Donkeys, Geese and Broken Eggs: Newton between the Wars
by Harry Mathias
Harry Mathias’s Geese
Reproduced with the kind permission of West Glamorgan Archive OfficeI was born in February 1921, in the Old General Hospital in Birmingham and was the first-ever baby to be born there by Caesarean operation. In 1924, when I was just two-and-a-half years old, I moved to Newton.
My father was a Welsh-born Welshman, having been born in Swansea in Tontine Street, facing the old slaughterhouse. My Auntie Ethel had long lived in a cottage at the top of Newton Road, on the right-hand side of the road looking down from the Mead, and there we lived for two to three years. I remember that to reach the cottages, we had to walk across slate slabs bridging a deep gully alongside the road, carrying the water down from Highpool.
Auntie Ethel was the first person in Mumbles to make ice-cream. Uncle Jack made an ice-cream container, and when it was ready he would go down the Valley to sell the ice-cream in Caswell Bay. On the Mead, at the top of Newton Road, there lived the Vanstones, woodworkers and carpenters. They had a workshop, just where Capitol Windows is now. They made coffins, which had to be delivered under the cover of darkness to Pressdee’s the Undertakers in Mumbles.
There was no water-supply in Auntie Ethel’s cottage. There was a supply of drinking-water on the corner, where the Newton Post Office now stands, and we went there with white-enamel buckets to collect it. The older cottages in the village had no water-closets, only earth ones. The waste was just buried in the gardens, every week.
When I was five, we moved from Newton to the Parish Hall in Murton. While we lived there, I went to the old Bishopston Primary School, near the Joiners’ Arms. We moved back to Newton when I was eight, in 1929. That was because both my mother and we children developed scabs from the polluted drinking-water in the pumps at Murton—contaminated, they said, by the dead sheep lying on the Common!
This time, we lived in the cottage alongside the Rock & Fountain, owned by Mrs Woollacott. To the back, the fields stretched way up to Summerland Lane.
Mrs Woollacott brewed her own beer—and that was my father’s job. He worked with ‘American’ Jones, an old seaman living in New Well Lane, who had worked on the American clippers. Each day, they had to stir the hops, and constantly taste the brew so that by the time they had finished, they were both very drunk!
Behind the Rock & Fountain could be found chickens, ducks and geese. My father got Mrs. Woollacott’s permission to rear twelve geese, for himself. Then he had a plan! He would develop horse and donkey-riding, on the beaches. He first bought Danny – a beautiful, totally-black, horse. But Danny turned out to be too big for beach-riding, although he was used each year, during the Mumbles Carnival in the 1930s, by ‘The Sheikh of Araby’ (from Briton Ferry). Danny would dance on his two hind-legs, and provide spectacular entertainment. But that was all. Danny never worked the beaches.
Then Dad exchanged his twelve geese for Billy, a Welsh mountain pony, which he got from Harry Bosworth, who had a farm in Highpool. I remember Harry Bosworth and his brother (they hated each other’s guts) carrying milk from the farm on a shoulder-yoke with a pail hanging down each side. They had one-pint and two-pint measures, which they always poured out carefully, over the bucket, so that not a drop was lost.
Billy was housed in a stable at the front of our cottage, on Newton Road. My Dad then got a Permit from the Guildhall to provide riding services for every bay from Brandy Cove to Bracelet Bay. He paid 7s/6d per donkey per year, and we had three donkeys. But he paid nothing for Billy! We charged 2d-per-ride for the donkeys, and 4d for Billy. As boys, we held the donkeys’ heads for every donkey-ride, every day – about 100 yards each time. My Dad took the reins for Billy. It was tiring work.
I well remember an unusual event, sometime in the early 1930s. We youngsters were playing in Newton, when we got a message that we had to get down, as a matter of urgency, to the White Rose in Oystermouth. We ran, without knowing what to expect when we got there. What we saw was the first black face ever to have been seen in Mumbles. He was an Indian, with a tray of silks and cottons. We stood in awe!
In 1935, as a family we left Swansea. I was 14, and I walked, with my father and our dog and cart, to Birmingham, in search of work. My mother, and younger brother and sister, travelled with our furniture in B.F. Hoppe’s lorry. It was already clear that my family needed the income, which I could earn – and there was no suitable work for me in Mumbles. For a short time I had worked as a Delivery Boy for a Miss Morris, using a heavy penny-farthing bicycle – and earning 6d per week. Soon after I started, however, the bicycle tipped over and one dozen eggs were broken. I was sacked, and I lost my wages – to pay for the eggs! (see The Bikers of Mumbles shops )
When we got to Birmingham, in 1935, I became an Apprentice Joiner, and I worked there until my return to Mumbles in 1979.