Lle Llywela

Tucked away in a box at the back of a cupboard, we have a huge collection of old family photos, some of them dating back over a century, which a few years ago I sorted through and scanned electronically. Quite a few of those photos are in poor condition, as we see here, so I’ve been having a go at restoration. What do you think? The results aren’t perfect, but do improve the image!

The caption on the back of this particular photo reads ‘Grannie Green and Granma Bitterly’, which places it somewhere around the turn of the 20th century, I’d say, looking at their approximate ages here.

Grannie Green was my great-grandmother, born Blanche Sara Ludlow in Cardiff in 1880; her mother died when she was 14, and four years later, at the age of 18, she married Samuel Green. He was eight years older than Blanche, and, family legend has it, met her when she was 10 and he was 18 and then waited eight years for her to grow up so he could marry her - the very idea of it seems scandalous today! Blanche and Samuel married in June 1898 and their first child, Alec, was born in December of the same year - definitely something of a shotgun marriage there! They had 12 children, who all survived into adulthood, and the 10th, born in 1918, was my grandmother, Vera. Blanche died of peritonitis in 1931 when Vera was 13 years old, while Samuel lived until 1960 - living with Vera and her husband Arthur after their marriage, despite their growing family. We still have the telegram the family received informing them that Samuel had died in hospital overnight - it arrived just as they were about to set off to visit him. It's so perfunctory: 'regret to inform Samuel Green passed away please call my office'. Damn, that's cold! But you paid by the character for telegrams!

The Bitterly connection is a bit more…complicated to unravel. ‘Granma Bitterly’ would have been Samuel Green’s mother, born Sarah French in Cardiff in December 1850, whose husband Thomas was born Thomas Bitterly in Wolverhampton in 1849 and seems to have changed his name to Green at some point in his youth, possibly about the same time that he moved down to Cardiff - a fresh name for a fresh start? There’s a whiff of scandal about the whole thing - especially since we know that Thomas Green also spent about five years in prison in the late 1870s after being convicted of wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm - can’t have been easy for Sarah, left alone to care for three small children in his absence! They went on to have three more after he came home. The family were officially known as Green, listed as such on their marriage certificate and censuses, and none of their children ever used any name but Green, but the caption on the back of this photo implies that Thomas and Sarah also still used the name Bitterly, informally at least! Of course, the full story with all the whys and wherefores of the name change is long since lost to time. We’ll never know what really happened. Sarah died in 1932, outliving her daughter-in-law by one year, while Thomas died in 1934, taking the secrets of his past to the grave with him.

About a week or so ago, we lost one of the old fellas from my church. His name was Reg Howe and he was 90, so, you know, he had a good innings, and yesterday was his funeral. My Nan went to the funeral, because she'd known him when they were both young, and she brought with her stories of how he had courted my grandmother when they were both teens but he was an incorrigible flirt in those days so she ditched him for my grandfather (also called Reg) instead. Nan also brought with her photos, taken at a party thrown by her parents in their house at Goodrich St, Caerphilly, toward the end of the Second World War.

So here's dear old Reg Howe as I never knew him - dressed up to the nines in drag and posing first with an American soldier friend called Paul Gossett and then with a group, my great-grandfather Arthur in the front

This is my great-grampy Arthur being very politically incorrect, taking off Hitler - well, it was the end of a long, hard war

My grandmother Betty on the left with two friends

And a group pose in the back garden

Just a quick little snapshot into another age, a party at my great-grandparents' family home, so very many years ago!

Today I went to the funeral of my great-aunt.

Yes, another one. This is the third since Christmas - they seem to go in waves. And I have - or used to have - a lot of them. My four grandparents had no less than 25 siblings between them, so when you add in the spouses...yeah, that's a lot of great-uncles and great-aunts. Every time we bury one, I think surely there can't be many left, and then I do a headcount and realise...yeah, still quite a few to go.

So today we buried Aunty Eileen, my maternal grandfather's youngest sister, aged 75. It was a nice service. Her husband John cried all the way through, which made me very emotional because...well honestly, I defy anyone to watch an 80-year-old man weeping for the wife he'd loved for the best part of 60 years and not have a tear in their eye!

I always like to write up a bit of a tribute after these things, for the genealogical tag of my journal, so this is Eileen:


Eileen was the youngest of three children born to my great-grandparents Billy and Beattie, the other two being Phyllis and my granddad Reg (pictured in this icon). When Eileen was 15 her 20-year-old neighbour John told her he wanted to marry her someday and she said no...only to change her mind a few years later; they were married 55 years. After their marriage, Eileen and John lived with Eileen's parents Billy and Beattie in their house on Ferry Road, Cardiff.

This is John outside the house on Ferry Road - with my great-granddad's 'chimney sweep' sign up behind him. After my great-grandparents died, Eileen and John bought the house and still lived there until fairly recently.


Phyllis and her husband Brian also lived in the house on Ferry Road, so when my Mum lost her mother and her dad took her back home to live with his parents...well, it was a bit of a squash in that house for a few years there. My poor Mum had to share a room with her dad, with a curtain strung up down the middle of it to give them a bit of privacy! At least until Phyllis and her family moved out. None of them had any money, but they did have a lot of love - a real, old-fashioned Grangetown family.

Here's Eileen with her mother Beattie and with my 9-year-old Mum shortly after she lost her mother and moved to Ferry Road to live with them.


Eileen went out to work, so her mother looked after the children - with my mum generally lumbered with babysitting duties in the evenings. Eileen liked a drink, in spite of being on barbituates for epilepsy, and she loved parties and dancing and friendship and fun. She had three children and a whole stack of grandchildren and great-grandchildren and loved her family immensely, feisty and fierce. Her funeral today came on the 12th anniversary of her sister Phyllis's death, much to the sorrow of Phyl's three children.

And that's another one lost to cancer. My granddad, both of his sisters, both of their parents, plus every one of their uncles and aunts not lost to the war...it doesn't bode well, really.

RIP, Aunty Eileen.

With the prospect of moving lurking large on the horizon, I've started going through my cupboards, sorting through boxes and bags of stuff that I've not touched in years. And in one of those old folders, I found this:

It's a picture of my great-grandparents, Edith and Alf, that I didn't even know I had - the best picture of them I've ever seen, as well, even if it is only a photocopy. How did I not realise I had it? Now that I've found it again, I remember exactly where it came from. Years and years ago, before Mum and I did all our family tree research, there was a big family party for my great-aunt Ivy's 80th birthday. All her surviving siblings came, and one of them brought copies of a few old family photos and was dishing them out left, right and centre. Great-uncle Phillip, I think. Or it might have been Cyril, but I think it was Phillip. So he gave this to me, probably the only time I ever met him, and I put it away without realising what it was. Well, I've found it again now and am very grateful to him!

He also gave me this:

That's Alf and Edith again a bit earlier, in the late 1930s with their 10 surviving children - there are multiple versions of this photo shoot floating around the family, but I love this one because all the kids look so happy and smiley. Also because g-u Phillip wrote all the names on it for me, and put his oldest sister Ivy down as 'Ive', which is cute!

Finding those photos tonight reminded me of that party, celebrating Ivy's 80th birthday with eight of her nine siblings still alive to see it. We lost Ivy just this spring, of course, at the grand old age of 93, and today the youngest sister, Marion, is the only one left, so it's nice to look back on this picture of them all, young and smiling with their lives ahead of them.

I know, I know, these holiday picspams are going on forever! What can I say? We packed a lot into a week and I like taking photos and showing them off!

One of the places we went during our week in Norfolk was Bressingham, the home of Blooms, which is a nationwide garden centre chain. Heh, I visited the Cardiff branch just last weekend, in fact! Bressingham is the home of the original garden centre, though, established by Alan Bloom, with his sons Robert and Adrian continuing to build up the family business after him. But the thing about Blooms of Bressingham is that it isn't just a garden centre. There's the garden centre, sure...but then there's also the gardens of Bressingham Hall, which are stunning, and there is also a steam museum - and it is also the home of the Official Dad's Army Collection!

( Piccies behind the cut )

Battle of the Atlantic commemorated

It's really poignant to see news articles this week remembering the merchant seamen killed during the war. I wish my granddad had lived to see it - he always felt that his little brother's death was forgotten by the country. My great-uncle Bobby was just 17 years old when he joined the merchant navy in 1941, and was killed only a few weeks later when his ship was shelled by a submarine and set on fire, making it impossible to launch the life boats. Bobby escaped on a raft, but died of his injuries and was buried at sea.

My Dad's cousin Kay has been sorting through all her mum's stuff since she died just before Christmas (that was my great-aunt Marj), and she's started scanning a bunch of old photos and posting them on Facebook for the family - much as I did with Lel's photo collection a couple of years ago. Marj's dad Alf lived with her in his old age, so she ended up with all the old family photos from that side of the family, which means the pictures Kay is putting up now are of a branch of the family I'd not seen many photos of before now - including my own grampy as a toddler, the youngest picture I've ever seen of him.

My gramp is the little dwt standing in front of his father - looking at the ages of the children, it must have been sometime in 1917 - my grampy Arthur would have been two years old in Dec 1916 and his brother Kenneth was born in Sept 1916; they are pictured with their parents, Alf and Edith, who'd have been only 23 and 21 years old at the time. I've always thought I mostly took after my nanna Vera's side of the family, but looking at Edith here...well, I can see myself, put it that way!

For comparison, this is the family again about 20 years later, in the late 1930s - by which time it had grown exponentially! Edith was notorious around Splott, where the family lived, for always having one in the pram, one on her hip and another one on the way!


I'd always known that my great-grandfather Alf served in the First World War - he was gassed and was never quite the same after, so the stories go. I'd never seen any pictures of him in uniform before - but Kay has scanned quite a few.


There aren't any younger pictures of Alf, but there is one of his parents, Thomas and Lavinia, taken probably sometime in the 1880s or 90s, when the family was still living in Bristol (they'd moved to Cardiff by 1901)


And there is also a rather sweet photo of my great-grandmother Edith as a child - she was born in 1896 and looks to be maybe 6 years old here, or thereabouts?


I'm now interested to see what else Kay turns up!

There's a for sale sign in my garden today. Times, they are a-changing. And so I find myself reminiscing about the past, and for that reason I'm going to have a 'dear photograph' moment - but for a different house.

( Continued behind the cut )

Over the weekend, my parents started sorting through some of the stuff they'd left in cupboards in the house where I currently live, ready for when they put the house on the market. At the back of one of the cupboards, they found a box containing a bunch of commemorative coins - including a couple of very special ones that Mum had almost forgotten she had. I certainly never knew they existed.

This is the first one, front and back:

It's a commemorative medal dating to July 1907, struck to commemorate the opening of the Queen Alexandra Dock in Cardiff, which was celebrated by a royal visit from Queen Alexandra herself, accompanied by King Edward VII and Princess Victoria. It was originally presented to my Great-Great-Grandfather Samuel Tarr, one of the labourers who helped to build the dock.

Queen Alexandra Dock is still there today - it is the only working dock left in Cardiff, and sits close to the area now known as Porth Teigr, the home of the new BBC film studios and the Doctor Who Experience, which was built on top of the old dry dock, where Samuel's son, my Great-Grampy Billy, spent his whole working life.

With the QA Dock coin is another, larger commemorative plaque struck in bronze - this one a memorial plaque that was given to the families of servicemen killed in action in World War I, accompanied by a very bald, typewritten message from the Palace, acknowledging the sacrifice of a loved one. The name on the plaque is George Tarr - that was Samuel's youngest brother. He was just 19 years old when he was killed, somewhere in France in May 1918.


There aren't any photographs of Samuel, so here's a picture of his son, my Great-Grampy Billy, with his own son, my Granddad Reg (also pictured in this icon) - that's the line these objects have come down through to Mum, and then me.

Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday have fallen on the same day this year. So today I am remembering my great-great-grandfather John Melean, who was wounded in the final weeks of the Great War in 1918 and died of those wounds in hospital in Southampton in February 1919, leaving behind a widow and 9 young children.


And I am remembering my great-great-grandfather Alf Browning, who survived the Great War and came home and fathered a long family - but, having been gassed, was never quite the same again, right up to the day he died.


And I am remembering my great-great-grandfather George Ward, who was fortunate enough to survive intact but never forgot his experiences.


I am also remembering my great-uncle Bobby Browning (son of Alf, mentioned above), who ran away to join the Merchant Navy in 1941 when he was just 17 years old, and was drowned just a few weeks later when his ship was torpedoed.


And his brothers, including my grandfather, who all served in the Forces in some capacity or other


And so many millions of other soldiers down the ages, who either lost their lives or survived scarred in some way, whether mentally or physically, because man simply cannot seem to live in peace with man.

Lest we forget.