Doreen Roberts
I was born in Llangollen, on a farm on the hillside above the town, Tan-y Bwlch on May 20th 1920 

The house at Tan-y- Bwlch

My father was John William Bailey (he lived at Maes Mawr, along with 4 brothers and sisters) and my mother was Jane Elizabeth Morgan from Llanraeder Mochnant. 
My dads father died when dad was 14. He came from Ireland and had fought in the Crimean war and the Indian uprising.When he left the army he was gardener to a colonel at Ystrad Hall.. He lived at Berwyn. My Nain came from Berwyn. 

I was one of six.
There was John, Betty, myself-Doreen, Arthur, Norah and Eileen.
We had a wonderful carefree life as children, well shielded from any sort of family or financial problems. I can only remember happiness as a child. 

There were brothers and sisters to play with - Doreen, John and Betty
My dad fixed a swing on a tree branch and there were always children from town, who were made welcome, as long as they stayed off the farmed fields. My dad was wonderful about having friends up to play and always encouraged this. The branch broke when I was swinging and I hit my face, but it did not stop us playing on the new swing set up by my dad, now over a lane, just down the road. There was an orchard, where one tree had a lovely low branch were I could hang up-side down by my toes. I used to get into trouble if my
Mum caught me. 

I was one of the first to join Llangollen Brownies, when they started in 1928, and went on to become a brownie pack leader, Girl Guide and Ranger. Above is a photo of a guide jamboree at Denbigh. I am there at the back. Below is a news-cutting about the 60th anniversary of the start of Llangollen brownie pack.

There was one particlar tree at the bottom of Barbers Hill where we loved to play. One day we noticed something high on one of the branches. We climbed up to see what it was and found a horseshoe, but the branch had grown through and round it until it had become a part of the tree itself.
It is said that the gibbet, which hung the barber on Barbers Hill still lies in a barn at Vivod.
The farm had cattle, pigs, sheep, horses, hens and of course dogs and cats.
We all liked to help around the farm. My mum always said that my dad was a “poor teacher” since he worked from the idea that we all learned more from our mistakes.
The milk was delivered locally using a horse-drawn milk float. When I first started School, I used to be taken down on the milk float. This did mean that I always arrived at school late. 
“Come on you 10 O’clockers” was what we would hear as we arrived at school. When we were older, we would walk both ways.
The Gales family now live in the house, but do not have the farm. There are photos of Tan-y-Bwlch , (see later) showing some of the changes. 
The main barn is now part of a new house.

There was a young girl of about 10 years old whose parents had died leaving her with her only relative, a young brother. She came to live with us and walked to school with the younger ones of us. Her name was Ada.
My mother regularly took visitors in, and had had a maid before Ada, but Ada stayed on as maid until she married.
There was only my father to work on the farm with help from one tramp, who slept in the barn. The tramp, William, had formerly been a butler, but had had a drink problem. He stayed with us until he eventually had to go into the workhouse at Corwen.
We did all get roped in at hay-making and other busy times.
Lots of people came to stay on the farm. Many came for year on year and became friends. I remember one school group in particular. They came from Garston School in Liverpool. The children stayed in a barn and the teachers in tents. They always came for the first fortnight in July.
There was one little boy who was crying and very homesick, wanting his mummy. I offered to be his temporary mum. He settled and enjoyed his stay. At the end of their stay, it rained and teachers had to stay behind to take down the tents when dry, and when asked for volunteers to stay to help, he was the first to put up his hand. They always had a camp fire on the evening before they packed up to go home. I remember one song in particular:-

Black Folk, White Folk everybody come
Join our Happy Sunday school and make yourselves at home
Bring your sticks of chewing gum 
And squat on the floor
I’ll tell you bible stories
That you’ve never heard before.
Jonah was a prophet
Of children he had seven
He put them on a donkey 
And sent them off to heaven
The road was a rough one and they didn’t know it well
So Jonah tipped the donkey cart and they all went to hell.

There were many other verses but it is this beginning that I find I still remember best.


As a child I didn’t get any pocket money. We ate well. My mother was a wonderful cook. At times Dudley Richards used to help my Dad. The last time I saw him in town, just before his recent death, he was still talking about my mothers cakes. 
The boys who came to play always enjoyed coming and remembered my mums cooking- I think it is a “boy thing”.
I used to be roped in to make third man for the boys’ cricket games, when my brother John would play with his friend Dick. I asked Dick to show me how to throw a googly. He must have shown me well; as I bowled him out the first time I tried.

I remember catching Brian and Wyn Jones scrumping damsons from the bottom orchard as they came up from town to play. They went very red when they knew I had seen them.

Doreen at a last visit added a few more tales: 

She remembered the school dentist and how she needed attention to a tooth and had to go to his surgery on Market Street. He said “See that wall there? If I see you again I will stand you by it and shoot your head off.”
She says that she had great trust in the town dentist, MrWilliams, and that after having an excrutiatingly painful filling while she was in Aylesbury-“he was a real butcher”- she decided, at 25 years old, never to have that sort of pain again, so when she came home she insisted on having all her teeth out. She went without any teeth at all for thee months on the dentist’s advice, but has only ever needed two sets of dentures in the last 65 years.
She was a true sweet lover, spent any pennies on sweets, and the one in the family who was slightly chubby. 
Brother John once told her that she had legs like gate posts- but that’s a brother for you and she loved him just the same. Her dad, however, teased the other girls in the family of having knobbly knees, which annoyed them too.
Brother Arthur had a sweet and funny nature and Doreen felt quite protective towards him. One uncle used to call him “Jimmy the rum chap” and Doreen said this name suited him very well.
She remembers one instance, when they went in to say goodnight to an uncle and his teacher lady friend and the keeper, Mr Mathews.They walked in during the middle of a tale. Arthur, innocently, said he knew a tale as well and was encouraged to tell it.
It was about a naughty boy in school, who was warned by the teacher, “If you do that again, I will take down your trousers and smack your bottom”. Of course he did, so she fulfilled her promise, but couldn’t understand why the boy was laughing. He replied when asked “you would laugh if you had your dongle stuck in an inkwell.” Was this a true story?
Doreen remembers that there was one really naughty boy in her class, who threw a full inkwell at the teacher. The boy was sent to the head. Doreen never could understand why the father came and shouted at the teacher, Mr Chorlton.

We had some good neighbours. Ceinwen Ellis lived next door with her three brothers and one sister. 
I stayed at home when I left school, but when war broke out I saw an advert for Nurse Training at Aylesbury and applied and was accepted. There was little time off, certainly not enough to go home for my weekly day off, so I actually didn’t get home for 12 months. This was in 1941. I was really unhappy and homesick, yearning for home and in the end I don’t think they were very surprised when I said I wanted to leave.
I worked on the farm, when I got home and got a job in Rowlands Cake Shop.
One of my sisters joined the Land Army and another worked in the office at Llangollen station.
My mothers’ brother, David Morgan, was one of the first to sign up from Llangollen for World War 1, and also, I believe one of the first Llangollen men to die. His name is there at the rear of the War Memorial.
We used to hear the planes going over in the war - a dreaded noise. We used to go into the dining room, which had shutters and a big oak beam over the fireplace and we would sit under the fireplace. There were a few holes locally, where bombs had been dropped. One house was hit over by Eglywseg. The German pilots used to mistake the River Dee for the Mersey, as they tried to bomb Liverpool.
I remember that after the war a local, self named, “lay-about”, obviously depressed by his own life-style, sought out my dad and apologised for being alive, while such a worthy boy as David had died. Too sad!
The local dances were wonderful; so popular that people walked here from Glyn Ceriog and further afield, and then walked home afterwards. Many came at 10pm until the end at 12midnight, but the younger ones, like my-self or the non-drinkers, joined in the dancing earlier.
As the RAFA club opened on a Sunday, that was its most popular night, as all the pubs were closed on a Sunday. It was always full. People came in droves from as far away as Corwen. I served behind the bar. 

I married Denis Roberts when I was 28 years old and we had one son, Arthur now in Ruabon and one daughter, Barbara who works in London. I have three grandchildren.
Denis and I stayed at Cae Madoc, eventually looking after my parents as they began to need assistance. We moved to Minfford in 1991. Denis passed away in 1997, just as we were due to move into my present flat.

Denis came from Acrefair and his job was a joiner in Monsanto from the age of 15 until he retired, with time out for the air-force. I met Denis, as we exchanged a shy smile as we passed each other in the street. At the time he was wearing his air-force uniform and looked very handsome. We passed again and my dad noticed the smile this time and asked who it was. so I explained that it was a local boy who I knew (I think I must have half recognised him)- and that was that.
Although many boys had walked me home safely to Tan Y-Bwlch after dances, I had never had a boy friend until I met Denis when I was 21.

There were some well known characters in town.
There was “Stump” (I do not know where he lived), Nello Black, who always wore a black skirt and apron and who lived on Hall Street. There were also quite a few well-known “regular” tramps. Quite a few would ask to sleep in the barns on the farm. I remember one was nicknamed Trwyn Mawr (big nose).
Gypsies came to town and we would run away if they appeared to be following us home. We were all quite frightened of gypsies.

The March Fair was always the first week in March. There were fairground rides. Most popular were the horses on the round-about and the cake walk. When I went on the cake walk, I thought a crowd of men were laughing at me, as me and my friend tried to hold onto our pants-difficult when everything was shaking and both hands were needed for holding on the sides, but we got off and the laughing continued, and when we looked round there was one poor lady with her knickers really falling down and unable to let go to pull them up. 
Dennis and I always won a coconut from the coconut shy. One year the police got involved as the fairground people had removed the sand used to support the coconuts, and it became impossible to knock the coconuts off as they were deep seated in the bottom of the cups.
Eventually we moved house to Cae Madoc, one farm further up, when one of my brothers, John, came home to farm after the war, and he took over Tan-y- Bwlch. His wife Sylvia Bailey still lives in Llangollen. He met Sylvia Potts while he was working as a policeman in Liverpool. 

We never went away on holiday, the nearest to a holiday being the Sunday school trips, where a good number of charabancs would take crowds of us to Rhyl or Llandudno for the day.
More like holidays for us, maybe, was when friends came to stay. One particular family, whose mother had lived next door to my father when she was young, came all their lives often for two weeks each Easter, one week for Whit, four weeks in August and one week at Christmas. We children were good friends and we loved these visits.
One visitor who came as a child to stay with her mother and father, sister and brother on the farm,and who stayed with the family as an evacuee during the war, later to settle and make her home here in Llangollen, was Babs Cresswell.

I used to help to deliver milk, using a horse drawn float with the milk churns on the back. Milk would be taken door to door and ladled into jugs. I remember that one day, when Arthur was bringing the cows down the field and I was at the point of getting off the cart, the horse suddenly bolted. I held on as best I could, half on and half off, and braced myself for the horse to come to a sudden halt at the gate, but the horse did no such thing; It ploughed right through the gate, breaking the gate post, but, fortunately, it did come to a halt down the lane. Meanwhile Arthur had abandoned the cows and chased after us. We never knew what had upset the horse. We continued to deliver milk until eventually, after John had taken over the farm, a collection was then undertaken by a local dairy.
I remember one small incident very clearly. I used to take milk to Sergeant Evans our local policeman. One day he said
“I am a very happy man today- my books are clean”
What a pity all police cannot say that now-a-days, even in a small town like Llangollen. 

The railway was very busy in those days. People came from all over. We used to hear the 9am train as it went into the sidings on our way to school and the driver and other workers would rush up through town to the cafe at the far end of Hall Street for their breakfast. People used to come off the trains and walk up the mountain then, past our house, in droves.
One of my sisters was working in the railway offices at the time of the train crash.

We were a large extended family and the family photos below include aunts, cousins friends and visitors.

My brother Arthur married Jean and they had one son and six daughters. 
His wife, Jean Bailey, now lives close by me at Minfford.They can be seen below in a family group photo.

Also living in Llangollen is my other sister in law Sylvia Bailey.
(See her own recollections about how she came to the farm from Liverpool.)

Transcriber’s note- lots of thanks to Doreen for the way she has so generously shared her memories and her photos. 
She celebrates her 90th birthday in one month- on May20th 2010.
A wonderful lady.