Welsh Folk Tales

by Peter Stevenson

  The driver held out his hand to the man in the shabby coat, who rummaged in his pocket and handed over tuppence and some fluff. The driver was incensed, and said for tuppence he’d give him a beating if he weren’t such a bag-o’-bones. Shabby took off his coat and put up his fists. The driver was over the moon at the chance to give this scrawny cheapskate a beating.

  ‘C’mon,’ he said, and stood there, beckoning. So Shabby hit him. Again and again, until the driver was spinning and fell flat on his face. The audience were open-mouthed. Shabby picked up his coat and walked towards the Crown, saying, ‘If you wish to know my name, it is Twm Cynah, from Maesydref, Mold.’

  Wil and Dan followed Twm into the inn and offered to buy their new hero a pint, but he refused saying he didn’t drink. He told the boys never to mock anyone because of their appearance, especially the old. And if they ever heard anyone singing their own praises, consider them idiots. He said, ‘Nid wrth ei big y mae prynu cyfflog [You don’t buy a woodcock by its beak].’

  Wil the Mill

  Wil was born in 1878 and worked at Parkmill on Gower as blacksmith, miller, churchman, shepherd, ploughman and undertaker. Now in those days, blacksmiths were also dentists. They pulled teeth with the big iron tongs they used to hold the hot metal over the fire. But Wil had a better method. He tied a rope round the tooth, tied the other end round the anvil, and engaged the customer in conversation. ‘Nice weather, how’s the garden, what’s that over there?’ Then he knocked the anvil onto the floor and the tooth was pulled.

  A bit of a thug from Penclawdd came to the forge with toothache. Wil tied a rope from the bad tooth to the anvil, chatted away and knocked over the anvil, but it didn’t fall to the ground. It just dangled there, with the rope held tight between the big thug’s teeth. He roared, knocked Will out with one punch, and ran off towards the river, carrying the anvil in his arms. When Wil came round, he gathered the boys from the mill, they caught the big thug by the ford, dropped him into the river, held him down, took the tongs and pulled his tooth.

  As the water turned red with blood, Wil told him, ‘You come to the mill to get your teeth pulled, you get your teeth pulled!’

  The Penclawdd Cockle Women

  A strange story was told about the cockle pickers of Penclawdd on the Burry Inlet early in the 1800s. The women were well-known characters on Gower. Every Saturday morning they walked barefoot with baskets of cockles balanced on their hats, to sell their week’s catch at Swansea Market. They wore their finest clothes – red and black-striped frocks, black and white-check aprons, plaid shawls and bonnets – and before they arrived, they washed their feet and put on boots, to look respectable.

  One day, they had loaded their donkey carts full of cockles from Whitford Sands and were walking back to Penclawdd when they heard the sound of galloping hooves coming from Broughton Bay. An enormous woolly rhino-like creature with a large horn on its nose was charging towards them. It upturned the carts, gored the laden donkeys till they lay twitching in the tide and chased the women, who ran for their lives. Over the following months the creature appeared on Llanrhidian Sands and Whitford Marsh, but no one knew where it came from. Soon, not a soul dared venture onto the sands.

  The women asked the help of a gwiddanes from Cheriton. That evening the old woman walked through Whitford Burrows to the beach, drew a large circle in the sand with a ram’s horn, and made a geometric pattern with dead-man’s fingers and laverbread. As she muttered an incantation, the moon shone brightly and the sound of hooves was heard. The woolly creature appeared, scratched at the sand and charged. As it entered the circle it stopped in front of the old woman, snorting and stamping. She ordered it to be gone, never to return to Llanrhidian Marsh or Whitford Sands until a hundred thousand tides had ebbed and flowed. The creature calmed and vanished, the sound of its hooves melted into the mist, and it has never returned.

  Although, a hundred thousand tides have ebbed and flowed across the marshes since then, so it would be wise to keep your wits about you next time you climb over the fences onto the National Trust land at Whitford Burrows.

  Sioni Onions

  The Breton Onion Man laid his bike against the pebbledash wall of the old lifeboat house in Morfa Nefyn, unwrapped a string of onions from the handlebars, and knocked on my mother’s back door. She ushered him in and sat him down at the kitchen table, made him a mug of tea and presented him with a selection of out-of-date cakes she had bought for a penny each at the Gwalia in Pwllheli the day before. He spoke a little Welsh and English, and she repeated everything to me, in case I couldn’t understand his Breton accent. She bought a string of onions which he hung in the cupboard under the stairs for her. He waved goodbye and pushed his bike along the road towards Edern. His name was Sioni, or Johnny. I had no idea there were hundreds of Sionis, all selling onions throughout Wales.

  The first Sioni sailed to Britain in 1828. He was Henri Olivier from Santec, near Roscoff, a fertile land packed with poor farmers, just like Pen Llŷn. By 1900, over a thousand Sionis spent their winters in Wales selling onions. The Welsh Sionis formed themselves into small companies, each with their own sales territory, and they learned rudimentary Welsh.

  One woman from Pontrhdygroes told a story about her grandmother who had come from Cornwall with her husband and had found work in the lead mines. When Sioni called, the old woman spoke Cornish, her daughter Welsh and the onion man Breton, and they understood each other perfectly well.

  Shortly before midnight on 18 November 1905, the GWR Steamship Hilda set sail from Southampton bound for St Malo with around a hundred and thirty on board. At midnight there was a snowstorm, the captain lost visibility, the Grand Jardin lighthouse was shrouded in white, and the ship was torn in two on the rocks just outside the port. As the hull of the ship sank, the passengers and crew were sleeping in their cabins. In the morning only five people were left alive, clinging to the frozen mast. One was a crewman, the other four were Onion Men. In all, almost eighty Sionis drowned that day, all from Finisterre, forty-four from the same commune of Cléder, and two companies lost their entire workforce.

  The Onion Men continued to trade with Wales. Claude Deridan, born in 1904 on the east side of Roscoff, took over his father’s company in Porthmadog, learned Welsh, marched with the veterans on Armistice Day and became a well-loved character in the town. Claude brought his men over from Roscoff each year and they set off with neatly strung onions draped over their bikes, always pushing, never riding. It was one of Claude’s men who visited my mother every year. We never knew his real name. He was, and always will be, Sioni.

  The Hangman Who Hanged Himself

  A hangman used to travel from Chester to Ruthin Assizes and stayed the night at the Duke of York in Buckley. The locals were intrigued by the stranger, but he refused to reveal his occupation. They pestered him and interrogated him until on his last visit he drank a little too much and told them he was the local hangman. There was silence. Someone asked him to prove it, so he stood on a table, hung a rope over the beam and showed them how to tie the knots to make a noose. Someone asked how it worked, so he placed the noose round his neck and tightened the knot. What next, they asked? He explained that the table would be removed and within a minute the poor man would be dead and his soul released to Hell. So they pulled the table away and the hangman hanged himself.

  27

  SEA, SMUGGLERS AND SEVENTH WAVES

  The Ring in the Fish

  Nest, wife of Maelgwyn, Lord of Gwynedd, lost her wedding ring while bathing in a pool on the River Elwy. Her bad-tempered husband was furious with her. That evening they were invited to dine with the Bishop of St Asaph. They were served fresh trout caught in the river, and as Maelgwyn sliced into his fish’s belly, his wife’s ring fell out.

  In Penmachno around 1870, a story was told of a woman who was gathering shells on the beach, when her ring slipped off her finger and fell into the sand, just as a seventh wave washed over it. When the wave flowed back the ring had vanished. She wen
t home in melancholy. The next day a man came round selling fresh herring, so she bought some to fry for dinner. She cut open the belly of one of the fish and what do you think she found? The ring? No, guts.

  Jemima Fawr and the Black Legion

  On 22 February 1797 the French Government had sent a marauding force of mercenaries and ex-prisoners called the Black Legion to capture Bristol, but the fleet of four ships had been blown off course, and they found themselves sailing into Fishguard Harbour. They heard the town cannon being fired to warn the locals of invasion and thought they were under attack, so they turned round and anchored off Carreg Wastad Point. Fourteen hundred men rowed ashore and spread out into the countryside. They set up a command headquarters at Trehowel Farm and sent out reconnaissance groups, many of whom deserted, went pillaging, or drank the cargo of brandy from a beached Portuguese ship. One troop broke into Llanwnda Church and warmed themselves round a bonfire made of Bibles and pews, so the story goes.

  All the while, the Fishguard and Newport Volunteer Infantry had been called in to help repel the invaders. They were a ramshackle troop of a couple of hundred local men under the leadership of a landowner’s twenty-eight-year-old son who had no military combat experience. They gathered in Fishguard and prepared to defend their town, supported by hundreds of locals armed with bullets made from lead stolen from the roof of St David’s Cathedral. Late on the 23rd they decided to attack the French, and set off up the hill pulling three cannons behind them, only to retreat due to failing light and exhaustion.

  At this point, Jemima Nicholas, known as Big Jemima, the six-foot tall, nineteen-stone wife of a Fishguard cobbler, took things into her own hands. Armed with a pitchfork and a reputation for breaking up bar fights, she marched out into the fields, rounded up twelve drunken French soldiers and locked them in St Mary’s Church. The French were in disarray, and were beginning to think they were outnumbered by the Welsh. The final straw came when they saw a line of redcoat soldiers marching over the hill above Goodwick Sands with rifles over their shoulders. The Black Legion surrendered, thinking they were outnumbered by an inexhaustible army. The army turned out to be Jemima and the women of Fishguard marching round and round the hill carrying pitch forks and wearing red shawls and petticoats.

  Jemima is buried in Fishguard Churchyard, where her tombstone reads, ‘The Welsh Heroine who boldly marched to meet the French invaders who landed on our shores in February 1797. She died in Main Street July 1832 aged 82 years.’ Since then, Wales has never been invaded, thanks to the legacy of tales of how the French were defeated by ‘the General of the Red Army’.

  Walter and the Wreckers

  Walter Vaughan, Lord of Dunraven, had watched many ships wrecked on the coast near his home. He had written to the government offering his thoughts on how to improve safety at sea, but his ideas were continually rejected. He became embittered, his wife died of a broken heart, his eldest son left for a new life abroad but his ship went missing, and his other three sons all drowned, two caught in a storm when fishing, while the other fell into a vat of whey.

  Walter turned to the dark side. A cargo ship was wrecked off Dunraven, and this time he plundered the ship for himself and paid off his debts. He went into partnership with the leader of the local wreckers, Mat of the Iron Hand. Years before, Mat earned a living placing lights along the coast to help lure ships onto the rocks. When he was arrested, he was brought before the local magistrate, who just happened to be Walter Vaughan. Mat and Walter recognised they were kindred spirits, each tormented by their own souls, and soon they made their fortunes from ships wrecked on the Glamorganshire rocks.

  One night during a storm the two wreckers were watching a ship tear itself apart when one man swam ashore. The custom was that no survivor of a wreck be allowed to live, so Mat walked down to the shore and as the man dragged himself onto the beach, Mat snapped his neck and cut off his ring hand. He showed the hand to Walter, and in that moment the Lord of Dunraven’s torment was complete. The rings on the fingers belonged to his eldest son who had left Dunraven years before to make his fortune and escape his father’s bitterness.

  Potato Jones

  At the height of the Spanish Civil War in 1937, General Franco blockaded Bilbao in an attempt to starve out the Basques. ‘It makes me sick,’ thundered Davey Jones, captain of the Marie Llewellyn, a Swansea tramp steamer. ‘Has our Navy lost its guts?’ So, in partnership with local landlady, Edith Scott, he set sail for Bilbao with a fleet of three tramp steamers and a cargo full of spuds to feed the hungry Basques, earning himself the nickname ‘Potato’ Jones.

  He was born in Swansea in 1871, and as a boy he cycled to Mumbles Head to watch ships from all over the world sail in and out of the docks. His party trick was to dive under a moored ship, and while the crew looked over the side for him, he swam beneath the ship, climbed up the other side and scrambled like a monkey up the rigging to the top of the mast, before passing a hat round for halfpennies. By the time he was fifteen, he had rounded Cape Horn. It was a dangerous life for a merchant seaman, for commercial ships leaked so badly they were referred to as floating coffins, and diseases like yellow fever were so rife that a graveyard in Santiago was nicknamed Swansea Cemetery.

  Jones was sixty-seven when he set sail for Bilbao with his three ships and a cargo of a thousand tons of potatoes. The captains of the other two ships were nicknamed ‘Ham and Egg’ Jones and ‘Corn Cob’ Jones. The Royal Navy refused to protect them, declaring them too foolish and alleging that they were smuggling guns and ammunition to the Republicans, which they were. A Spanish battleship was ordered to sink them on sight. Jones found himself without communications in a storm that lasted four nights.

  Newspaper headlines asked, ‘Where is Potato Jones?’ Some thought he had joined the hundred and seventy-four Welshmen killed in the Spanish Civil War. In fact, the weather had forced him to return to Alicante and dump his cargo, leaving him in a right old grump.

  Later in the war, Jones rescued eight hundred refugees who were fleeing Franco’s fascists, and took them safely to France – the act of a true folk hero.

  The Kings of Bardsey

  Ynys Enlli is an island of twenty thousand saints, ten thousand Manx shearwaters, three hundred and fifty species of lichen, over one hundred grey seals, a handful of houses, a few fishermen, farmers, artists, poets, birdwatchers and Merlin, who is fast asleep in a glass tomb underground. It is a mythical mix of the sacred and the secular, where pirates built their houses with stones stolen from the ruins of the sixth-century St Mary’s Abbey.

  On a trip over to Bardsey in the late 1800s, Thomas Pennant said the boatmen stopped in the middle of the Sound, and stared, ‘tinctured by the piety of the place’, as they prayed for safe passage through the whirlpools.

  Bardsey Islanders were fiercely independent. They had their own moral code, their children swam with seals and they were the descendants of pirates who lived there under the protection of the Lords of Pen Llŷn. In 1820, they elected a King, who wore extra ribbons in his hat to signify his authority. In 1826, the second monarch was twenty-seven-year-old John Williams, who farmed twelve acres at Cristin Uchaf. At his inauguration he stood on a chair in the presence of the lighthouseman while Lord Newborough presented him with a tin crown for dignity, a silver snuff box for wealth and a wooden soldier for an army. Fifteen years later, King John drowned trying to cross Bardsey Sound alone. The following day his son was born, and thirty-four years later he succeeded his father.

  King John II developed a reputation as a gloomy drunkard who spent too much money at the Ship in Aberdaron. After thirty-six years on the throne, he was advised to abdicate. When he refused, the people of Enlli staged a very Welsh revolution. The King was plied with beer, rowed to Aberdaron and dumped on the beach for the mainlanders to deal with.

  His successor was Love Pritchard, farmer and fisherman from Tŷ Pellaf, who inherited the crown with the words, ‘I am the oldest, I am going to be King now’. In 1914 Love offered to fight for the
King of England, but was politely rejected on the grounds that seventy-one was a little too old. Love was offended and declared Bardsey neutral during the war. Some said he secretly supported the Kaiser.

  In 1925, at the height of discontent in the land, he led an exodus from the island. He died the following year and the monarchy passed with him, despite his wish that at eighty-three he still hoped to find a Queen and father a son.

  The island was resettled in 1931 and became a home for naturalists, artists, writers, farmers and fishermen, inspired by the solitude and the wildlife, the lack of mains electricity and the thought of being stranded when the wind blows. There are never enough hours in the day, and when you leave the island a thousand and one fairy tales go with you to guide you safely back to the Otherworld.

  When I was little, I was standing on the beach at Aberdaron with a bucket full of eels from the river. My mother had banned me from the kitchen because the eels had learned how to escape from the bucket. I was watching the Bardsey boys load the old wooden boat with provisions when they picked me up and dropped me amongst the tin cans, coal bags and tractor parts. They gave me a fishing line to dangle in the Sound and told me stories about the creatures that lived beneath the whirlpools. I caught a skate, which from nose to tail was as tall as I was. They said it was a mermaid, and I had no reason to disbelieve them, for dried skates were often exhibited in jars at freak shows as mermaids. Later that day, they returned me to the beach. My mother never knew I’d caught a mermaid.