jacobs Story),  or on Nigel Callaghan’s estimable local site  http://www.lloffion.org.uk/newdocs/the_otters_story/intro/display

She starts her account with several narratives about tame, pet otters.  Just as Gavin Maxwell made clear in Ring of Bright Water 80 years later, they make engaging pets.  The story potters along with captured otter cubs suckled by a domestic cat, otters reared with dogs, and grown otters catching fish for their masters.  You are in little doubt, the author likes otters.

But  the introductory pages have left a clue, like the pre-credit sequence to whet your appetite in the movies.  The scene was opened upon a glorious early May morning on Cors Fochno ( Borth Bog) “with the hedgerows greening over and sparkling with dewdrops in the level sunshine”, the dark river “blue in the shadow, silver in the sun” flowing off the mountains.  At the end of her anecdotes of captive otters, she rejoins this scene: to introduce the gathering of the hunt, the red and blue clad huntsmen some on horseback, the seething mass of excited hounds, and the hunt followers, “Welsh farmers in their old blue or grey coats, a rabble of wild hill boys awed by the novel sight of their betters” and two gaily clad village girls, one a smouldering Celtic beauty, the other, plain.

I won’t linger of on the details except to say that it is as sexist and gory as an episode of the popular historical fantasy drama Game of Thrones.  There is agony, blood, demoniacal screams and lots of whipped dogs. “How could hunting be hunting without lashing of hounds and cries of pain from writhing creatures, round whom the sharp whipcord is cut with all the force of a thick lash and a strong man’s arm, roused to passion by excitement?”  Men are men –standing tall and strong, violent, striding, shouting, digging out the otters holt to capture the cubs within.  Women are egging them on – there is a moment when the she-otter and her cubs might have been spared and the hunt called off early.  The master hesitates, and the pretty girl, like a spectator at a gladiatorial fight, seals the animals’ fate by her strident encouragement.

There is plenty of graphic death. In an early skirmish we meet the huntsman’s own terrier, Vermin,  who “with his large soft eyes looking up through his long hair might have sat for the begging dog in Landseer’s portrait”.  Vermin is unfortunately mistaken by the hounds for an otter, as he emerges from a hole in the bank into the water. He is torn to shreds before the men can rescue him, and his body is casually discarded.  The dog otter is caught and killed, “screaming in an excruciating minor key”, soon afterwards.

The female otter escapes upstream with hounds in pursuit while some of the men set to work to dig out her young.  One is mortally injured by the spade, two captured in a sack, one escapes to starve alone in the river. Gallant Mrs Otter comes back down stream where she is eventually speared on the two pronged pitchfork which otter hunters carry for this purpose.  Even then in her desperation she twists and turns and prises her impaled body off the tines and drops back into the water, to be eventually grabbed by the hounds. It is an unsparing account of gore and death.

At the end of this celebratory tale the female otter hangs skinned from a tree and the master of the hunt bestows one of its severed pads upon the pretty Welsh girl.  She colours prettily – “no charm, no jewelled gage-d’amour, could hold her with a sweeter spell than did just then that flabby, webbed, and mutilated foot”.  But the man, on the point of making his move, has second thoughts.  She is a bit too eager, “strangely hard…also she had been too conspicuous that day”, and he turns away.  The final words of this psychodrama are four italic ones. “The otter was avenged”.

It would be nice to imagine that this was a pro-otter polemic – a wake-up call for people so unthinkingly cruel.  But it was not written as such.  The messages it carries are about the beauty and excitement of an otter hunt on a beautiful day and about the heady excitement of a testosterone-fired mob of men crazed by the hunt.  There is only one lesson.  The forward hussy does not get her man, and that is natural justice.

 

 

Lady Author Lost

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 By the Curious Scribbler

I’ve been reading the work of a long-forgotten lady writer: Dorothea Jones of Gwynfryn.

I was led to her by the author Herbert M Vaughan  of Llangoedmor, who, in his round-up of eccentric Welsh Gentlemen ( The South Wales Squires, published 1926) included a throwaway remark in his chapter on Literary Squires.  “ At no great distance, on high ground that overlooks the great  marsh of Borth,  is Gwynfryn, the home and estate of Bishop Basil Jones of whose services to literature I have spoken elsewhere. The Bishop’s sister Miss Dora Jones was also a writer. There used to be a charming volume called Friends in Fur and Feather, which used to delight us in childhood with its accounts of the birds which haunted the swamps around Borth.  But I have never come across this book it later life —- Ils vont sous la neige d’antan”.

A postcard, pre 1910 showing Gwynfryn Hall, which stands above Borth bog and was built c. 1814

Today there is nothing easier than finding long-forgotten volumes lost in the snows of yesteryear.  In seconds, Google Books brought up the goods, an attractively bound volume in royal blue cloth ornamented with gold tooled  leaves and flowers and red squirrels on its cover.  I enjoy reading old books in the page view format, – except for the smell, everything of the material book can be enjoyed.

Published in 1869 it contains nine stories and a steel engraved illustration for each.  Taken together they blend a delight in nature, pets, and the Welsh countryside along with a fervent approval for fox hunting and cubbing ( even if the victim has been  a pet fox,  being torn apart by hounds is represented as  the most noble way to die).

We know that red squirrels were formerly widespread in Ceredigion and in the first story a baby red squirrel is reared as a pet, takes up residence on the cornice in the drawing room, and eventually returns to the wild.

An illustration from ‘Friends in Fur and Feather’. The pet red squirrel helps himself to rhubarb tablets

In another two horrid boys have stolen two buzzard chicks from their nest on Borth bog and are feeding them on mashed potato.  Our author rescues them and reared them on the abundant meat from fallen stock available to a gentry naturalist. “of suicidal mutton, drowned sheep, fished out of bog drains, they had plenty.”   A quite gentle story about a young blackbird explains its Welsh name pig-felyn.  Nothing to do with pigs, she tells her English readers, but the Welsh  name for yellow beak.  Unfortunately a cat gets the blackbird, much as last year a nestful of cute warbler chicks starring in Springwatch on the very same bog fell victim to a black cat.

What is fascinatingly dated about the stories is their strong flavour that all is right with the world.  In childhood her dog is bitten by an adder, becomes ill,  and is later euthanized by one of the servants:  “I was afraid to ask, for the sack and the bowstring had been familiar institutions amongst our pets of late”.  In another story a donkey is tormented by three young gentlemen on horseback wielding their riding whips and chasing it across country.  The fallen donkey’s injury is regretted, for it was a charming and reliable animal but somehow the young men, who do not provide their names, escape without undue censure.  A story on the newly opened home for lost and starving dogs in London (the early RSPCA) remarks cheerfully that unattractive stray dogs unlikely to be re-homed  will be happier to have their lives terminated  “ then they have to take prussic acid and their poor little troubles are over. ”

‘Homeless’    an illustration from ‘Friends in Fur and Feather’

Another dog story glorifies the military campaign of Bob, a middle sized mongrel, with Her Majesty’s Scots  Fusilier Guards in the Crimean war.  Having escaped all injury during the two year campaign he was knocked down in the London streets when marching with his regiment, and subsequently  stuffed and displayed in the United Services Museum at Whitehall.

‘Bob’ of Her Majesty’s Scots Fusilier Guards. ( a likeness taken after he was stuffed)
An illustration from ‘Friends in Fur and Feather’.

Friends in Fur and Feather was clearly a bracing if sentimental read for Victorian children like Herbert Vaughan and in 1883 a slimmer and un-illustrated edition of eight of the stories was published by George Bell and Son of London in the Bell’s Reading Book Series for schools.

The true identity of the author, ‘Gwynfryn’  is in danger of being lost to sight.

The copy I had read on Google Books was stamped ‘Bodleian libraries’, so I sought it through the Bodleian electronic catalogue.  My indignation was aroused to find that the book has been attributed to the output of an American nature writer, Olive Thorne Miller, (1831-1918)  who included amongst her output a book called ‘Little Folks in Feather and Fur and Others in Neither’ which was published in 1880. Miller, though, was an urban New Yorker, not a Welsh woman and could not have written these stories.

I am in correspondence with the Bodleian to reclaim Gwynfryn for Wales!

Dorothea Jones can, with a little effort still be traced.  She was born one of twin girls on 18 March 1828 at Gwynfryn to William Tilsley Jones and his wife Christiana.  Already in the household was an older brother, William Basil Tickell Jones who was later to become Bishop of St Davids.  He was the only child of an earlier marriage to Jane Tickell of Cheltenham.  In the following ten years six further children were born to Christiana but it must have been a harrowing time: between 1835 and 1838 five children died, including Dorothea’s twin Christiana, and her nearest sister Josephine.  Perhaps such a  childhood  fosters a robust attitude to death.

Dorothea Jones is one of the few women to have been awarded her own entry in the Dictionary of Eminent Welshmen by T.R. Roberts published in 1908.  In it there is a reference to another of her books, which is described due to a misprint as “The Other’s Story”.  It took a bit more searching to find this, but the result was gratifying, as I at last came across “The Otter’s story” by ‘The Author of ‘Friends in Fur and Feather’, ‘Sick and in Prison’ Etc., Etc.’.  It was published in 1880 in London, also with a pretty blue and gold tooled cover, and is dedicated in print  ‘Affectionately  and gratefully inscribed by the writer to her  brother William Basil, Bishop of St David’s’. This too is in the Bodleian and attributed to Olive Thorne Miller!

The cover of The Otter’s Story Etc, by the Author of ‘Friends in Fur and Feather’
Published in London in 1880

The National Library of Wales also has a number of copies of Friends in Fur and Feather, but  simply catalogues them under the pen name of Gwynfryn.

There are other traces of lost history to be gleaned from these old story books; the identity of their first owners.  A nice 1869 copy in the National Library of Wales is inscribed as a gift to Louisa Frances Best on December 7th 1869 and was given with Arvie’s Best Love.  A reading-book version from 1883 was the property of Florence Richards, while another 1869 copy in the New York Public Library was given to Jennie Ryder, Xmas Gift from the SS of the Chapel of St Christopher, Thomas Sill, New York, to mark the Feast of the Holy Innocents in 1870.

As family history enthusiasts search the past for their relatives on the web, it is not impossible that Louisa, Florence and Jennie may one day be spotted by their kin, led to this website by the re-publication of their names.

Dubious dates of Anno Mundi

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We found  some puzzling inscriptions on last week’s visit to South Ceredigion.

At Alltyrodin we went to view the handsome stable block adjoining the Georgian house.  The central doorway is set in large ashlar blocks from the nearby estate quarry, Gwarallt at Bwlchyfadfa.

The handsome ashlar central doorway in the stables at Alltyrodin

The handsome ashlar central doorway in the stables at Alltyrodin

And above the door is a carved plaque with lion rampant which reads:

J LL Esq.,
AD 1840
AM 5841

Inscribed owner's initials and date on the stables at Alltyrodin

Inscribed owner’s initials and date on the stables at Alltyrodin

J LL  represents John Lloyd, who inherited Alltyrodin on the death of his older  brother David in 1822.  He was unmarried and childless ( though there is a deed for a prenuptial settlement  in 1826, when he was about to marry Dorothy Alicia Seymer of Bath, spinster)  He was still alive and signing deeds in 1836. On his death his estate duly passed to his niece and her husband John Lloyd Davies is identified as master of Alltyrodin by 1843.

AM 5841 represents the date as Anno Mundi; years since the alleged creation of the earth.  It is a slightly problematical date.  Bishop Ussher  (1581 – 1656) decided upon 21 September 4004BC for the creation of the earth, while the Masonic convention is to use 4000 years. Jewish sources use 3761 years BC instead.   Assuming the stables were completed in or after September 1840, the carving is consistent with the Masonic convention: 4000 plus 1840 plus 1 if after September, would generate the observed date Anno Mundi  5841.  Fairly easy to interpret, then, except that the modern  Masonic Dictionary would designate a date of AD plus 4000 years as Anno Lucis, and  AD plus 3761 as Anno Mundi.  Perhaps they thought differently in the 19th century.

Not far away at Bwlchbychan a handsome gateway with three posts and connecting walls frames the drive down to the house.  Here the mason is identified in the inscription as D James mason.  The sandstone blocks are neatly stippled with chisel marks like those remarked on at the chapel inTanygroes in the foregoing blog.

The gates on the drive leading down to Bwlchbychan

The gates on the drive leading down to Bwlchbychan

On one post the inscribed plaque reads Erected 5861 and the other bears the same information  Cyfodwyd (was raised) in Welsh and the year 5861.  Assuming the same convention, these gateposts went up in  autumn 1860, and this looks consistent with their architectural style.  At Bwlchbychan the dating is uncorroborated Anno mundi, whereas at Alltyrodin the more familiar Anno domini date appears larger, and above.

Right hand gatepost has the English inscription

Right hand gatepost has the English inscription

The left hand gatepost has the Welsh inscription

The left hand gatepost has the Welsh inscription

The house was home in the 19th century to John Pugh Vaughan Pryse, third son of Pryse Pryse of Gogerddan.  Shortly after his second marriage (to Decima Dorothea Rice of Lwynybrain),  it was rebuilt in 1850 “ in the plain domestic style of architecture”, and presumably the gateposts and lodge were built shortly after.  Herbert Vaughan in his book, The South Wales Squires, described it as a rather dismal house and its occupant John Pugh Vaughan Pryse as a man who chased the fox as often as he could: ” in the dining room alone were 30 foxes masks, varied by a few heads of hares and otter’s poles. On the hearth rug lay a footstool comprised of a complete stuffed fox.” Pryse died in 1903, at the age of 85.

It is not clear to me whether these Anno Mundi dates indicate membership of the Freemasons on the part of the squires of Alltyrodin and Bwlchbychan, or whether instead they represent the beliefs of the actual masons who worked the stone on their behalf.

Out and about with The Welsh Stone Forum

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Last Saturday was not a day many people willingly ventured out.  It was the third of three days on which a blisteringly cold wind from the Russian steppes seared its way across Ceredigion, and although unlike north and east  Wales we had no snow, the chill factor made the eyes water and the marrow shrink.   Setting out from our home we soon encountered our first obstacle a massive ash tree, fallen and pivoted on the hedge bank to block the road.  When leafless trees fall it is a high wind indeed.

Ash tree felled by high wind on 22 March

Notwithstanding this, a small group of specialists converged from all over Wales to explore the building stones of south Ceredigion. Our topic for the day was a locally occurring Ordovician sandstone, one form of which, Pwntan stone, has already been mentioned in this blog, as the stone from which Tremain Church is built.

First we met at Tan y Groes.  Here the main road is constricted by sandstone buildings on either side of the road, and speeding traffic roars through the gap.  There is a Calvinistic Methodist chapel on the south side of the road with adjoining vestry building.  Recently modified for residential use, the gable end facade has been recently cleaned by sandblasting.  So many different styles of ornamental tooling can be seen.  The main construction blocks have been pecked and pock marked with many short chisel blows.  The edges of narrow ornamental dressings are transversely grooved, across the shorter axis of each stone.  The voussoirs of the window arches are similarly ornamented and where large stone are used, a false division has been carved, to create the appearance of two or even three smaller voussoirs instead of a single block.  The building was commenced in 1849 a year after the completion of nearby Tremain.  It is not known whether it is by the same mason, but it is certainly work by a meticulous craftsman.  The characteristic interlocking stones of Tremain are not here however.  Perhaps Calvinism is better represented by uncompromisingly coursed blocks.  Other buildings in the village are yet plainer, built of rubbly blocks of sandstone.  The chapel buildings could only have been created with hand-sawn stone.

Tooled masonry in Pwntan stone shows several decorative styles

The Calvinistic methodist chapel at Tanygroes, Ceredigion, built 1849

St Michael’s Tremain has already been described.  It is the perfect habitat for the creamy white crustose lichen Ochrolechia parella.  On the west end the lichen is so extensive that the building is almost white.  The toxicity of lead to lichens is nicely illustrated by the two strips of stonework below the lancet windows.  When rain drives against the leaded windows and runs down to trickle off the sill it poisons the lichens and the stonework remains clean.

Ochrolechia parella, a crustose lichen cannot grow where lead leaches off the windows of the church

St Michael’s Church, Tremain, the west end almost white with lichen covering the brown sandstone

No such problems exist for the lichens in the churchyard at St Michael’s Penbryn.  Here is a charming long low whitewashed church set in a circular graveyard on a hill above the sea.  Here many of the 18th century stones are completely white with lichen, but remarkably the  inscriptions can still be discerned because the lichen follows the carved indentations beneath.  The stones have a characteristic shape curved at the top with square shoulders beneath.  There are several grander  graves  in which the same round topped, shouldered shape is formed in cut blocks of pwntan stone framing an inscribed slab of slate or sandstone.  They date from 1780-1820 and stand like theatrical doorways on the sloping plot.  At first sight you might think them whitewashed, so extensive is the lichen cover.

One of about 30 small gravestone at St Michael’s Church Penbryn. carved Pwntan stone is a perfect substrate for the lichen Ochrolechia parella

One of several grand headstones framed in Pwntan stone, at St Michael’s Church Penbryn

St Michael’s Church, Penbryn is a medieval church, with later restoration. Characteristic round topped, shouldered gravestones date from the late 18th century

There are various places east of the main A487 where sandstone was formerly extracted but most are long neglected and overgrown. The group then went on to visit Gwarallt quarry, Bwlchyfadfa near Talgarreg where farmer Iwan Evans  has had the initiative to re-open the quarry which supplied high quality sandstone in the 19th century.  In a trade magazine of the 1880s it was vaunted as stronger, and cheaper, than Portland stone.   The stables at nearby Alltyrodin mansion were certainly built from Gwarallt stone, but whether it was exported over a larger area is lost to history.

In the quarry one can see the thick beds of sandstone dipping down at 45° to the field above.  Big blocky stones are quarried from the face and can be cut for paving slabs or shaped for modern stone building or restoration work. Some beds are too thick, yielding several-ton chunks too large for the saws on site. There are some monstrous blocks waiting by the road to catch the eye of a sculptor.  Pwntan stone holds the sharp detail of its carving for hundreds of years.  It would be a good choice for a new work of art.

Welsh Stone Forum examine the extracted sandstone at Gwarallt Quarry, Bwlchyfadfa

Iwan Evans with a freshly sawn sandstone paving slab from his quarry at Gwarallt

 

Visit The Welsh Stone Forum   http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/cy/364/

 

 

 

Hospital is no place for the old

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I listened to Anne Clwyd MP on the radio the other day, describing the conditions of disinterest and neglect ( like a battery hen)  which marked her husband’s death in hospital in Cardiff.  In the wake of the Mid Staffordshire inquiry, she has been appointed to a government committee to advise on how NHS hospitals should handle complaints.

She has been inundated with correspondence from people from all over the UK whose relatives received little care or compassion on NHS wards. But perhaps most shocking is that while individuals regularly make the same observations, it is widely recognised  among professionals that hospital is no place for the old.

I was responsible for managing my nonagerarian mother’s care and experience in a nursing home in the last five years of her life. About 3 years ago she became severely dehydrated as the result of prolonged diarrhoea.  In need of rehydration the GP assigned her to hospital.

I say assigned because, although the distance was less than a mile it took four hours for her to be admitted.  Those four hours were spent in an ambulance on the tarmac outside A&E, parked alongside three other ambulances containing elderly non-urgent patients.  It was a a freezing cold, brilliantly sunny, January day.  Only two ambulances remained in service, I was told, to deal with emergencies in the entire county!

This part of the care was, however, very good to my mother.  While an IV saline drip cannot (for reasons of arcane regulation)  be provided in a nursing home, she was promptly attached to one in the ambulance.  The heating in the van was excellent, and for nearly four hours she lay quietly rehydrating, attended by the paramedic, the driver, a young care assistant from the care home and myself.  If only, after the four hours, she could have been taken back to her nursing home!

She was at last processed in A&E and eventually admitted to a ward within the target waiting time (not including the ambulance-blocking hours, which do not count towards the target).  It was there that the inadequacies of care became seriously apparent.  Placed in a side ward she was left alone for long periods and not provided with a call bell.  Anti nausea medicine prescribed by the doctor took more than seven hours to appear from the pharmacy.  Simple comforts like tea appeared seldom, ( certainly not on request) while meals were served during “protected mealtimes” when witnessing relatives were banished from the ward. Nursing staff were sullen and uncommunicative.

‘Is she eating anything?’ I asked at the nursing station on my daily visits.

‘Oh we’re very keen on food.’ was the evasive reply.

But evidence there was none.  Full plates were cleared away untouched.  Food and fluid  intake charts were not filled in.  Although quite able to stand my mother was manhandled with a hoist and wheelchair to visit her en suite loo.  No one sought to find out what her physical abilities were. In her own words, she felt she was handled like a piece of meat. Over a week she became more and more deeply miserable.On the sixth day, without explanation, or recording in the notes, she was put onto a glucose drip.  Perhaps they finally noticed she wasn’t eating anything?

Laundry is a reponsibility of the visiting relatives, and on each day I would be provided with a bag of dirties to take home.  Because the reason for her bowel problem remained undiagnosed she was receiving ” barrier nursing”.  How then did the bags I took home prove to contain other patients’ labelled clothing?  When I called to point this out the staff nurse told me that that the two owners of the nightdresses had died, and that I should throw these items away.  A little research proved this to untrue.  One of the ladies was back at my mother’s nursing home, and I eventually returned her freshly laundered nightdress!  I failed to trace the other. But it summed up the attitude on that ward.  Old women with a nursing home tag on their admission bracelet were not seen as individuals.  They were a generic nuisance.

Eventually I wrote a letter to the consultant ( whom I never saw) requesting that she be discharged, whether they knew what was wrong with her or not. I refused permission for invasive tests, which she would have experienced as nothing short of an assault.

In the course of that week I realised then that hospital is just too harsh an environment for a frail nonagenarian.  And that the quality of care is lowest for this category of patient. In her subsequent management I always pointed out to GPs responsible for her care that hospital was not an appropriate destination for the very old.  No one ever disagreed, or suggested that the benefits could outweigh the de-merits of hospital admission.

 

 

 

 

More on Miölnir

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by the Curious Scribbler

I ended my last blog wondering whether the poet Longfellow had acceded to George Powell’s somewhat histrionic request that he burn his poems the works of ‘Miölnir’ and trample the ashes into the ground.

The answer proved, in the digital age surprisingly easy to find.

From my computer I could access the Harvard library catalogue, Hollis, and typed in the author’s name Miölnir.  And there it was, Poems Miölnir [pseudo.] 2nd series published by J. Cox Aberystwyth 1861.  A second click opened the very book, online, in Google Books.  And on the title page I found the cramped dedication in George Powell’s handwriting:

George Powell’s dedication to Prof Longfellow on the title page of his book

H.W. Longfellow Esq., and Prof.  With the sincere respects of the author G Powell.

And on the second page of the volume is the bookplate marking the donation of the Longfellow Collection to Harvard College Library.

Bookplate from the Longfellow donation to Harvard Library

Gift of Miss Alice M  Longfellow, 20 Dec.1894

So Powell’s gift was not destroyed, joined the library of Longfellow, and was donated by his daughter to Harvard, where he taught.

Reeling from the public criticism in the Spectator, George, in a letter to Longfellow in 1862,  whittled down his poems in this volume to just eight which he felt possibly worthy of approval, and listed these in the letter which bewailed his treatment by the critics.  By his own reckoning his best poems were those on pages  41, 68, 95, 102, 107, 138, 140, 141

Another revelation from this piece of armchair research is that I was wrong to presume that the double volume of both Miölnir books was sent to Longfellow, or indeed to The Spectator.  Even the cover of Longfellow’s copy is reproduced online, and it is in the original cream binding lined and decorated in black and red.

The cover of Longfellow’s copy of Miolnir’s verses, Series II

The text is amended here and there for typographic errors which escaped the author’s attention in proof.  The amendments are in George’s hand.

So I must contradict my earlier post.  I now believe that Mr Chater’s copy is a unique one, bound for George some considerable time after his humiliation.  He, like, everyone else, had had the two separate books, one green, one cream,  and thus he had dedicated each of his own copies, lovingly, to himself.  It is these  which were later unbound and rebound together in green leather.

Arthur Chater’s copy of the volume by Miölnir

In the first series of poems were two pieces of comic verse which, by the time of the second series,  Powell had already repudiated in favour of his more aesthetic and gloomy style.  In the Epilogue to the second series, before he had suffered the ignominy of the Spectator review,  he wrote  ‘I have refrained in this volume from attempting any “comic strains”. They were in the last one, such a lamentable failure, were so forced and inexpressibly weak, that I shall take very good care in future – at any rate till my mind be more matured – not to let my pen compromise me so much’. Significantly these two poems have been unceremoniously ripped from this edition.

Personally I find comic verse easier to digest than works of tortured beauty and elevated sensitivity which are Powell’s predominant style.  I therefore reproduce, for the first time since 1860 one of George Powell’s youthful ‘betises’ as it appears in an undamaged copy of his first volume .

‘Agriculture by a Facetious Farmer’. A humorous verse in the first volume, which George was later to regret.

The pun never fails to entertain.

The disappointments of George Powell of Nanteos, poet

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I am startled by the brutality of reviewers writing for The Spectator in the 1860s.  I had been browsing in search of reaction to the publication of a volume of poems by George Powell, and  I soon discovered that the flavour of poetical criticism in 1861 – 1862 was stinging indeed.

In August 1861, for example, I found a long review of poems penned  by a clergyman.  “The Rev. John Graham has done a very foolish thing in ever devoting an hour from his time to writing verses. He has done an infinitely more foolish thing in venturing to print them. He ought never to write without burning all he writes as soon as it is written………..  We close Poems: Sacred, Didactic and Descriptive in bewilderment and dismay”.

Another new work, Athelstan, A Poem by Edward Moxon received similar derision “ Mr Tennyson may sleep secure. His laurels are still safe….. Whatever else he may be, the author of Athelstan is certainly not a poet, either by birth or manufacture”.

A review entitled Poetry Tearful and Tremulous discussed two new volumes: Cypress Leaves by WHCN (an Etonian) and Poems by Ingle Dew BA. “—we re-iterate our hope that these remarks may induce Mr Ingle Dew BA, and WHCN to feel heartily ashamed of their literary escapades and to attach for the future as little importance to the twitterings of their own emotions as those exceedingly few persons who will read their work are certain to attach to them.”

Aspirant poets must have retired to sob at such a drubbing.

George Powell, was amongst these poets.  The son and heir of Nanteos mansion he was, like WHCN, an Etonian and by 1861 an undergraduate at Brasenose College Oxford.  He had already published in 1860, at his own or more probably his father’s  expense,  a collection of five short stories which as far as I am aware never received critical attention.

George Powell first published a small volume of 31 poems, entitled Poems of Life and Death in 1860 under the pseudonym Miölnir.  His epilogue excuses any deficiencies in the light of his own youth and inexperience.  However he leads the reader to his cause:  “First attempts are in all cases, even those of great genius, defective to a certain extent. They should be regarded as, not perfect works, but a foreshadowing of perfect works or more perfect works: as exercises not as models, as footlights not as stars”.  He signs off as Miölnir, Brussels, December 3rd 1860, and before the year was out a slim book with a dark green embossed cover was printed for the author by J Cox of Pier Street, Aberystwyth.  Perhaps it was distributed as Christmas presents.

Nanteos, portrayed in Nicholas’ Annals and Antiquities of the Counties and County Families of Wales 1872

A  second volume was  soon under way, arranged in four parts with many personal dedications, most significantly part 3 to the poet Longfellow, whom he did not know, but admired from afar.  The final poem added only in press was an elegy to the Prince Consort who had died on the 14 December 1861.  The second volume was signed off on 20 December 1861, and appeared in a cream cloth binding.

There were also some copies in which both parts were bound as a single volume.  One such copy went to The Spectator, and another was posted with the compliments of the author, Miölnir, to the poet H.W. Longfellow at Cambridge, Boston, Massachusetts.

800px-Longfellow_National_Historic_Site,_Cambridge,_Massachusetts

Longfellow’s home in Cambridge Massachusetts

A third of these combined volumes has found its way via the second hand trade into the hands of Mr Arthur Chater.

Arthur Chater’s copy of the volume by Miölnir

This is a puzzling volume, for on the title pages of both the first and the second series of poems is a dedication, “GEJ Powell with the best love of the Author, Miölnir”

Poems by Miölnir, the dedication at the beginning of the first volume

and “George EJ Powell with the best love of the Author”

The handwritten dedication from Miölnir to George Powell

A comparison of the handwriting with that of George Powell’s letters to Longfellow confirms that it is in the same hand.  George Powell, perhaps in order to be able to claim close acquaintance with his alter ego, was in effect sending himself his love!

On 1 March 1862 Powell must have opened The Spectator with keen anticipation.  He read as follows;

“The premature mild spring weather is bringing out the minor poets, and ere long the cuckoo will be heard in the land. The most pretentious of verse makers is Mr W.C. Kent—- Though it may not be necessary that the driver of fat oxen should himself be fat, it is at least necessary that the writer of poetry should be something of a poet – which Mr Kent decidedly is not.  A more feeble, but at the same time a far more modest versifier is one who assumes the pseudonym of Miölnir.  Indeed his only merit is the negative one of self abasement, which he carries to the extreme point of simplicity.  He is evidently an amiable and ingenuous youth, whose naïveté and genuineness of character will command many friends, too staunch to be alienated by the meagreness of his poetic faculty.”

Powell  was obviously smarting when he wrote  again to Longfellow on 14 March 1862. “ I most unwisely sent it to The Spectator for review, a thing I ought never to have done with a work printed for private circulation”.  After a prolonged account of the review and its limitations he concluded  “ I will not trouble you with a long account of my petty woes, which I have quite recovered from” .

Clearly he had not recovered his composure at all and wrote another long letter to Longfellow in June. “ being compelled to leave Oxford by continued ill health,  and perpetual gloom and low spirits, the former induced, I believe, by the damp unwholesome air, and the latter by my insurmountable distaste for members of the College by whom I found myself surrounded – I wished for as complete a change as possible so came here [to Reykavik].

The following January George was back at Nanteos but the injury was still very much on his mind. “ Six or seven months have toned down wonderfully even my limited admiration for my own poems in so much that I now look with loathing upon that last volume…..  If I had only attended to Horace’s ‘Nonum prematur in annum’ I should have been spared the mortification of exposing the weakness and folly of my mental childhood.  May I entreat you to burn the volume of Miölnir’s poems and trample its ashes underfoot.”

It is not known whether Longfellow acted upon this entreaty by the humiliated poet, but clearly George could not bring himself to burn his own personal volume, so affectionately dedicated to himself.  He published no further poetry but found a new outlet for his writing as a translator of Icelandic sagas.

 

Footnote: Nonum(que)  prematur in annum  translates as Let it ( your first draft) be kept back from publication until the ninth year.

Remembering Tabernacle Chapel

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It is not often you see a listed building smashed to dust in front of your very eyes.

The 11th of July 2008 was such a day though, on which we stood and watched with disbelief as the largest demolition crane ever seen in Aberystwyth methodically chomped its way through the burnt shell of this landmark chapel crammed into the sloping plot between Mill Street and Powell Street.

The chapel was a huge building, its curved gallery of pitch pine seating supported by elegantly fluted  iron columns.  It had long lost a viable congregation, though I remember attending a big school carol service there in the 1980s. While an undeniable hulk dominating the town, its fine interior, and the portentious facade at the Powell Street end had contributed to its listed status and its eventual downfall.  Saving these features and creating a sympathetic conversion to flats at the same time would have been a considerable challenge. Planning permission for such a scheme was granted, but work never began.

On the preceding Friday in July the empty building had caught fire, and although only metres from the fire station its roof was soon well alight. By morning, the smoke scarred windows and collapsing roof ridge caused the closure of the nearby roads to traffic.

The fire damaged building

The Calvinistic Methodist Tabernacle Chapel, built in 1878 and gutted by fire 130 years later

The following Friday the gigantic crane began at the Mill Street end reaching great clawfuls of masonry with the grab on its telescopic arm and advancing inexorably through the building.  The tiers of seating, the elegant metal pillars, the pitch pine interior were all soon reduced to a tangled mass under the caterpillar tracks of the machine.

The Powell Street facade was especially grand, and almost independent of the rest of the barn-like structure.  Here it was not rendered but built of dressed local stone, with pillars, balusters, and seven tall round-topped windows and lintels of Cefn Sandstone from Ruabon  stone.  It seemed untouched by the fire.  By the early afternoon, only this facade, and the return walls built in the same material still stood.  Naively we assumed this would remain and could still front the eventual conversion and retain a little historic character in this part of the town. To the side of this facade, and enclosed by substantial arrow headed iron railings was a tiny shady patch of grass, barely a garden.  This had been one of Aberystwyth’s secret spaces. For in the centre of the little lawn was a plinth on which stood a bronze statue of a  winged youth, with a laurel wreath on his curls and a bundle of ragged palm leaves cradled on his arm.  His foot balanced on a sphere of bronze and on this sphere are engraved in bold capitals the names of fourteen men.  These were the members of Tabernacle chapel killed in the First World War.  Like the monumental town memorial, this graceful piece was also the work of Mario Rutelli.  By the morning of 11 July 2008 it had been removed from the site.

The demolition crane just kept on working its way through the building.  Effortlessly it reached up from the old chapel floor to grasp the towering pediment of the Powell Street entrance and casually brought it crashing to the ground.  Methodically it tugged off the coping stones of the parapet. The immaculate turned stone balusters snapped like so many broken teeth.  Then it chomped up the chimneys at the two corners, the seven elegant first floor windows, the little balcony over the sturdy pillared portico.  The massive freestone quoins of the corners were the hardest to shift and among the last stones standing.  Supported on the inside by the two chimneys these massive corners would surely have braced the facade.  Finally there was just the ground floor with its three tall doorways and four windows standing.  And when these crashed to dust the workmen carried away the white-lettered Tabernacle board and gave it to a neighbour as a souvenir.

For a brief period we thought the Powell Street Facade would be retained

 

The demoliton crane soon nibbled away the facade

The massive quoins and chimney corners were difficult to demolish

A new view opened up towards Penparcau. The railings of the little War Memorial garden remained.

Finally the Tabernacle board is given away as a souvenir

That night the crane left town, and a great gap allowed a view from Powell Street out to the hills of Penparcau.  The site was soon surrounded by high fencing and the wreckage was gradually carried away.  The little garden is a forlorn tangle of brambles now.

Rutelli’s pretty monument eventually found a refuge in the Ceredigion Museum, eight sturdy volunteers carried it up the stairs and strapped it to a pillar of the Coliseum where it can be admired today amongst the varied exhibits.   The accompanying information sheet states that the developers, Merlin Homes, intend to eventually restore him to his little garden at the corner of the site.  But there has so far been no development, and this summer will be five years since the fire.

Rutelli’s statue now resides in the  Ceredigion Museum

For Ceredigion Museum visit   http://www.ceredigion.gov.uk/index.cfm?articleid=197