The Dunns

There is record of the name being used in this way as early as 1734. Seaward of this, nowadays, are grass and flowerbeds, then car parking and the prom. It had been a station for buses and for the Mumbles Railway.

All of this was the site of what a 1663 plan called “a Mansion called Dunns or Madocks Mews”. By 1670 the owner was almost certainly John Maddocks, a sailor, and it seems to have stayed in that family, and in that of the Angells with whom they intermarried, until it was demolished in 1854. There are drawings of it, even a distant photograph, and a second plan from about 1818, just entitled “Dunns”. It looks as if it had been the residence of a well-to-do farmer, with walled gardens, a stable and barn or “cow house”. The outdoor seats in its seaward facing courtyard suggest some leisure – and the guns shown on the 1663 plan some danger! 

There are suggestions that some of the associated farmland had been flooded by the encroachment of the sea.

It seems reasonable to suggest that the house was owned by a family called Dunn before the time of the Maddockses. Though the derivation of the name has Scottish and Irish possibilities, the trading links between south Gower and the West Country suggest the local Dunns were English. In various spellings it was and is a common surname, exemplified in the poet John Donne (1572-1631) and Dunn & Co., the men’s hatters whose headquarters was in Swansea on their demise in 1996.

In 1326 Robert Dun was one of those accused of stealing royal possessions from Swansea Castle. (He and many others were probably guilty.) In 1433 a Geoffrey Don was steward to John Duke of Norfolk for all his Gower lands. That the name proliferates after 1600 is probably partly down to the larger number of records surviving. In Swansea in 1629, a Harry Donn was apprenticed to John Matthew a tailor, and in 1631 an Owen Donne was similarly “bound” to Owen Rosser, and Mary his wife. Like the labourer Jenkin Dunn of Bishopston (1768) these were poorer men. George Dunn lived in Wind Street, from at least 1778 to 1785. Henry Dunn, the town jailer in 1799, ran a beer house and kept pigs. These two sound a shade more affluent.

Others are nearer the status to own a “mansion” like the one at Mumbles. Hugh Donne is recorded as a Swansea burgess in 1641. Henry and Jenkin Donne also became burgesses after coming to the town as “sensors”, men who had to pay to be allowed to trade. Henry (or Harry) did business in Swansea from at least 1640 to 1648 before being elevated to the burgess-ship in 1649; he witnessed the will of the Swansea notable Walter Thomas in 1654, and attended a Leet Court as late as 1659. He was a tailor, making Jane Rogers a “gowne” in 1642. Jenkin (sometimes John) Donn or Donne sounds richer. He was a mariner who made his first appearance in 1675. He is recorded as shipping in cargoes of oakum (rope fibres to caulk the planks of ships) in 1678. A burgess from 1677, he attended Hall Days until at least 1690. In 1679 he was a constable (a lowly office), but in 1689 was the corporation finance officer or Common Attorney. He settled in the town and married. He had a pew in St. Mary’s in 1709. A Jenkin Donne, perhaps his son, still lived in Fisher Street in 1719 and there is mention of his house in 1739, though by then he, too, had died and his widow, Jane, was taking his place at Leet Courts.

Nothing ties any of these Dunns or Donnes to Mumbles. Mariners from the village were drawn to live in Swansea, but I have so far not found “Donne” or its like in 17th Century Port Books. It is possible, but no more, that Jenkin Donne was a Mumbles man.

The most interesting titbit comes from a 1641 survey:

“Mary Donne wyddow holdeth three acres of arable lands lying off Monmouls field…”

The exact location of this field is not known. Nor is the name of Mary’s late husband. But site and date suggest that the Dunn of the Dunn’s Mansion is not far away.

More: The Dunns collection >