Pontypridd Welsh Towns

It's hard to believe but, if you'd stood on this spot 200 years ago,

all you'd have seen were fields and a few white cottages.

But, for a relative newcomer,

this place has more than left its mark on Welsh life.

It's been the home to great builders, engineers,

and one or two eccentrics.

It's the birthplace of our national anthem,

our favourite sculptures, and a world-famous singer.

As people round here like to say, this is a town with no history

but with hell of a past.

This is the story of Pontypridd.

# The old hometown looks the same

# As I step down from the train

# And there to meet me

# Is my momma and poppa... #

Tom Jones' old hometown of Pontypridd

lies about 12 miles north of Cardiff

and is famous as the market town for the valleys.

It lies at the place where the River Rhondda meets the Taff,

and it's these rivers that brought Pontypridd into existence.

As far back as records go,

Pontypridd was a place to cross the River Taff.

Its original name was Pontytypridd, "the bridge by the earthen house".

There was no town here. So why did people want to cross the river?

Well, the answer lay another dozen miles up another river valley,

at Penrhys in the Rhondda.

In the Middle Ages, there was a timber bridge slung across

the river here to take pilgrims on their way to the shrine at Penryhs.

I have this sort of idea that

-pilgrimage is all about some massive trek.

-Yes.

Is it true you could do a sort of mini-break pilgrimage?

Oh, yes. Yes.

Quite a lot of the pilgrims who went to Penrhys would've come from the area round here.

And the thing about pilgrimage routes is that

you build the bridge because of the pilgrimage,

but then everybody else can use it.

After Henry VIII closed down the monasteries,

there were no more pilgrims.

There was no money to pay for the upkeep of the crossing.

For the farmers on either side of the river, this was a problem.

So, in 1746, they commissioned a local stonemason,

William Edwards, to build a new bridge.

It took Edwards four attempts to get it right.

This spring floods swept away his early wooden versions

and his first stone bridge collapsed under its own weight.

You could imagine that, by this stage,

the farmers were getting a bit fed up.

But Edwards wanted to give it one last shot

and the result was an engineering masterpiece.

That William Edwards' bridge has survived more than 250 years

is testament to its brilliant design.

To reduce the weight, he put in these holes on either end.

When it was completed in 1756,

it was the longest single-span stone bridge in the whole of Europe,

snatching the record from the Rialto of Venice.

All we need here are some gondolas.

For an idea of what the bridge looked like when it was new,

there's this, The Bridge of Beauty, painted in 1790 by Julius Ibbotson.

There's the bridge, surrounded by lush farmland.

It's no surprise that other artists - Turner, Richard Wilson -

were drawn to this but, just as this painting was being completed,

the landscape was about to change for ever.

Noise, bustle and heat, they are our impressions.

But it makes any Welshman thrill with pride to hear mention of Pontypridd,

industry of the hardest and toughest variety.

But King Coal's domain has majesty.

The industrial revolution in South Wales started in the 1750s

with the ironworks in Merthyr Tydfil.

The problem was transporting the iron products to their destinations.

The solution was the Glamorganshire Canal, started in 1790

and its 25-mile length completed a mere four years later.

In the 1970s, the canal was buried under the A470,

a tribute to the canal builders' choice of route.

But there is one short stretch still visible in Pontypridd.

And, in the last couple of years, a band of local enthusiasts

have begun restoring it to its former glory.

It was the realisation, about two years ago,

that particularly these locks were starting to deteriorate.

There were trees growing out, as you can see there,

damaging the structure.

They are grade II listed structures.

They're historic and important for Pontypridd.

It struck a few of us then that we should be

doing more than had been done in the past.

Oh, lovely mud!

It's funny, isn't it, to think that here we are,

we'd have been looking up at the bottom of barges

carrying the output of Wales.

That's right, yeah. Extremely important, you know.

There was nothing else that could move that sort of quantity efficiently.

The ultimate plan is to restore the locks, the bridge, the basin,

and a length of canal as it was 150 years ago.

The canal meant that Pontypridd started to develop as raw materials

came down the valleys on an early railway called a dram road,

before being loaded onto the canal barges.

Coal came down from the Rhondda on the dram road

to be taken on from Pontypridd by canal.

There's a clue to what happened here.

This is the Tumble Inn, where the coal was tumbled out,

ready to be loaded into the barges.

The canal was also the reason Pontypridd's most famous factory came to the town.

The Brown Lenox Chainworks opened in 1818 and made anchor chains

for all the biggest ships from the 19th century right up until the QE2.

This is Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Behind him, chains from Pontypridd.

Brown Lenox's innovation was the bar across the middle of the chain

which made them immensely strong.

From such simple ideas, empires are built.

They're used on giant liners.

The Queen Mary carried a Pontypridd chain

and battleships Rodney and Nelson are anchored by chains made by men

whose hearts are chained strongly to Wales, the land they love.

# Ooh! We're back on the train

# Ooh!

# Aah!

# Ooh!

# Back on the chain gang. #

The Brown Lenox Chainworks were a big part of Pontypridd's life

for the best part of 200 years.

They closed in the year 2000 and soon all this will be a supermarket.

From the great chains of Brunel's ships to a chain store.

Somehow, the links of history have been broken.

But there is a bit of Brunel in Pontypridd.

In 1836, he designed this impressive viaduct,

part of the new Taff Vale Railway.

But the station here was called Newbridge. What was going on?

Well, while the whole area around here had always been called

Pontytypridd, with the completion of Edwards' bridge,

it became known as Newbridge.

It took the postmaster Charles Bassett to sort it out.

Fed up with getting letters for every other Newbridge in Wales,

in 1856 he had the name officially changed to Pontypridd.

Mind you, the railway took another decade

before it changed the name of the station.

Trains! Always a bit late.

But, even with its new name,

mid-19th century Pontypridd was still a pretty small place.

The population was only about 5,000,

a tenth the size of an Aberdare or Merthyr.

However, in 1856, the same year Pontypridd got its name,

the town gave Wales a very special piece of music.

Listen to the roar for Eddie Butler as he leads his new-look side out.

Mae hen wlad fy nhadau, an anthem to stir the heart of any Welsh person

and fire up an international team.

It didn't always work, mind.

Composed in Pontypridd by father and son team Evan and James James.

The story goes that while out walking one day in January 1856,

harpist James James got a tune inside his head.

He rushed home to tell his father Evan, a keen poet who,

there and then, on the spur of the moment, wrote down the famous words.

But how did it become the national anthem?

The answer lies in a Ponty pub.

Evan and James James weren't chapelgoers but played in pubs such as this one.

This is what their famous song might have sounded like when it was first performed.

-In all its original glory, Gwyn!

-Oh, wasn't that lovely?

-And different.

-Yeah, absolutely.

How did it go from being something sung around Pontypridd

to being the national anthem of Wales?

I have read that in the eisteddfod of Llangollen of 1858 that

John Owen actually sang it there,

and it became very, very popular

and he was singing it at various concerts and so on.

And it became, very, very soon, the popular song.

It became the national anthem of the eisteddfod

in a matter of four or five years.

When was it first played at a rugby international?

It was sung in 1905 when Wales beat the All Blacks.

And the story was that, you know, the All Blacks had swept all before them

and beaten everybody and they came to Cardiff to play Wales

and the people are saying, "Oh, this haka, it's a great inspiration.

"I mean, what are we going to do about this?"

And then there was a letter from a Mr Williams from the Rhondda

in the Western Mail who said,

"We ought to sing Mae Hen Fy Nhadau. That'll scare them up a bit."

And the people did.

And, apparently, it really struck terror in the hearts

of the New Zealand players and Wales won.

For generations, Pontypridd's favourite landmark

has been the rocking stone.

It was formed in the last ice age

when two huge boulders were left perched on top of each other.

In the 19th century,

it became the meeting place of the town's druidic society.

Their leading light was the deeply eccentric Dr William Price.

He's now best remembered as the man who made cremation legal

but was also a Chartist, vegetarian, nationalist,

and builder of these roundhouses for a never-finished museum of Welsh life.

Was he bonkers?

No! Gosh, not at all.

People get this very bad impression of Dr Price over the years.

And it hasn't been helped by the fact that, certainly, everything

seems to have been overshadowed by the whole cremation act.

Everyone thinks of Dr Price and thinks of cremation.

What they don't remember is the fact that he was 84

when that happened so it'd been quite a wonderful,

adventurous and very colourful life up until then.

Do you think we forgive him his inconsistencies

because he looked like that?

It's a wonderful outfit, isn't it? It's so flamboyant and so colourful.

It's very much like him, I think.

It kind of shines an awful lot of colour

on what was a very dark Victorian age, I believe.

He's certainly someone that should be remembered and honoured,

I think, in the history of this wonderful town.

William Price's Pontypridd was the small Welsh-speaking town

that had been there for 50 years.

That all changed with the discovery of

rich seams of coal on the outskirts of town.

With the opening of the mines,

there was a huge growth in Pontypridd's population,

rising from just under 8,000 in 1875 to over 40,000 by 1911.

There's not much left of the mines that used to ring Pontypridd.

But here's one that does remain.

This is the Great Western Colliery in Hopkinstown.

It closed in 1983 and on the outside there's all this decay.

But on the inside...

..is the original steam winding engine, built in 1875,

the oldest surviving example of its type in the whole of the UK.

Precision engineered, this was cutting-edge technology

for its day and has been lovingly restored by a team of volunteers.

This engine was 50 per cent better than any

previously installed in South Wales in the year that it was built.

It could raise 1,000 tonnes in a nine-hour shift,

a quarter of a million tonnes in a year,

12 and a half million tonnes in its working life.

So, really, a very impressive piece of technology

for the late Victorian period.

If there was this new coal to be brought up, who dug it out?

There was a tremendous new influx

because there wasn't enough of a labour force to man these new mines.

So lots of people came in from the west of England.

They came from Gloucester, they came from Hereford.

Did that change the complexion of Pontypridd?

In the 1850s and '60s, it was a small, mainly Welsh-speaking town.

By the early 1900s,

the congregation of a minister up in the Rhondda,

who was moving to Pontypridd,

warned him that he was going to a very English place!

There was a harsh reality to living and working in Victorian Pontypridd.

And here at 4pm on Saturday June 23rd, 1894, disaster struck.

This was the site of the Albion Colliery in Cilfynydd.

Now it's the home of Pontypridd High School.

On that Saturday afternoon,

290 men and boys were killed under ground when coal damp ignited.

It was the worst Welsh mining disaster of the 19th century.

For today's students at Pontypridd High School,

the disaster still has relevance.

Here we have a plan of a layout of the old colliery

and there's a sort of macabre detail.

All these numbers refer to the bodies of the men and boys.

You're here at the school, guys.

Were you conscious of what had happened beneath our feet?

Yeah, of course we were.

I live in Cilfynydd so I've always been close

to where the Albion Colliery once stood.

So I've known a lot about the history since I was a little girl.

Jamie, does it somehow haunt your generation?

Yeah, definitely, it's like echoes of it with us now because,

if you think about it, we're getting an education and we're learning

where they were working down the mines and they all, you know,

a lot of them met quite gruesome deaths and things.

It's quite... it's quite sad to think about it and I suppose we should feel lucky.

But, at the same time, we should remember them,

and like Lowri said, keep it on for future generations.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Pontypridd was a frontier town,

more akin to the American West than Victorian Britain.

Growing fast, full of energy, much of the town was built then.

And, if you look around today, you can still see some of the details.

This is the town's Tabernacle Welsh Baptist chapel,

built in 1861, now the town's museum.

It's currently being refurbished

and that reveals more evidence of Pontypridd's Edwardian opulence.

Members of the Cilfynydd Art Society have been involved in

recreating the colour scheme of the chapel as it was in 1910.

What's that?

Well, this is the scrapings that they got from

the ceiling to give us the shades, the colours that we needed to find.

But that's a fraction of a...

Yeah, well, we used a magnifying glass and did the best we could!

This little bit in the middle, on the original colour scheme,

was listed as lemon yellow.

But the sample that we had didn't look like it was actually

lemon yellow and it wasn't a very clean sample.

And we decided that a very pale peach, which almost looks yellow,

works better with the other peaches in the colour scheme.

-You can't have your peaches clashing!

-No!

And with work on the ceiling going full steam ahead, I had a sneak preview

to see how the restored paint scheme was working out.

Wow!

Wow!

Suddenly it's on a different scale altogether, isn't it?

Yeah, you can see how big the ceiling is now.

Looking very impressive, the bits they've already done.

I'm terrified of standing up.

A hundred years of plaster will come down on my head!

Yeah, be careful not to bash it!

The scale is just vast

compared with that sheet of paper you had to work on.

Yeah, it's fascinating to see it actually coming to life now.

This is what? The background has been done?

Yes, this is all the background paint here that's been done.

This whole panel has been repaired

and this is a very pale grey-green which has been done so far.

And these are colours from the 1980s?

Yeah, these are the ones that we're trying to take

them back now to the 1910 colours.

The elaborate detail in the museum's ceiling

is evidence of Pontypridd's wealth at the beginning of the 20th century.

Another architectural gem from the Edwardian area

is the town's market hall.

Pontypridd's market has always been a central part of the town's life.

It was first established in the early 19th century and,

as the town grew in importance, so did the market.

For much of the 20th century,

Pontypridd market was THE shopping centre for people of the valleys.

Even in the 1960s, the market was still thriving,

perhaps because you could buy mini-skirts there by the inch.

# Oh, I've got a sheet for my bed and a pillow for my head

# I've got a pencil full of lead... #

These days, it retains its charm but is much quieter,

a victim of the supermarkets that have sprung up on the outskirts of town.

But Pontypridd wasn't all about working and shopping.

There were over a dozen Italian cafes in town.

And, at its heart, a special place to take time off.

This is Ynysangharad Park, opened in 1920 with cricket,

golf, tennis, the bandstand.

All there for public relaxation

although there is one place that is off-limits to the public.

At the heart of the park is this, the lido.

It was built in 1927 and once rang to the sounds of Pontypridd at play.

It's the last of its kind in Wales.

And the process has begun to find the funds to restore it.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to see it as it once was?

From this energetic, feisty town,

it's not surprising that sporting heroes emerged.

Pontypridd Rugby Club was founded in 1876.

They're still going strong, although perhaps they'll never be

the heart and soul of the Welsh game as they were ten years ago.

They've produced some outstanding players

like Neil Jenkins and Martyn Williams.

Rugby has historical strength.

But 100 years ago, the most famous son from Pontypridd was a boxer.

Freddie Welsh was a local hero

and world lightweight champion between 1911 and 1917.

But Ponty's boxing clubs weren't only about fighting.

They helped raise the money to build the town's cottage hospital

which opened in 1911.

In the years before the founding of the NHS, cottage hospitals

like the one in Pontypridd provided the best health care for working people.

This rare film archive shows the hospital in action in 1935.

But, sadly, the well cared-for patients in these shots

were the lucky few.

For the less fortunate, there was only one place to go - the workhouse.

Although it was demolished in the 1970s

to make way for the Dewi Sant Hospital,

Pontypridd's workhouse still sends a shudder through the town's history.

Someone who knows all about this is Pontypridd-born novelist Catrin Collier,

whose grandmother was a nurse in the workhouse's infirmary.

Catrin researched her family history as the basis for her novels.

Workhouse - it's like a word from some dark history.

I'd associate it with Dickens and I assumed that from about the 1880s on,

the world had become more enlightened. It certainly hadn't.

Right up until the end of the Second World War, I think,

the workhouses were regarded as a repository

for anybody who couldn't afford to keep themselves.

Widows, children, families where the husband was too ill to work,

people who were mentally or physically incapable

of working in some way, they ended up in the workhouse,

where they were expected to work 12 hours a day for three meals.

Was it a brutal regime?

It was very, very harsh. The food was minimal.

My grandmother apparently got into trouble with the authorities

and the soup that the workhouse inmates were given was actually

the water that the vegetables had been boiled in.

And she agitated, got into trouble for agitating,

but, eventually, some of the vegetables were left in the water.

And when they pulled it down and put up the Dewi Sant Hospital,

didn't some of that linger on?

It never lost its reputation.

My father made me promise that he'd never have to go into

what he called the workhouse.

But when he broke his leg, he had no choice. He had to go into Dewi Sant.

And the wonderful consultant who runs Dewi Sant,

he used to practically greet all the old people

as they came in and said, "This is not the workhouse.

"We do look after people,"

and, I must admit, it is a superb hospital

and the staff there really, really do look after the geriatric patients.

Whether you were in the workhouse or not, the period between the wars

in Pontypridd and the rest of the valleys was grim.

During the depression of the 1930s,

the unemployment rate in the town was over 75 percent.

The government was largely inactive

but there were attempts to bring new jobs to depressed areas

and one of those was just outside Pontypridd, in Treforest.

This is part of the great expanse of the Treforest industrial estate,

one of the first of its kind to be built in Britain.

It opened in 1937 and was designed to create jobs

in light industry such as textiles,

some of them run by refugees from fascism.

During the Second World War, as industries were moved out of cities

and away from the bombing, the Treforest estate was a hive of activity.

The buzz continued into the 1940s and 1950s with new electronics

and clothes factories starting up.

Working in the glove factory, there was one Thomas Woodward,

soon, under his stage name of Tom Jones,

to become Pontypridd's most famous son.

Pontypridd has produced a number of great singers,

including opera stars Sir Geraint Evans and Stuart Burrows,

but it's Tom Jones who's most associated with the town.

And the town remains close to Tom's heart.

He has a red Pontypridd phone box in his Bel-Air mansion and, in 2005,

played a triumphant homecoming concert in Ynysangharad Park.

Tom Jones lived in this house in Laura Street

and the street has another claim to fame.

The mother-in-law of the former president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, also lived here.

Imagine the street parties.

Since the 1960s,

many of Pontypridd's traditional industries have been closing down.

The mines, the chainworks have gone.

There are new employers, the University of Glamorgan,

even Doctor Who, which was filmed on the industrial state in Treforest.

But there is one small company

that everybody associates with Pontypridd.

Groggs was founded in 1965 by artist John Hughes,

and over the years their models of Welsh rugby heroes have become

almost as famous as the players themselves.

The statues are now made by John's son Richard, who continues

the family tradition for meticulous attention to detail.

So it started out, Richard, as artwork, more than the figures?

Yeah, Dad's idea was to be the Picasso of Pontypridd, really.

He didn't really think about rugby as such.

He just wanted to make things.

But the rugby giants, they were all based on..

Mabinogion characters, yeah.

So he just one day switched those giants with clubs

and things like that into rugby players.

I suppose with people like Mervyn Davies and Gareth Edwards...

Great characters, absolutely. They were born to be Groggs, really.

We still get characters like that now.

-Well, they were almost caricatures in the flesh.

-They were, where they?

I came into the business and started concentrating on faces

and trying to refine them.

Have you got a favourite?

Neil. Neil Jenkins.

But, I mean, to us, they're all favourites,

they're all heroes, you know.

And it is very important to us that we've stayed here.

We haven't decided to go somewhere else where, you know,

we could probably make a lot more money but this is it.

This is our heart and soul, really, Ponty.

And on the statue marking the 2010 captain's climb of Kilimanjaro,

I spotted a familiar face.

An old man, an old goat on Mount Kilimanjaro,

buried in the middle, being pulled up, pushed up.

Pontypridd has changed a lot in the last 30 years.

When the A470 was built,

it split the town in two and it lost some of its identity.

Now many of its people work and shop down the road in Cardiff.

But there's also a rich seam of defiance here.

This old shopping centre from the 1970s has been demolished

and a new one will take its place.

This is a relatively new town

but there is a deep-rooted sense of belonging here.

From Ponty and proud of it, they say.

Pontypridd is very much its own place and has its own future.

The investment that is going into Pontypridd now

should've probably happened about 20 years ago.

But now at least it is happening and, hopefully,

when some of the roadworks are done,

then, you know, it should be a vibrant market town again.

I'm saddened to see the way it's becoming, the way it's going

but I want it to come back as it used to be

because I'm extremely proud to be from Ponty.

I'm normally wearing my Pontypridd rugby shirt when I'm working!

I've got a picture of the bridge on my bedroom wall,

I'm that proud of it.

# Yes, they'll all come to see me

# In the shade of that old oak tree

-# As they lay me 'neath the green, green grass of home.

-#

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