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.
