War Planes over Bwlchgwyn

Extracted, with permission, from "I Remember...My Life In Bwlchgwyn (1939-1943)" by Gwenda Lewis. © G Lewis 2005.

"In late 1940 we realised that German planes which were bombing Merseyside were passing overhead, having crossed Southern Ireland, which was neutral, and cutting across North Wales. We soon learned to distinguish the pulsing throb of the enemy engines, which was quickly followed by the wailing of air-raid sirens and by the distant weaving of searchlight beams as they combed the night sky.

There came a night when an enemy plane heading north-east, and chased by British fighter planes, jettisoned some of its bombs over our area. This was a new and worrying turn of events and Mr Richards, the Headmaster, asked Miss Roberts to organise some older pupils to fix anti-splinter muslin on the classroom windows of the school.  Then bricklayers were called in to build high walls to protect the two school entrances from blast. This would hopefully minimise damage during night raids but also offer some protection for the children should we be bombed during school hours.  Of course nothing could protect us from a possible direct hit. But thankfully daytime raids never happened.

During one night raid some incendiary bombs fell on the flat-topped Minera Mountain behind Bwlchgwyn.  The dry heather and bracken burned fiercely in the darkness and quickly spread, revealing electricity pylons on the mountain.  The German pilots must have reported hitting an important installation because they returned for about nine consecutive nights to bomb it again and again with high explosives. The smell of the smoke could be detected thirty miles away.

Now this was rather close to home and I remember waking up one night to the sound of these enormous explosions, like the worst thunderstorm you ever heard.  The force of the explosions made the house shake and the windows rattle.

One late evening in October my mother, David and I were in the living room listening to the wireless and did not hear the enemy plane overhead, neither did we hear a warning siren.  We heard nothing until the bombs began to fall.  The next morning we awoke to find the village peppered with bomb craters and I immediately [28th October 1940] wrote to my father describing the frightening experience and our response to it.

This particular raid was reported in the local paper, without naming the village as that information might help the enemy.

BOMBS DROPPED ON NORTH WALES VILLAGE

NO CASUALTIES OR DAMAGE

An enemy raider passed over a village in North Wales on Sunday night.  High explosive bombs were dropped in fields in and near the village. About 15 craters were to be seen next day.  Three were in soft ground in a field below a vicarage, another was within a few feet of a highway and others were near farms and houses.  Apart from a few broken windows, no damage was done and there were no casualties.  Cattle who were out in one of the fields where three of the craters are, were all unhurt.

One bit of excitement I seem to remember was when  a German Heinkel bomber came down on the slopes of the Penllyn Mountain.  Hearing the rumours of this crash the village boys, including my brother David, were very anxious to visit the site but the police kept them away until the bodies of the crew were located and removed.  Then the lads scrambled over the wreckage and came home triumphantly carrying chunks of twisted metal and other souvenirs to add to their collections of bits of shrapnel scavenged from bomb craters.  What was left of the plane was put on display in Wrexham town centre as an encouragement to the people that the enemy was not getting it all his own way.

Highly prized were pieces of perspex from the cockpit window.  Uncle Stan managed to get one and fashioned a bangle each for Margaret and me, cleverly carving a design on its surface with his penknife.

More sad in a way was when a British Hudson plane with a Canadian crew crashed in the wooded valley of Nant y Ffrith.  The local policeman was otherwise occupied in the 'Four Crosses' pub beyond the village so  George Edwards, who ran a local bus service, having spotted the flames of the burning aircraft, hastened to the scene where he found one crew member critically injured but still alive.  Seeking to save time he carried the man to his car and set off for the hospital in Wrexham.  Sadly the man died on the way.  One might think that George would be thanked for trying to save the crewman's life.  Not a bit of it.  When the policeman got back from the pub he gave George a stiff reprimand for interfering instead of going back to the village to find him so he could alert the relevant authorities.

Now some have said that those two incidents were simultaneous and linked, that in the total darkness the German and British planes had experienced a slight collision, perhaps a wing-tip encounter, which explained them spinning off in different directions before crashing.  Unfortunately my memory of all this is patchy after so many years and people I have talked to have differing versions of what actually happened.  Strangely, there seems to be no official record of the incident, even a book 'Luftwaffe over Clwyd' published after the war makes no mention of any plane crashes at all.  All this suggests that it was highly classified information and suppressed as far as the public was concerned.  One child was told by her father she must forget it as it never really happened!  So I guess we shall never know the truth about it.  Nevertheless a cemetery nor far away has been found to be the final resting place of both Canadian and German crews.

Why did we, in Bwlchgwyn and the surrounding area, take such a pounding from the German Airforce?  They may have been hoping to put the Monsanto chemical factory near Ruabon out of action, or to disable the radar station and searchlights on the moors near Llandegla.  Perhaps it was simply a mistake, or it has since ben suggested that British electronic experts were experimenting with a means of interfering with the aircrafts' navigation instruments and the German pilots were deceived into thinking they were somewhere else altogether.  We shall never know.

Eventually, probably some time in late 1941, the bombers stopped coming.  The night skies over Bwlchgwyn were once again silent.  No longer were we straining to distinguish the throb of the German plane engines from the steady drone of the British fighter planes, when we used to say, with relief in our voices, 'It's all right, it's one of ours!' "

© Gwenda Lewis 2005. Please contact me if you require permission from Gwenda to reproduce her text.

Snow Clearing in Llandegla

The Christmas Tree has been put away for another year, but it's cold and occasionally snowy outside, so I looked for a snowy picture to grace the website.

I found a picture from my cousin June's collection, a picture of some Air Force men clearing snow at Llandegla. Following the link on my home page at http://www.belton.me.uk/ will take you to another picture with more detail. Do you know the men? Most of them are likely to have been quite local to Llandegla and Bwlchgwyn, especially the man in the portrait, who must have been known to my uncle, Harold Belton.

Remembrance Day

I have updated my website at http://www.belton.me.uk/ and corrected a few links to the War Memorial pages - the link on the home page goes to a list of memorial pages, following the links for each serviceman leads to a copy of the Certificate from the CWGC and also gives more personal information about some of the servicemen. The Certificates and photographs are provided by courtesy of the CWGC at http://www.cwgc.com/

If you know of any other relatives of mine who should be included in these pages, please let me know.

Nant y Ffrith

I have been researching over the last few days, but I haven't found anything of great, must-write-about interest.

It never ceases to amaze me, though, just how hard our lead and coal mining ancestors worked - not just in the 1870s and 1880s but right up to fairly modern times, or the coming of the family car. The long hours and arduous work were only one aspect of their working days: the walk to and from work was a job in itself.

I was following the lives of some families (including George Belton's family) who lived in Nant-y-Ffrith, Bwlchgwyn. For census purposes, this covers roughly the area from the bridge on Llanarmon Road and follows the Nant-y-Ffrith river through the deep valley right down to the Ffrith itself. These families lived close to Llanarmon Road - so where did they work?

George Belton and his sons were all coal miners, not lead miners, and the coal fields end at approximately 700ft above sea level - roughly by Hurricane House on the Ffrwd or where the old railway line crossed Ruthin Road at the Coedpoeth crossing. I am not aware of any coal mines higher than this so it is likely that they walked, every day, down to Nant y Ffrith, through the valley and either followed the path past the foxstones to the Ffrith or they joined Nant Road or Glascoed Road at some point and made their way to Brymbo.

That is a long walk. In winter, never seeing daylight, frequent frosty or snowy spells, sodden tracks and paths, sometimes iced over, heavy drizzle, thick fog, it must have seemed twice as long, exceedingly dreary and not without dangers. Was there a possibility of transport? It doesn't seem very likely. Most of the cottages in this part of Nant y Ffrith were not much better than hovels. In one census, George Belton, Mary his wife, two adult sons (also coal miners), and a younger son and daughter, all lived in a house with only two rooms inhabited. That's not two rooms plus a scullery or anything else, it is literally two rooms in which to do all the washing, cooking, sitting, eating, dressing and sleeping. And it would have been damp.

The housewife would have worked as hard as her husband, getting the children off to school (if not prevented from attending by inclement weather, illness or being needed at home) and maybe taking the first of the children to school every day - another long walk, this time to Bwlchgwyn village and back, until the oldest children were old enough to escort their younger siblings; trying to keep the bedding dry, the house warm, wash and dry clothes, carry water and do her best to have a hot meal ready for the men on their return from work. For all that they were poor, they were still proud people and, if they adhered to one of the chapels or the church, they would take their places with pride at the Sunday services, mixing with their extended families, visiting, exchanging news.

Nanty-Ffrith seems a very remote place to have lived but, a very small comfort, there were a lot more people living in that area than would be apparent now. The houses were usually very small, occasionally one or two low walls or stones remain, but most have disappeared completely, the ruins overgrown or the stones recycled. Although most of the houses were isolated, they were not isolated by any considerable distance - a young lad could run to a neighbouring house for help and the women and children would have had some opportunity to socialise every few days.

In fact, things hadn't changed all that much in 1951, when I was born (in the relative comfort of the village itself); the cottage did benefit from one cold water tap and some electricity, but otherwise it was only marginally more habitable than the hovels in Nant y Ffrith.

Why did the people put up with these conditions? Why didn't they move? That's a story for another day.

St. David's Day in Bwlchgwyn

I recently came across a newspaper report of the celebration of St. David's Day at Cae Adar Farm, Bwlchgwyn, in 1896.

The celebrations were actually held on Monday night, the 2nd of March, at Cae Adar Farm, when about a hundred people thoroughly enjoyed a special St David's Day supper, prepared by Mr. George Jones, the grocer. This was the first time that an event of this kind had been held and Mr John Jones, the owner of the farm, hoped that everybody would have an enjoyable evening. The concert president was Mr. John Edwards of the Brithdir and the secretary was Mr. Robert Williams of the Gors. The accompanist was Mr William Williams of Minera who also sang several solos. Shem Jones and his party sang and Mr Robert Roberts gave a solo. There were many other singers, too. Speeches were made by Messrs Samuel Kendrick, William Davies the schoolmaster, Richard Rogers, draper, of Bradford House and Edward Kendrick, who read a paper about the history of St, David. Mr. John Jones of Cae Adar sang the closing song to St. David and, united in the chorus, everyone was enjoying the evening like none before.

What an evening that must have been! I can remember concerts in Bethesda Chapel and Church Fetes, Harvest Festivals and Nativity plays, village sports days and bonfires in the rec (King George's playing fields), but I can't imagine this sort of concert being arranged, or so well attended, these days. If any of my readers does remember similar events, I would love to hear about them.

Arthur Belton

The next photograph (I think this blog is probably better read in reverse order!) is still firmly ensconced in its frame and, having been stored safely for 50 years, has acquired some obscurity in the glass. As I was not going to tackle a dis-framing or risk anything more than an e-dust over the glass, the quality of my photograph is not good - but the original is not very clear and sharp either.

The subject is a really beautiful studio protrait of my grandfather, Arthur Belton, looking every bit like my father; my grandmother, Edith (nee Edith Davies Williams), their two sons, Horace and Harold (my father was yet to arrive), and, appearing a bit spooky because of reflections, the little dog posing at Edith's feet.

I never knew these grandparents, or Horace, but my cousin always refers to them by their proper Welsh titles of Taid and Nain. Arthur Belton and his family lived at 17 Wesley Road, Bwlchgwyn and this picture was taken between about 1913 and 1918.