Carmarthen Welsh Towns

Carmarthen.

From here it looks a sleepy place, on the curve of a meandering river.

But for centuries, this was the biggest town in Wales.

Carmarthen was a bustling centre of commerce and culture,

and the lifeblood of the town was the River Towy,

once packed with ships.

As well as a busy trading port, Carmarthen was a holy place,

a hotbed of rebellion,

a town that has produced desperate criminals and outstanding sportsmen.

It is also a place that has spawned mystical tales of sorcerers

and magic oak trees.

But the true history of Carmarthen

is far more fascinating than any myth.

The story of Carmarthen begins with the Romans. Around 75 AD

they took one look at this river crossing, eight miles inland,

overlooked by easily defended high ground, and said, "We'll take it."

The Romans recognised Carmarthen's strategic importance.

As the lowest of bridging point on the River Towy

it was the gateway to West Wales.

And its location at the river's tidal limit meant it

could also be reached by sea.

The Romans built a fort here, and later a walled town which

became a magnet for local traders and craftsmen.

Along with Caerwent,

this was one of just two towns the Romans built in Wales.

They called it Moridunum.

You may think the name comes from the mystical Myrddin,

or Merlin in English,

but there is no wizardry to this.

The Romans simply took the Celtic words for sea - "mor" -

and fort - "dunos" -

and made them, with a Latin tweak, "Moridunum".

Over the years Moridunum becomes Myrddin,

stick another fort, "Caer", in front, mutate it a bit,

"Caerfyrddin."

The Romans also left something else behind, something rather unexpected.

It is up here, just tucked away off the road to Llandeilo.

An amphitheatre.

Only one of seven in Britain,

which shows the importance of this place as a Roman regional centre.

When it was full this place would have rung with the cheers

and roars of 4,000 to 5,000 people.

Maybe it is the start of our passion for contact sport.

After the Romans,

the next people to stamp their mark on Carmarthen were the Normans.

In 1109, Henry I of England built a castle here.

There were others in the area but they belonged to mere barons.

This was a royal castle.

And it was put here to show the locals who ran the show

in this part of the world.

Just as a community had grown up around the Roman fort which

was now known as the old town, so the Normans created

a community here, around the castle, the new town.

The new Norman town thrived economically.

But the old town was still a rich cultural centre.

Historians believe that it was in the Priory there

that the Black Book of Carmarthen was transcribed in the 13th century.

It is now treasured as one of the earliest

and most important surviving manuscripts in the Welsh language.

In 1546, the two towns were amalgamated by Royal Charter.

The newly united Carmarthen was booming.

500 years ago the River Towy

would have been busy with ships bringing in goods from the sea,

picking up fresh cargo, connecting local farmers

and tradesmen with markets in Bristol, Devon, and France.

By the 16th century, Carmarthen,

with its thriving port had become the biggest town in Wales.

Records of what was coming in and out of the port still survive today.

What have we got here?

This is a very important transcript of the Welsh port books.

The Welsh port books were basically the custom returns

for the whole of Wales.

What we are looking at here is the returns in the book

for the period Michaelmas 1556 to Michaelmas 1567.

Let's look at these two vessels.

There's the Marie John of Carmarthen,

and the Nitingall of Carmarthen. They have both come from France.

The Marie John has landed salt,

and the Nitingall has landed Gascony, 24 tonnes of Gascony.

So it has landed wine.

That is basically wine from what we would call Bordeaux.

But for the salt, the salt is going to be used in a number of trades.

Obviously for the farming community it is important for butter, for

salting hams, but it is also used

in the sort of woollen industry as well.

The Michael, the Matthew, the Nitingall,

does that suggest it is a busy place?

Carmarthen is very, very important

for the whole economy of the region, so right the

way up, 20 or 30 miles away, places as far as Llandovery,

if you are manufacturing wool out to there it is going to

come down to Carmarthen, a very busy, bustling place.

And with bustling trade came a thirst for knowledge.

In 1725, the first press in Wales moved here. Others soon followed,

making Carmarthen the most bookish town in the country.

Outside Lammas Street meeting house there is a plaque to one

of the town's most prolific printers,

John Ross and his collaborator

Peter Williams did not play by the book when it came to taking on

the powerful academic establishments of Oxford and Cambridge.

Ross and Williams wanted to publish a Welsh language bible that

everyone could afford, but there was a snag, only Oxford and Cambridge

had the authority to publish a bible, as they held the copyright.

Methodist minister Peter Williams had a cunning plan.

Peter Williams discovered a loophole.

In other words, if a bible was published with explanatory notes,

he could get away with it.

The other thing was that people could not afford a bible.

They were too poor to afford a bible.

So what he did was to publish this in parts. 15 in all.

So that you were able, much as you have these days, you know,

these publications coming out in monthly issues or whatever.

And it built up into a complete copy of the Bible.

The Peter Williams Bible was such a success that 18,000 copies

were printed during his lifetime,

spreading the scripture through the chapels and homes of Wales.

And all thanks to a few footnotes.

The Welsh language has deep roots in Carmarthen.

The town has played a key part in shaping the modern Eisteddfod.

The colourful pageantry of the festival can be traced back

to 1819, when Iolo Morganwg linked his Society of poets,

known as the Gorsedd of the Bards,

with the Eisteddfod, for the first time, in Carmarthen.

But all this ceremony

and culture only tells half the story of the town.

It also had a dark side.

During the 18th and 19th centuries it was notorious as

one of the most corrupt and violent boroughs in Britain.

The Guildhall, the scene of many clashes between the towns two

political factions, the Whigs and the Tories.

1831, election year, a mob twice stormed the Guildhall,

beating up clerks and threatening to kill anyone who dared to

vote for the Tory candidate.

Carmarthen made history that day is the only town in Wales to have a

parliamentary election cancelled because of violent disorder.

And there was more to come.

A decade later, gangs of men dressed in women's clothing roamed

Carmarthenshire, destroying toll gates which taxed road users.

These were the Rebecca Riots.

But toll houses like this one on the western edge of town were

only the straw that broke the camel's back.

The poor in the countryside were already suffering from high

rents and bad harvests.

Squeezed on all sides, the farmers of South West Wales had had enough.

They joined forces to fight back,

rallying to a very unusual clarion call.

This conch is called "Crag End Becca", or "Rebecca's shell".

It had been hidden for generations by a local family who feared

they would he locked up or transported to Tasmania,

if the authorities ever discovered that it had once been

blown as a call to arms, during the Rebecca Riots.

WHEEZING

I am quite dizzy now!

BUGLE EFFECT

Come on, rioters!

By 19th June 1843, over 1,000 protesters marched

into Carmarthen, heading for the Guildhall, were they would deliver

a list of demands and grievances to the mayor and magistrates.

But they never got there.

A mob broke away and came straight here, Carmarthen workhouse, having

forced the master of the workhouse to open the gates,

they stormed inside.

They all came in, hundreds of them, by all accounts.

They began throwing beds out of the window,

pushing over the furniture, trying to burn the place down.

And so it was a serious riot.

Why did they choose the workhouse?

Why did they pick on the place that had least?

The workhouse was very unpopular.

Families were divided, the mothers were taken from their children

and the husbands and wives weren't allowed to live together,

and the food, apparently, in Carmarthen Prison

was much better than it was in the workhouse,

so if you wanted a symbol of oppression and dereliction,

go for the workhouse.

Those imprisoned for their part in the workhouse riot

served their time in the county jail,

which stood on this site,

now occupied by the council headquarters.

Nothing remains of the jail,

but a volume known as the Felons Register

can be found in the Carmarthenshire Archives.

-John, it's a mighty tome.

-It is, yes.

-What do we have here?

It is the Felons Register for Carmarthen Gaol from 1844-1870.

This is the register of all the people that were incarcerated there.

It comes complete with photographs. Who did all this?

Well, the photographs were taken by the governor of the jail

at the time, George Stephens.

He was just interested in photography.

They do turn out to be some of the earliest,

if not the earliest, mugshots in Britain.

-2CMHL.

-Yeah, two calendar months' hard labour.

-What was he doing?

-Stealing clothes.

There's a chap there from France.

Stealing a pair of boots.

-He looks very French.

-He does, doesn't he? Yes, yeah.

Does that suggest that Carmarthen offered rich pickings

-and word got out?

-Well, yeah, I mean,

it was a relatively cosmopolitan place at the time.

There was more trade going on here, so probably more opportunities

for people to come up here and steal and rob.

Two favourites of mine -

John Evans and Daniel McCarthy.

13 and 14.

Attempting to steal strawberries.

14 days' hard labour.

And three years in reform school. I mean, they didn't even

get the pleasure of eating the strawberries.

They just attempted to eat them.

There's one very notorious woman

in Carmarthen who was named Anne Aubrey,

and from her early twenties

she was recorded in the census as a "seamstress",

which is a euphemism for a prostitute,

but her main crime was permanently drunk and disorderly, and violent.

And she's so drunk on occasion,

she was actually unconscious on the streets.

And in one case, the policeman arrested her

by borrowing a wheelbarrow

and wheeling her down King Street to the police station.

The main crime, I think, in Carmarthen was drunkenness.

It is now and it was then.

In its heyday, Carmarthen proudly claimed

to have more pubs per head than anywhere else in Wales.

It still enjoys something of a reputation as a boozer's paradise.

During one 19th century election,

a prospective Parliamentary candidate plied locals

with 25,000 gallons of ale,

11,000 bottles of whisky and 500 bottles of cider.

They drank the lot.

And voted in his rival.

But Carmarthen was changing. During the 19th century,

the town lost something of its Wild West feel,

as developers embarked on a programme of civic improvement.

A number of important landmarks sprang up,

including Trinity College, St David's Lunatic Asylum,

as it was called then, and the imposing Picton Monument,

put up in memory of Sir Thomas Picton,

Governor of Trinidad, and the most senior officer to die at Waterloo.

And in 1852, the railway came to town.

This spelled the beginning of the end

for Carmarthen's life as a port.

Steam power was driving not just trains,

but an industrial revolution that would leave Carmarthen behind.

By the end of the 19th century,

the town that had once been the biggest in Wales

was now only the 24th largest.

If the people of Carmarthen were dismayed

at the changing fortunes of their town,

they didn't let it show. In 1900, they celebrated

the dawn of a new century by building this civic park.

And they fitted it out with a state-of-the-art facility

for enthusiasts of a new, action-packed high speed sport.

When this velodrome was built,

the country was in the grip of cycling fever.

We still are.

The bicycle as we know it today, with its chain-driven gears

and pneumatic tyres, was only invented in the late 19th century.

By 1900, cycling enthusiasts were pushing this new creation

to its limits, in competitions held at Carmarthen Park,

watched by hundreds of spectators.

But more sombre times were to follow.

Like every other town across Wales, Carmarthen suffered

losses during the First and Second world wars.

A snapshot of the town during the Second World War is

captured in a unique volume

belonging to the family of Alec Richards.

I have to say, this is one of the most interesting books

I have ever seen. It's a remarkable record.

-It is a remarkable book, actually.

-Isn't it just?

-It is.

Tell me, how did it come about?

Well, my mother, during the war,

she kept this diary. She started it at the beginning of the war.

Carmarthen was an important centre for the recruitment

and training of troops.

And Alec's family home overlooked Ystrad Playing fields,

where soldiers were billeted during the war.

Among them were many American GIs.

We had tremendous fights. The local boys are losing

all their girlfriends, you see.

They were young, had their nice uniforms and plenty of money.

I remember catching my sister in a home-made tent up in the woods.

There was this Yank she'd got friendly with.

Rather upset her.

These sketches, done by a GI. These are extraordinary.

Whoever it was obviously became one of the family,

as far as my mum was concerned.

She was artistic as well.

That's what encouraged it, I think.

April 1944, so it's two, three months before D-Day,

so we don't know...

-Half these guys were probably killed, you see.

-Yeah.

-It's a book out of which the spirit of the age comes.

-Truly, it does.

Now, we know Carmarthen had earned its place in the electoral history

books, thanks to its fondness for a good old riot,

but in 1966, it rocked the political establishment once again.

In March of that year, Lady Megan Lloyd George had been

elected as Labour MP for Carmarthen, with 21,000 votes.

Plaid Cymru candidate Gwynfor Evans had come third,

with just 7,000 votes.

Plaid had never won a parliamentary seat,

but Lady Megan's death a few weeks later prompted

a by-election that would change everything.

Gwynfor's son, Guto, was roped in to help with the campaign.

This election was a special election.

We noticed that there was something happening that people we knew,

old liberals, old liberal families, were prepared to say,

"Oh, this time we are considering voting Plaid."

We knew that we were in for a good chance to become a good second

-and that's what we were campaigning for.

-But only second?

Yes, and we thought that the Liberals

were main contenders for second place.

Our tactics were to ensure that the Liberals didn't have much publicity.

There was a poster war going on between us

and we caught some liberals taking down our posters in Johnstown

and we chased them through the town

and this was at three or four o'clock in the morning.

On election night, Gwynfor Evans made history

when he was voted in as Plaid Cymru's first MP,

with a majority of 2,500 votes.

They opened those sash windows.

There isn't a door coming out to the balcony,

they had to step over the windowsill to come out.

It was announced from up there.

The square was full of people.

The whole place just erupted. It was like a volcano.

There was a little silence and then, whoosh.

Everybody started jumping up and down and shouting and laughing and crying.

A lot of people... My sister just broke down and wept.

She had to be comforted up in the corner up there by people.

She just couldn't take it.

It changed modern Wales. It changed the political scene altogether.

Carmarthen was punching above its weight through the 1960s and 1970s.

Not only did it transform British politics, it also produced

more than its fair share of sporting heroes and they were moulded here.

It's a bit overgrown now,

but this is the rugby pitch of the old Queen Elizabeth Grammar School.

The school produced some of the greats of Welsh rugby,

including Roy Bergiers, who scored the crucial try in Llanelli's

legendary 1972 victory against the All Blacks.

The crossbar!

You did churn out player after player.

Was it the milk of the famous Carmarthenshire countryside?

Could well be. We had a mixture of

boys from gwlad and boys from prifddinas -

boys from the country and boys from the town.

We had big, stocky farmers and you had the nippy...jinky backs

who had to run away from the farmers.

10:30 on a Saturday morning, people were coming down from the residential

areas around and they would be lying on the banks up at the top there.

You'd have parents, schoolboys.

It was a big occasion.

It was like watching first-class rugby.

You have Ray Gravell and he was, believe it or not, scrum-half

and I was in the centre then, playing on these fields, watching Gerald.

When I was in sixth form, Gerald was having his trials and then I found it

very surreal that, a few years later, I was joining him in the Welsh team.

Carmarthenshire has continued to produce the cream of Welsh rugby.

We've had five people on the last tour

and we were with the Welsh Grand Slam team.

That's Steve Jones, Mike Phillips,

although Mike Philips was from Whitland Grammar School.

Rhys Priestland, Ken Owens and Jonathan Davies.

They're all from the Carmarthen area. We're still churning them out.

But to see it today, overgrown and unkempt,

it does put a lump in my throat.

Bergiers going for the line. Bergiers it is all the way.

Aye, the '70s was a magical time for Welsh rugby, but in 1978,

a different kind of magic was causing concern

for the people of Carmarthen.

Behind me once stood the town's most mystical object -

in the eyes of some, the very key to its destiny - Merlin's Oak.

BBC reporter Vincent Kane visited the spot when the tree,

or what was left of it, was still standing.

Known to the townspeople as Merlin's Oak.

And attached to that old stump is a couplet, which reads...

It turns out the old oak was a tree with a long history.

Well, an oak has stood here since at least the late 1600s,

although the association with Merlin - or Myrddin - goes back possibly

another thousand years.

Unfortunately, in the Victorian age, so they say,

two locals meeting of an evening under the oak, canoodling as it were.

Some local puritan took it into his head to poison the tree.

Within living memory, you had this old withered tree

in the middle of this major junction

held up by concrete obstructing the view.

Numerous locals, myself included, had shunts on the junction.

Despite local fears that the felling of the oak would lead to

the downfall of the town, in 1978, road safety came first.

It was moved and the junction changed

and where the old oak used to stand, there is now just

a romantic mini roundabout.

Today, one fragment of the oak is kept in St Peter's Hall.

It's displayed in an upright position, of course,

and so far, so good - the town's still standing.

The lush Towy valley has long been renowned for its dairy cattle

and the abundant milk they produce.

For centuries, the dairy industry was one of Carmarthen's

great success stories.

For a town which boasted the biggest dairy cattle market in Britain

and two creameries, milk was big business.

SHOUTING

But in 1984,

local farmers were furious when the European Union imposed quotas

limiting the amount of milk they could produce.

They organised a protest that would bring Carmarthen to a standstill.

One of them planned to make the event truly epic.

I phoned my friend, Enid Jones, who was a neighbour and suggested

that perhaps we could have a theme

of Cleopatra, who used to bathe in milk.

The news soon spread and before long we had 11 ladies willing to

jump into the tubs with us.

# Walk like an Egyptian... #

And off we went to Carmarthen.

It was early May and it was a cold day,

so you can imagine sitting in a bath with very little clothes on.

But I have to say, the excitement got us through.

It was pandemonium.

In the end, there was about 80 tractors and they completely

snailed up the town as they started from one end to the other.

And we were lucky that another kind neighbour, Mrs Marion Davies,

went into a local pub and got us all a tot of whisky to warm us up.

Perhaps we were the first calendar girls, looking back on things!

And when news broke a year later that Carmarthen District Council

was building an underground control centre,

which many believed would be used as a nuclear bunker reserved for public

officials, the citizens of Carmarthen showed

their rebel spirit once again.

About 40 antinuclear protesters

moved onto the site earlier this morning,

settling in for what they say they are prepared to make a long stay.

To build a bunker would be a provocative act.

That was Rod Stallard 25 years ago.

He was one of those who occupied the site for five weeks.

They put a security fence.

There were some of us who could climb the security fences quite easily.

They had dogs there - I was attacked by a dog one day.

I remember one morning,

it was dark and I had a pair of overalls on and a flat cap

and I just walked through the gate, complaining that my employers

had got me out of bed early.

The protest grew increasingly bitter,

but opponents of the so-called bunker were vindicated

when the local government ombudsman found the council had failed

to follow its own planning procedures in building it.

Carmarthen had witnessed some truly historic events,

but in 1997, it still had one surprise up its sleeve.

On the day of the referendum to determine

whether Wales should have its own Assembly, it was touch-and-go for

the Yes camp, right up to the final announcement

in Carmarthen Guildhall.

HE SPEAKS WELSH

26,000. So, I think that's a yes all round.

It was the moment, which clinched the night for the yes campaign,

and which will ensure yet another place in the political history books

for Carmarthen.

The times were changing and Carmarthen was changing with them.

For centuries, farmers had descended on Carmarthen on market day

to buy and sell livestock, visit the shops, catch up with old friends.

But market-day traffic had made the town's notorious

congestion problems even worse.

Carmarthen's position as the lowest bridging point

on the Towy meant the town was a bottleneck, particularly in summer.

If you've ever motored down to South Wales on your holiday,

you will know all about Carmarthen.

Almost inevitably, you'll spend some time here stuck in a traffic jam.

Really, for most motorists, the main concern is getting

out of Carmarthen, rather than hanging around.

But people DID want to hang around, and in November 2000,

to ease congestion, the mart was moved out of town.

Many fear that the move has taken the heart out of Carmarthen.

Some of those keen to restore the town's vitality

are pinning their hopes on Carmarthen's most mystical son.

There are moves afoot now in Carmarthen to take more

advantage of the Merlin brand, to hold a pageant here

celebrating the legend of Merlin

and to possibly have a massive lookalike event with perhaps

thousands of people dressed up as Merlin, walking through this town.

Only time will tell

whether Carmarthen can ever conjure up a thousand Merlins.

The old wizard may be more myth than man,

but Carmarthen's historical legacy is very real.

The town the Romans built here 2,000 years ago became the economic,

administrative and cultural capital of South West Wales

and two millennia later, that remains the case.

But more than that, Carmarthen is a town

with a fierce independent spirit.

And a magic all of its own.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd