LIFE GOES ON: SEP 2017

Rhyl multiview postcard - probably 1960s

During September 2017 the following old posts were updated:

Bodrhyddan Hall -

http://rhyl-life.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/bodrhyddan-hall.html

Derbyshire Miners’ holiday camp -

http://rhyl-life.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/quiz-answer-101_26.html

HMS Rhyl / a dredger named RHYL -

http://rhyl-life.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/hms-rhyl-8.html

Men’s Convalescent Home -

http://rhyl-life.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/bedford-street.html

North Wales Police -

http://rhyl-life.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/eyes-down.html

Sands / Pier -

http://rhyl-life.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/something-cool.html

WW1 Church Lads’ Brigade -

http://rhyl-life.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/militarianism-2.html

WW2 ARP wardens -

http://rhyl-life.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/showpiece.html

Rhyl multiview card - postmarked 1958

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OTHER WORLDS

A surprisingly large amount of info and pix received here at Jones Towers is not about Rhyl but about towns and villages nearby.

Above: Bodfari railway station (opened in 1869). This shot dates from 1961, a year before the station closed down and is taken looking westwards towards Denbigh. Station buildings on your right were on the Chester bound platform. Last I heard the station was a private residence.

Below: An old image of  the present Tafarn Yr Heliwr/Sportsman's Arms on Denbigh Moors. The pub is in Bylchau near Denbigh or Llansannan according to whose directions you take. "You can't miss it," I suppose.

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Above: A lofty view of part of Dyserth village on a card postmarked 1937.

Below: In Dyserth Parish Church aka St. Bridget's Church – the 15th century Jesse Window photographed circa 1930.

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Above: Found in a batch of Prestatyn pictures, an image captioned Old Pigeon House, Talacre. I'm glad about the caption, otherwise I wouldn't have known what the hell it was.

Below: Fforddlas in Prestatyn. What shall we say – 1950s?  Fforddlas in Prestatyn is one word whereas Ffordd Las in Rhyl is two words often written mistakenly as one.

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Above: Multiview card of Towyn near Abergele, postmarked 1955. The church bottom right is (Grade II listed) St. Mary's consecrated in 1873.

Below: This is a memorial at St. Michael's Church, 1 Peel Street, Abergele. The inscription reads: "Sacred to the memory of 33 persons who names are inscribed on this monument. They perished in the railway accident near Abergele on the 20th of August 1868 and their remains are deposited within this enclosure."
Click on the image to see bigger version.

The family names are (top to bottom left):- Farnham, Chinnery, Berwick, Aylmer, Franks, Askin, Cripps, Edwards, Farrell, Holmes;
(top to bottom right):- Ingram, Kellett, Lea, Lund, Owen, Outen, Parkinson, Roe, Scovell, Smith, Stearn, Strafford, Symes.

For details of the accident see Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abergele_rail_disaster

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Recently I've had meetings with film maker Mike Theaker who is planning a new Rhyl project. Mike co-produced the most popular video on my YouTube channel where it is titled Rhyl 1960s: A Tale Of Two Seasons
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7l8SIqHvsw

Only the videos marked RhylTime are mine!

Colin Jones / email: rhyl.colin.jones@live.co.uk

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QUIZ QUESTION # 192

The above appeared as a 2-page spread in Rhyl's tourist guide book 1959. The advert was out-of-date by then.

The question: How might you have known the advert was out of date?

Click on the image to see a bigger version.

No need to send me an email - just check your answers against mine on Sunday 1st October 2017 after 12 noon.

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Recently a row broke out between Welsh Assembly member Neil McEvoy and his Plaid Cymru colleagues over the question of whether tenants of social housing properties (council and housing association) should be allowed - under certain conditions - to buy their homes as is the case in England.

Mr. McEvoy believes that tenants should have that right, but Plaid is ganging up with the Labour Party to bring an end to the right to buy in Wales because it reduces the social housing stock.
[Reducing would be welcome in places such as Rhyl West where we have too many Pennaf/Clwyd Alyn Housing Association properties.]

Private landlords can pitch their properties down or up market according to demand, but General Purposes social housing remains only for the comparatively deprived. Therefore it keeps poorer communities from being anything other than poor.
[That suits the Labour Party because tenants of social housing, if they vote at all, are most likely to vote Labour.]

I have been the tenant of a Pennaf/Clwyd Alyn Housing Association flat for 16 years and would not wish to own it under any circumstances - wouldn't even want it as a gift - but I don’t believe there should be a law to prevent others from buying theirs.

Those of us in Wales who voted to have our own government did not expect that twenty years later we would have one ready to pass a law that left us with fewer legal rights than people who happen to live in England.
Welsh Assembly members need to tread carefully here.

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QUIZ ANSWER # 191

Last Sunday I posted this photo of a slice of Rhyl townscape. The question: What might you have found here in the 1960s?

The answer is a hotel.

The photo shows corner of Kinmel Street and Elwy Street where Mrs. B.C. Black presided over 'The Central' hotel/guest house/B&B. Her description of the place as being two minutes from the prom and sea might have been a tad optimistic - but that's how landladies tended to be.

[Grammatical note – I tend to write ‘a hotel’ rather than the more correct ‘an hotel’ because the latter now seems archaic. For the same reason I write ‘will’ where ‘’shall’ would be appropriate. Learn the rules then ride roughshod over them, that’s my motto.]

That rounded corner is rather nice. It helps to compensate a little for the angular inelegance of the new-ish medical centre nearby:

Like many small towns in Wales, Rhyl is a remarkably inelegant place. Perhaps this is because - as a poor nation - we can afford only the cheapest and nastiest architects.
Rhyl has also become very prosaic; if you have any poetry in your soul Rhyl would kill it stone dead.

The town is sinking under the weight of people who arrive here already deprived and lacking in spending power.
The latest big name retailer to announce closure of their Rhyl branch is Burton / Dorothy Perkins whose High Street premises are due to close in January 2018.

Top floor of the building in the 1950s & '60s was the Regent Ballroom dance hall. Click here if you wish to read previous posts about this:
http://rhyl-life.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Regent+Ballroom

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ECHOES OF WORLD WAR 2

Of the above, the late Les Slee of Molineaux Road, Rhyl, said: "This is a picture of Military College of Science (later RAMTS) Group 37A taken in Rhyl in September 1941 after the passing-out parade following completion of apprenticeships. I am on the right-hand end in the middle row. One of the officers in charge was Colonel A. T. 'Goldie' Gardner who was a test driver for MG cars. He had only one arm.
     "These boys went all round the world as Artificers reparing motor vehicles, instruments and guns, and some never came back alive. Quite a few of us (including me) got married to Rhyl girls and settled happily here."

In the photo below, Mr. P.T. (Phil) Trehearn is shown far right in fundraising mode. As President of Rhyl Individual Traders' Association (RITA) he started a war comforts fund and organised the local British Red Cross Penny-a-Week Fund. Mr. Trehearn became a member of Rhyl Urban District Council during the war. Photo supplied by Peter Trehearn.

Click on any image to see a bigger version.

The image above was supplied by Eric Hughes whose wife Doreen commented as follows:
"At Marine Lake Fun Fair my father, the engineer Albert Barnes was resident director. When the war began I was only 13. The fairground was open as usual on summer evenings and I used to help out there. My father's workshops in Westbourne Avenue were requisitioned by the Army. He experimented with apparatus to be fixed on the front of tanks to explode land mines.
     "The picture above shows an example of a rolling device. In the background is a government inspector. The outcome of the experiments was a device involving flailing chains, which was actually used by the military."

The image below was supplied years ago by Mr. Joe Cooper of Prestatyn. It shows 'C' Company Home Guard GPO Rhyl (that's right, Dad's Army) with a serious gun known as the Northover Projector.

All four images so far are from the book 'Rhyl In The Second World War' by Yours Truly which was published in 2003 and may be available from local libraries.

The one below, showing 'F' Company Home Guard Rhyl, came to hand too late to be included in the book.

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MON 2nd APR 2018 UPDATE: 'Rhyl In The Second World War' says, "The beach was spiked with long wooden poles, and pyramid-shaped concrete objects were positioned on the sands to prevent enemy landings by air or sea."
Below is an image not in the book, a recent acquisition showing holiday-makers and donkeys among the beach barricades at Rhyl in 1944.
Click on the image to see a bigger version.

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Colin Jones / email: rhyl.colin.jones@live.co.uk

See my Rhyl videos on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/user/RhylTime

Only the videos marked RhylTime are mine!

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QUIZ QUESTION # 191

Below is a slice of Rhyl townscape photographed today by Yours Truly.
The question: What might you have found here in the 1960s?

No need to send me an email - just check your answers against mine on Sunday 17th September 2017 after 12 noon.

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These days  Tir Prince Raceway in Towyn near Abergele is the place for trotting races but the 1967 advert below harks back to similar events at Prestatyn Raceway.
Click on it to read the small print.

Night Trotting, eh?  We have that in Rhyl West – it's the druggies on a mission to pick up more stuff.

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BREXIT SCHMEXIT

Yesterday in London thousands of people marched in protest against the British government's plan to leave European Union. I am not surprised. Our European citizenship is too valuable to throw away.

If any future British government tried to interfere with workers' rights, consumers' rights and other protections conferred on us by the EU, we could see civil unrest on a massive scale.

We are not Americans, we are not Chinese, we are Europeans –  and now that barriers between European countries are down they must stay down.

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QUIZ ANSWER # 190

On 31st August a recent photo appeared with a place name blanked out.

The question: What is the missing name?

The answer: Llys Catrin.

Here is the original photo. Click on it to see the restored name.

Also a badge was posted from a campaign by The Visitor newspaper.
The question: What was the campaign about?
The answer: Point Of Ayr Colliery.
Here is the badge with the message restored.

The campaign was part of a struggle to keep Point Of Ayr Colliery in use before its eventual closure in 1996.
You can read about the colliery and Point of Ayr in general in Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_of_Ayr

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MON 5th MAR 2018 UPDATE: On the subject of coal, this large china plate is a collector's item. It commemorates the North Wales pits and gives the opening date of Point of Ayr Colliery as 1874.
Click on it to see a bigger version.

The following references are added here for indexing purposes:
National Union of Mineworkers N.U.M. North Wales Miners Association.

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FLASHBACK #29

George Ellis of Colwyn Bay found a reference to the Country Club in Rhyl and wondered where it is/was.
It stood on the corner of Rhuddlan Road and Ffordd Derwen on the site of the present Ffordd Derwen pub. This advert is from Rhyl Urban District Council's tourist guide book of 1948.

In the advert are intriguing references to Ralph "Muffit" Moffat of radio station AFN (American Forces' Network) in Munich and a brochure about High fidelity recordings - Made in your own home . . .

Click on any image to see a bigger version.

In the same guide are details of the council's coupon system in which their coupons were worth twice their face value – even in car parks!

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