Seal of Roger Sturmy, the younger c. 1218 (Penrice & Margam, charter 1986)

Even to archivists familiar with medieval documents in their day to day work, seals have never been high on their list of priorities, neither in terms of describing them in detail nor in terms of undertaking conservation or preservation work to ensure their survival.  They have been viewed solely as a form of authentication, mostly for title deeds, and as a method of guaranteeing transactions, and are not considered worthy of attention in comparison to the deeds themselves.

This dismissive, almost blasé, view of seals is set to change as a result of the Library’s current exhibition ‘Seals in context: Medieval Wales and the Welsh Marches’, one of the outcomes of a project undertaken by the Department of History and Welsh History at Aberystwyth in collaboration with the Department of History and Welsh History at Bangor University. The exhibition includes a selection of seals recorded from across Wales and the Marches, many of them held at the Library, including early medieval seals appended to the Penrice and Margam charters and to the Pitchford Hall estate deeds.

Seal of Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester and Hertford, c. 1218-1230 (Penrice & Margam, charter 2046)

As a result of this exhibition, there can no longer be any justification for viewing seals as mere appendages to documents, but rather they must be considered as valuable sources of evidence throwing light on numerous aspects of Welsh medieval society.  Included are seals not only of noblemen and Welsh princes, including that of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth (‘Llywelyn Fawr’, 1173-1240), but also of women and those of lower status in the community.  They range in design from the traditional equestrian seal and heraldic shields, to birds and beasts of all kinds, hares riding hounds, and a grotesque creature with a man’s head.

As well as the exhibition, a presentation by two members of the seals project team will be held at the Library’s Drwm on 23 May at 1.15 p.m.

Alwyn J. Roberts

Jones family group, ca. 1885 (jth01360)

One of the bonuses of working on a digitisation project such as the Europeana Libraries Project is the opportunity it provides to reacquaint yourself with some of the library’s collections. As part of my first job here at the Library, on the desk of the old Department of Pictures and Maps, the John Thomas photographic collection was one that I returned to again and again, as a matter of personal interest as well as in relation to my day-to-day work. Twenty years later I find myself again working with this collection as we prepare them for access through the Europeana and European Library websites.

Primarily a commercial photographer, a mainstay of Thomas’s work was the portrait photograph. While looking through some of Thomas’s family portraits recently, I was struck by how even these formal photographs offer an insight into the social mores and aspirations of the late Victorian period. Two photographs in particular, one of the Jones Family (no relation, as far as I know!) and one of a large family group in Chwilog, brought this home to me.

Large family group, Chwilog, ca. 1885 (jth02068)

The family photograph was clearly an important event for both families and was an opportunity to express the family’s respectability. For the Jones family this is reflected in their formal dress. But what I find of most interest here is the contrast between the clothes worn by the Jones family and their surroundings – the photograph seems to have been taken in a backstreet or yard. The sheet hung behind them provides the illusion of a more salubrious setting; Thomas would crop his photographs so that the final image would seem to have been taken elsewhere, in this case in a drawing room or library.

For the Chwilog family group, with grandparents, parents and children all in their Sunday best, the photo is also a way of displaying their respectability. However, what I find of most interest here is the inclusion of the horse with the family group. The family it seems has taken the opportunity to record for posterity what was of value to them, from the bonds between family members to the well-kept front garden and a prized possession, the horse.

Douglas Jones

Less well known are other Welsh connections with Titanic, which as we all know, sunk a hundred years ago this week. Designed to rival Cunard’s luxury Ocean Liners, she was designed to be the last word in comfort and luxury, with an on-board gymnasium, swimming pool, libraries, high-class restaurants and opulent cabins. All this must have seemed a world away from  the sprawl of Victorian terraced houses at Treherbert and Tonypandy.

Dai Bowen (seated) one of the two boxers who lost his life on the Titanic

Amongst those who were to sample something of both were two Welsh boxers, Leslie Williams and Dai Bowen. Quite how much luxury and opulence they were to encounter as third class passengers is unclear, but it was certainly a world away from the collieries and blacksmiths shops they had worked in. Both were successful boxers at home in Wales, Dai Bowen being current Welsh lightweight champion, though Williams being the older of the two was the better known.  They had signed up for a series of contests in America and booked third class tickets costing £16.10p each for the privilege of sailing on the Titanic. Both perished and only Williams body was recovered, identified by his effects – two pocket books, two gold rings, one pair silver cuff links, papers, knife, $30 in gold and a total of £5 16s 6d (£5.83p) in cash along with his ticket giving his address as 59 Primrose Street, Tonypandy.

We all know the legend of the dance band on the Titanic, playing until the last moment. Two of the band members were Wallace Hartley and Jock Hume. Some years before both had enjoyed a summer season playing at the end of the pier at Aberystwyth.

William Troughton

Photos of ‘Frongoch POWs‘ is the heading of one a collection of photos at the National Library by the Bala chemist, H. W. Lloyd.

I immediately thought of the Irish Republican prisoners kept there after the Easter Rising of 1916 in what became known as the ‘university of the revolution’. An interesting account of their containment has been written by Lyn Ebenezer and published, first in Welsh in 2005 as Y Pair Dadeni – Hanes Gwersyll y Fron-goch and then, in 2006, in English, as Fron-goch Camp 1916 – And the Birth of the IRA. There is also a trilingual plaque, Irish, English and Welsh, to their incarceration at the site of the old camp which is now Ysgol Bro Tryweryn primary school.

German POWs at Fron-goch

The Germans arrived there on 25 March 1915 – exactly a month and a year before the Irish Easter Rising, whose defeat would see the next group of prisoners to arrive at the damp camp near Bala.

The photos, it seems to me, were taken in one day. There are many informal photos of a stage production – clowns, singers, an orchestra and men convinsingly dressed as a women (see above). The others are of the more formal, Edwardian (or should I say, Wilhelmine) military pose.

What became of these men after the War?

I’m trying to guess their ages. Is it just me, or do people in old photos always look older than people today? Maybe it’s their clothing or moustaches or the wrinkles on their weather-beaten cheeks that makes them look older. But most of the men would be in their twenties or thirties. Did they return to join the Freikorp or even the Spartakists  or, did they, like most Germans, try and keep away from the extremes? Did they return to Metz only to find it was no longer in Germany but in France or that their village in Upper Silesia was now part of Poland? Were their savings wiped out in the hyperinflation of the 1920s? Were any of them Jewish? Did the younger ones fight in the Second World War?

With the turmoil of the First World War and its tragic aftermath, those months in Fron-goch may have seen an almost idyllic retreat of fellowship and recreation.

I wonder if any of them ever returned to Bala and Fron-goch and if there are any stories, in Wales or Germany, of their time at the Camp?

Siôn Jobbins

It’s not often that the National Library of Wales is the venue for a Wales film premiere, but that’s what will happen on Thursday 29 March as we screen The Four Horsemen.

OK – so it’s not your latest Hollywood blockbuster, but it’s certainly a potential myth buster! The Four Horsemen is a documentary film about the current financial, political and environmental situation (some would say crisi) the West finds itself in. It’s produced by the Renegade Economist people and includes interviews and footage with 23 leading political thinkers and financial advisors.

Among the well known names are the philosopher Noam Chomsky and the economist and former World Bank Chief Economist, Joseph Stiglitz. The popular stock-broker cum financial commentator, Max Keiser, also pitches in – many will know him from his cult programme on the Russia Today news channel. The Financial Times’s Assistant Editor, Gillian Tett  also gives her views as does Michael Hudson who’s advised governments across the globe on the need to shift taxation from labour and on to land value. The political spectrum is wide and includes Phillip Blonde of the Res Publica think tank and proponent of ‘Red Toryism’.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A session by the film’s producer, Ross Ashcroft.

As the home to the Welsh Political Archive and also the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales, the screening of the Four Horsemen will bring together two important parts of the Library’s work. It will also be a development on one of our most popular recent events, a talk by the BBC’s Business Editor, Robert Peston.

Who said ideas were dead?

Siôn Jobbins

Soldiers and horses at Llandeilo, c. 1912

This letter which my colleague Stephen Benham came across whilst cataloguing the records of the firm of solicitors, Roberts & Evans of Aberystwyth (temp. ref. C10/1/2), relates the experience of Major Stanley Rimmer, of the Royal Field Artillery.  He describes the scale of the operation to collect horses soon after the outbreak of the Great War.  It provides an insight into the hardship faced by communities at the loss of their valuable assets, an essential means of transportation and labour for many which would undoubtedly impact on their livelihoods, for such poor return:

Woolton
Liverpool
11 Aug. 1914
. . . I have nearly 200 horses in my charge & all sorts of equipment & stores which have meant a worrying time since last Wednesday, & shall be glad when things are more settled & definite.  It has been an extraordinary experience taking peoples horses off them compulsorily & frequently for much less than their value.
Yours truly
Stanley Rimmer

On the Oscars theme, a number of Welsh actors have been nominated for these coveted awards over the years, including Ray Milland, Mervyn Johns, Richard Burton, Rachel Roberts, Stanley Baker, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Jonathan Pryce, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Michael Sheen, Ioan Gruffudd, and Christian Bale.  Hugh Griffith (1912–1980), was nominated on three occasions and won Best Supporting Actor for his role as Sheik Ilderim in ‘Ben-Hur’ (1959).  On Wednesday (21st March) the Welsh broadcaster, Hywel Gwynfryn, will be giving what promises to be a fascinating portrayal of this great Welsh actor, when he recounts how he came to write a biography of Hugh Griffith.  The presentation, ‘Yr Arab o Fôn – a fi’ (‘The Arab from Anglesey – and me’), will be held here in the Drwm; simultaneous translation is provided.

Siân Bowyer

The project has presented the Library with many new challenges since 2009 and we are still on target to complete the digitisation (scanning and Optical Character Recognition) during 2012. We are now busy completing many of the in-house digitisation work and ensuring that a steady stream of scanned newspapers are delivered offsite to be processed by Jouve, our external OCR contractor.

Newspaper and periodical titles should start to appear online before Summer 2012 and we are thrilled at the prospect of making this new digital collection freely available on our website. This will not only add value to our existing services but will also mean that worldwide audiences, wherever they may be, will be able to access these collections in new ways and discover countless nuggets of genealogical facts, forgotten incidents and interesting miscellany that would otherwise remain hidden within the covers of heavy and dusty volumes in Aberystwyth.

For those unable to wait, here are some interesting articles I stumbled upon today as I was working on the County Observer, and Monmouthshire Central Advertiser, dated 18 February 1871.

Of course, a coastal map of Wales is that, a map of the coast. It was there to help navigate the coast which was the quickest way of traveling and avoiding the brigands and muddy tracks inland. But to a modern eye the coast looks positively empty.

The maps start from the north east, follow Anglesey‘s treacherous coastline and goes south.  Caernarfon a walled town, Pwllheli a couple of streets, Llandudno a couple of houses, Swansea a small market town. Aberystwyth is seen to have grown in the intervening years between Lewis Morris and Williams Morris’s map … or maybe, it’s just better drawn.

One sees how the landscape has changed. As an Aberystwyth resident, the fantastically-called Bryn Diodde (misery/pain hill) on the seafront seems to have been obliterated since it was included in both maps.

There are towns which simply aren’t on the map at all.

Rhyl – not even a glint in the tourists eye. Not even mentioned below Rhuddlan or St Asaph.

Abaeraeron, the beautiful Regency town barely appears on William’s map having only been built in its modern form in 1807.

Port Talbot, like a Welsh Tel Aviv, is yet to rise on the empty sand dunes.

It’s a lost age – a Wales of half a million people not 3 million. A slow, pastorial Wales. Outside the market towns and south Pembrokeshire, a solidly Welsh-speaking Wales.  For a sense of the space between settlements and low density of population, one would need today to travel to the Balkans.

But not a quiet Wales, either. A Wales of religious revivals, of rowdy market fairs and dancing, of blind harpist plying their trade in pubs. A Wales of Tribannau Morgannwg sung to drive the ox to plough, of the Fari Lwyd and sports like Cnapan and Bando played on those ‘empty spaces’.

A lost Wales -  with the lost sound of Welsh bagpipes played at weddings and lost Welsh accents like the Gwenhwyseg with it’s ‘a denau’ (thin ‘a’) similar to the ‘a’ pronounced in Montgomeryshire Welsh today). An ‘a’ which sounds closer to an ‘e’ … some would say today’s hard ‘a’ in the Cardiffians ‘Kairdiff‘.

The maps of the Lewisiaid Môn (the Lewis’s of Anglesey) aren’t complete but they’re a small off shore view of a country which was hardly mapped then and of a time not fully appreciated today.

Siôn Jobbins

Claire Tomalin, in her recent biography of Dickens, draws attention to another short journey undertaken by the novelist, this time on the morning of Wednesday, 8 June 1870 – the day of his fatal illness – to visit his neighbour, the landlord of the Falstaff Inn, and to cash a cheque for £22. Having raised £43 (the equivalent of over £3,200 today) during the last 3 days of his life, a substantial amount of money should have been discovered at Gad’s Hill Place when Dickens died that Thursday evening. However, one of the first actions of his housekeeper and sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth after his death was to write to the family solicitor to say that only £6.6s.3d had been found in the pockets of Dickens’s suit. What had happened to the remaining £36.13s.9d?

Claire Tomalin in The Invisible Woman: the story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (1991) attempted to construct an alternative narrative to the widely accepted account of Dickens’s last day of consciousness, Wednesday, 8 June 1870. Drawing on some eyewitness accounts, Tomalin suggested that Dickens secretly travelled to London that day to visit his mistress, Nelly Ternan at their house in Linden Grove, where he gave her ‘housekeeping money’. It was there that he collapsed, and from there that he was taken in a closed-carriage to die respectfully at home in Rochester.

The Tomalin theory has been wildly debated, but it seems that the National Library’s cheque may be another of the small pieces that make up a new picture of Charles Dickens’s final days. The recipient of our £21 may well have been the mysterious Nelly Ternan …

Maredudd ap Huw

This will be the sixth consecutive year the Library has attended, to what has become great showcase of our work and collections. The Library is the premier source for all Welsh genealogical research, and we hope that the visitors to this weekend’s event will visit the Library’s stand to take advantage of our presence, and  to discuss their Welsh ancestry with the experts attending, under the banner of the Welsh Help Desk.

Special presentations will be held during the Show, highlighting Welsh genealogy research, and sources at the Library. These will be held on Saturday 25 February at 10.00 a.m. and Sunday 26 February at 3.15 p.m. 

Guests visiting this year’s stand will include BBC’s news anchorman and presenter Huw Edwards, together with another familiar face in London Welsh circles,

Sir Deian Hopkin, who has just taken up his role at the Library’s President, will also pay us a visit.

The Library’s unparalleled resources include parish registers, probate records, nonconformist chapel records, estate papers, maps, photographs, drawings, paintings, pedigree books, Great Sessions Records, local history books, journals, newspapers, census etc. And, especially for this event, we will have access to several indexes which are not currently available on our online website. The Library has also launched a successful online probate index where you can view our wills on our website http://cat.llgc.org.uk/probate

We are very much looking forward to welcoming you to our stand.

If you have any friends or relatives in the area who would appreciate some help with their genealogy – they are welcome to call in!

For show details and tickets visit: www.whodoyouthinkyouarelive.co.uk

Cyril Evans