Chapters 26 - 30

Chapter 26. Some Rites Of Passage, 1914 - 1932

Deaths

My grandmother Anastasia Lane died on 4 December 1914 at the Wimborne Arms, Dowlais: my Dad (Aloysius Lane) “in attendance”.

My grandfather Patrick Lane died 1 May 1929 at 26 Alfred St., Port Talbot, our home at that time. “In attendance” was his nephew, Chris Jones, since my father was very ill at the time.

My grandfather Jeremiah McCarthy died on 26 March 1932 at 74 Theobald Rd., Canton, Cardiff; his son Jerry, “in attendance”.

Marriages

And two families (or four?) become one - Patrick Aloysius Lane (b.1900) married Mary Ann McCarthy (b. 1893 or 1895) on 10 September 1923 at St Mary’s Church, Canton, Cardiff.

Births

Peter Lane born 26 January 1925 at 26 Alfred Str., Port Talbot: father described as “Insurance Agent”.

Patrick Lane born 8 August 1927 at 26 Alfred Str., Port Talbot.

Gerard Lane born 21 September 1929 at 26 Alfred Str., Port Talbot.

John Lane born 26 March 1931 at Wyndham Crescent, Canton, Cardiff.

“From age to age you gather a people to yourself...”

Chapter 27. The Leaving Of Dowlais For Aberavon

My Gran Lane, Louis’ mother, was buried at Pant on 8 December 1914. Everyone who knew her must have thought that it was particularly fitting that her funeral Mass and burial should have taken place on the feast of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady. For while the feast had been celebrated for many hundreds of years, it was not until 1854 that Pius IX declared that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was an article of faith: and it was only in 1858, with the appearances of Our Lady to Bernadette at Lourdes, that the feast, and the doctrine, became, as it were, ‘popular’. I remember my other Gran (McCarthy) winding up the clockwork of her Lourdes’ statue so that it played Immaculate Mary.

Between Gran’s death (4th December) and funeral (December 8th) her body would probably have been kept in an open coffin in her home, the Wimborne Arms. The last time I was to see such an open coffin in a private home was in 1947 when I went back to Cardiff for Gran McCarthy’s funeral. For she, like my Gran Lane, was ‘at home’ in 74 Theobald Rd. This Irish tradition has died out and we have the dead being taken from the place of death - hospital or home - as soon as possible by the undertaker who has the body kept in some form of ‘chapel’ at his headquarters.

Having the dead person ‘at home’ was, clearly, linked with the tradition of the ‘wake’. Relatives from near and far, friends and others who wanted to pay their last respects to the dead person would come to the home, stay a while with the dead body, usually in prayer (sometimes with the recitation of the Rosary by a crowd), and then stay a while with the bereaved family. To-day, fewer and fewer people call on the bereaved: perhaps it is more embarrassing to call ‘cold’, as it were, as compared with the time when the call was made on the dead person laying there, before facing the bereaved.

Of course, as all Irish know, the wake could, and often did, degenerate. Chat led to drink and food, and more drink and chat, and to drunkenness. But most often the drink and food was taken in moderation while the chat went on. It was this ‘chat’ that was most valuable for the grieving: to be surrounded by friends who shared the grief, to know that the community had come in support, this helped make the grieving somewhat easier. There was no need, in those days, for counselling: the community provided its own.

There was one further benefit of keeping the body at home. Traditionally, bodies were taken from home to the church to lie before the altar overnight before the funeral Mass. This last ‘leaving of home’ was a chance for the community to gather en masse to walk in procession with the bereaved family accompanying the coffin. My last experience of this community sharing was in 1941 when hundreds of us gathered in Castle Street, Aberavon to walk with the family of a former classmate, Bobby Payne, as we took his father’s coffin to church. I was only sixteen and this was one of my first introductions to almost-adulthood Catholicism: for by now I was working. I have never forgotten the crowds in the street, the murmuring of conversation, the hush as the coffin and the family came from the house, and the silence of the short walk to the church. It was an impressive demonstration of community, of togetherness. The memory is one of the reasons why I resent post-Vatican 2 attempts at pretending that only now have we understood ‘community’. What did someone say? The arrogant stupidity of those who do not know their history?

Gran Lane, like all other Dowlais Catholics, was buried in the Catholic section of the cemetery at Pant. This had been specially opened (in its separateness) to take the many who died from cholera in the 1840s. I have no real idea of the burial: but I am entitled to think that, if it was anything like the many funerals to which I have gone, it would have followed a crowded Mass, an impressive procession of dark clothed relatives and friends, and prayers over the grave and coffin. One of my most vivid memories is the dropping of earth on my Dad’s coffin in Aberystwyth: I have some empathy with his feelings as he dropped his portion of earth on his mother’s.

And then “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to-day...”. I, obviously, know nothing of the discussions that went on in the various Scannell homes in and around Wind Street and Penydarren. I do know that the upshot was my granddad’s decision to leave Dowlais to go to live with his sister-in-law in Aberavon. I remember helping Jenny, Pat’s widow when she wondered whether to stay in Retford after Pat had died, or whether to go back to New Zealand where she would have the support of her own family. I know that, in 1929-30, my Dad and Mum moved from Aberavon to Cardiff so that my mother would have the support of her large family as she tried to cope with a sick and unemployed husband and their three children. I know how much comfort Muriel has had from “all the boys” around her as she comes to terms with Gerard’s early death. So, as it were vicariously, I can understand why Granddad Lane moved from what must have seemed an empty home now that Gran had died.

He was only 56 years old, and Dad was a fourteen-year old Grammar schoolboy when they moved. His sister-in-law, born Ellen Scannell, was married to Joe Twomey and lived at 3. Alexandra Street, Aberavon. She had three sons of about my Dad’s age - Patsy, Joe and Mike, all of whom I was to know as ‘Uncles’ although they were, in fact, my Dad’s cousins. Gerard and Muriel were to make their first home at that house, 3 Alexandra Street, when they married. Like my Granddad and Dad they lived, almost cheek by jowl, with a number of Scannell-Lane relations. For, in the next street, Gwendoline Street, lived Uncle Johnnie Scannell and Aunty Catherine (‘Cassie’) who had an only son, John (yet another cousin for my Dad). And in nearby Gladys Street, lived Chris Jones, son of a Scannell sister, who was to have a son, Francis, who was my age.

All three Twomey boys were closely involved in the life of the church which, like their families, was also ‘just around the corner.’ Uncle Patsy was a leading figure in the CYMS: his early death at the age of 30, left a large hole which the others, including my father, tried to fill. The other two boys, when they married in the 1920s, lived in 3 Alexandra Street for a time. Indeed, Uncle Joe continued to live there and his children - John, Peg, Tess, - were at school with me, with Tess being a year older than me. Uncle Mike went to live in another ‘next’ street, Castle Street where his two daughters, Eileen and Winnie, were born - more cousins for me.

So, the move from Dowlais to Aberavon in 1915 was not as traumatic as, say, our family’s move from Plymouth to Wallington in 1964. For there we knew no-one, had no extended family to turn to, play with, be helped by. In 1915 and later, Granddad Lane had two sisters-in-law, a clutch of nephews and nieces (cousins for my dad) all within four streets of one another. Of course, Granddad and my Dad had had that sort of extended family in Dowlais. I never knew Dowlais, with its small houses, smokestacks, noise and hustle. So I never knew the Dowlais extended family. But I did know, from living for a while in yet another (fifth) neighbouring street (John Street) the Aberavon extended family.

There were, of course, others who had their own extended families: in neighbouring streets were nexuses of O’Briens (one of whose descendants would be a close friend to our Peter in Bournemouth): O’Neils (one of whom would be the De La Salle head of St Joseph’s, Beulah Hill when Simon and Paul were there): O’Sullivans (one of whom would be a colleague of mine at Coloma College in the 1960s and 1970s): Callaghans, Walshes, Harringtons...almost ad infinitum. St Joseph’s parish was more of a series of families than a mass of individuals, making social life that much more lively and easy to organise. I regret that my children never knew any of that close-knit set of relationships.

Dad was a fourteen-year-old Grammar schoolboy when he moved to Aberavon. His Twomey cousins, all of his age, were working in the local steelworks owned by Guest, Keen - also owners of Cyfarthfa and the Dowlais works. Like most of their friends, they had left school at the age of twelve: indeed, they might have left at the age of eleven if they had ‘passed’ the primitive examination which showed an above average competence. Imagine, 1915, this century, one of the richest countries in the world, and we took children into steelworks at the age of 11 or 12.

So, at 3 Alexandra Street, 3 Twomey working boys and one Lane schoolboy - of their age. I don’t know what happened, but my Dad never went to school in Aberavon, but went, with his Twomey cousins to work in the steelworks. Was it that Gran’s death, removed the stimulus to further schooling? Was it that Granddad, unable to write still, considered it was high time that Louis was out and about like his cousins? Was it my Dad, eager to be like his working cousins, who persuaded his Dad to let him go to work? Did he use the ‘patriotic argument’ and claim that, like others, he ought to answer the call of King and country and make his contribution to the war effort? Was it sheer economics? For Granddad was now retired - with what money I know not. And he had to contribute to the costs of the household in which he and Louis lived.

In the 1960s, two historians, Marsden and Jackson, wrote what I saw as a seminal study. They based it on research into the later careers of children who had been at school with them when they were eleven years old. For me, the most important of their finds was that most working class children had the same sorts of occupations as their parents had had, and had the same sorts of standard of living. They found that the relatively few who were upwardly mobile came from homes where mothers had ‘married down’ and, in so doing, had given up, or lost, their own chances of social mobility. The authors described these mothers as ‘fallen women’ - taking great care to explain their use of this term. It seemed that mothers who had come to see that they had lost their own opportunities, went out of their ways, to see that their children ‘got on’ at school. They were, in a sense, living vicariously through their children.

It was not only, as Howard Spring wrote, Fame is the Spur. There were many other spurs, one of which was the mother’s determination. And, it may seem, my Dad had had that maternal ‘spur’: she had seen something of ‘the better’ when she kept house for Casartelli in St Bade’s, Manchester: she did her best to see that Louis got a chance to get at some of that ‘better’ - in Bullingham and Merthyr Grammar School. But, the spur removed by her death, he left. In hindsight I think that, later, he came to regret his lost opportunities. His friendship with articles clerks, later solicitors, like Sheehan and Wehrle, must have led him to see that, he, too, might have done better for himself. His more than nodding acquaintance with schoolteachers, at both primary and secondary schools, indicated not only that he was, in some ways, their equal, but that he, too, might have ‘gone on.’ So, pace Marsden and Jackson, Louis was ‘a fallen man’ whose determination for his children’s success was inspired, in part, by his wish to live vicariously through them. Of that more later.

So Louis went to work in the steelworks. And it was as ‘steel smelter’ that he married Mum in 1923: his steelworking lasted longer than the war. For me that war (1914 - 18) was mere ‘history’. Mum and Dad would mention ‘Little Bobs’ as Lord Roberts was known: would have known of the power of Lloyd George as war leader: would have known families who lost sons: knew people, like an O’Brien whom I saw at church, who had lost limbs or, maybe worse, been affected by gas. For them the war was ‘my current events’. Granddad, and by implication, my Dad, watched as the Labour Party split over the war with many ILP (and so ‘socialist’) members adopting the pacifist attitude which led to Ramsey MacDonald losing his seat in the 1918 election. They saw wages increased, allowing many families to enjoy a higher standard of living than they had known in peacetime. They heard Lloyd George promise “Homes fit for heroes to live in.” And like Harry Gosling, President of the TUC in 1918, they hoped “for a better life than we had known in 1913.” It was this rise in expectations that helps to explain the general welcome given to the two revolutions in Russia in 1917, and to the setting up of the world’s first socialist government. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven,” wrote Wordsworth of the French Revolution. Many Labour people felt like that in 1917-18 as Lenin took Russia under socialist control. If in Russia, why not in Britain? If in Moscow, why not in Aberavon? They were heady days, indeed.

Ed. I heard on ‘the grapevine’ that Johnnie Scannel had lost the use of one of his eyes during the last days of the Boer War as a result of a misfire while cleaning his rifle. John tells me that he also had a scarred lip which was well covered by his extensive moustache.

Another story is that he received his injuries through an accident in the steel works. Personally, I prefer the Boer War story – far more heroic.

While I was visiting Alf and Eileen (nee Twomey) Adams in Port Talbot we were told the story that she remembers visiting Gwendoline Street and Johnnie scaring her and the others by chasing the little children with the removable eye in his hand or rolling the eye across the table.

Chapter 28. Aberavon Catholics, 1914 - 22

I do not know at what age my Dad became eligible to join the Catholic Young Men’s Society (CYMS). In my time one had to be sixteen before being allowed to join and get the pleasure of using what was mis-named ‘the Hall.’ But in those days the school-leaving age had been raised to fourteen, and although the majority of my former classmates went to work at that age, they were still not considered adult enough to be allowed to join the CYMS. Maybe, in the days when boys left school at the age of twelve to enter the world of work, they were allowed into the CYMS at, say, fourteen.

What I do know from old photographs that used to deck the walls of ‘the hall’, was that my Dad was a member of CYMS committees early in the 1920s. There he sat, with a sprinkling of older men and younger, all in their dark suits, with stiffly starched, high-winged collars, theirs boots sheltered from the mud of the streets by the universally-worn spats. The dictionary describes the spat as “a short gaiter covering the instep and reaching above the ankle.” Made of felt, usually grey in colour, they were originally called ‘spatter dashes’ which helps to show their purposes. We have lost the need for them now: cleaner streets? more easily cleaned shoes? cheaper polish?

The dignified clothes worn by the committee members of the CYMS - including their spats - were an outward sign of the improvement that had taken place in the economic and social lives of the majority of Catholics. We have seen how the despised emigrants lived in mid-nineteenth century Merthyr and Dowlais. They had lived like this, too, in Victorian Aberavon: indeed, as late as the 1940s there were still people living in small terraced Victorian cottages which, on Water Street, would flood during periods of neap tides. But, even as early as 1918, the Aberavon Catholic community had a mix of professional, managerial, skilled labour and well-paid if unskilled labour, as well as too many still classed as ‘the poor’. You can see that mix reflected in the CYMS photographs and by looking at the names of the men. ‘King’ Madden who was chief foreman on the Docks, responsible for deciding which of the men gathered each morning should get work. There was a solicitor, Karl Wehrle, soon to be the first Catholic Mayor of the borough. There was O’Brien, J.P., showing, in face and clothing, the stern rectitude of the financier. And there were the foremen, charge hands and other skilled steelworkers.

In the early 1930s, when I went to Mass with my Dad, we used to hang about outside the Church for him to chat to others. I was baffled, at first, by the salutation, “Hello, Brother Lane...” or whatever was the name of the person being addressed. “Brother?” They were Maddens, Corishes, Waters and so on, not Lanes. So it was that I leant that, à la Masons and other similar societies, members of the CYMS were taught that they were brothers, one to another, part of that Mystical Body of Christ which we call the Church. As I was to learn, this did not mean that there was never wrangling, backbiting, jealousy and unbrotherly behaviour. Much later, in the 1960s, I was to hear Labour’s Deputy Leader, George Brown, say that “When I hear the word, ‘Brother’ at a Party meeting, I quickly put my back to the wall to ensure that I’m not going to be stabbed.” No, the use of ‘Brother’ in the CYMS was not a sign that its members were free from original sin and all its effects.

But it was an effort to bond the community together. That bonding was reinforced by the Society’s many activities, including the Monthly Communion which all members were expected to celebrate. On each First Sunday, wearing their red sashes, they sat together in serried rows at Mass and went to Communion en bloc. For young people such as myself it was an impressive sight; I was pleased that, one day, I might join such men at Mass. Until 1930, we went to Mass in a relatively small, low, stone-built and iron-roofed church. By then we had four priests, three Masses each Sunday and two every day, as well as a sermon, Rosary and Benediction. It was a very vibrant community, with few old enough to remember the way it had developed. You can see that development reflected in the entries in annual Diocesan reports and in the jottings left by priests in their Ordos - now kept in the Catholic Central Library near Westminster Cathedral. In brief these show:

1852: A ‘mission’ was founded at Aberavon: a priest would walk along from beach from Swansea to Briton Ferry where he would be met by men who would guide (and guard?) him to Aberavon. I am not sure whether there was a residual memory of such walking behind the habit (I won’t call it a tradition) of walking along the beach at ‘the ferry’ on fine Sundays in the 1930s.

1854: Father Percy writes of tending the 1,000 Catholics in Aberavon who have ‘no church, no school and no priest’s house’.

1858: Benedictine priests (from St David’s, Swansea?) serve Aberavon and Briton Ferry with two Masses on Sunday and celebrate Mass in Neath on alternate Sundays. By now there were ‘2,000 Catholics in Neath and Aberavon’.

1859: Land was bought for a school and chapel. Incidentally, some had had some sense of vision, for the ‘land’ was large enough to provide, in the future for a large church, a dominating Presbytery, ‘the Hall’ to which I will come back, an Infants School and a large elementary school.

1864: For the first time Mass is said every Sunday at 11 o’clock.

1891: Mass is also said on Holidays of Obligation, while there were the Rosary and Stations of the Cross every Friday evening.

But to ‘the Hall’. While the church was a modest building in 1918, the members of the CYMS, went ahead with planning the building of, and paying for ‘the Hall’. This was, relative to the Church and Schools, a massive and impressive structure. On the first floor there were four smaller rooms and one larger one, the largest dance Hall in the town, along with its stage and back-stage, as well as toilets and a small kitchen/refreshment’s bar. On the second floor was the one large room which had two full-sized billiards’ tables, a table-tennis area and room, later for a darts area. Here, too, was a refreshments’ bar where, as downstairs only soft drinks and simple items such as biscuits and chocolates were sold: hard drinking had to be done elsewhere.

One has to admire the vision and boldness of the men who carried this project through: Twomeys, Maddens, O’Briens, Corishes, Sextons and so on. Most of them had lived, and many of them still lived, in small, poorly built houses lacking bathrooms and indoor lavatories. But they saw the need for the upwardly mobile community to demonstrate its progress with this Hall. For many men it became a major centre of life. There were card games in one room, chess, draughts, dominoes and the like in another, a small library and magazines in a third. There were parish socials, bazaars, Gaelic League meetings as well as meetings concerned with the organisation of collections of Building Fund each Sunday. And, every evening, the billiards’ tables were fully booked from an early hour and friends (‘Brothers’) sat and watched while they chatted - and mocked the failures of others.

Here, too, in rooms up and down, men discussed Irish politics - at least until 1923. Here they spoke of the Easter Rising, 1916 - most of them, like the majority of Irish people ‘at home’, condemning the IRB’s futile Rising at a time when many thousands of Irishmen were

fighting in France and Gallipoli. But here, too, they talked of the horrific treatment meted out by the military government to the handful of rebels who were caught or who had surrendered. In Ireland, and in Aberavon, there was revulsion at the shooting of men who now came to be seen as ‘patriots’ and ‘martyrs’. Once again, it seemed, the British had snatched defeat from the jaws of their victory, and Irish voters were to show in the election of 1918, that they were now almost all supporters of the rebels’ cause.

The 73 Sinn Fein MPs refused to come to the Westminster Parliament. Instead, they set up their own Parliament in Dublin, and claimed the right to speak for a free and independent Ireland. In Aberavon, at the Hall, and in private homes, Catholics read of, and heard from newcomers about, the savage activities of the Black and Tans sent over to break the independence movement. Later in the 1930s, I was to learn to sing the rebel songs that were written during 1918-21. Only much later did I reflect on the fact that these rebel songs were sung in Aberavon at that very time and in the homes of men and women whom I had grown to see as God-fearing, respectable regular communicants.

In the opinion of the Catholic Irish, this ‘war’ had come about because Lloyd George, as Prime Minister, had reneged on the promise of Home Rule which had been legislated for in 1912-14. In June 1918 his government had abandoned Home Rule.

Irish leaders, such as De Valera and Michael Collins, became heroes in Irish eyes for leading the political and military campaigns against ‘occupying forces’. While the Catholics were divided over the wisdom of guerrilla tactics - murders of policemen, assassination of soldiers - there was unity against the British retaliation campaign. And slowly, liberal opinion in Britain and around the world, swung in Sinn Fein’s favour. So it was that, in 1920 Lloyd George’s Coalition government pushed through the Government of Ireland Act. This gave one Parliament in Dublin and another, for Ulster, in Belfast.

Sinn Fein and the IRA refused to accept this partition of their island - which they saw as a sop to the bigotted Protestants of part of Northern Ireland. So the Anglo-Irish war went on, with increased ferocity. However, by July 1921, both sides agreed to a truce and a meeting between an Irish delegation and members of Lloyd George’s government. In December 1921, the Dail accepted the terms of the Treaty which had been negotiated by Collins and others. This provided for:

1. An Irish Free State of 26 counties with a Parliament in Dublin.

2 Dominion status for the IFS whose government would take oaths of allegiance to the British Crown.

3 A Northern Ireland State of 6 counties (out of Ulster’s traditional eight).

4 A Boundary Commission to settle disputes about the border between the North and the IFS.

British troops were withdrawn from the South. However, de Valera, the President of the Dail, refused to accept the terms of the Treaty. He wanted a united Ireland with no oath of loyalty to the Crown. There followed the murderous Civil War between ‘Staters’ led by Collins and ‘IRA Irreconcilables’ led by de Valera. Only in 1932 did de Valera call off his IRA guerrilla war. “It was,” as the old song said, “a most distressful country.”

For Catholic voters in Aberavon, Irish affairs loomed large during election campaigns in 1918 and 1922. In June 1918, Parliament had passed Representation of the Peoples Act. This gave the vote to all men over the age of twenty-one: previously less than half of them had the right to vote because they were not house holding ratepayers. So, in 1918, for men, democracy had arrived some 70 years after the Chartist’s last gasp in 1848. For women, however, the Act was less generous. Only women aged 30 or more had the right to vote - a somewhat half-answer to the suffragettes demand for “Votes for Women” and to their wartime campaign for “The Right to Work.”

For which Party were Catholics to vote in 1918? Surely not for the Tories, with their traditional hostility to Home Rule and their campaign in support of the proposed ‘Rising’ by Ulster Protestants in 1914. Hardly for Lloyd George’s branch of Liberals, now seen as the betrayers over Home Rule. So it was that Irish politics allied themselves with other Catholic working class ideas, and the vast majority voted for the Labour Party candidate. However, in Aberavon in particular and in Britain as a whole, Lloyd George was seen as ‘the war winner’ who promised “homes fit for heroes”. The result of the election was:

Coalition MPs: 395 Tories and 133 Lloyd George Liberals.

Labour MPs: 39

Asquith’s Liberal MPs: 28

Others: 21 (excluding 73 Sinn Fein MPs)

Even though Labour had not won in Aberavon, Party members there as elsewhere, took pride in the fact that, for the first time, their Party was the Official Opposition in the Commons. This encouraged party workers to get more members, to campaign vigorously and to draw attention to the failure of Lloyd George’s government. For, after a short post-war boom, this government went in for tax cutting (and no ‘homes for heroes’), for savagery in Ireland and for feathering the nest of it supporters. “They were”, said a future Tory Prime Minister, “hard faced men who had done well out of the war.” And who continued to do well; Lloyd George became wealthy through the sale of Honours to many of the ‘hard-faced’. By 1922, even his Tory partners were uneasy about his continuing leadership. A group of them, led by Baldwin, called for a meeting of Tory MPs (the forerunner to the modern 1922 Committee) where, in spite of pleas from Tory Ministers such as Austen Chamberlain, they voted to fight the next election as a separate Party and not as members of a sleazy, graft-ridden Lloyd George-led Coalition.

For my Dad, voting for the first time in November 1922, and other steelworkers, and for the Catholic community in general, the 1922 election campaign was one they would treasure for years to come. For their Labour candidate was Ramsay MacDonald, leader of the Party, who had lost his seat in 1918 because of his wartime pacifism. My father would recall that MacDonald’s presence on a platform was ‘magic’ - and this long after he had seen MacDonald betray his Party in 1931. Others would remember it as “like a moral crusade” with MacDonald as “a second Messiah coming amongst us.” MacDonald was a magnificent orator - if, too often, carried away by the hywl, so that there was more rhetoric than substance in what he said.

My pushy Dad, a little better educated than the majority of his Catholic colleagues, was friendly, through the pub trade of his own father, with Joe Brown, one of MacDonald’s main workers, a publican in Taibach. I would come to know Joe Brown of the Somerset Arms, whose son, George, an ex-purser on the Cunard liners, gave me my first job at the South Wales Transport Office in Neath (1940). Links everywhere. Anyhow, Dad and dozens of others were active in the autumn of 1922: leaflets were delivered, posters stuck up, meetings stewarded, and, on Election Day, canvas returns ticked off as Party workers sent in regular flows of cards showing who had and who hadn’t voted.

It was during this 1922 campaign that someone wrote a MacDonald song which I was to sing long after MacDonald had ceased to be a Labour leader. Indeed my children learned to sing it in the 1950s and 1960s, and at Oxford, Christopher was able to help his History tutor through the chorus (the tutor only having seen the verse in Marquand’s biography of MacDonald.’) It went to the turn of the chorus of Men of Harlech:

Ramsay, Ramsay, shout it;

Don’t be shy about it;

Labour’s day is bound to come

We cannot do without it.

Onward Labour, on to glory,

This your war cry, this your story,

How we proved at Aberavon,

Ramsay is the man.

The Tory candidate was a popular owner of a local works, Geoffrey Byass’ who had been Mayor of Aberavon and so was well known. The sitting MP, a war hero, Major Edwards, stood again for the National (i.e. Lloyd George) Liberals. In 1918 he had had a majority of 6,000. But MacDonald’s ‘crusade’ led to a sweeping Labour victory: he got 14,318 votes, Byass, 11,111 and Edward’s 5,328. Said the New Leader: “His election is enough in itself to transform our [Labour’s] position in the House. We have once more a voice which must be heard.” Nationally, too, the election had been more than a partial triumph for Labour. Results gave Tories 344 seats, Labour 138 and Liberals (Lloyd George’s and Asquiths combined) 117. Labour was clearly the alternative government. As the song said, “Labour’s day is bound to come” in the not too distant future.

Chapter 29. Two Families Become One: The Lane-McCarthy Marriage

In to-day’s Catholic Herald, a priest, Father Richard ... writes of his wish to be known to his people as ‘Dickie.’ My conditioning has been, or is, such that I find it almost impossible to address even priests with whom I have worked closely for some years as ‘Father Tom’: the notion that I might call Father Smalley, S.J. ‘Tommy’ or Father Peter Griffiths, S.J. ‘Pete’ leaves the mind boggling. ‘Dickie’ indeed: no doubt made from de haute en bas as a condescending wish to gain popularity.

It was otherwise (and with a vengeance) in the Aberavon where my father became an adult (1921) and had his first vote (1922). His parish priest was Canon Kelly, a priest whose Masses I was to serve as a nervous nine-year old in the 1930s: more of that later. By the time I came to know of him (for I cannot claim that I knew him) he was a tall but stooping elderly man on the threshold of retiring to his family home in Ireland. Born, like so many of the people in this story, in the 1860s, he had come to serve God in the newly-formed Diocese of Newport. Then he had been one of the thirteen ‘secular’ or ‘diocesan’ priests in that diocese, for, as we have seen the majority of the priests serving the twenty or so parishes in Glamorgan, and the smaller number of chapels and missions elsewhere in Wales, were in religious orders’, Father Kelly, as he then was, had helped celebrate the division of the diocese in 1895. When six counties of North Wales and five of the counties of South Wales were split off to from the Vicariate Apostolic of Menevia. He was present at the first Mass celebrated by the new Vicar Apostolic, Frances Mostyn, son of an ‘old Catholic’ family of Talacre, and had helped celebrate Mostyn’s elevation to the new see of Menevia in 1898. He could not have foreseen that, in 1924, that new Bishop would become Archbishop of Cardiff and, as such, his Ordinary-superior.

Father Kelly, as one of the longer serving priests of the Welsh-wide old diocese, helped welcome Bishop Hedley’s successor to the see of Newport. And he took part in the celebrations in 1915 when Bishop Bilsborrow O.S.B. became the first Archbishop of the re-named diocese of Cardiff, where, in fact Bishop Hedley had been living since 1881. Father Kelly was more personally affected by the decision made in 1919 which abolished the control the Benedictines had exercised over the diocese - now archdiocese. When there were few ‘secular’ priests, and when travel was difficult it was not surprising that the first Benedictine Bishops had used their fellow-monks of

Belmont as the Diocese Chapter, and had made several of them Canons - i.e. members of the Chapter which helped govern the diocese. In 1919 the Benedictine Chapter and Canons were replaced by a newly constituted Chapter made up of ‘secular’ priests. Not everyone welcomed this major change: some saw it as small thanks to the Benedictines who had served the diocese so well, and had helped re-create, if not maintain, a link with the medieval Church. Others saw it differently: it was hardly reasonable to shut off the ‘secular’ priests from avenues of promotion which went to men who, from their monastic state, were apart from the Diocese.

Archbishop Bilsborrow, O.S.B, presided over the abolition of the one Chapter and the creation of the new. He had to find six or so secular priests with whom he would share the government of the expanding diocese. One of those chosen was Father Kelly, who now became Canon Kelly, with the growing parish of St Joseph’s Aberavon listed as one of whose parish priests had to be a Canon, a tradition broken only when the old parish was split into three, so that St Joseph’s lost its once pre-eminent position.

Now, if Father Kelly had been a power in the Catholic community - as were all priests in the early part of this century - by how much more (as the Latinists would say) was Canon Kelly such. Tall, vigorous (I am told), an active visitor of his flock who sought his advice on things secular as well as religious, he encouraged the growth of the CYMS and other societies and guilds, promoted debating and discussion groups, ran the school almost single-handedly (as did most priests of the time), and was much loved.

As one outward sign of that affection was the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood. This took place in 1922. One of the most public elements of the week-long rejoicing was a grand Concert at the Grand Theatre, Aberavon. Here was a chance for the community to ‘show off’ its growth, its confidence as well as its unity under its Canon. And the Cardiff Catholic Choral Society was invited down to be a lead item in the Concert. My father, along with dozens of other members of the CYMS, helped plan the programme, sold tickets, stewarded the evening - and met the ‘stars’ from Cardiff. Among the members of the Choral Society were a clutch of McCarthys: Will, a noted bass singer (whose ‘Drinking’ with its descending final lines was an always popular item), Mag (an accomplished pianist and accompanist as well as singer) and Mary Ann, a contralto who had sung on the same platform as Adelina Patti, the famous Florentine operatic star who built her home at Talgarth in Breconshire. This was a little to the north of the Crawshay fishing lodge at Llangorse - one link with our family’s past. On Patti’s death it became a nursing home to which TB patients were sent in the hope, often realised, that the fresh air would benefit them. Among those who so benefitted were members of my extended family. So a future link with our family story.

Anyhow, the pushy twenty-two year old Louis met the twenty-nine year old Mary Ann McCarthy. Of their courtship (over the relatively vast distance between Cardiff and Aberavon) I know little. How often they met, indeed, how they first met, nothing. One or two of dad’s memories come to mind (and no doubt, as with so many of his stories, these lost nothing in their recollection). One was of the first Sunday dinner (i.e. midday meal - no luncheons for the working classes) that he had at the McCarthy home at 80 King’s Road, Canton. For here were Mary Ann’s married sister Frances and here five children (who were, later, to have 80 Kings Road as their home), her two married brothers, Will and Jerry with their children, her three yet unmarried sisters, Mag, Win, and Eileen, and the ‘baby’, the unmarried Ben. Louis had been used to crowded cottages in the Scannell’s Dowlais. But this was ridiculous: more an audience or a crowd, than a family. He was often to recall that dinner - and in particular the huge basin of thick gravy that was brought to the table. None of the sauce boats which his mother had used on the dinner-for-three table in Wind Street, Dowlais.

Later, I was to enjoy the crowds that congregated at the homes of Frances and Mag in particular: there always seemed to be room for ‘one more’ - and yet another. And in such crowds was the banter, teasing, story telling and mickey-taking that, I infer from dad’s recollections, must have been the pattern established in Kings Road. From my own memories of how we treated incoming boy-friends or girl-friends to the Lane household, I shudder to think of how the once spoilt, still only child, Louis dealt with the war veterans Will, Jerry and Ben, and how he and Mary Anne coped with the comments on their relative ages (“boy snatcher” “mother seeker”??)

I have told of Mary Ann’s conversation with her Benedictine priest whom she spoke to after Louis had asked her to marry him. Louis, too, spoke to his priest, the redoubtable Canon Kelly about his plan to marry. Dad’s recollection was the Canon saying, “And who told you that you are old enough to marry”, for he was, after all only twenty-two in 1922 when they got engaged.

We have seen something of the history of the Lane-Scannell-Twomey family into which May (as she was always known) was about to enter. It was not altogether dissimilar to the history of the McCarthy-Barry clan into which Louis was to be engulfed. Her father, Jeremiah McCarthy was born in 1858 and had worked all his life on the Bute Docks railway system which became a subsidiary of the Great Western Railway while retaining a degree of independence. I remember him as a tall, heavily moustached engine driver with his flags, whistle, steel lunch box and uniform. It was in his memory, I think, that we learnt the song which all our children were dandied to:

On the way to London, early in the morning,

See the little engines, all in a row,

See the little driver, pull the little lever

Chuff, chuff, chuff, and away we go...

In fact he was a foreman driver and, as such one of the ‘aristocracy’ among the working classes. This was reflected in the move from the small terraced cottage where my mother was born (Lewis Street, Canton) to the seemingly cavernous house at 80 King’s Road with its three floors, many rooms and large garden. Another illustration of his relative wealth was the fact that all his daughters were trained musicians with their high grade certificates from either the London School of Music or the Guildhall School of Music in pianoforte or singing. Few workers could afford the tuition fees and the pianos that were needed for the gaining of these certificates.

There was, too, what my father would call ‘the grain’: he was talking of the looks of our first five children - their skin, their hair, their eyes, their smiles, their confidence. Or, as Jenny Lane said of them, “although they were five-of-a-bundle [five under five I remind you] there was nothing institutionalised about them.” ‘The grain’: I like it. And the McCarthy family had that grain: I remember the well-padded appearance of Uncle Will - more recently seen in the appearance of his son and my cousin, Billy Mac.

I recall the dignified appearance of Uncle Jerry, even when coming home from his job on the docks. And, to cut it short, there was the dignified stance of May - not for nothing did her sisters remember her as ‘the Duchess.’ I remember her put down of some unfortunate at a party in Ben’s house in about 1941. “Come on, my dear,” said the poor man, “give us a song.” Icily May looked at him, “I’m not your dear,” she said. Even in old age she walked tall, dressed well, looked smart - and feared no one. I see some of her stance in Clare’s head-holding, and in Simon’s confident posture in photographs when meeting the Queen and Prince Philip.

‘The grain.’ Treasure it. My grandmother McCarthy brought her contribution to that graining. She was born in Pontlottyn in the Rhymney Valley on New Years Day, 1864. Her father was Patrick Barry ‘labourer in the ironworks’, who was unable to pen his name when he went to register her birth. Her birth certificate, like my father’s, shows that their fathers made ‘their mark.’ Her mother was born Frances Sullivan (so bringing the Frances tradition into the family). I do not know how many brothers and sisters Mary Ann Barry

had. My Aunts remember tales of a sister, their Aunty Liz Barry of Pontlottyn: one such has her throwing a bucketful of pigswill at a street preacher who was attacking the name of the church. ‘Church militant’ indeed. Three of my aunts once went up to Pontlottyn to stay with the Barry family: they recall sleeping four in a bed in the small worker’s cottage, for the Barrys, like the Scannells and Lanes of Dowlais were at the lower (lowest?) end of the social scale.

Jeremiah McCarthy married Mary Ann Barry in June 1888. The marriage certificate shows that she was a living-in servant to Captain Fraser of Cowbridge Road, Canton - a reminder of the days when the far end of Cowbridge Road housed a well-to-do middle class, including the family of Ivor Novello the musician. I know nothing of the post that she held in that household, but I note that, at roughly the same time my Gran Lane was in Father Casartelli’s household in Manchester: I allow myself to infer that my Gran McCarthy drew from her servant’s experience some, maybe all, maybe more, of the lessons which Gran Lane got in Manchester: taste, desire for the better...

May McCarthy, my Mum, was the third of the McCarthy children. She was born on 23 October 1893 at 9 Lewis Street, Canton, a street of small terraced cottages, not unlike the cottages in Wind Street, Dowlais where my dad was born. Her birth certificate has a little puzzle: her date of birth is given as 23 October 1893 - a date which all her children knew. “How old is Mum? Seven years more than the century.” It was an easy sum to work out. But, and here’s the puzzle, the birth was officially registered on 7 December 1895. Births, like deaths, have to be registered within six weeks of the date involved: like too many people, both my father and mother were themselves prone to ‘play it along’ and register things at the last legal moment. Mum’s parents seemed to have been like that, too. From 23 October to 7 December just about gets inside the six weeks’ deadline. But, 1893 in one column and 1895 in another?

Now turn to the marriage certificate of Patrick Aloysius Lane (steel smelter) and Mary Ann McCarthy (Spinster) and we see that on 10 September 1923, May is shown as being 28 years of age. Now if she was born in 1893, she was fibbing: if she was, really, 28 years old in 1923, then her birth certificate’s column 1 is wrong with its 1893. Not for the first time the student-historian learns to distrust the evidence (Key Stage 3 History).

Another interesting item is column 3 of the marriage certificate where May is shown as ‘spinster’. But we know from what she told us over the years that she had had a number of jobs. Certainly, like almost all children of her age, she left St Mary’s School, Wyndham Crescent when she was 12 years old. At some time she worked in a large store where, I can infer, she showed that ability with figures which, later, allowed he to help Dad when he had to add up columns of receipts: she was always quicker and more accurate than he was. We also heard her stories of being a nanny to, I seem to remember, a French but Cardiff-based family. All these Scannells, McCarthys fitting themselves to be mother-housekeepers; weren’t we the lucky ones? Maybe, in 1923, she was “resting between engagements” as the acting profession has it. Maybe she was wanted at home to help her Mum and/or her older sister Frances who had her own bundle of children by then? Who knows? What we do know is that there was a Nuptial Mass in St Mary’s Church, Canton where the celebrant was the well-remembered Dom Byrne, later to be Abbott of either Belmont or Ampleforth, I’m not sure which.

We also know that the newly-weds spent a honeymoon in Torquay - very classy for working classes when Torquay was part of the English Riviera. There were stories of a particular tearoom/cafe/ice-cream parlour to which they used to go when there, the memory of which obviously pleased them as they grappled with the problems of seven children and the depressed 1930s.

After the honeymoon they returned to live in Aberavon, not in the Twomey home in Alexandra Street but at 26 Alfred Street. I was born there in January 1925 - but that’s another story.

Chapter 30. The First Lane Home: Alfred Street, Aberavon

“Every picture tells a story,” they say (whoever ‘they’ may be). Probably true, although I have just done an exercise for Key Stage 4 history students asking them to comment on the way in which Stalin was ‘brushed into’ the photograph of Lenin’s arrival in Russia in 1917, and Trotsky was ‘brushed out’ of another, showing Lenin and his companions in October 1917. Maybe as Professor Joad would have said (and that dates me), it all depends on what is meant by ‘story’: a lie? a fairy tale?

And that reminds me of Dad’s tendency to ‘gild refined gold, to paint the lily’ when telling a story. One such bit of gilding and painting for which he must have been responsible was the description of his father’s occupation given to the Registrar of his marriage in 1923. “Colliery foreman, retired”, it says. Dad wasn’t going to be outshone by the description of Mum’s Dad as “Docks Foreman”: so no “Pit banksman” as in earlier certificates, or “Beerhouse keeper”, “Beer retailer” or, as on Granddad’s death certificate, “Retired Innhouse Keeper.” So, promotion for Granddad Lane.

We have already seen how members of the Lane-Scannell tribe followed a long-standing tradition by which older members of families, especially if widows or widowers, went to live with younger, married members of the tribe. Indeed, my father had been ‘taken in’ by his aunt, ‘Gran’ Twomey, who had also taken in her brother-in-law, my Granddad. So it is not surprising to see that, when my Mum and Dad went to their new home at 26 Alfred Street, Aberavon, my Granddad went to live with them. Where else should he be, except with his son and daughter-in-law? To-day we live in larger, more comfortable homes, tend to have small families, and certainly have higher incomes and standards of living. Yet, paradoxically, it is in this age of affluence that we have become accustomed to the notion that older members of families are to be put in so-called Rest Homes rather than be taken in by younger members of their families. Not all social change has been social progress.

Mum must have found Alfred Street one of the major elements in what I think as ‘culture shock.’ In the large home in King’s Road she had been a few yards away from a magnificent and well-ordered Benedictine Church, the busy shopping area of Cowbridge Road, the tram stop from which she could get a ride for 1 old penny to the bustle of fashionable St Mary’s Street, High street, St John’s Square, Cathays...In Alfred Street she was not too far from the church - small and iron roofed, which lay at the end of the Water Street line of shops from which it was a step to the main shopping street, Station Road. But there were, as there are, ‘shops’ and ‘shops’. Nothing in Aberavon to begin to compare with the selection of shops to be found in Cardiff: no Roberts, David Howells, D.H. Evans and other large stores: no delicatessens, large cafes, a choice of theatres and cinemas.... Poor Mum.

Poor indeed when she had time to look around in Alfred Street. We lived at 26 with, I think, No. 30 as the end house of the terrace. After that, for maybe a hundred yards in front of you, about a hundred yards to the left and fifty or so yards to the right, lay a huge expanse covered in ash: plenty of ash in Aberavon, from tin works, steelworks, gas works and the like. This ash lay on top of what had once been the town rubbish tip: indeed, as a child I used to watch the rubbish lorries cross the dusty (in summer) or muddy (in winter) surface to tip their loads out at the far end of the covered land. For months this rubbish would pile up. Then it would be levelled, and covered in a layer of ash so that the wasteland expanded.

I grew up thinking that ‘the Tip’ was merely the small area of ugliness that was permanently visible - though shifting as new ash was laid down. Because the wasteland which had been the old Tip, was now called the Fairfield. Euphemism wasn’t invented in the 1980s - when we called ‘the sack’ redundancy, the dole, ‘social security’, and ‘rat catchers’ health inspectors. What a good idea to call ‘the Tip’ a Fairfield: reminiscent of medieval Britain, boys and girls come out to play, maypoles and Morris Dancing.

In fact, it was a genuine Fairfield and in more ways than one. Four times a year there was a Fair with the huge expanse covered in stalls and booths: farmers and their shawled and stove-hatted wives brought flannel, clothes, small wooden household goods, as well as dairy produce, chickens, ducks and the rest for sale. In the darker evenings the booths were lit by naphtha lamps or oil lamps, so that the whole place took on a romantic appearance with crowds thronging to find hoped-for bargains, and the sellers calling out the nature and prices of their wares. And here, too, as in medieval fairs, sideshows, merry-go-rounds, boxing booths, daredevils who road motorbikes on ‘The Wall of Death’....

And such sideshows, with many additions, formed yet another kind of Fair which came twice a year for a fortnight or so. Huge wheels with flying chairs, massive roundabouts, bumper cars, as well as boxing booths, “See the Fat Lady...Flying Pig...Boneless Wonder...Fish-tailed Maiden...” and other similar shows, many with their own organ-ground-out musical accompaniment, made the Fairfield a child’s delight. “Penny for a ride on the horse-roundabout”: “Penny for a toffee apple with its crisp sugared coating”, penny to sit with Dad in a bumper car while we chased - or tried to avoid - other dads and friends.

And still more. For once a year the Fairfield became the centre for the Circus, with its many wild animals, including gigantic elephants, roaring lions and tigers, galloping ponies and glitter-clad trapeze and other ‘artistes’. But it cost six pence to get into the Big Tent and I can remember being taken on only two occasions in the 1920s and only once in the even hungrier thirties. Better value for money came from a visit to the Palace or Capitol cinemas: not for nothing were they called ‘penny gaffes’ and, until 1930, one watched silent films of daring-do.

If you ever go to Aberavon, you will have to imagine that there was no building between the end of Alfred Street and its neighbour, Michna Street and the backs of Vivian Terrace and nothing between Bailey Street and Briton Ferry. In your mind’s eye you might try to sweep away a dozen or more modern streets, the Catholic Comprehensive School, a massive housing estate as well as the Baglan Industrial complex. Much of this post-war development was built in the old Tip/Fairfield. More of it was built on the ‘Fields’ that covered the huge area between the end of our street and Baglan (going north to south) and between the end of the Tip and Briton Ferry (going from east to west). I do remember playing there when we came back to live in John Street: for here we could catch tadpoles, minnows and other small creatures which we kept in jam jars until they died - of starvation probably. Here, too, there were rivulets to be jumped, paths which led down towards the sandier dunes - or warren - which ran up from the six mile long Aberavon Beach.

So, for Mum, something of a culture shock. But, in the warren and the beach, something of saving graces. Indeed, her sisters and brothers and their children would pour down from Cardiff on excursion trains to come to enjoy what we took for granted - ‘our beach’. It was an easy ten minutes walk from our house to the beach, and Mum took full advantage of it. Why not, with three children in Alfred Street and more of us when we lived in John Street. And if we were not going with Mum, we were taken by the Carey girls and their friends, who loved playing at nurse maids to the babies they didn’t have in their own home.

To-day a long concreted promenade, hotels and other buildings as well as a massive Wimpey-built estate covers the warren, the dunes having been flattened. So, gone are the rugby pitches allocated to as many churches as asked for one - St Paul’s, St Mary’s, the Catholics.... Gone too the pleasure of walking up dune and down, of picnics some yards only from the sandy beach, of watching ‘toffs’ play golf on the links course...

But back to the house where I was born on 26 January 1925. A terraced house with its front door opening on to the pavement, it had two rooms downstairs, the larger (back) room having water supply and cooking facilities: I have earlier written about ‘Thomas the Oil’ coming to our house, so cooking and lighting must have been done by paraffin oil. I have also referred to bathing in a zinc tub in that back room - no bathroom or indoor lavatory there in those days. The Careys lived in Number 10 and I well remember the celebration when they had, built on at the back, a bathroom and indoor lavatory; but by then the two older girls were teaching in Aberavon so that family income allowed for such ‘luxuries’ in the late 1930s.

I remember my Granddad in his tall wooden chair, like the one we now have in our kitchen: indeed, that memory was the reason for buying that chair. I remember the birth of either Pat or Gerard, - probably Gerard, with Mrs Carey helping the midwife, the redoubtable Nurse Rees, who must have birthed half of Aberavon around which she cycled on her upright bike. I remember being taken in to see Mum and the newborn baby. More clearly I remember Gerard’s baptism - for a selfish reason. Uncle John O’Neil (married to Mum’s sister, Win), Uncle Lynn Roblin and Aunty Margaret and Aunty Eileen walked from Alfred Street, up Corporation Street and along part of Water Street to the Church on a Sunday afternoon. Baptisms were always on Sunday afternoons “between 3.30 and 4.30” as the Church notices reported weekly. I don’t remember anything about the ceremony itself by which Gerard became ‘priest, prophet and king.’ What stands out is walking home again, and Uncle John taking me into a small shop - supposedly open only for the sale of newspapers - and buying me a small train set. In my Jackie Coogan cap and coat, I was well pleased. Incidentally Mum didn’t come to the Baptism: in those ‘olden days’ - and indeed until after Vatican 2, mothers of newly-born had to wait for six weeks or so before going to be ‘churched’. This ceremony seems, to modern eyes, something of a slur on motherhood. The Church claimed that is was performed in memory of Our Lady’s going to the Temple for her Purification some six weeks or so after the birth of Jesus: the feast is still celebrated on 2 February each year. The mother took her baby to church, knelt at the entrance door with a lit candle in her hand and was prayed over by the priest who recited some prayers, including two Psalms. The ceremony has been dropped: too many people saw it as suggesting that the mother was, in some sense, ‘unclean’ and needed purifying: some claimed that it implied that either pregnancy or giving birth was in some way ‘unclean’.

Back to that birth certificate. On it my Dad’s occupation is given as ‘Insurance Agent’. This was a great change from the ‘steel smelter’ job which he had when he got married in 1923. Maybe the change was forced on him: by 1925 the British steel industry, along with many others, was suffering from the onset of the depression which was a slow down in the works and he, and others, were sacked. Maybe, he deliberately sought the new occupation. I am reminded of Peter Walker’s account of his choosing to become an insurance agent as soon as he could after leaving school at the age of fourteen. “The only man in our street who had a bicycle was the insurance agent. I took the job in the hope that I, too, might be able to afford to buy a bicycle.” Certainly the job was less physically demanding, than was steel smelting, although it called for Dad being out in all weathers if he wanted to collect from his clients. That’s why I remember him in his heavy, long leather coat. I don’t know whether he ever got a bicycle: nor can I ever remember him riding one or ours (although he nicked our boys’ two penny books). I do remember him having a motorbike while we lived in Alfred Street, and I remember riding behind him holding on to him for dear life as he went up and then down Beach Hill to take me to the beach.

One final memory of Number 26. In Number 24 lived a family named Rouse. The father and two of his daughters made up the small pit orchestra which played the music which accompanied the silent films which I saw at the Palace Cinema which was in Water Street, near the church and Viazzanni’s Italian cafe. I remember that they moved to Cardiff before we did (and we moved in 1930-31). And I remember the Careys and my parents talking about their move. It was caused by the introduction of talking pictures (‘the talkies’) which did away with the need for pianos and violins in pit orchestras. I don’t know what became of them, victims to technical progress - not the last such victims I was to know.