Discovering Welsh Towns

This programme is a sort of detective story.

It's about how you can find out about the place where you live,

your city, town or village.

There are clues everywhere if you know where to look.

I've come to Monmouth.

It's my nearest town and the place I went to school.

It's famous for Henry V and Charles Rolls of Rolls Royce.

But this isn't about the top dogs. This is history from the bottom up.

This is the story of the ordinary people who lived here

and how their lives have changed over the last 1,000 years.

I'm going to investigate the history of Monmouth for myself,

through old buildings, documents and individual lives.

It's an often surprising story of industry and iron forging,

of rivers and river trade,

of pigeons and parachutes.

And also a very 21st century way of finding out about the past.

The first question to ask in any town is why is it here?

The biggest clue may be in the name.

Monmouth, where the River Monnow joins the River Wye.

The two rivers have been bringing people here for thousands of years,

but water isn't the only reason why the settlers came.

Another clue to the story of a town is the oldest building.

Here it's this, or what remains of, Monmouth Castle,

standing high on a hill above the town.

The Romans first built here and it's easy to see why.

It's ideal to defend.

But it was the Normans who were the real founders of Monmouth.

William FitzOsbern, cousin of William the Conqueror,

first built the castle in 1068 and it was besieged

during the bloody Battle of Monmouth in 1233.

Monmouth was one of the outposts of Norman rule.

This is Monnow Bridge, built in 1270

and the last remaining fortified bridge of its kind

still standing in the UK.

The Normans needed protection

because although they controlled the border lands, the Welsh Marches,

the rest of Wales resisted them.

The border was often fought over and needed to be defended.

Walking around town I discovered more signs of the Middle Ages.

Outside Monmouth Priory are three carved heads

of a knight, an angel and a miller,

representing the king, church and merchants,

the key elements of any medieval town.

The window is named after Geoffrey of Monmouth,

12th century historian and author of the legend of King Arthur.

But he would never have sat in the window,

which was built 300 years after his death.

To get a true sense of Norman Monmouth you have to walk the streets.

This is Monnow Street, still very much the heart of the town today.

It's classically medieval.

One main street, wide in the middle for the market

and narrow at both ends to keep the livestock in.

You can see how towns develop through old maps

and on this one of Monmouth from 1610, both Monnow Street

and today's town plan are clearly visible.

But to find out more about what it was really like, you have to literally dig deeper.

The Monmouth Archaeological Society was founded

by two schoolteachers in the 1950s

and has made Monmouth one of the most excavated towns in Britain.

Any time someone digs a hole in Monmouth the archaeologists jump in,

although sometimes this can get them into a bit of trouble.

Quite often the roadworks, which we've always covered,

quite often they go on through the night because of the traffic.

We were there three o'clock in the morning with the lights on

and recording the stone work.

With that, suddenly, at 3.30am there were police everywhere.

Someone had tipped off the police we were tunnelling into the bank.

-No!

-It's true. People don't believe this but...

Anyway, we explained that the...

Well, the chaps who were doing the gas mains explained themselves too.

We got away with it but it was a bit dodgy.

I thought we were going to be in handcuffs!

-These are some examples of your finds.

-The pottery, yes.

These are jug spouts and they're dated to the late 1200s.

This is a demon.

A beautiful little chap.

I thought he was a carol singer.

He turned up on Christmas Eve in lower Monnow Street.

I held him under the tap in the back room in the torch light, really,

and he came to life almost.

This one is a pig or a boar.

He's lost his tusks but it's the same thing. They're jug spouts.

Age?

-Middle to late 1200s.

-Wow.

This archaeology business, is it an obsession?

I find archaeology as exciting now at my advanced age

as I did when I was 12 or 13.

It never goes away.

It's exciting and it's also our own.

It's our own history, our own place, our own life and everything else.

Wonderful.

It's not only objects that tell us about local history.

I must have walked past Monmouth's museum thousands of times,

but this is the first time I've gone deep into the archives.

Here they have documents dating back hundreds of years

and curator Andrew Helme showed me one

which mentions a famous woollen cap made in the town.

Andrew, these look alarmingly old to be anywhere near a clumsy man.

What have we here?

These are the Hundred Court rolls from the 15th century, 1449.

Very dense.

Five skins, literally skins, written on both sides

with bureaucratic Latin.

The whole point of getting these out

is they're the earliest records we've got in Monmouth Museum.

They're part of the borough archive for the town.

They illustrate one of Monmouth's main claims to fame.

In this particular document we have for the first time

in Monmouth's history,

the mention of somebody involved with caps or capping.

On this particular sheet,

one of the entries which you can just make out here,

this little line is recording a debt.

It's owed by a Welshman, Thomas ap Davy,

and a gentleman called Richard Capper.

At this stage people's surnames often reflected what they did for a living. Thatcher...

-Butler.

-Butler!

-Capper.

-There he is.

-Richard Capper is here.

He's involved in this record of a court case.

The Monmouth Cap was an essential item of 16th century headgear.

Made of wool, thousands were produced

both in the town and further afield.

Worn by itself or under a helmet

it gets a mention in Shakespeare's Henry V.

When adventurer Francis Drake set off on his explorations

he took 36 dozen with him.

And Monmouth has another military connection.

The Royal Monmouthshire Royal Engineers,

one of the oldest regiments in the British Army.

Founded as a militia in 1539, their base, Great Castle House,

was built using stones from the castle.

There's also the thorny question of whether Monmouth

was Welsh, English or neither.

The problem stems from the Act of Union of the 1530s.

In it Monmouthshire was listed as part of Wales

but was not included on the list of Welsh counties.

For centuries documents had to carry the phrase "Wales and Monmouthshire",

an anomaly that wasn't sorted out until 1974.

There's a local rumour that while Wales, England and Monmouthshire

declared war on Germany in 1939,

only England and Wales signed the peace treaty

making Monmouthshire, technically, still at war.

Just in case.

Despite its image as a county town, I was surprised to find

there's quite an industrial history to Monmouth as well.

The whole area was famous for iron making from Roman times

and there are still clues to that iron making tradition.

There were three foundries in the town

making all sorts of implements and here - nails.

Nails haven't been made in Nailers Lane for over 200 years.

But I got local blacksmith Gareth Thomas to bring history to life

and show me how they were produced.

Here we are. This is the very stuff of Industrial Revolution, isn't it?

-Absolutely.

-And yet, it's so, so small and so simple.

-Light us up.

-Yeah, OK.

The tinder box in which is the flint and steel.

The tinder is burnt cotton.

Because it's pretty much pure carbon and it's very dry

it'll take a spark like that.

So that's now glowing.

We'll add plenty of dry fuel.

There we have a fire.

-Amazing, isn't it?

-Yeah.

Charcoal for the fuel.

On the back of the blower there is a handle.

-If you give that a turn.

-Clockwise?

-Anti-clockwise.

How many nails would they be expected to make in a day?

Hundreds.

Yeah, you'd have to make hundreds to be able to make the money.

We've got a heat now.

The next thing is to put it to the anvil.

And you can change its shape by flattening it,

turning it through 90 degrees.

I've stretched out that piece now.

-And the point is made?

-The point is made.

-You've made your point.

-Yeah.

You hit round the head of the nail.

And put it into the nail heading tool.

That's hot there, mind.

-One nail.

-One nail.

Which was an important cottage industry

all through the iron working areas.

Very often carried out by families in the back yard.

-The nail, a tradition revived. Nails back in Nailers Lane.

-Yeah.

Anyway, there it is.

We're back!

With all this trade and industry, Monmouth was booming.

Merchants and traders were doing well, so well that one of them,

haberdasher William Jones who made his fortune in Germany,

left the then substantial sum of £6,000

to found a school in the town.

Monmouth Boys School is still going strong

and I spent many a year there.

I'm sitting in the school library under the watchful gaze of William Jones.

This is a letter, written by one of the pupils in 1762.

He's explaining the school rules.

It's in Latin.

This is like being at school again.

"Let there be no quarrelling,

"thieving, lying, swearing and cursing."

Broke most of those on the first day!

"On the Lord's day everyone must go to church

"two by two in crocodile to repeat the principles

"of the Christian religion, the younger ones in English,

"the older ones in Latin or Greek.

"Whoever violates these rules, let him be punished."

The landscape gives a clue to a town's history.

The River Wye played a vital role in Monmouth's commercial life.

It's hard to imagine now, but this bank was full of wharves

and on the river, no rowing boats, but barges and working boats

called trows that were bringing goods in and out of the town.

The river around Monmouth is famously beautiful and tranquil,

but in the 18th and 19th centuries it would have been very different.

Anne Rainsbury is an expert on the history of the River Wye.

It was the main highway.

It was, if you like, the motorway into the hinterland.

There was industry which used the small tributary rivers

and charcoal from the woodland.

I mean, the woods, obviously, were completely different

in terms of a resource.

Timber and oak bark were very important exports of Monmouth

and all down the Wye.

Big timber for building buildings and ship building

and the oak bark was used for tanning leather

and a lot of it went out through Chepstow to Ireland

for the tanning industry there.

You've got this hive of industry and yet is it not true that

the tourist industry came along as well?

Yes. Amidst all of this and amidst what, certainly,

in the Lower Wye Valley would have been an industrial scene,

people coming to admire the scenery,

looking for picturesque, the picturesque scenery.

So, the people arriving with their romantic notions

of what this is all about, how did they get on with the people

whose reality it was working there?

The local people were often their guides when they got out of the boat

and had to climb up to get the view at the top of Symonds Yat.

It would be a local cottager who would take them to the top for, obviously, a sum of money.

Or when they got out at Tintern there would be lots of beggars

trying to make their money.

So it was tourism with all the sort of buy a handbag here...?

We've been flogged all kinds of things along the way.

Yeah, perhaps swap handbags for a plate of plums

or a bag of nuts or something like that!

The most famous visitor on the Wye tour was Lord Nelson,

who stopped off at Monmouth in 1802.

In tow were his mistress Emma Hamilton and her husband.

Nelson came up here to the Kymin for lunch

in this splendid banqueting house

before being whisked back down into town

to visit one of Monmouth's hidden little treasures.

Tucked behind a wall in the middle of the town is a secret garden.

It's something I never knew was there.

Now being carefully restored, the garden dates back hundreds of years.

It's named after Nelson

and features an odd looking memorial to the great man.

You might think it's a summerhouse in a pleasure garden.

It's easiest to think of it as a kind of temple to Nelson.

Much less of a summerhouse, it's a celebration of Nelson,

a sort of shrine.

I think to put the cap on it, the fact that it's got

the very seat he sat on in the Beaufort Hotel actually there

has a quality of a sort of focus for worship.

After its prime in the mid-19th century

the garden became neglected, overgrown and almost forgotten.

But now a group of local volunteers from the University of the Third Age

are cutting away the weeds

and restoring it to its Victorian splendour.

It shows how everyone can get involved in local history.

We've done a lot.

In 2007 the U3A gardening group got involved and now every Friday,

I'm the Historic Gardens advisor,

but I have between eight and 12 U3A gardeners who come and help

cut the lawns, cut the shrubs, they've been working on the bank,

working on the pond, the pavilion.

We're now putting back the borders

using plants that would have been available in the 1880s

as our plan is, because that's the bit we're working back to.

We've got historically authentic plants.

The Monmouth we see today is Georgian,

built in the late 18th and early 19th century.

It was smart and well-to-do, but there were poor people as well.

The parish had to look after them

so they were keen to get rid of anyone they didn't think belonged.

This is the poors book, the first poors book of Monmouth we've got.

We're particularly interested in an entry

when the town went to great trouble to try and get rid

of a potential drain on the rate payers of Monmouth

by moving this particular lady you can see there.

Elizabeth James and her five children.

Three pages of this volume are taken up with all the payments made

to various people in an attempt to prove

that Elizabeth James and her children didn't actually belong to Monmouth.

They ended up spending a grand sum of twenty pounds,

which in those days was quite a lot of money.

Twenty pounds, line drawn under the...

There was a conclusion but I'm afraid we don't know what happened to her.

She doesn't appear in the poor records for Monmouth again,

so presumably they did succeed in getting rid of her,

but where she went we've got no idea, I'm afraid.

Individual stories can bring history to life.

This is Church Street,

which used to be on the main coaching route to London.

It's pretty narrow now, but would have been even narrower back then.

One night in the early 1830s,

Mrs Syner, who ran a gingerbread shop,

was locking up when the coach went through.

Her apron strings caught in the wheels

and she was dragged the length of the street.

The coachman thought he'd killed her, but up she gets,

picks up his whip and hits him in the mouth dislodging two teeth.

She then campaigned successfully for a bypass.

You don't tangle with the women of Monmouth.

Stories like that of the redoubtable Mrs Syner

can be found in the archives of the local newspapers

and by the 1830s Monmouth had two of them -

The Monmouthshire Merlin launched in 1829,

and more the mouthpiece of the establishment and still going strong today

The Monmouthshire Beacon which began in 1837.

All over the front pages there are advertisements.

"Yoland's Specific Solutions. Case of stone in the bladder cured."

"Loose teeth fastened" in The Beacon.

There are stories of local and national importance on the inside.

For example, in The Beacon,

"Dreadful riot and loss of life at Newport."

The Chartist uprising 25 miles down the road

which would have a huge impact on Monmouth itself.

The Chartist riots in Newport were a national event,

leaving 22 dead on the streets and fears of revolution.

Chartist leader John Frost and his co-defendants

were brought to Monmouthshire Hall for trial.

Facing a charge of high treason, Frost would have been put

in one of these holding cells, standing room only in here,

before being taken up to the courtroom for trial.

The courtroom has been restored to as it would have been for the trial.

Monmouth was the county town and the local gentry were fearful

of the new radicals from industrial South Wales.

They were in little doubt that the Chartists were guilty of treason

and one document gives an unexpected insight into this.

Sitting on the grand jury convened to see if the prisoners should stand trial

was John Etherington Welch Rolls,

grandfather of Charles Rolls of Rolls Royce.

Here are the actual court papers of Rolls Senior.

He was an inveterate doodler and these drawings

give a pretty clear idea of where he stood.

Here is a re-enactment of the scene at the Westgate Hotel.

And here are the Chartists hanging from the gallows

on the roof of Monmouth jail.

In the trial itself the men were condemned to death,

but after a huge public petition

their sentence was commuted to transportation to Australia.

After the Chartist trial, the big events of Victorian Britain

somewhat passed Monmouth by.

The boom in industrial South Wales overtook the small metal industry,

but Monmouth was still a thriving market town

and a clue to that is hidden beneath one of the town roads.

These are the old abattoirs, derelict, all but forgotten now.

They were built under the market hall. So the meat went up there

and the blood from all these slaughterhouses went into the river.

When the railways came to Monmouth in the 1860s and 1870s

it spelt the end of the river trade

and the riverfront housing turned into slums.

This is Granville Street, now a quiet cul-de-sac

with just a few houses heading down towards the Wye.

But at the turn of the 20th century

it was one of the town's poorest areas.

You can get census returns online and this is from 1901

and it reveals Granville Street to be full of houses,

30 of them, tiny, teeming with life.

These pictures were taken by the town surveyor

just before the slums were demolished.

They show how photographs can also give a glimpse

of the harsh realities of life for the many.

At the other end of the social scale was Monmouth's most celebrated son, Charles Rolls.

He founded the famous car company with engineer Henry Royce,

but he was also a pioneer aviator who launched a balloon in Monmouth

filled with gas from the town gasworks.

Sadly, he was also Britain's first air casualty

when he crashed his plane at an air show in 1910.

Monmouth also had places for entertainment.

This is the Savoy Theatre,

the oldest theatre in continuous use in Wales.

This beautifully restored interior dates from the 1920s,

but there's been entertainment on this site since Elizabethan times.

Over the years it's been a theatre, a cinema, a music hall

and even, briefly, a roller skating rink!

In my day it's where you went to see rock bands.

For the 20th century, film archive can also tell a story

like this home movie footage of Monmouth in the 1930s.

With history of the last 70 or 80 years

you can still talk to people who lived through it.

In the Second World War a new industry came to Monmouth.

Temco made parachutes and employed women from all over the town.

I met up with a few of them to find out what it was like.

Here we have some of the Temco girls.

Maud, are you anywhere?

I'm there.

Where's that taken?

That's taken in the grounds at a break time of Temco.

It was my first full-time job but I had worked since I was 13

somewhere else.

How much were you on?

I was paid monthly two pounds ten shillings.

Did that keep a 15-year-old happy?

Yes, it did.

Were they strict on quality control?

Oh, it had to be tested out quite often through the day

to make sure it was safe.

If it wasn't safe, if it wasn't right, you had to undo it all.

Dorothy, you didn't work there but your mum did.

Yes. My mother worked there, again at the age of 15.

When she started working at Temco she was earning 15 shillings.

Here we have...

..a parachute, perhaps made by your mother.

Obviously a small parachute for...

It's a parachute for pigeons.

What happened was

the pigeon was attached to a parachute, the parachute was dropped

behind the lines

and then our men attached a message to the homing pigeon

which was then sent home.

Hence on the south coast, you weren't allowed

to shoot homing pigeons in the war

because they were bringing home important messages.

Was it all deadly serious? Did you have any fun?

During the lunch hour we used to go into the air raid shelter

and there was a lady by the name of Mrs Manchie

that played the piano accordion.

She taught us all to dance.

That was the leisure side of the work.

By the end of the war, you're all 20,

I bet you were a right handful.

No, we weren't! We weren't. We weren't!

-We weren't.

-We didn't know what trouble was then!

After the Second World War, Monmouth changed again.

The last remnants of the metal industry,

the tin plate works in nearby Redbrook, closed in 1961.

A new dual carriageway took traffic away from the town

but controversially cut it off from the river.

With its schools and Georgian buildings,

Monmouth continued to prosper

and in 1974 the town was officially confirmed as part of Wales,

although most will say it always was.

As we've seen, Monmouth is brimming with history and historians.

But the town's past isn't all about looking back.

A new project, a world first no less, has just been launched.

Monmouth is going digital.

It appears Monmouth has moved into the modern age.

It doesn't seem right somehow. But how have you done it?

I started a project on Wikipedia that lets anyone

add to Wikipedia articles about Monmouth.

So far we've had 350 new articles in, I think, 20 languages now.

You invited people through Wikipedia?

-If you've got anything to say...

-Yeah.

-And the response?

-Amazing.

People from all over the world have been adding new things.

The QR thing?

There's going to be about 100 QR code plaques around the town.

The QR code is like a barcode which your phone can read through its camera.

You use an application on your phone to scan the code.

I am living proof that it may work.

-Monmouth is on my phone.

-Great.

-It's a first, isn't it?

Yeah, we're the first Wikipedia town in the world.

It's lovely that everybody's contributed to this

and made it happen.

Monmouthpedia reveals the ongoing enthusiasm for local history

and local historians in the town.

As I've discovered, the history of Monmouth

isn't only about the great and the good,

it's also about ordinary people,

iron workers, shopkeepers

and women making parachutes.

The history of the town is written by local people,

people with a passion for their town and the past.

It's something you can do wherever you live.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd