Welsh Folk Tales

by Peter Stevenson

  Dic Penderyn

  In the early 1800s, young Dic Lewis left rural Aberafan with his family so his father could find work in the coal mines of industrial Merthyr. When he was old enough, Dic followed his father underground and found himself in a world where miners lost their jobs at the whims of employers, were expected to work long hours for little money, families lived in fear of the workhouse, poor housing and sanitation caused typhus and scarlet fever, and water was so polluted it was thought safer to drink beer.

  In 1831, he was twenty-three, married and living at Penderyn, near Hirwaun, when Merthyr exploded. Up to ten thousand miners and ironworkers marched and took control of the town for a week. He watched as a Highland Regiment was called in, colliers were rounded up outside the Castle Inn, there was gunfire, bloodshed, hundreds injured and arrested, and many were killed. Dic found himself charged with riotous assembly and stabbing Donald Black of the 93rd Highlanders in the leg with a bayonet, and he was sent for trial. Black told the court he could not identify Dic as his attacker, but two shopkeepers did, and the death sentence was passed. Of all those arrested, he was the only one sentenced to be hanged.

  Merthyr people were convinced of Dic’s innocence, and over ten thousand petitioned the Home Secretary, Lord Melbourne, who reluctantly ordered a stay of execution for two weeks. But the government and coal owners wanted a scapegoat, and the death warrant was finally signed. As the noose was placed round Dic’s neck at Cardiff Gaol on Friday, 13 August, he said, ‘O Arglwydd, dyma gamwedd [Oh Lord, here is injustice]’. Thousands marched with him to St Mary’s Church in Aberafan, where they gathered outside the churchyard walls to hear his brother-in-law, the Methodist minister Morgan Howells, speak of an innocent man who had left a world of cruel injustice.

  Forty years later, Ianto Parker confessed on his deathbed that he was the man who had stabbed Donald Black, then fled to America and never returned. Yet it is not Parker, nor the mine owners, nor politicians, nor shopkeepers who are celebrated to this day in songs, stories and malt whisky, it is the man they martyred, Dic Penderyn.

  The Treorchy Leadbelly

  The Texan songhunter Alan Lomax was on an epic ethnographic journey around the world collecting folk songs for the Library of Congress in Washington DC. In 1953 he visited Padstow in Cornwall where the locals thought he was trying to steal their ‘Obby Oss’ song and put it on the hit parade, like he did with ‘Leadbelly’. In August he arrived at the Miner’s Club in Treorchy and interviewed singer and storyteller, Tom Thomas, small, bald, rosy and seventy-six. Tom told Lomax this tale:

  ‘Lewis and Sam were miners and they were on strike and, oh, their bellies were rumblin’ with hunger. Lewis was comin’ down the road and Sam was comin’ up the road, and Lewis says, “How you, bwt?”

  ‘Sam says, “Oh be quiet. I haven’t had a bite or a sup for three days and my belly’s grumblin’.”

  ‘“Oh I’ve had a lovely feed,” says Lewis, “it’ll keep me goin’ for three days. See that house, with the green grass in front, and the monkey puzzle tree? I was nibblin’ the grass there this mornin’ and the woman comes out and asks what I’m doin’, and I tell her I’m so hungry, and she takes me into the parlour and cooks me a roast dinner, roast tatws an’ all. Go to that house.”

  ‘So Sam went up the road to the house with the monkey puzzle and he drops down onto his knees and starts nibblin’ the grass. The woman runs out of the parlour, and says, “What you doin?”

  ‘He says, “Oh, I’m so hungry.”

  ‘She says, “Oh, you poor man. Come into the parlour. Then go out the back door, the grass is longer out there.”’

  The Rat with False Teeth

  In 1951, a miner in Merthyr applied to the council for a replacement set of false teeth. He explained that a rat called Fagin had stolen his upper dentures from his jacket pocket while it was hanging up in the colliery workings. Councillor Williams, a former miner, said a rat once ran off with his tin food box, and Councillor Owen said at his colliery a rat had stolen someone’s watch. So they agreed to pay half the cost of replacement dentures, while somewhere in the pit, Fagin the Rat was grinning widely.

  Siôn y Gof

  Siôn Jones the blacksmith, lived in a cottage at Ystumtuen near Ponterwyd with his wife Catherine and their two children. He earned a living shoeing ponies for the local lead miners, but times were hard. In late 1719, Siôn set off alone in search of work at Dylife, a bustling mine where there was work for a hefty blacksmith. The unwritten laws of the mines stated that whenever a man moved on for work, he left his wife and children behind, for she was the property of the mine and they would marry her to another man.

  Catherine, poverty stricken and starved of love, wanted none of this. She wanted her husband Siôn, so with her two children in hand, she followed his footsteps to Dylife, only to find him remarried to a maid servant from Llwyn y Gog. Catherine was distressed, their children were growing up without a father or a wage, and surely her heart had a say in this porridge pot of emotion? Siôn told her to go, Catherine refused, there was an argument and Siôn picked up an axe and stove in her head.

  In January 1720, three bodies were found at the bottom of a mineshaft, a woman, a boy and a girl who had tried to feed from her mother’s breast. Fingers pointed at Siôn. He ran towards Castle Rock above the River Clywedog and was caught before he jumped, put on trial in Welshpool and sentenced to be hanged. When asked why he did it, he answered, ‘Because of some other woman, and the Devil’. He was taken to Pen y Crocbren, Gallows Hill, sat on a horse with the noose round his neck and the horse made to walk. His body was hung out to rot for all to see, wearing an iron gibbet he had forged himself. In death, Siôn had found the work he had been seeking.

  Siôn’s head and gibbet appeared in 1938 in a chemist’s shop window in Machynlleth, before being donated to St Fagan’s Folk Museum. His ghost haunts Llyn Siôn y Gof, the pool below Castle Rock, searching for his head, while Catherine haunts the old mine workings at Dylife, searching for her lost husband.

  The Hole

  An old miner showed a young miner a hole in the ground and told him that there were rich seams at the bottom. Without so much as a thank you, the lad started digging. Down and down he went, getting smaller all the time. Each day, the old man lowered food and drink to him in a bucket on a rope. Another old collier leaned on his shovel and said, ‘There’s kind of you. You must like him.’

  The old miner said, ‘No, can’t stand the cheeky bugger. Only time I get a bit o’ peace is while he’s down there.’

  The Penrhyn Strike

  The very word ‘Penrhyn’ was anathema in our house. My father refused to go anywhere near Penrhyn Castle and as a child I never understood why. If the subject was mentioned, he would tell the ‘other’ story, the one the history books never told.

  In 1832 Queen Victoria, aged thirteen, visited Bethesda quarry, owned by the second Lord Penrhyn, Edward Douglas-Pennant. She wrote:

  It was very curious to see the men split the slate, and others cut it while others hung suspended by ropes … others again drove wedges into a piece of rock and in that manner would split off a block. Then little carts about a dozen at a time rolled down a railway by themselves.

  That same year, Penrhyn commissioned Henry Hawkins to paint an extraordinary image of the Bethesda slate quarry with men hanging from ropes, bodies swarming like ants. It was Gustave Doré’s engraving, ‘Dante’s Inferno’, intended as a celebration, but it screamed.

  Much of Lord Penrhyn’s money had been inherited from his father, Richard Pennant, MP for Petersfield and owner of six sugar plantations and six hundred slaves in Clarendon, Jamaica. When slavery was abolished, the Pennants received a huge sum from the government as compensation for losing their workforce. Their quarry workers were regarded as little more than slaves themselves. They were paid a pittance, lived in insanitary conditions with no safety measures, and had only Christmas Day off each year.

  The history of the quarry was one of conflict. W
irt Sikes, American Consul to Wales and social reformer, reported that the miners refused to work on Ascension Day 1878, as they believed that an accident was about to happen, and by 1896 they were locked out unpaid for eleven months for joining the North Wales Quarrymen’s Union.

  In 1900, the second Lord Penrhyn, George Douglas-Pennant, Yorkshireman and conservative MP for Caernarfonshire, prosecuted twenty-six of his workforce for refusing to allow contractors to work at the quarry. The three thousand-strong workforce were barred from contributing to the union and told to work or leave. As they walked out, mine owner E.A. Young locked the gates behind them, beginning a strike that lasted three years.

  There were inevitable hardships and police violence, yet there were other tales. A firm in Ashton-Under-Lyne, Lancashire, sent the quarry workers two and a half tons of plum pudding for Christmas, giving rise to a children’s rhyme:

  Wele cawsom ym Methesda

  Y pwdin gorau gaed erio’d.

  Chlywodd Young nag Arglwydd Penrhyn

  Ddim amdano cyn ei ddod.

  Pwdin yw, du ei liw,

  Y gorau brofodd neb yn fyw.

  We had in Bethesda

  The best pudding there ever was.

  Neither Young nor Lord Penrhyn

  Knew of it before it came.

  It was a black pudding,

  The best any living creature has tasted.

  After Christmas, families left Bethesda in search of work. Penrhyn reopened the quarry with a new workforce of four hundred and signs were placed in front windows saying, ‘Nid oes bradwr yn y ty hwn [No blacklegs here]’. The Riot Act was read and troops were sent in to protect the bradwr. But slowly, one by one, people returned to work. Bethesda was desolate, the market closed, fever shut the schools, outside businesses took the work and strikers were sacked.

  Lord Penrhyn played the role of fairy-tale villain rather too well. One of his fifteen children, Alice, fell in love with an Italian gardener in her father’s employ. Penrhyn forbade her to see him and confined her in her bedroom, where she scratched a message in Italian on the window pane, ‘essere amato amando [to be loved while loving]’.

  A woman from Menai Bridge told the tollhouse keeper at the suspension bridge that she once saw a girl in a bedroom at Penrhyn Castle who had been locked in there for falling in love with a gardener. The woman sketched the girl. Next time she came to Penrhyn, she showed her sketch to the staff. They showed her a photograph of the family taken in 1894. She pointed to the girl she had seen. It was Alice.

  Well, fairy tales are supposed to have happy endings. Alice fled to London where she worked as an artist, became a devout Christian, and remained unmarried. Her father died a few years after the strike ended, and eight years later the unions were admitted.

  Even when the National Trust took over Penrhyn Castle, my father refused to go there. Folk memory is long and deep in Bethesda, where the ancient stories live on in the legendary Mabinogi Fish and Chip Shop.

  The Wolf

  A miner from the Rhondda caught rabbits for the pot and sold the skins for roof tiles to keep the rain out. But rabbits were tiny and it took a lot of them to thatch a roof, so he decided he could save time and make more money if he caught one big animal. He went out into the woods, and met a huge wolf, which ate him up.

  19

  HOMES, FARMS AND MICE

  The Lady of Ogmore

  A Welshman was caught firing an arrow at a stag on the Lord of Ogmore’s Hunting Lodge in the Vale of Glamorgan. He was ridiculed and brought before the Norman lord accused of poaching, and was about to be sentenced to be tortured, when the lord’s daughter spoke. She reminded her father that the Normans were an occupying force who had taken the land from this man and his ancestors, and in truth, the land could not be owned, bought or sold by anyone, rather shared equally and worked for the common good. As it was her birthday, she asked her father to release the man and allow the Welsh to be free to hunt the land.

  The lord was amused by his daughter’s impertinence, but he set the man free and said the Welsh could have all the land that she could walk around barefoot before sunset. She stared straight into her father’s eyes, kicked off her sandals and began to walk. The thorns and flints tore her feet, but on she walked, following close to the coast, with her father’s soldiers armed with tape measures behind her, until the sun set in the sky. The lord kept his word, and the land his daughter walked around is Southerndown Common nature reserve and open to all, thanks to the Lady of Ogmore.

  The House with the Front Door at the Back

  An old farmer with a stubbly chin lived in a damp lime-washed house at Deunant near Aberdaron. Every evening before he went to bed he took a few steps outside the front door of his house, loosened his braces, dropped his trousers and squatted down. Over the years, he had created a fine muck heap that he used for mulching his potatoes.

  One evening he was sat there, trousers round his ankles, when he noticed a little man staring at him. The little man asked, ‘What have I done to make you so angry?’ The farmer was confused, and then noticed the little man was covered in dung. ‘I have lived here all my life and have never meant any harm to anyone. Yet every evening, I sit by my fireside with my wife and baby, when dung pours down my chimney. If you don’t believe what I say, step on my foot three times.’ The old farmer did as he was told and he saw, next to his front doorstep, a street he had never seen before, with smoke pouring from the chimney of a tiny house which was completely covered in dung. On the front doorstep sat a little woman holding a baby, both of them dripping dung. The little man suggested the farmer might consider using his back door in future.

  The old farmer was full of remorse. He took stones and lime mortar and bricked up his front door, so that he would never again drop his dung over the little family. He built a flowerbed and planted sweet-smelling evening primrose and night-scented stock. Then he took a sledgehammer and knocked a hole in his rear wall, so that every evening he could squat outside his back door instead.

  And that is the story of the house with the front door at the back.

  The Cow on the Roof

  Siôn Dafydd from Denbighshire never stopped grumbling about his wife. She never cleaned the house, the babi was always bawling, the chickens lived in the kitchen, she didn’t feed the cow or the pig, and when she did make him a meal it was never enough to fill his belly. He wanted better after a hard day weeding the turnips. Eventually she tired of his moaning. She handed him the babi, told him that he could clean the house, make the porridge, clean out the chickens, sweep the yard, milk the cow, feed the slops to the pig and she would weed the turnips. Siôn was a stubborn man, so he agreed.

  So there he was, stirring the porridge. The babi was crying. He picked it up, but it wouldn’t stop griping, and he needed to stir the porridge before it burned, but every time he put the babi down it cried, so he sang to it which made it cry more. The pig was squealing with hunger, so he dropped the babi, mixed buttermilk with the slops, spilt milk over the floor, ran outside and opened the sty door. The pig ran between his legs, into the kitchen, licked up the buttermilk, knocked over the porridge and licked that up too. He picked up an axe and hit the pig over the head.

  The cow started mooing. Siôn ran outside, and found she had eaten all the grass, so he propped a ladder up against the house and pushed the cow up the ladder onto the roof to eat the thatch. He tied a rope round her neck, dropped it down the chimney, ran to the kitchen and tied the other end of the rope round his ankle. He scraped the porridge off the floor, plopped it back in the pan and stirred, while the babi cried.

  The cow was enjoying the thatch when it slipped and fell off the roof. Siôn felt the rope tighten round his ankle and found himself being pulled up the chimney. His legs went either side of the pot-hook which stabbed him in the crotch, and there he stuck, whimpering.

  His wife came back having been for a nice walk after weeding the turnips, to find the poor cow hanging from the roof. She ran inside and what did she see?
A dead pig, chickens everywhere, a bawling babi, milk all over the floor, and her husband hanging upside down with a pot-hook in his crotch and his head in a porridge pot.

  Manawydan Hangs a Mouse

  The story so far …

  Manawydan, brother of Bendigeidfran the King of the Island of the Mighty, had returned to Arberth alone. His wife Rhiannon and stepson Pryderi had vanished, and a grey mist hung over the land like a curse.

  Manawydan farmed the land well. He sowed three fields, the seeds grew through the soil despite the sun being unable to shine through the grey mist and soon his golden corn was ripe. So he decided to harvest his first field the following day. In the morning, all he found were bare stalks. Every ear of corn had been snapped off overnight.

  ‘By my beard, who has done this?’ said Manawydan. He looked at the second field, the corn was ripe so he decided to harvest it the following day. In the morning, all he found were bare stalks. Every ear had been snapped off. ‘By the hairs of my beard, I have been robbed again,’ he said.

  He looked at his third field and the corn was ripe. ‘Shame on my beard,’ he said, ‘I will keep watch tonight, for the thief who stole my wheat will surely try to steal this too.’

  So Manawydan armed himself, propped his eyes open with sticks, and kept watch. At midnight he heard a great noise. He leapt to his feet, sword in one hand, spear in the other, and prepared to battle with the monster. What he saw filled him with terror. A mighty army was marching towards him. An army of mice. They were swarming all over his field. There wasn’t a single stalk without a mouse on it, and they were nibbling the ears of corn. There were so many that Manawydan couldn’t keep his eyes on them all. He chased them this way and that, but they were too fast for him. He was about to have a tantrum, when he spotted one mouse so fat it could hardly move. He dived on it, caught it in his glove, tied it with string, and off he went to Pryderi’s court, a proud victorious warrior.