22 – Northern Wales near Betwys y Coed: 19 September 2024

Richard Reece Roberts was especially hard to trace.  When he was born, his name was Richard Reece and this is the name under which his earliest records were made.  Richard was the Christian name given to him by his parents, and Reece was the surname of his father.  When Richard became an adult, Welsh custom required that his surname be changed.  Welsh custom was that male children adopt as their surname, the Christian name of their father.  Because the Christian name of his father was Robert, once he became an adult, Richard’s name became Richard Reece Roberts.  After the change in his surname, all subsequent records showed Roberts as his surname.

Apart from the custom of a change in surname for male children, other factors made it even more difficult to trace Richard’s personal history.

For reasons rooted in history, the number of surnames in Wales is limited compared to the number of surnames in other countries.  Many unrelated families have the Jones surname, but even when sifting through the multiple families with the Jones surname is not a concern, the limited number of Welsh surnames can make it difficult to be certain that a record for someone with the names you are seeking is truly the person for whom you are looking.

Richard Reece Roberts came from a place in northern Wales called Cwm Penmachno.  In 2024, the nearest village to Cwm Penmachno is Penmachno and the nearest town is Betwys y Coed.  Betwys y Coed is located in an astonishingly beautiful part of a beautiful country called Wales.  Wales is one of the countries making up the United Kingdom.

Within 20 minutes’ drive of Betwys y Coed is Lake Llynogwen (GPS 42F2+7AR Bangor United Kingdom).  If you get lucky, you might be able to park in one of the limited car park spaces in the designated car parks alongside the lake.  I went early and still found the car parks nearly full.  If you cannot find a car park, you cannot stop because the lake is beside a very busy road where stopping is impossible.  The lake is ringed by mountains and looks crystal clear.  Today, the sun was shining and I got a car park and most of the photos came out exceptionally well.

In Betwys y Coed itself, Saint Mary’s Church was holding an antiques and collectibles fair.  The church building was as wonderful as the people exhibiting their wares at the fair.

I drove to Penmachno and turned into the narrow road with the sign pointing to Cwm Penmachno.  I think Penmachno means something like “head of the river Machno”.  The word “Cwm” means” valley.  If my translation from Welsh is correct, that gives the meaning “Valley of the head of the River Machno” to the name Cwm Penmachno.

The narrow road to Cwm Penmachno surely does take you down an astonishingly gorgeous valley ringed by mountains with deep green fields on either side.  If a car comes in the opposite direction, you must hope there is somewhere nearby where you can stop and let it get past you.  The hamlet of Cwm Penmachno is at the very end of the road and the road does not go beyond the hamlet.  At the very, very end of this narrow road, there are two rows of houses where Richard Reece Roberts lived when he was a child.  Before you get to the end of the road, you pass a chapel and a school.  Richrd went to school in this school and his parents married in the “licensed school room” in this school.  They probably worshipped in the chapel.

The entrance to the former slate quarry has some parking spaces where your car will not bock the road if you stop.

The quarry operated for many decades, being consigned to disuse only in the 1970s.  I wandered up the hill through the remains of the quarry.  The grass is now growing again and some of the ugliness of this industrial site has now been smoothed over, but multiple scars still remain.  Using an astonishing amount of misplaced ingenuity, the quarry owners turned a place of great beauty into a hub of intensive labour aimed at extracting slate from the mountain about Cwm Penmachno hamlet – and created an astonishing amount of ugliness where beauty once dominated everything.  The people who made money from the enterprise would undoubtedly say that their slate quarry created jobs that would otherwise have never existed.  I have no doubt that this claim would be true, but surely the blighting of the lives of those paid a pittance to exhaust their strength in the quarry should be counter balanced against the assertions of those whose main object was to make money.

Richard Reece Roberts might have had similar thoughts.  His father worked in the Cwm Penmachno quarry when it was a fully functional enterprise.  Richard’s ordained fate was surely to spend all of his strength like his father and so many others in Cwm Penmachno hamlet working in the slate quarry.  Somehow, Richard left the beauty of Cwm Penmachno and the blight inflicted on the countryside by the quarry and made a much better life in Liverpool and Hoylake.  Together with his wife Eleanor Edwards, Richard helped establish Newlands School in Hoylake.

Surely teaching children how to read and write enriches the world much more than ripping the guts out of the world by extracting slate?

As I walked deeper into the quarry, I passed the remains of the “cottages” built by the quarry owners to provide shelter for their workers.  These cottages must have had one massive advantage.  Their workers only had to walk put of the door and they were already at work!