Scrap Book Project – A Story for Easter

This is the story of Mary Jones from my Bible Studies exercise book when I was about six years old.

Mary Jones was from a poor family who lived at the foot of the Cader Idris mountains in the village of Llanfihangel-y-pennant near Dolgellau in wales.  She was born  into a family of devout Methodists and she herself professed the Christian faith at eight years of age.

Having learned to read in the circulating schools organised by a man called Thomas Charles it became her ambition to possess a Bible but there was no copy on sale nearer than Bala – twenty-five miles away. Having saved for six years until she had enough money to pay for a copy the story goes that she started out one morning in 1800 and walked barefoot all the way to obtain a copy from the Reverend Charles who was the only man with Bibles for sale in the entire area.

According to one version of the story Thomas Charles told her that all of the copies which he had received were sold or already spoken for and Mary was so distraught that Charles spared her one of the copies already promised to another.  In another version, she had to wait two days for a supply of Bibles to arrive, and was able to purchase a copy for herself and two other copies for members of her family.

According to tradition, it was the impression that this visit by Mary Jones left upon him that impelled Charles to propose to the Council of the Religious Tract Society the formation of a Society to supply Wales with Bibles.

Her Bible is now kept at the British and Foreign Bible Society’s Archives in Cambridge University Library. It is a copy of the 1799 edition of the Welsh Bible, ten thousand copies of which were printed at Oxford for the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge.

How much of the story is true will probably never be known.  However, Thomas Charles undoubtedly used the story to persuade the Religious Tract Society to establish a new organisation, the British and Foreign Bible Society.  This came into existence in 1804 and over the next two hundred years years distributed thousands of Bibles to people across the world.

The society – often known simply as The Bible Society – still distributes Bibles to places like India and Africa and is an ecumenical and non-sectarian organisation and the story of Mary Jones and her determination to own a Bible was central to its creation, its continuing ethos and to its work.

_____________________________________________

Related Articles:

Hillmorton Chapel and St John The Baptist Church, Hillmorton

Childhood and Religion

Picture Stories From The Bible

The Miracle of the Feeding of the 5,000

The Vale of Rheidol Light Railway

Because the weather had been so appalingly bad it was difficult to imagine that it could possibly get any worse (unless the World had slipped of its axis overnight and Wales was now in the Caribbean hurricane belt) and inevitably (even the met office could have predicted this) there was some degree of improvement in the morning when Molly woke me at six o’clock and declared it time to get up.  It was still unseasonally cold and the sky was cloudy and we needed the heating on in the cottage but at least it was white cloud and the only dampness was a bit of early morning sea mist.

It was still anorak weather when we left the cottage at about ten o’clock and set off back towards Aberystwyth and Devil’s Bridge with a plan to take a steam train journey.  Things didn’t go smoothly because after ten minutes Molly realised that I had forgotten items that she considered essential for the journey (comfort blanket, teddy bear etc.) so we had to turn back to rectify the mistake.  We had better luck at the second attempt and soon we were on our way.

Not far out of Cardigan there was a signpost to a local attraction which given all of the rain was a bit ironic – The Felinwynt Rainforest Centre.  That was the last thing we needed so we drove straight by and back through Aberaeron, which on account of the fact that it wasn’t raining at the moment looked slightly more cheerful today.  Although it was only a forty mile journey it seemed to take forever to get to Aberystwyth and it was nearly twelve o’clock when we took the turning to Devil’s Bridge and my heart dropped from my abdomen to my groin as it started to drizzle again.

As we drove towards the railway station the road began to climb and the scenery became dramatic with lush green meadows, rivers and lakes below, conifer woods on either side and Red Kite and Buzzards soaring majestically above the trees.  It stopped raining but even so it was still overcast and gloomy when we pulled into the station car park, parked the car and joined all of the other people in dripping kagools and clutching umbrellas in anticipation and waiting for the twelve-thirty train.

The Vale of Rheidol Light Railway was authorised by Act of Parliament in August 1897 and at the time of building it was state of the art narrow gauge construction that passed through terrain where it would have been almost impossible to build a standard gauge line without prohibitive costs. The railway opened to the general public on 22^nd December 1902.

In 1912 at the height of the line’s prosperity consideration was given to converting the line to electric traction, using hydro-electric power from the River Rheidol but control of the line passed to the Cambrian Railways and the plans were abandoned.  In 1923 Cambrian Railways were themselves absorbed by the Great Western Railway and goods services were withdrawn completely.  The winter passenger service was withdrawn in 1930, and the line closed completely from the end of the 1939 summer service for the duration of the Second World War.

Ownership of the line passed to British Railways in 1948, and it survived through threats of closure to become the last steam railway owned by British Rail until privatised in 1989.  The railway is now a tourist attraction and owned by a charitable trust, who have renovated and improved the locomotives, rolling stock and track and the engines and carriages currently in use were built for the line by the Great Western Railway between 1923 and 1938.

We bought return tickets and because it was too cold for the open sided carriage at the rear found a seat in a covered compartment  instead and sat back to enjoy the views as the gleaming red engine was coupled up and with a couple of shrill blasts of the whistle started off ponderously down the hillside.  It was an hour’s journey there and another hour back so it was a bit of a problem when Molly declared that she didn’t like it after only five minutes or so and I had to spend the rest of the journey trying to keep her amused by pointing things out along the way (horses, sheep cows; any parent will understand) and by having our cheese sandwich picnic that I had prepared earlier.

Amazingly as the train clattered along the tracks towards the coast, pitching us from side to side and filling our lungs with smoke through the open window the weather began to improve and there were definite signs of blue sky above and ahead and by the time we arrived in Aberystwyth the sun was shining and the temperature had unexpectedly leapt several degrees.

We didn’t get to stay long in Aberystwyth however because there was only a half an hour turn around so we wandered through the station and onto the main street that looked positively cheerful in the sunshine and then went back to the train for the return journey which was pleasant but uneventful except for the moment when Molly nearly pulled the emergency chain as her inquisitive hands swept their mischievous way through the carriage.  Luckily Jonathan was alert and saw the danger and was just in time to stop her.

Talyllyn Railway and Plas Panteidal Holiday Village

Mary Jones’ Bible

This is the story of Mary Jones from my Bible Studies exercise book when I was about six years old.

Mary Jones was from a poor family who lived at the foot of the Cader Idris mountains in the village of Llanfihangel-y-pennant near Dolgellau.  She was born on 16th December 1784 into a family of devout Methodists and she herself professed the Christian faith at eight years of age.

Having learned to read in the circulating schools organised by a man called Thomas Charles it became her ambition to possess a Bible but there was no copy on sale nearer than Bala – twenty-five miles away. Having saved for six years until she had enough money to pay for a copy she started out one morning in 1800 and walked barefoot all the way to obtain a copy from the Rev. Charles, the only man with Bibles for sale in the entire area.

According to one version of the story Thomas Charles told her that all of the copies which he had received were sold or already spoken for and Mary was so distraught that Charles spared her one of the copies already promised to another.  In another version, she had to wait two days for a supply of Bibles to arrive, and was able to purchase a copy for herself and two other copies for members of her family.

According to tradition, it was the impression that this visit by Mary Jones left upon him that impelled Charles to propose to the Council of the Religious Tract Society the formation of a Society to supply Wales with Bibles.

Her Bible is now kept at the British and Foreign Bible Society’s Archives in Cambridge University Library. It is a copy of the 1799 edition of the Welsh Bible, ten thousand copies of which were printed at Oxford for the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge.

How much of the story is true will probably never be known. However, Thomas Charles undoubtedly used the story to persuade the Religious Tract Society to establish a new organisation, the British and Foreign Bible Society. This came into existence in 1804 and over the next two hundred years years distributed thousands of Bibles to people across the world.

The society – often known simply as The Bible Society – still distributes Bibles to places like India and Africa and is an ecumenical and non-sectarian organisation and the story of Mary Jones and her determination to own a Bible was central to its creation, its continuing ethos and to its work.

_____________________________________________

Related Articles:

Hillmorton Chapel and St John The Baptist Church, Hillmorton

Childhood and Religion

Picture Stories From The Bible

The Miracle of the Feeding of the 5,000

Aberfan Mining Disaster

On October 21^st 1966 there was a terrible tragedy in the town of Aberfan in South Wales when after days of heavy rain a primary school was engulfed with waste from a coal tip that had become dangerously unstable and eventually collapsed.

Like a volcanic eruption the slurry slid down Merthyr Mountain behind the village at about nine o’clock just as the school was starting the business of the day, killing one hundred and sixteen children and twenty-eight adults.

I can remember the disaster quite clearly because I think it was the first time in my life (I was twelve years old) that such an incident made an impact upon me and I recall watching the television news footage and the terrible despair of the community.

Coal mining was still big business in South Wales in the 1960s and all of the towns in the valleys had their pit and their slag heap that consisted of the waste and the slurry that was extracted from the mines.  Coal mining was a dangerous business and there were frequent news items about disasters and deaths and this just seemed to be an acceptable risk associated with the industry but this was something completely different and the death of so many children brought the dangers and the unpleasant nature of the industry to the attention of the public and the Government and may have been one of the early reasons for its eventual demise.

Immediately after the disaster The Town of Merthyr set up a Disaster Fund collecting approximately £1,750,000 by the time the fund closed a year later which was a huge amount in those days.  Unbelievably, part of the fund was used to make the remainder of the waste tip safe and the Coal Board thereby avoided the costs of doing the job themselves. The Labour government paid back the £150,000 in 1997, although taking account of inflation this should have been £1.5m.

Although the National Coal Board was found responsible for the disaster at an enquiry, Lord Robens, its Chairman, declared the cause of the slide to be the responsibility of the community and falsely claimed that nothing could have been done to prevent it.  Robens never apologised or showed any sign of remorse.  The NCB was ordered to pay compensation to the families at the rate of £500 per child and the Merthyr Vale Colliery was closed in 1989.  In February 2007 the Welsh Assembly announced the donation of £2m to the Aberfan Disaster Memorial Fund, in part as recompense for the money requisitioned from the fund by the government in the immediate aftermath of the disaster.

Eight years after the disaster I went to Cardiff University and lived at the southern end of the coal mining valleys, the story always stayed with me and one day I took a train to Aberfan to see the place for myself. There was no evidence of the disaster of course and the slag heap had gone.  I visited the cemetery and the memorials and although it gave me some sort of ‘closure’ I have always remembered that dreadful event.

The Annual Family Holiday

When I was a boy in the 1950s and 1960s family holidays came once a year and were rotated tri-annually between a caravan in Norfolk, a caravan in Cornwall and a caravan in Wales.  I’m not being ungrateful because these holidays were great fun and in those days it was all that my parents could afford.

In the 1950s about twenty-five million people went on holiday in England every year as life started to return to normal after the war.  Most people went by train but we were lucky because granddad had a car, an Austin 10 four-door saloon, shiny black with bug eye lights, a heavy starting handle, pop out orange indicators and an interior that had the delicious smell of worn out leather upholstery and this meant that we could travel in comfort and style.

Although there were not nearly so many cars on the road in the 1950s this didn’t mean that getting to the seaside was any easier.  There were no motorways or bypasses and a journey from Leicester to the north Norfolk coast involved driving through every town and bottleneck on the way which meant sitting around in traffic jams for hours and worrying about the engine overheating or the clutch burning out.

Just getting to the coast could take the whole day and usually involved stopping off along the route at some point for a rest and a picnic.  Granddad would find a quiet road to turn off into and then when there was a convenient grass verge or farm gate he would pull up and the adults would spread a blanket on the ground and we would all sit down and eat sandwiches and battenburg cake and they would drink stewed tea from a thermos flask and I would have a bottle of orange juice.

One of the favourite places to go on holiday at that time was Mundesley which is about ten miles south of Cromer where there were good sandy beaches and lots of caravans.  I last stayed in a caravan in about 1970 and I have vowed never ever to do it again.  I just do not understand caravanning at all or why people subject themselves to the misery of a holiday in a tin box with no running water, chemical toilets and fold away beds, there is no fun in it whatsoever.

In 2000 the National Statistics Office estimated that British families took 4,240,000 towed caravan holidays a year year; how sad is that?  To be fair I suppose it was good fun when I was a five-year-old child but I certainly wouldn’t choose to do it now when I am ten times older.  Caravans simply had no temperature control, they were hot and stuffy if the sun shone (so that wasn’t too much of a problem, obviously) and they were cold and miserable when it rained, which I seem to remember was most of the time.

Bad weather didn’t stop us going to the beach however and even if it was blowing a howling gale or there was some drizzle in the air we would be off to enjoy the sea.  If the weather was really bad we would put up a windbreak and huddle together inside it to try and keep warm.  Most of the time it was necessary to keep a woolly jumper on and in extreme cases a hat as well and Wellington boots were quite normal.  As soon as the temperature reached about five degrees centigrade or just slightly below we would be stripped off and sent for a dip in the wickedly cold North Sea in a sort of endurance test that I believe is even considered too tough to be included as part of Royal Marine Commando basic training.

After the paddle in the sea we would cover ourselves up in a towel and making sure we didn’t reveal our private parts struggled to remove the sopping wet bathing costume and get back to our more sensible woolly jumpers.  Then we would have a picnic consisting of cheese and sand sandwiches and more stewed tea from a thermos flask.

If the sun did ever come out we used to get really badly burnt because when I was a boy sunscreen was for softies and we would regularly compete to see how much damage we could do to our bodies by turning them a vivid scarlet and then waiting for the moment that we would start to shed the damaged skin off.  After a day or two completely unprotected on the beach it was a challenge to see just how big a patch of barbequed epidermis could be removed from the shoulders in one piece and the competition between us children was to remove a complete layer of skin in one massive peel, a bit like stripping wallpaper, which would leave you looking like the victim of a nuclear accident.

We didn’t always go to Norfolk and we didn’t always stay in caravans.  If we went on holiday with mum’s parents who lived in London we would get a train to Herne Bay or Margate in north Kent and stay at a holiday camp in a chalet which was just about one step up from a caravan.

Beach holidays in the fifties and sixties were gloriously simple.  The whole family would spend hours playing beach cricket on the hard sand, investigating rock pools and collecting crabs and small fish in little nets and keeping them for the day in little gaily coloured metal buckets before returning them to the sea at the end of the day.

There were proper metal spades as well with wooden handles that were much better for digging holes and making sand castles than the plastic substitutes that replaced them a few years later.  Inflatable beach balls and rubber rings, plastic windmills on sticks and kites that were no more than a piece of cloth (later plastic), two sticks and a length of string that took abnormal amounts of patience to get into the air and then the aeronautical skills of the Wright brothers to keep them up there for any decent length of time.

I remember beach shops before they were replaced by amusement arcades with loads of cheap junk and beach games, cricket sets, lilos, buckets and spades, rubber balls and saucy seaside postcards.  I can remember dad and his friend Stan looking through them and laughing and as I got older and more aware trying to appear disinterested but sneaking a look for myself when I thought no one was watching.  I knew they were rude but I didn’t really know why.

For a treat there was fish and chips a couple of nights a week but this was in the days before McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken so most of the catering and the eating was done in the caravan or the chalet or if we were really unlucky in the dining room of the holiday camp.

Later, after dad learned to drive, we used to go to Cornwall and Devon and North Wales, to the Nalgo holiday camp at Croyde Bay and the Hoseasons holiday village at Borth, near Aberystwyth.  The last time I went on the family holiday like that was in 1971 to Llandudno and by my own confession I was a complete pain in the arse to everybody and I don’t remember being invited ever again.

In 1975 I went to Sorrento in Italy with dad for my first overseas holiday and nothing has ever persuaded me to go back to British holidays in preference to travelling in Europe.  Since then I have spent my summer holidays on Mediterranean beaches where the sun is guaranteed and the beer, rather than the weather is always cold.

Talyllyn Railway and Plas Panteidal Holiday Village

The Talyllyn Railway is a narrow-gauge preserved railway in Wales that runs for nearly twelve kilometres from the town of Tywyn on the Mid-Wales coast to Nant Gwernol near the village of Abergynolwyn. The line was opened in 1866 to carry slate from the quarries at Bryn Eglwys to Tywyn, and was the first narrow gauge railway in Britain authorised by Act of Parliament to carry passengers using steam haulage. The line remained open even after the quarry had closed for business, and on 14^th May 1951 it became the first railway in the world to be preserved as a heritage railway by volunteers.

I have mentioned before that when I was younger and before cheap air flights holidays alternated between Norfolk on the east coast, Cornwall and Devon in the south west and occasionally Wales.  I seem to remember that we weren’t that keen on Wales because it always seemed to rain but in 1971 dad came across the Plas Panteidal Holiday Village near Aberdyfi (it was called Aberdovey then and Tywyn was Towyn) and we travelled there some time during the summer for our annual holiday.

We found it about four kilometres east of Aberdyfi but to get to the reception and then to the wooden chalets involved a steep climb up a single track roadway and was a process designed to take years off of the life of the clutch especially on arrival with the car loaded with unnatural amounts of people and luggage.  It has all been upgraded and modernised now but in 1971 the timber cabins could only at best be described as rudimentary with a basic lounge area and two poorly furnished bedrooms at either end.

But what the cabins lacked in facilities was more than compensated for by the magnificent setting in a wooded hillside and exceptional views over the Dyfi estuary on one side and the Cader Idris mountain range and Snowdonia on the other.

A short drive up the coast was Tywyn and the terminus of the railway and on a day out away from Plas Panteidal I remember taking the round trip to Abergynolwyn and stopping off half way up to visit the Dolgoch Falls.

The Talyllyn Railway is represented in the ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ books as the Skarloey Railway; most of the fictional locomotives are based on real-life equivalents. The author, Rev. W. Awdry, visited the line on a family holiday in the early days of preservation and became involved as a volunteer soon afterwards.

The preservation of the Talyllyn Railway was also the inspiration for the 1953 film The Titfield Thunderbolt, an Ealing Studios comedy about a group of villagers attempting to run a service on a disused branch line after closure. The script writer for the film had heard about the preservation of the railway and spent a day there in 1951 and some of the early incidents in preservation were incorporated into the film.

I returned to the Plas Panteidel Holiday Village in 1976 and again in 1979 and on both occasions took a trip on the Talyllyn railway.  Most recently in 2011 I took a short break in South Wales (my first UK holiday since 1986) and although I didn’t go to the Plas Panteidel Holiday Village I was close enough to take a trip to Tywyn and take a ride on the railway.

A Year in a Life – 22nd December, The Vale of Rheidol Light Railway

 

Because the weather had been so appalingly bad it was difficult to imagine that it could possibly get any worse (unless the World had slipped of its axis overnight and Wales was now in the Caribbean hurricane belt) and inevitably (even the met office could have predicted this) there was some degree of improvement in the morning when Molly woke me at six o’clock and declared it time to get up.  It was still unseasonally cold and the sky was cloudy and we needed the heating on in the cottage but at least it was white cloud and the only dampness was a bit of early morning sea mist.

It was still anorak weather when we left the cottage at about ten o’clock and set off back towards Aberystwyth and Devil’s Bridge with a plan to take a steam train journey.  Things didn’t go smoothly because after ten minutes Molly realised that I had forgotten items that she considered essential for the journey (comfort blanket, teddy bear etc.) so we had to turn back to rectify the mistake.  We had better luck at the second attempt and soon we were on our way.

Not far out of Cardigan there was a signpost to a local attraction which given all of the rain was a bit ironic – The Felinwynt Rainforest Centre.  That was the last thing we needed so we drove straight by and back through Aberaeron, which on account of the fact that it wasn’t raining at the moment looked slightly more cheerful today.  Although it was only a forty mile journey it seemed to take forever to get to Aberystwyth and it was nearly twelve o’clock when we took the turning to Devil’s Bridge and my heart dropped from my abdomen to my groin as it started to drizzle again.

As we drove towards the railway station the road began to climb and the scenery became dramatic with lush green meadows, rivers and lakes below, conifer woods on either side and Red Kite and Buzzards soaring majestically above the trees.  It stopped raining but even so it was still overcast and gloomy when we pulled into the station car park, parked the car and joined all of the other people in dripping kagools and clutching umbrellas in anticipation and waiting for the twelve-thirty train.

The Vale of Rheidol Light Railway was authorised by Act of Parliament in August 1897 and at the time of building it was state of the art narrow gauge construction that passed through terrain where it would have been almost impossible to build a standard gauge line without prohibitive costs. The railway opened to the general public on 22^nd December 1902.

In 1912 at the height of the line’s prosperity consideration was given to converting the line to electric traction, using hydro-electric power from the River Rheidol but control of the line passed to the Cambrian Railways and the plans were abandoned.  In 1923 Cambrian Railways were themselves absorbed by the Great Western Railway and goods services were withdrawn completely.  The winter passenger service was withdrawn in 1930, and the line closed completely from the end of the 1939 summer service for the duration of the Second World War.

Ownership of the line passed to British Railways in 1948, and it survived through threats of closure to become the last steam railway owned by British Rail until privatised in 1989.  The railway is now a tourist attraction and owned by a charitable trust, who have renovated and improved the locomotives, rolling stock and track and the engines and carriages currently in use were built for the line by the Great Western Railway between 1923 and 1938.

We bought return tickets and because it was too cold for the open sided carriage at the rear found a seat in a covered compartment  instead and sat back to enjoy the views as the gleaming red engine was coupled up and with a couple of shrill blasts of the whistle started off ponderously down the hillside.  It was an hour’s journey there and another hour back so it was a bit of a problem when Molly declared that she didn’t like it after only five minutes or so and I had to spend the rest of the journey trying to keep her amused by pointing things out along the way (horses, sheep cows; any parent will understand) and by having our cheese sandwich picnic that I had prepared earlier.

Amazingly as the train clattered along the tracks towards the coast, pitching us from side to side and filling our lungs with smoke through the open window the weather began to improve and there were definite signs of blue sky above and ahead and by the time we arrived in Aberystwyth the sun was shining and the temperature had unexpectedly leapt several degrees.

We didn’t get to stay long in Aberystwyth however because there was only a half an hour turn around so we wandered through the station and onto the main street that looked positively cheerful in the sunshine and then went back to the train for the return journey which was pleasant but uneventful except for the moment when Molly nearly pulled the emergency chain as her inquisitive hands swept their mischievous way through the carriage.  Luckily Jonathan was alert and saw the danger and was just in time to stop her.

 

Talyllyn Railway and Plas Panteidal Holiday Village

A Year in a Life – 21st October, Aberfan

On October 21^st 1966 there was a terrible tragedy in Aberfan in South Wales when after days of heavy rain a primary school was engulfed with waste from a coal tip that had become unstable and collapsed.  It slid down Merthyr Mountain behind the village at about nine o’clock just as the school was starting the business of the day, killing one hundred and sixteen children and twenty-eight adults. 

Coal mining was still big business in South Wales the 1960s and all of the towns in the valleys had their pit and their slagheap that consisted of the waste and the slurry that was extracted from the mines.  Coal mining was a dangerous business and there were frequent news items about disasters and deaths and this just seemed to be an acceptable risk associated with the industry but this was something completely different and the death of so many children brought the dangers and the unpleasant nature of the industry to the attention of the public and the Government and may have been one of the early reasons for its eventual demise. 

The Town of Merthyr set up a Disaster Fund collecting approximately £1,750,000 by the time the fund closed a year later.  Part of the fund was used to make the remainder of the waste tip safe and the Coal Board thereby avoided the costs of doing the job themselves. The Labour government paid back the £150,000 in 1997, although taking account of inflation this should have been £1.5m.  Although the National Coal Board was found responsible for the disaster at an enquiry, Lord Robens, its Chairman, declared the cause of the slide to be the responsibility of the community and falsely claimed that nothing could have been done to prevent it.  Robens never apologised or showed any sign of remorse.  The NCB was ordered to pay compensation to the families at the rate of £500 per child and the Merthyr Vale Colliery was closed in 1989.  In February 2007 the Welsh Assembly announced the donation of £2m to the Aberfan Disaster Memorial Fund, in part as recompense for the money requisitioned from the fund by the government in the immediate aftermath of the disaster.

A Life in a Year – 13th August, The Annual Family Holiday

When I was a boy in the 1950s and 1960s family holidays came once a year at about this time and were rotated tri-annually between a caravan in Norfolk, a caravan in Cornwall and a caravan in Wales.  I’m not being ungrateful because these holidays were great fun and in those days it was all that my parents could afford.

In the 1950s about twenty-five million people went on holiday in England every year as life started to return to normal after the war.  Most people went by train but we were lucky because granddad Petcher had a car, an Austin 10 four-door saloon, shiny black with bug eye lights, a heavy starting handle, pop out orange indicators and an interior that had the delicious smell of worn out leather upholstery and this meant that we could travel in comfort and style.

Although there were not nearly so many cars on the road in the 1950s this didn’t mean that getting to the seaside was any easier.  There were no motorways or bypasses and a journey from Leicester to the north Norfolk coast involved driving through every town and bottleneck on the way which meant sitting around in traffic jams for hours and worrying about the engine overheating.   Just getting to the coast could take the whole day and usually involved stopping off along the route at some point for a rest and a picnic.  Granddad would find a quiet road to turn off into and then when there was a convenient grass verge or farm gate he would pull up and the adults would spread a blanket on the ground and we would all sit down and eat sandwiches and battenburg cake and they would drink stewed tea from a thermos flask and I would have a bottle of orange juice.

One of the favourite places to go on holiday at that time was Mundesley which is about ten miles south of Cromer where there were good sandy beaches and lots of caravans.  I last stayed in a caravan in about 1970 and I have vowed never ever to do it again.  I just do not understand caravanning at all or why people subject themselves to the misery of a holiday in a tin box with no running water, chemical toilets and fold away beds, there is no fun in it whatsoever.   In 2000 the National Statistics Office estimated that British families took 4,240,000 towed caravan holidays a year year; how sad is that?  To be fair I suppose it was good fun when I was a five-year-old child but I certainly wouldn’t choose to do it now when I am ten times older.  Caravans simply had no temperature control, they were hot and stuffy if the sun shone (so that wasn’t too much of a problem, obviously) and they were cold and miserable when it rained, which I seem to remember was most of the time.

Bad weather didn’t stop us going to the beach however and even if it was blowing a howling gale or there was some drizzle in the air we would be off to enjoy the sea.  If the weather was really bad we would put up a windbreak and huddle together inside it to try and keep warm.  Most of the time it was necessary to keep a woolly jumper on and in extreme cases a hat as well and Wellington boots were quite normal.  As soon as the temperature reached about five degrees centigrade or just slightly below we would be stripped off and sent for a dip in the wickedly cold North Sea in a sort of endurance test that I believe is even considered too tough to be included as part of Royal Marine Commando basic training.

After the paddle in the sea we would cover ourselves up in a towel and making sure we didn’t reveal our private parts struggled to remove the sopping wet bathing costume and get back to our more sensible woolly jumpers.  Then we would have a picnic consisting of cheese and sand sandwiches and more stewed tea from a thermos flask.

If the sun did ever come out we used to get really badly burnt because when I was a boy sunscreen was for softies and we would regularly compete to see how much damage we could do to our bodies by turning them a vivid scarlet and then waiting for the moment that we would start to shed the damaged skin off.  After a day or two completely unprotected on the beach it was a challenge to see just how big a patch of barbequed epidermis could be removed from the shoulders in one piece and the competition between us children was to remove a complete layer of skin in one massive peel, a bit like stripping wallpaper, which would leave you looking like the victim of a nuclear accident.

We didn’t always go to Norfolk and we didn’t always stay in caravans.  If we went on holiday with mum’s parents who lived in London we would get a train to Herne Bay or Margate in north Kent and stay at a holiday camp in a chalet which was just about one step up from a caravan.

Beach holidays in the fifties and sixties were gloriously simple.  The whole family would spend hours playing beach cricket on the hard sand, investigating rock pools and collecting crabs and small fish in little nets and keeping them for the day in little gaily coloured metal buckets before returning them to the sea at the end of the day.  There were proper metal spades as well with wooden handles that were much better for digging holes and making sand castles than the plastic substitutes that replaced them a few years later.  Inflatable beach balls and rubber rings, plastic windmills on sticks and kites that were no more than a piece of cloth (later plastic), two sticks and a length of string that took abnormal amounts of patience to get into the air and then the aeronautical skills of the Wright brothers to keep them up there for any decent length of time.

I remember beach shops before they were replaced by amusement arcades with loads of cheap junk and beach games, cricket sets, lilos, buckets and spades, rubber balls and saucy seaside postcards.  I can remember dad and his friend Stan looking through them and laughing and as I got older and more aware trying to appear disinterested but sneaking a look for myself when I thought no one was watching.  I knew they were rude but I didn’t really know why.   For a treat there was fish and chips a couple of nights a week but this was in the days before McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken so most of the catering and the eating was done in the caravan or the chalet or if we were really unlucky in the dining room of the holiday camp.

Later, after dad learned to drive, we used to go to Cornwall and Devon and North Wales, to the Nalgo holiday camp at Croyde Bay and the Hoseasons holiday village at Borth, near Aberystwyth.  The last time I went on the family holiday like that was in 1971 to Llandudno and by my own confession I was a complete pain in the arse to everybody and I don’t remember being invited ever again.

In 1975 I went to Sorrento in Italy with dad for my first overseas holiday and nothing has ever persuaded me to go back to British holidays in preference to travelling in Europe.  Since then I have spent my summer holidays on Mediterranean beaches where the sun is guaranteed, the beer is always cold and pretty suntanned ladies sunbathe topless.

A Life in a Year – 14th May, Talyllyn Railway and Plas Panteidal Holiday Village

The Talyllyn Railway is a narrow-gauge preserved railway in Wales that runs for nearly twelve kilometres from the town of Tywyn on the Mid-Wales coast to Nant Gwernol near the village of Abergynolwyn. The line was opened in 1866 to carry slate from the quarries at Bryn Eglwys to Tywyn, and was the first narrow gauge railway in Britain authorised by Act of Parliament to carry passengers using steam haulage. The line remained open even after the quarry had closed for business, and on 14^th May 1951 it became the first railway in the world to be preserved as a heritage railway by volunteers.

I have mentioned before that when I was younger and before cheap air flights holidays alternated between Norfolk on the east coast, Cornwall and Devon in the south west and occasionally Wales.  I seem to remember that we weren’t that keen on Wales because it always seemed to rain but in 1971 dad came across the Plas Panteidal Holiday Village near Aberdyfi (it was called Aberdovey then and Tywyn was Towyn) and we travelled there some time during the summer for our annual holiday.

We found it about four kilometres east of Aberdyfi but to get to the reception and then to the wooden chalets involved a steep climb up a single track roadway and was a process designed to take years off of the life of the clutch especially on arrival with the car loaded with people and luggage.  It has all been upgraded and modernised now but in 1971 the timber cabins could only at best be described as rudimentary with a basic lounge area and two poorly furnished bedrooms at either end.

But what the cabins lacked in facilities was more than compensated for by the magnificent setting in a wooded hillside and exceptional views over the Dyfi estuary on one side and the Cader Idris mountain range and Snowdonia on the other.

A short drive up the coast was Tywyn and the terminus of the railway and on a day out away from Plas Panteidal I remember taking the round trip to Abergynolwyn and stopping off half way up to visit the Dolgoch Falls.

The Talyllyn Railway is represented in the ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ books as the Skarloey Railway; most of the fictional locomotives are based on real-life equivalents. The author, Rev. W. Awdry, visited the line on a family holiday in the early days of preservation and became involved as a volunteer soon afterwards. The preservation of the Talyllyn Railway was also the inspiration for the 1953 film The Titfield Thunderbolt, an Ealing Studios comedy about a group of villagers attempting to run a service on a disused branch line after closure. The script writer for the film, had heard about the preservation of the railway and spent a day there in 1951, and some of the early incidents in preservation were incorporated into the film.

I returned to the Plas Panteidel Holiday Village in 1976 and again in 1979 and on both occasions took a trip on the Talyllyn railway.  This year I will be taking a short break in South Wales (my first UK holiday since 1986) and although I am not going to the Plas Panteidel Holiday Village I will be close enough to take a trip to Tywyn and take a ride on the railway.