In the late 19th Century, fate drew four of my great great grandparents together in the village of Glyncorrwg in the Welsh Valleys: Frederick Hill, Elizabeth Aucutt, Charles Thomas and Elizabeth Peters. They had moved there, drawn to the excitement and growth of the industrial revolution, travelling to the end of the new railway line in the Afan Valley in South Wales. In Glyncorrwg and then the next village of Cymmer, they and their descendants made lives for themselves, and it was in a house in Cymmer that my maternal grandmother was born, Annie Aucutt Thomas, who subsequently married my grandfather, Bill Maloney of Aberkenfig.
These four, Annie’s grandparents, moved to Glyncorrwg in the 1860s primarily for employment. They stayed there to work, and also for love. The Afan Valley was, and still is, an area of outstanding natural beauty in which to raise a family, although today the loss of previous industries has almost sent the area backwards in time.
It was the 1860s when they arrived there. Across Britain, the landscape had been changing for decades. Rural life was on the decline. People moved where the work was. In their tens of thousands they gravitated to the new industrial heartlands. More than half the world’s coal and iron ore was supplied from Britain at that time, and much of it was starting to come out of Glamorganshire in South Wales, due to the deep seams of iron and coal in the many valleys there. As more collieries were set up, new railways were built to link the coastal ports to the mines, and to bring in men from all over Britain to work in them. Around the main stops for each new line, communities started to flourish. One of these was Glyncorrwg, high up in the Afan Valley.
These days, Glyncorrwg is a quiet village with little going on. When I visited in 2018, and was looking at the school which one of my gt gt grandparents first developed there, an old woman started talking to me. She told me that it was a lovely place but that there was now nothing left since the pits and other industries had been closed down. “They’ve taken it all away, everything,” she said, sadly. Like most of South Wales, this was staunch Labour country, although Plaid Cymru also do well there now.
The last Glyncorrwg mine closed in 1970, making the Afan Valley the first of the seventeen South Wales coal valleys to lose all its pits. Although miners could work elsewhere for a few years after that, the whole industry in the region was decimated following the Miners’ Strike in the 1980s and was all closed down by the 1990s.
Back in the 19th Century, it was very different. Arriving in such an area from more rural, or certainly less industrial areas, must have been an exciting culture shock. To quote my mum, writing about the move there, in her own book, A Welsh Childhood:
“When Frederick and Elizabeth got off the train at Glyncorrwg to begin their new life it was a totally different world that confronted them: the noisy railway terminus surrounded by mountains dominated the centre of the village and through a haze of smoke from the steam engines and dank polluted air they could just see the coal tip and the thriving local colliery which employed most of the men in the surrounding district. With the taste of coal dust in their mouths, they made their way through the narrow streets, where many friendly young women greeted them in Welsh, holding babies swaddled in large blankets which were then wrapped around their own bodies.”
Frederick Hill and Elizabeth Aucutt, arrived there together, in 1869, in their early twenties. They were seeking a new life together after their recent marriage just over the border in England. They soon moved next-door to another couple, Charles Thomas and Elizabeth Peters, and witnessed their marriage. The four of them became good friends and lived close to each other for several decades. Nothing symbolised this more than when the eldest son of one of the couples married one of the daughters of their next-door neighbours.
Here are the facts of their lives as I currently know them.
Frederick Hill had been training then working as a teacher in Bedwellty in Monmouthshire. He was originally from Hereford, over the border in England. There, his boatman father, Henry Hill, traded coal, brought into the small Cathedral city by the new railway line completed in 1845. He sold this coal from a boat firstly along the River Wye and then on the recently completed Hereford to Gloucester Canal. The son of John Hill, a Hereford Cabinet Maker, Henry had married, in 1841, Frederick’s mother, Harriet Howard, a labourer’s daughter, from the Herefordshire border town of Kington. Frederick was the second of their sons to be born, in 1845, in a house near the River Wye just outside the main city walls.
Frederick arrived in Glyncorrwg with his new wife, Elizabeth Aucutt, who was from the small village of Whitchurch in the Wye Valley, near Symonds Yat, 20 miles south of Hereford. Elizabeth was the daughter of Thomas Aucutt, a Hurdle Maker in Whitchurch, and Sarah Lewis, from Kymin, near Dixton – a small village riverside village on the Welsh side of the border in Monmouthshire. Kymin is a hill above Dixton and the nearby town of Monmouth. From the top of the hill, you can see across five counties. Frederick and Elizabeth had met in Monmouth when he was training to become a Registered Schoolmaster. The marriage ceremony had taken place at St Dubricius Church in Whitchurch.
Their move seems to have been in response to advertisements seeking a teacher for a new school in the village of Glyncorrwg, and a woman to teach sewing in the village. When they arrived there, the ‘school’ was held in a single room annexed to the Church. With the introduction of new national legislation, a couple of years later, enabling the formation of local School Boards, the school started to expand under Frederick’s leadership, providing teaching for growing communities down the valley in Cymmer and Abergwynfi, as well as building new premises elsewhere in the village in 1885.
Frederick and Elizabeth Hill were soon to be living next-door to another couple with whom they became good friends: Charles and Elizabeth Thomas, who were of pure Welsh stock.
Elizabeth Peters’ wedding with Charles Thomas was her second marriage in Glyncorrwg. She was a widow when the Hills first arrived in the village. Her first husband, William Davies, whom she had moved from Neath to marry, had been killed in a colliery or railway accident (accounts vary), and both these industries took many lives in the Valleys at that time, with health and safety being sacrificed for profit in almost every workplace in the area. The website www.WelshCoalmines.co.uk lists the names of hundreds of men killed every year in the pits at that time, with several named William Davies dying in the late 1860s.
Elizabeth’s father, John Peters, came from a family of grocers in Neath. He was recorded as a shipping wharf clerk at one time, but seems to have developed his own specialist trade of Druggist, which became known as Chemist. John’s wife, Rachel Rees, was herself a grocer’s daughter, and became a seamstress in Neath. There is mention of Elizabeth working once as a chemist herself, but she met her second husband Charles whilst in employment as a governess at a large local farm owned by the Jenkins family who were one of the richest in the area. After William’s death, she was left struggling to bring up their family, until she married for a second time.
Elizabeth’s new husband, and the fourth of my great great grandparents in this story, was Charles Thomas, who was around ten years older than her. She took his name from when they married in 1870, and they moved in together with all her Davies children. Charles had arrived in the village at least a decade earlier: in 1861, he was recorded as living alone in a hut in Road Street, Glyncorrwg. His occupation then was building walls. He had come to the village after years working as a Common Carrier selling produce from his grandfather’s farm on a horse and cart, to houses and villages from Cowbridge to the Afan Valley.
The marriage between Charles and Elizabeth was solemnised at Glyncorrwg Church on 27 May 1870, with the witnesses being Frederick and Elizabeth Hill.
The 1871 Census for Glyncorrwg shows that the Hill family and the Thomas family lived next to each other in Old Stone Row, a set of small, terraced houses high up on one of the hills on the edge of the village. Frederick was a Schoolmaster and Charles was a Coal Miner.
Ten year later, Charles, still a Coal Miner on the 1881 census, was in a house in Stone Row with Elizabeth and seven Thomas children, the eldest being their son James. Frederick now had an address in Lower Stone Row and he and Elizabeth had 5 children, the third born being their daughter Emily.
By 1891 both families had moved to new houses one street down the hill, in Baxter Terrace. Almost every household in the streets around them had a single occupation: Coal Miner, for all males old enough be made to work. That applied to the 14 year old Hill son, Frederick, and even 12 year old Thomas Thomas, as well as three of his Thomas brothers: James, 20, William, 19, and David, 15. The daughters of the families were mostly still at home, with no occupational information being recorded for the Thomas girls Catherine, 13, Elizabeth, 9, and Gwenllian, 11, nor for 16 year old Emily Hill. Susannah Hill, aged 17, was an apprentice, and her younger sister Louisa, 10, was still at school.
What records do not show is when James Thomas and Emily Hill first became boyfriend and girlfriend. They knew each other all their lives, and on 23rd May 1893, in Glyncorrwg Church, they became husband and wife, with witnesses to the ceremony being recorded as father Frederick and sister Susie Hill. The married couple, James still a miner, moved down the valley to the next village, Cymmer, and took up residence in 21 Lloyds Terrace, where the family and their descendants remained for many years.
Of James’s and Emily’s parents, Frederick Hill was the first to die, at the age of 50, on 27th May 1896, at home in Glyncorrwg. The South Wales Daily News reported that his burial, held on Sunday 31st May, was one of the largest funerals ever seen in the valley. The school staff, and all their assistants, all the Education Board, and members of the District Council were present. The cortege extended all the way from the house to the church.
Elizabeth Hill (Aucutt), only lived another year, dying on 17 August 1897 in Glyncorrwg, at the age of 53. Charles Thomas lived until he was about 72, dying in Glyncorrwg in 1902. On the 1901 census he was recorded as being a retired Coal Hewer, born in Cowbridge. Elizabeth Thomas (Peters) lived on for two more years, dying in Glyncorrwg in 1904 at the age of 64.
Of their children, my great grandfather James Thomas, aged 43, collapsed and died of a Thrombosed Iliac Vein at Lloyds Terrace, Cymmer, on 9 September 1914, just as the Great War was starting. He was recorded on the death certificate as a Coal Hewer. My mum in her book describes him as someone who tried to organise union protests against poor conditions for miners and lost his job for doing so. His brother David Thomas, of 9 Baxter Terrace, Glyncorrwg, signed the Entry of Death. After the war, Emily Thomas (Hill) remarried, her husband being a cousin, Frederick Hill. She was born a Hill and died one, much later, in 1958, at the age of 84.
The stories of James and Emily, and their eleven children, as well as the two others that Emily had after James died, are for another time. For the record, these children were: Lizzie Thomas, Lilian Thomas, Emily Thomas, Louisa Thomas, Frederick Thomas, Millicent Thomas, Charles Thomas, Harry Thomas, Elizabeth (Bessie) Thomas, Annie Aucutt Thomas (my grandmother), Adeline Thomas, William Hill, Mary Hill. Of these, I used to spend regular childhood holidays with Bessie in Aberavon, and Mary in Broadstairs, Kent, where she ran a guesthouse on the front, as well as seeing Addie several times each year with her husband Tom Bowen in Ealing, London. Sadly, Annie Thomas, my grandmother, died of Tuberculosis in 1944 when my mum was only 12.
