Meliden Characters

Mr. Edward Parry, the Assistant Overseer of the Poor, writes about some well-known faces around the village.

Meliden Characters – Mr. Henry Jones (and his toilet humour?)

‘Mr. Henry Jones is known to all the miners because he was himself a miner for nearly thirty years. He always dreamed of becoming an innkeeper and when he reached the age of forty-one, a wonderful opportunity arose—the house next to the new railway warehouse became available for renting from the London and North Western Railway. The railway was a new and cheap way to bring coal into Meliden and so Mr. Jones set up a yard next to the warehouse and he became a coal merchant—no more mining! The coal business gave him the financial security he needed and he soon took advantage of the licensing laws to sell beer and cider from barrels in his own front parlour. [From 1830, the Excise Department had issued partial licences in an an attempt to discourage the excessive drinking of gin which needed a full license.] They have called their house The Miners’ Rest.

‘Mr. Jones has something that no-one else in Meliden has—a little brick shed housing a special kind of privy. A big porcelain bowl is screwed to the floor and a water tank is attached to the wall behind it. It takes some nerve but when you pull a handle on the end of a long chain, water pours down a pipe and into the bowl. I am not certain what happens after that because it is very complicated and Henry would not talk about it. He calls it “flushing the lavatory” and he collects water from the roof of his house to make it work. I told him that I thought his customers might not care to risk using it but he said it was not for them and that everybody would have one actually inside their house within a few years! Henry Jones has a wonderful sense of humour.

Meliden Characters – Mr. Tom Williams, a prominent farmer

‘Mr. Tom Williams is the tenant of Llŷs Farm which lies across Maes y Dre [the Village Field], which is below the church. He rents one hundred and seventy-seven acres of good arable land for which he pays his dues twice yearly to Lord Mostyn. Llŷs was the most important farm in Meliden until quite recently, with fields reaching all the way down to Morfa and Towyn but prices of wheat have started to fall and Mr. Williams is worried about his future. It is not his first farm, he came from Cwm originally and has always had a good reputation but now he’s over sixty and only has his son, John, to help him—a far cry from ten years ago when there was work for ten farm labourers in addition to a cowman, dairymaid and a house full of servants. Nowadays, nobody wants to work on the land because there is more money to be made in the mines or on the railways. He has to rely on casual labour most of the year but at harvest time there are faithful regulars who have been coming here for years—attracted, no doubt, by the fine harvest supper his wife Mary is famous for. Mary is not happy because Tom can only afford two domestic servants—the Sleights at Rhyd Farm have six, and that is just for the house.

Meliden Characters – Sian y Fasged (Jane the Basket)

‘Normally, I would not discuss any of the paupers that I have to help as Assistant Overseer to the Poor but Sian y Fasged [Jane the Basket] is different. She is 77 now and rents one of the dwellings at Tai Cochion from Mrs Jones, Llangernyw. Her husband died in a mining accident over 50 years ago and she has struggled ever since. To begin with, she had two sons who were able to support her but then, within months, they both died of consumption, leaving their widows and children for the Parish to support. The mothers found work in service in the new boarding houses in Rhyl but they were live-in positions and children were not allowed. My predecessor had no choice except to consider placing the five children into the workhouse but Jane would have none of it and promised that she could look after them herself. With some reluctance, it was agreed by the Board of Guardians that they could stay with her at Tai Cochion where she was living with her daughter. Jane was younger and stronger in those days and able to get work as a charwoman and taking in endless washing. If she had not been for caring for her grandchildren, she could have remarried—but she never did.

‘Last year she lost her daughter Mary Jane during that outbreak of typhoid fever. It was traced to the water from the Tai Cochion pump and the magistrates ordered the handle to be locked but somebody smashed the chains and within hours, people had started using it again. There has been talk of laying a water main from Marian Mills but people like Jane would never have enough money to rent a key to work the standpipes.

‘The children have all gone now—no one knows where—and Jane lives alone. She keeps a few hens and sells eggs to help pay the rent. Mrs Davies who keeps the Red Lion, helps with scraps to feed them and Mrs. Ellis at the bakehouse pays her to collect brushwood from the hillside for her oven. Without their kindness, Jane would have been in the workhouse long ago.

‘The reason we call her Sian y Fasged is because she goes up to Talargoch most afternoons with her basket and collects lumps of coal that have fallen off the railway trucks as they roll down the bumpy siding to the Clive engine. Captain John knows about this but turns a blind eye. You might expect people to laugh and the children to taunt Jane on her daily journey but they never do.’

[Jane Jones met her end in 1884 when at the age of 86 she failed to hear a train rolling down the incline behind Talargoch Cottages—ironically it was the last ever coal-train to the Clive engine. A rumour of a vast hidden fortune spread rapidly through the village and her house was searched but nothing was found.]

Between the church and the Red Lion was an L-shaped terrace of dwellings—the seven picturesque but notoriously insanitary Tai Cochion (Red Houses) cottages which were brick built, something unique in Meliden at that time. Quite how they ended up being built in brick has never been explained. The people of Tai Cochion used to draw their water from a well which was on the right when going down Church Hill. The hill used to be known as Allt y Ffynnon (The Well Hill) but the well never had a good reputation and was suspected of being the cause of an outbreak of typhoid fever in 1877. In 1926 the first fine Meliden council houses were completed on Ffordd Bryn Melyd and the families of Tai Cochion were given the first choice to move to there. They must have feared that it was all a dream and that they would wake up to find themselves back in Tai Cochion with the ghost of poor old Jane.