My father, Tredegar and Nye Bevan
Today, 5th July 2023, health campaigners will be marking the 75th anniversary of the NHS, as I will be myself on a campaign stall in my town centre in Kendal. It therefore seemed an appropriate day to add a post about my father, Thomas Dillwyn Powell-Davies, to this family history blog. That’s because the ‘birthplace’ of the NHS was the Welsh town of Tredegar, and that’s also the town where my father worked from 1936-1946, work whose value was acknowledged by none other than Aneurin Bevan himself.
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| A testimonial for my father from Nye Bevan |
My father’s treasured photograph album of his time in Tredegar, together with his files about his work with wartime evacuees, and his letters demanding that action be taken about housing and poverty in the town, also provide a record that may be useful to anyone with an interest in the history of Tredegar. I have included some of them in this post, including personal correspondence with Nye Bevan.
I should only add at the outset that, as he married and had children when already in his fifties, sadly my father has not been alive for over thirty years. Questions that I would now like to ask, or should have asked long ago, will now never be answered. However, from the various files that he left behind, I have hopefully pieced together an account that is faithful to both Dillwyn and to the historical record.
In writing this, I hope the post shows that Tredegar didn’t just lead the way on Health Services, it also hosted innovative work about how to meet wider social and psychological needs as well.
Before Tredegar
Dillwyn was one of four sons born to Thomas and Isabella Powell-Davies in Pontypridd. Thomas, my grandfather, had been adopted at birth by the Davies family. His adopted father and his two sons worked at the Brown & Lenox chainworks, but Thomas was given the opportunity to study to become a schoolteacher. He was then ordained as an Anglican Minister and, in 1923, became vicar of St. Hilda's in Griffithstown, Newport, where my father lived as a teenager. (At some point, Dillwyn contracted TB and spent some time recovering in a sanatorium, although the dates are unclear).
All of the four sons seem to have been brought up with a belief in social justice to some degree or other. The eldest, Mervyn, born in 1904 must have been most influenced by the Russian Revolution, joining the Communist Party. Dillwyn was more in the tradition of ‘Christian Socialism’ that was a significant influence in the early Labour Party. That doesn’t mean that this vicar’s son wasn’t without some radicalism in his youth. He certainly told us about being active in the days of the 1926 General Strike in trying to stop strike-breakers. My sister even tells me he talked about hiding from the police alongside Nye Bevan himself on one of those days – although I have no way of knowing if that’s true!
Dillwyn went to the University of Wales in Cardiff, then followed his father into becoming ordained as a Church of England Minister. After a year as an Assistant Curate in Bedwas, in 1936 he took up post as Warden of the “Hostel of the Good Shepherd” in Tredegar, then a centre for the unemployed funded by Pusey House, an Anglican institution based in Oxford.
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| My father, c.1936 |
The Hostel of the Good Shepherd 1936-1940
A yellowed and faded newspaper article from the ‘Merthyr Express’, glued to the back of my father’s ‘Hostel of the Good Shepherd’ photo album, explains my father’s initial work when he first arrived in Tredegar.
“Up to May 1940, the Hostel of the Good Shepherd Tredegar, had built up a reputation, almost of national importance, for its activities on behalf of the unemployed and the friendless. Clubs were run for men and women, boys and girls in the building formerly occupied as offices by the Whitehead Co., also Scout, Guide, Cubs and Brownie activities, a nursery school - when that movement was in its infancy - cheap midday meals for the poor, and a clothes depot. All these were centred around the Chapel of the Good Shepherd ministered to by first the founder Rev. Fr. Kent White and subsequently by the present warden. Rev. Fr. T. D. Powell Davies, who technically is a curate of St. George's Parish. The Hostel and its work were financed by friends at Pusey House, Oxford”.
The photos in the album record scenes of the derelict site of the Deighton Steelworks and men ‘on the dole’ in Iron Street in May 1937. The smile from one of the men being photographed suggests that the photographer - my father – was known to them.
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| Derelict Site of the Deighton Steelworks |
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| On the 'Dole', Iron Street, Tredegar, 1937 |
There’s also a striking photo of the Chard family, the title in the album noting that the ‘Means Test’ means that the eldest son must ‘live out’.
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| The Chard family, 1937 |
The “Men’s Club” Activities show how the Hostel operated as an unemployed centre, providing activities such as weaving, woodwork and archery, including the building of a large boat.
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| Launching the 'Ladybird', 25 miles from the sea! |
There are pictures of the nursery children and a letter from my father pointing out to the Monmouthshire Education Committee that the Hostel hosted the only nursery then in existence in the county.
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| "Washing the rompers, repairing the range" |
There are pictures of “tea-parties” at the Hostel and a holiday by the sea at Marcross for local families. There are also shots of the hikes and activities organised for the youth, including cricket matches up on Cefn Golau.
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| Cricket at Cefn Golau |
There are also pictures of the guide and scout camps that Dillwyn organised, including one taking boys away to Devon. A post-war CV in my father’s files records that, from 1936-45, he was District Commissioner of the Tredegar and Rhymney Boy Scouts’ Association. A testimonial from the Tredegar Superintendent of Police noted that Dillwyn “ran a Boy Scout Group which comprised of members of the Hostel and slum children. He organised very successful camping holidays for the lads. I have spoken to many of the lads on their return from camp and their chief topic has centred on the respect and admiration which they held for the Rev. Davies”.
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| Guide Camp 1937 |
Good Health also requires Good Housing
There are also letters on file confirming that my father wasn’t just providing ‘charity’, he was also campaigning for better living conditions and taking up personal cases too. One letter is appealing for those in the greatest need to be awarded council housing rather than, as he saw it, “those who through influence of political or financial considerations” being housed first.
Another from the Welsh Board of Health confirms that a visit to Tredegar had been made as a result of his letters and that the “cases to which you have drawn attention” are being looked into.
Some of those cases appear to have been drawn to his attention by Doctor Sutherland, who succeeded AJ Cronin at the Tredegar Medical Aid Society. A 1939 letter from the Doctor points out the conditions at 20 Iron Street “where the living conditions are deplorable” … “There are four bedrooms in this house, each of which I believe is occupied by a separate family. The Davies family occupy one of these bedrooms and Mrs Davies informs me that nine of them sleep in one bedroom!! I am told that there are more than thirty people living in the house. I have sent Mrs. Davies to see you and to tell you all about it”
Of course, the doctors at the Tredegar Medical Aid Society understood that for a NHS to operate successfully, action also had to be taken about poverty, bad housing and all the other conditions that create ill health. That’s still very much the case today.
There are typed notes in my father’s files that I believe refer to the cases that he was raising (either then and/or at a later date). Here are four of them:
20 Iron Street: Sewage seeping into living rooms. Condemned beyond repair. Council says nothing can be done. News Chronicle and Aneurin Bevan informed and urged to immediate action.
19 Iron Row: Doctor advised man to create disturbance in every council meeting until his complaints were seen to. Dr. says worse than 20 Iron Street.
The Hostel of the Good Shepherd 1940-1945
With the outbreak of war, the Hostel, supported by the Ministry of Health, became a residential hostel for teenage boy evacuees whose social and psychological needs were too great for them to be billeted directly with families.
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| "Unbilletable" - Autumn 1940 |
Under the headline “End of a Great Experiment”, the Merthyr Express article states:
“With the departure of the majority of the evacuees from Tredegar on Friday there came to an end an experiment which has been watched with great interest by all interested in psychological and psychiatric matters in South Wales.
[In May 1940] Then came the air raids on London, and the evacuation, first of its children and later its women folk too. Tredegar received its quota; and, of course difficulties arose at once. The Hostel buildings were surveyed: and the Warden and his helpers were asked to make it available in some way to relieve the local evacuation problems. In this way it became a sort of half-way house for children awaiting billets. …
In the course of time the kind of evacuated child at the home altered: those suffering from sickness grew less, and the number recognised officially as "difficult" children grew more. At that time the Welsh Board of Health were setting up a psychological service to deal with difficult children and came to hear of the work done at the Hostel. Those in charge of the Hostel were asked to allow it to become part of the Board's service. …
The Warden insisted on the Welsh Board of Health fitting out the place and furnishing it properly for the purpose for which it was to be used, and this was done. The Hostel formally became part of the Welsh Board of Health's Psychological Service dealing mainly with boys aged from 11 to 16 whose difficulties and delinquencies were incidental to their emotional maladjustment, their personal difficulties proceeding directly from the upset caused to their lives by evacuation; on the loss of their parents; and the breaking up of their homes.
The work done has been highly successful and part of the reason of the Hostel's success has been due to the fact that the evacuee boys did not find themselves segregated from the rest of the community.
A very large number of boys in need of social care have passed through the hands of Fr. Powell and his helpers during the five years the work has been carried on. There have been periods when the number in residence has been as high as 48. At one time when a batch of evacuees included a very large proportion of mothers and babies and difficulty was found in accommodating them in the town, there were 20 mothers and babies in temporary residence at the same time in the Hostel awaiting billets. In all, over 300 have been dealt with at the Hostel - 93 of these since the Hostel was set up under the status of a 'special case Hostel.'
All this work has been going on without any flourishing of trumpets. The Welsh Board of Health has paid the living expenses and for the equipment for these 'difficult' boys, but everything outside of that, the scores of things which turned an institution into a home, have been found and paid for by Fr. Powell Davies and his friends”.
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| 'Resident Boys and Local Children' , 1943 |
Dillwyn’s work acknowledged
The work of the Hostel – led by my father with the support of others such as the composer Geoffrey Bush - may not have been widely acknowledged but those who knew the work that had been done were full of admiration.
A 1946 testimonial from George Seth, psychologist at the University of Wales noted that the Hostel (using the terminology of the time) “became one of the most interesting experiments in this new field of educational activity in the county. A large number of boys – retarded, delinquent, and emotionally maladjusted – passed through the hostel and very few failed to benefit from their stay there. Mr. Davies [Dillwyn] met this new demand with an intelligent enthusiasm and a degree of informed psychological understanding which made the hostel a model of its kind, carried on under the most adverse conditions of wartime strain, unsatisfactory accommodation, and unpropitious surroundings”.
Another from the Boy Scouts Association, wrote that “this was an experiment in Social Service which successfully brought happiness to a large proportion of a Welsh mining town through the period of intense depression”.
And last, but certainly not least, a testimonial on ‘Ministry Of Health, Whitehall’ paper signed by Aneurin Bevan (posted at start of post) records that the “Tredegar Urban District Council received the most valuable assistance from [Dillwyn] in dealing with maladjusted children who were evacuated to the area. Indeed, his hostel was regarded as one of the best for dealing with difficult children and with children accused of delinquency. I know Mr. Powell-Davies to be passionately concerned about the welfare of the young”.
After the war, Dillwyn gave up being a Minister and trained as a teacher. He went on to work in residential special education and in adolescent mental health units. But these years in Tredegar were still years that I think he was particularly proud of.
Some final words from Nye Bevan
But that isn’t the only correspondence in the files from Nye Bevan. Another is a March 1945 reply to a letter from Dillwyn that must have again been demanding action over the state of housing and poverty within the town.
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| A letter from Nye Bevan to my father, March 1945 |
I haven’t got a copy of Dillwyn’s original letter, but it appears to have been questioning whether Bevan shared the view of others in Tredegar that the issues should not be publicised. He starts his reply by saying “perhaps you would [be] inclined to misjudge me. I do not share the myopic attitude of the local parish people”.
Nye Bevan’s further words are certainly worth noting. Firstly, he makes clear that he recognises that the NHS was not his personal idea, but an idea born from the community and trade union movement of Tredegar: “There is no immaculate conception of progress, and certainly there was never a reform yet that had its origin exclusively in the mind of a politician”.
Secondly, he recognises that publicity and protest is needed to bring about change: “the only way to get these abuses redressed is by the utmost publicity. Tredegar loses her good name more by trying to hide what she ought to reveal than by having her shortcomings known … Therefore not only do I agree with what you have done but I regard such exposures as the beginning of good health in any state”.
Sadly, a separate letter to my father from a journalist apologises that his editor has refused to run “the Tredegar story” adding that “One hour in Tredegar might have shaken him, but alas! editors don’t go to our Tredegars”. Clearly, when it comes to exposing how government policy is damaging working-class communities “freedom of the press” worked the same way in 1945 as it does in 2023!
We owe it to our parents and grandparents who fought for the NHS, social services, council housing, comprehensive education and all of the other reforms won by the labour movement to continue to expose the damage being done to our communities with “the upmost publicity” – not least through strike action, such as that being taken by my union, the NEU, today.
But we also need political representatives prepared to make these demands as well. Nye Bevan wouldn’t recognise today’s Labour Party as being anything like the one he knew in 1945. He’d definitely be barred from standing as a Labour candidate! It’s time trade unions started again and launched their own party afresh.
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| Tredegar, 1937 |
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