William Harry (1835 to1883)

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 19^th 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