Book extract: Ponty Is It? by Daryl Leeworthy

Daryl Leeworthy

‘Let’s face it, there is only one Ponty. Pontypridd: birthplace of Tom Jones and the Welsh National Anthem, and home to what was once the most famous bridge in the world.

Ponty people have acted, played, swum, worked, and written their way into the history books, and always with their unique brand of humour.

We love to gossip, drink frothy coffee and eat chips. I’ve tried to capture some of this in my own way with a walking and bus tour – which is convenient as I don’t drive. I hope this will be a journey the locals enjoy, even if they tell me I got it all wrong, and, with so many visitors this year, that it’s an enjoyable introduction for those who do yet know the true delights of this remarkable town.’ (Daryl Leeworthy)

With the Eisteddfod coming to town, writer and historian Daryl Leeworthy, whose books include Labour Country and A Little Gay History of Wales, as well as critically acclaimed biographies of valleys writers Elaine Morgan and Gwyn Thomas, offers readers an irreverent but deeply personal tour of Pontypridd and its hinterland in his new books Ponty Is it? Travels in a Valleys Town. We are pleased to publish this extract.

Ynysangharad War Memorial Park

Come to think of it, is there any finer park in the land than this one? Roath Park has its lake and its lighthouse, to be sure, Bute Park fringes a castle, and Cyfarthfa in Merthyr Tydfil has a boating lake, miniature railway, and a museum, but there is something quite special about Ponty Park. For one thing, and I suppose from now on I had better use the official title, Ynysangharad War Memorial Park ensures that the town centre has balance. Urban development on one side of the river, a vast open space on the other.

There has been a park here for more than a century. Last summer, dignitaries gathered to mark exactly one hundred years since the visit of Viscount Allenby on 6 August 1923, the summer bank holiday, when he officially opened this memorial to the fallen of the First World War. It is often said that Allenby, the officer in charge of British forces in Palestine in that war, was conscious that his role in history was to be learned about in a museum, whereas everyone would know the exploits of Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence.

There is, after all, no David Lean film about the noble lord. Well, it is not the case in Ponty, at least, for here Allenby’s name will be attached to the park forever and to the war memorial perched on the Common which he unveiled on that same summer’s day.

If you had walked through on that first afternoon, knowing what the park looks like now, you might have been disorientated. Much of the fabric has changed: there was no bandstand, no lido, no statue, no war memorials either for that matter. No, in 1923 the park’s appeal lay in its tree-lined avenues, its bowling greens, tennis courts, children’s playground, and a large paddling pool. ‘No fitter memorial could have been provided,’ exclaimed the Pontypridd Observer, especially for a generation tired of war. This is why the park was once a memorial without a memorial.

In the 1930s, ‘War Memorial’ was even dropped from the park’s name, hence Ynysangharad Park or, more simply, Ponty Park. The bandstand was completed in 1926 and opened on 24 July by Artemus Seymour, a Labour councillor from Cilfynydd. The lido followed in 1927, a miniature golf course in 1929, and the statue to Evan James and James James in 1930. Further enhancements, including a concert pavilion and a crazy golf course, were installed after the Second World War. There was further refurbishment in the 1990s, in the wake of Storm Dennis in 2020, and ahead of the National Eisteddfod in 2024.

Chainworks

Before it was a park, this area of Pontypridd was known as Ynysangharad Fields and was the residence of local industrialists, Lewis Gordon and Alice Lenox. The former ran the nearby Brown Lenox Chainworks.

The Lenoxes lived at Ynysangharad House and were sufficiently benevolent to allow locals the use of parts of the grounds for sporting activities: Alice opened a series of riverside lawn tennis courts in 1892 and her husband made a similar gesture towards the town’s cricket and rugby clubs, allowing use of fields in much the same location they are today.

Eventually, albeit informally, the Fields became known as Ynysangharad Park, and in the 1890s, with local government now bestowed upon the town, the idea was floated that the Fields should be municipalised. It took thirty years for that to happen. Ynysangharad House, incidentally, became a clinic in 1931, providing maternity and child welfare services, inoculations, outpatient psychiatry, and even a pioneering birth control unit.

Having entered the park from what used to be called M&S Bridge, I now have a choice to make. Do I head to the left (i.e. to the north) towards the lido, to my right and onto the path leading alongside the river towards Treforest, or straight ahead and onto the cricket ground. If I follow the last route, I shall pass a series of sports facilities known in the trade as MUGA (Multi-Use Games Areas).

These are on the right. A group of teenagers is busy playing basketball. The other view, to the left, takes in the rest of the park. There are some mature trees, whose leaves bring autumnal spectacle each year, and an open patch of land where some puppies are being trained by their owners, and younger children, evicted from the MUGA by their older siblings, are kicking a ball into the air. Then comes the sunken garden with its memorial to the miners, before a left turn takes me on to the bandstand, which has just been refurbished, the cricket pavilion, the William Goscombe John statue of Evan and James James, and the new education centre called Calon Taf.

Lido

Instead, I walk towards the lido. Outside there is a noticeboard and some wind-up speakers on posts. They look a little like the talking pipes that appear on the Teletubbies. Turn the dial and someone will start speaking their memories of the pool in past times. And what memories they can be.

When I worked here as the heritage officer in 2018, one of the locals came in and told me all about the time she trod water for half an hour watching Tom Jones strut about on the poolside in his white underpants.

‘Corr, love, ewe could see everything!’ she says. Caught in the hot flush of desire, her hands move across her body as if she is measuring something.

‘O’ corse,’ she adds, breaking the mood, ‘he wusn’t Tom Jones in those days.’

‘Woodward he was,’ her husband chips in from behind.

‘Never forgot tha’ I haven’t, taught me everything about men it did see.’

She makes the measurement again, larger this time, as the pair move off for their swim.

Ponty Is it? Travels in a Valleys Town by Daryl Leeworthy is published by Parthian. It is available from all good bookshops.