The swansea/cardiff appreciation society

Rhondda

I've been meaning to ask for some time where Ystradyfodwg was. Thanks for the explanation.

Having visited the Rhondda on many occasions (customers and branches in my banking career and in sport - football, cricket, tennis and squash (playing squash there next week at the Tylorstown Centre, immediately before the Leicester CC game, hope to get to CCS by half time) I had never heard of it and assumed it was some little village off the main drag - not the thriving metropolis it obviously is.

Also, I had never realised there was an influx of Welsh speakers from west Wales when the mining industry blossomed. I could never work out why there was such a heritage of the Welsh langauge in the area - now I know.

 

BfB.

Most of my ancestors came from Pembrokeshire & Carmarthenshire, though my main Jones line were as far as I can go back from Dowlais and they could only speak Welsh until my Great-grandfather who spoke both Welsh & English, when the free schools opened in the Rhondda they only taught English and within 2 generations Welsh was lost in most families.

 

One of my grandmothers was from the Rhondda and always spoke Welsh as a first language at home until well into the sixties, and as a kid I used to speak Welsh with her, I've lost it now, but if I hear people speaking Welsh I can usually get the gist of the conversation, she is long gone now, but even well into her 80's she used to think in Welsh, and had to make a conscious effort to translate what she was going to say into English, her grandmother used to tell her stories of the infamous "Welsh Not" and getting thrashed with a leather strap if you were the unlucky kid at the end of the day........hard to believe now.

 

Proph, I think the old 'Welsh Not' is the origin of the present day 'Goal Not'.