Meeting at Nanna Todd's Shop

By Carol Powell

Parade Gardens, Southend, Mumbles, Swansea c1915Nanna Todd's shop is marked X on the photo above.

In September 2023, we enjoyed an All-Day-Breakfast at Trams, on Mumbles Road and noticed a group of young teenagers on another table.

The building is Victorian and was originally two shops. We sat in the section adjacent to Hallbank and as was my wont, I was thinking of what happened on that same spot in past times.

Close on one hundred years ago, Robert and Margaret Todd ran a greengrocery-cum-sweet shop, at this premises, 16, The Parade, Mumbles, from before the Great War until after The Second World War. There, on many evenings, the local boys and girls would gather to chat and socialise, under the watchful eye of friendly, motherly Nanna Todd. She was a tall, thin, white-haired bespectacled lady, who was said to be ‘a good age’ in the 1920s.

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Some of these same lads would enlist into the armed forces during both world wars and she took to displaying their photographs in her shop window.

Twenty years after the Great War, one of the famous Libby’s letters to the Forces > in the Second World War, noted that on 28 October 1941, -

Mrs. Todd would like to be remembered to 100s of the local boys who know and respect her. Last war, she collected photos of the folk in the forces and had them in frames in her shop. She is repeating the idea and three large frames are full of faces. Some people think the blokes in the last war were better looking!

The displays were gradually and tragically transformed into spontaneous tributes to those who failed to return home, becoming Mumbles' unofficial Memorial >.

Margaret Ann Todd 'Nanna' died in 1950 aged 91 years and is interred in Oystermouth Cemetery.

Today, other generations of youngsters continue to socialise in this same place.

A photo from the display