Some Mumbles Peacheys
by Carol Powell
LATEST MEMORY
John and Emily Peachey came to Mumbles with their family of ten children in the 1830s and eventually went on to have twenty-one, some of whom did not survive to adulthood. John, the son of Edmund and Mary (née Hoare) was born in Bognor Regis in 1786, and came to Mumbles to take up a post as a Preventive Officer with the Coastguard Service. He had served in the Battle of Trafalgar before marrying Emily, the niece of Sir Charles Gray, MP for Colchester. Emily died in 1852 aged 53, but John lived to the ripe-old age of 91, passing away at his home in Park Street in the summer of 1877.
The Dunns, Mumbles
One of their sons, Edwin, as well as being landlord of the Nag's Head public house from the 1850s, founded the Livery and Posting Stables in The Dunns in the 1880s, which would eventually occupy numbers 6, 7, 8 and 9. It was a family concern, run for many years by he and his wife, Mary Ann (née Lloyd), joined later by their sons, Edwin Junior, Samuel, Absalom, Jehu and Herbert. By 1940, the Western Express Directory recorded that Jehu was the proprietor and by 1950, the Swansea Directory lists K. Peachey at 528 Mumbles Road.
The Business catered for visitors arriving at Oystermouth station on the Mumbles Train, who needed transport to the beaches at Langland and Caswell or further or as transport for wedding parties and chapel outings etc.
An advert from Mumbles Press c1908 and photo of Edwin Peachey & Sons, c1880
Herbert Peachey driving Miss Stone's Sunday School Class
They had numerous horses. as well as a variety of vehicles including brakes, a fine Lando and a silver and black hearse. This would have been an impressive sight on its way through the village to Oystermouth Cemetery, drawn by a team of six black horses replete with plumes and one of the brothers riding high above them in his top hat swathed in black crepe.
By 1901, Mary Ann was a widow, aged 62 (Edwin having passed away in 1896) living with bachelor sons, William, aged 38, Ernest, 36, Jehu, 27, Samuel, 25 and daughter, Theresa, 19 ( a niece of the Theresa, born 1821, who passed away in 1842 and her baby sister, also Theresa, born in 1853, who died in infancy). At the business in The Dunns, a few doors away lived son, Edwin Junior and his wife, Mary (née Davies), daughter of a mariner. Herbert aged 23 and his wife Myra, were living round the corner at 4, Park Street with their baby daughter, aged two months, the fourth to bear the name of Theresa Peachey. And this was where Herbert kept the much-prized hearse.
Absey Peachey at the Station Yard, c1908
Anthony Lee, contacted us on our Facebook page :
The family still talk about my great uncle Absey and the episode with a Llama!
One night going home drunk, Uncle Absey thought it was a good idea to rescue a real stuffed llama from a travelling circus ... He planted it on the front lawn to surprise the family when they woke next morning.
At that time nobody in Mumbles had seen a llama so yes, it was a surprise.
He also used to appear in the Ladies Hair salon at the bottom on Queens Road, just above Dunn's Lane, with a matchbox and announce "Here's your weekly delivery of fleas!".
Absey Peachey was immortalised in two poems. One was When Mumbles was The Mumbles, verse five by Cyril Gwynn, known as the Gower Bard.
When Absey Peachey's cabhorse
was waiting at The Dunns
To meet a fare at every downward train
To Langland or Caswell was then a horse's run
For motor cars were few, let me explain
The other was verse thirty-two of
The Ballad of the Old Mumbles Railway by Dan Morgan
And in the station yard you'll find
Many a horse trap waiting there
Our old friend Peachey -ever kind,
Lifts whip to hat – he seeks a fare.
But the Great War came to Mumbles in 1914 and along with many of its young men, away went the village horses having been requisitioned by the Army. Even the Peacheys' family pet, a gentle beautiful mare named Mari Llwyd, along with their other horses were sent to France. A little later, the army came for their wagons and then Herbert was called up.
Herbert's family had thought he would be exempt from conscription, as he was blind in one eye. A distressed Theresa, spent the day of his departure with her sisters Ida and Doris watching their father and other local 'boys' leaving on the Mumbles Train for training camps, prior to their journey to the Front. The story goes that they were still there in the evening when their Dad waved from an incoming train. He had been all the way to Cardiff, been re-examined and rejected as unfit!
Sometime later, two Mumbles families received letters from their boys serving in France, describing how cheered they were seeing a wagon emblazoned with Peachey's Posting and Livery Stables - Mumbles passing their position.
Anthony Lee added more:
'I talked to an old man in the 1970s who had been in the trenches in the First World War, who remembered seeing Peachey's horse drawn wagons going up to the front. After the war none of the horses, or wagons ere returned to Mumbles and with the advent of motor coaches and lorries, that marked the demise of the company.
My great-great grandmother who was in charge at the time had refused to buy motor coaches because she thought that they would never catch on!
In the back of Oyster mouth taxis, you can still see the stables where the horses were kept.'
‘My memories are of the late 1950s when we used to spend Easter at my grandmother's, Teresa May Hodge (nee Peachey), 62 Queens Road. (Where I was born in 1953)
We used to go to Pressdee the baker, on Queens Road, on Good Friday morning for Hot Cross buns.
Horse-drawn carriages thus featured prominently in the life of Theresa who went on to marry John Hodge. Many years later, following a long life of 101 years, making her one of Mumbles’ oldest residents, her final wish to travel in a horse-drawn glass hearse was fulfilled.
The beautiful carriage acquired for the day, was built in 1893 and had spent most of its life around the West Wales area, before being found in Carmarthen by the people who lovingly restored it. It has only one brake on one wheel on the coachman’s side.
Theresa May Hodge's Funeral Cortege passing Peachey's Livery Stables
On the sunny afternoon of Tuesday 16th April 2002, many people stopped to admire the horse-drawn glass hearse, drawn by magnificent black horses named Prancer and Dancer, their coats brushed to a shine and wearing the customary black plumes on their heads. It travelled from Pressdee’s Funeral Home on Stanley Street, down Victoria Avenue, into Chapel Street and down Gower Place to her funeral service at the Christadelphian Church, where she had been a regular worshipper for many years. Afterwards, the picturesque procession travelled past her grandparents’ much-remembered livery stables, round the corner into Newton Road and onwards to her final resting place at Oystermouth Cemetery.
Oyster Cabs now occupies part of the premises in The Dunns, but had been run by Eric Owen as a garage for many years following the Peacheys and then became the home of the Oystermouth Garage. In the summer of 2000, it was occupied for one season as the Mumbles Local History Centre.