William Harry’s family was from the village
of Radyr in Glamorganshire, Wales.
Members of the family had lived and farmed there since at least the
early 1700s. William was born in January
1835 and he was baptised in the Radyr Parish Church on 17 January. William’s parents, Mary (nee Williams) and
John, had only married on 11 November 1834 – a little less than two months
before William’s birth. Mary was 16 years old when William was born and she
turned 17 in April 1835. John was 20
years old.
The Welsh had followed a patronymic naming system up until the
middle ages, where the last name of the son was the father’s first name. This system was still used in some rural area
of Wales up until the 19th Century, but the
country predominantly used fixed surnames. Mary and John adapted this naming
system to suit themselves, and named their child Mary’s surname.
Over the next 19 years William was joined
by nine siblings, eight of whom were brothers!
William became a blacksmith and worked in
the railways. In the 1850s William and his brother John moved to work in Panteg
railway works. William was working as an iron bar roller. This task involved
operating the machine that rolls the iron into required shapes, most usually
for train tracks. During this time he met a woman named Mary Williams,
ironically the same name as his mother.
William married Mary in Stokes Croft,
Bristol on 2 July 1861. Bristol is 60 kilometres southeast of Trevethin. The Parish register describes them both as
residents of the town, but they were both living in Monmouthshire at the time
of the 1861 Census in April. It would seem that they were ‘on their way’ to
Swindon, Wiltshire.
In 1840 Swindon
was selected as a place to establish an engine building and maintenance works
for Great Western Railway (GWR) Company.
The GWR was so named as it was working on
railways west of London. The “greatness”
of the distances in the United Kingdom are not so great when compared to the
vast distances in North America and Australia.
By 1864 the GWR network consisted of 955 kilometres of broad gauge, 309 kilometres of
mixed gauge (three gauges enabling both standard and broad trains to travel
along the route) and 653 kilometres of standard gauge; a total of 1900
kilometres crisscrossing the West, Wales and the Midlands of England (not much
further than the distance between Brisbane and Melbourne!).
Swindon
had been a small market town until the mid 1800s: there was no existing heavy
industry in the area. Workers were moved in from the rest of the country,
particularly from Wales. A village for
workers was built about two kilometres north of Swindon. The new houses were built in what is now
known as Cambria Place and Cambria Bridge. Cambria is a form of the word Cymru, the Welsh
name for Wales. The area was also called
New Swindon. Mary and William Harry were two of the many
Welsh people who migrated to Swindon to work for the GWR. New Swindon grew quickly. In 1895 R Jefferies, in “Jefferies’ Land: A
History of Swindon and its Environs” wrote:
“Houses were built at a rate which
astonished the country, and a new class of men, hitherto unknown in the
neighbourhood, appeared, men who worked hard, earned high wages, and were
determined to live upon the best they could afford. The agricultural labourer was content with
bread and beer, the mechanic must have meat, groceries, and other comforts. …
Tradesmen found New Swindon a profitable place – a Wilshire California.”
Mary and William Harry arrived in Swindon,
Wiltshire, England sometime after their marriage but before the birth of their
first child in 1863. All of Mary and
William’s eight children – seven males and one female – were born in Swindon. Despite the fact they family lived in
Wiltshire, they retained much of their Welsh roots. In many ways this was
understandable and reasonable. The family lived in a Welsh enclave in Swindon,
they spent time in Wales and they possibly spoke Welsh at home.
Mary and William’s first child, Thomas
William, was born in early 1863. About
15 months later, Frederick Edward was born and a third son, John, was born a
year later in early 1865. Two more
sons, William and Henry (Harry – thus called Harry Harry), were born in 1868
and 1870 respectively.
In 1871, at the Census on 2 April, the
Harry family was residing in Cambria Place, New Swindon. The
household included Mary and William with their five sons along with Mary’s
mother, Ann Williams, and four older children of Mary’s sister, Ann. Not far away lived William’s two brothers,
one of whom was married, who were also working on the railway. Another brother had also been living in the
area but had moved just prior to the Census.
Mary
and William had a further three children: Mary Ann, the only daughter, born 1872;
Charles Evan born 1874; and Alfred, born 1875.
The railway works were difficult places to work. Jefferies described them as follows:
“Passing between a
row of fiery furnaces seven times heated, the visitors enter the rail-mill
where the rails are manufactured. This
place is a perfect pandemonium. Vast
boilers built up in brick close in every side, with the steam hissing like
serpents in its efforts to escape.
Enormous fly-wheels spin round and round at a velocity which renders the
spokes invisible. Steam hammers shake the ground, where once perhaps crouched
the timid hare, and stun the car. These
hammers are a miracle of human manufacture…
a mass of red hot metal [is] wheeled along and placed beneath the steam
hammer, where it is thumped and bumped flat… The workmen wear shoes shod with
broad headed iron nails from heel to toe.
Their legs are defended by greaves – like an iron cricketing pad; their
faces by a gauze metal mask. The clang,
the rattle, the roar are indescribable… Out comes a mass of white-hot metal, it
is placed on a truck and wheeled forward to the revolving rollers, and placed
between them. Sparks spurt out like a
fountain of fire – slowly it passes through, much thinned and lengthened by the
process; which is repeated until at length it emerges in the form of a rail.”
Sometime
around the early 1880s William, Mary and their four youngest children moved
from Swindon to the parish of Higher Llangynwyd, Glamorgan, Wales. William
decided to leave the hard work of the railway and was working as a Hotel
Keeper, operating a hotel called “Gelly” in the small
village of Abergwynfi in the Afan Valley.
The entire population of Higher Llangynwyd was less than 10,000 and
consisted of a number of small villages, the largest of which was Maesteg – ten
kilometres from Abergwynfi. Originally the area had been owned by the Jenkins family who ran a farm
called Gelli – hence the name of the inn!
William
Harry died at Abergwynfi on 21 January 1883 age 48. It seems that the railway
had taken its toll on him. William had left the family relatively financially
secure, probably through his well-paid work at the GWR.
Relationship to SNR = Great, great, great grandfather
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