Gwent locals reconnect with their cultural heritage

Life on the Levels forms an oral history of one of the country’s most hidden and overlooked areas, spanning a period from the 1930s to the 2000s. The Living Levels Landscape Partnership (LLLP) is a Heritage Lottery Funded (HLF) Landscape Partnership Scheme which aims to reconnect people and communities to the Gwent Levels landscape and provide a sustainable future for this historic and unique area.

They are capturing voices and memories in danger of being lost. In its time, the Levels has supported farming, reen maintenance, fishing, bathing, foundry workers, ship wrights, poachers, railway workers, and many more.

Through interviews, letters, diaries and photographs Newport Museum and Art Gallery have created a rich archive of stories and a resource for future generations. This exhibition is a photographic response to those interviews.

George and Fanny Kibbey moved from Worcestershire to work on the Great Western Railway. As daughter Iris Theobald recalls: “Nearly every family had a man working on the railway.”

Iris had four sisters: Ivy, Olive, May and Rose. Ivy (James) remembers the family receiving cheap coal. “The railway would dump a ton in the road and we’d to shovel it into the coal house.”

“We spent half our life on the Moors.”- Iris Theobald and Ivy James, railway children (Rogiet). Picture: Emma Drabble/Living Levels Landscape Partnership

Their father drove steam engines on ‘double homes’ (staying one night away) and emergency stand-ins - “the call boy came knocking any time of the day or night to get him up.” The Royal Train, meanwhile, was sometimes parked close to the Severn Tunnel near Portskewett Station. “They said it was a secret, but we all knew.”

The railway sisters would roam the Levels. Iris said: “The fields were just all wild flowers: we spent half our life on the Moors. There’d be cockling between the tides - you’d got to be careful - the tide comes in quickly” and perhaps a penny’s worth of ice cream in a glass on Sundays “shared because there was no money then”.

“We’d be down the moors, make a house in the woods, follow the fox hounds and red coats, or chat to the Gypsies with their brown and white horses and old-fashioned caravans.” When war came there was munition work, making blackout headlamp covers and, if you were lucky, dancing with GIs. It was, says Ivy, “ten time better than it is now.”

Edward Watts is chairman at the Mission to Seafarers at Newport docks, a safe haven for seafarers from all over the world. He has family connections to the sea.

“Nearly every family had someone who went to sea.”- Edward Watts, MBE DL (Newport). Picture: Emma Drabble/Living Levels Landscape Partnership’.

“I went into shipping, but on the land side. My father went to sea, my grandfather went to sea. In…Pill, or Pillgwenlly if you want to call it by its correct name, nearly every family had someone who went to sea within their family. It was just part of life.

“I’ve been here over 50 years. In the recent past the docks were full, this was a busy place with boats coming in from all over. Because you had coal, iron ore, steel, because Llanwern was going full pelt. So, Newport was a very big and very important port. Therefore, there were people here from all over the world. It is a dock area, and so it was a multi-cultural area long before it became twee to call it multicultural. Take me. My grandmother is from Cornwall and my grandfather from America.

“We would have upwards of 100 seafarers in here at the Mission of an evening once upon a time, but also you used to have hostesses come down and dance for the seamen. And these days people go ho-ho, you know, but it wasn’t – it was quite innocent. You know, they would come dance for the seamen, their taxi would come at half past nine and take them home. And the elderly ladies from the church would come down and chaperone. You know, it was quite quaint.’

Sue Waters has a passion for the past: “I always used to listen to the old people. My father would say: ‘Oh, she’s got her ears flapping again!’ and he was right.”

Schooled at St Joseph’s convent when it was based at Tredegar House, Sue grew up black-berrying, trading orchard plums by the roadside (“tuppence a pound and we’d sell everything we’d got”) and secretly sampling the farmhouse cider when dispatched to bring a jug full to the supper table. “It was horrid!”

“If we don’t teach our children, they won’t teach anybody else.”- Sue Waters, historian (Whitson). Picture: Nanette Hepburn/Living Levels Landscape Partnership

She moved into one of the oldest farmhouses on the Levels when she married David Waters. She remembers ‘casters’ like Bill England, Alf Stevens and Hubert Jones who, she thinks, did a better job of cleaning the reens than modern machinery; the Levels’ fodder trade that fed the pit ponies working the Valleys collieries; and all the landowners, from the monasteries and Eton College to Tredegar House estate and the steel works, that occupied the Levels.

She’s currently compiling her history of the Levels in the firm belief that the past can inform our futures: “I wasn’t interested in the past until my latter years. But then you lose someone who has passed their local knowledge down and you realise it’s the end of an era.”

Brought up and schooled at Marshfield, Tim Rooney was, by his own admission, never happy in the classroom. “I wasn’t very keen on school, but I was always very keen on horses.”

“It’s a throwaway society.”- Tim Rooney, farrier (Marshfield). Picture: Emma Drabble/Living Levels Landscape Partnership’.

Not surprising given his family background on the Levels. “In those days,” says Tim, “every farm would have a Point-to-Point horse” and local hunt masters like Lord Tredegar relied on a good supply of horses. Tim’s grandfather Gustavas, was a horse dealer and sold horses to the army. “He was still riding in his seventies.” Meanwhile Tim’s father, former soldier and Marshfield farmer ‘Guvo’, rode some 70 winners at Point-to-Point.

Tim started a shoeing business in 1972 when there were very few farriers around. There was no shortage of work. “We didn’t go out shoeing: a lot of hunt horses came to the forge.” Then there were the council workers who brought their hand tools in for sharpening or repair. “No mechanisation then. They don’t repair things now.” On one occasion Gypsy Tom Price arrived in a little van. “In the back was a Shetland pony!”

St Mellons-born Arthur recalls how his little village (“it was very compact”) once supported five pubs including the White Hart, Fox and Hounds, Star Inn and the Bluebell. But it was the milk meadows that really made the place: “The grass grows wonderfully.”

“I grew up in Utopia.”- Arthur Thomas, farmer (Marshfield). Picture: Emma Drabble/Living Levels Landscape Partnership’.

These rich pastures led to the Levels serving as Cardiff’s dairy and before he and Anne took on their own farm, Arthur helped his father, Walters deliver milk by pony and cart from his farm, Hendre Isaf, to St Mellons and beyond to Rhymney and Roath. Walters progressed to a three-wheel Raleigh van and even built his own house in 1935 “from the makings of the milk”.

Arthur, after serving with the RAF on atomic warfare, left and with Anne bought their own farm. He was a self-taught farmer and when it came to hedge repairs he was stumped. “I’d never done hedge laying so I stopped and talked to this grumpy old so-and-so laying a hedge.

“Next thing I know he was at the back door: ‘I’ve come to see if you’ve got a job for me.’” Evans the hedge layer stayed with the Thomas’ until he retired.

“We put that farm right. We did all the fences, the walls: marvellous. I had a great education off this gentleman. I owe him a lot.”

But now, he says, traffic deters owners riding their horses to the forge. “We go out to shoe virtually every horse: it suits us a lot more because the horses are quieter in their own environment.”