Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went,
The lamb was sure to go.
It followed her to school one day,
Which was against the rule,
It made the children laugh and play,
To see a lamb at school.
This piece of Llangollen folklore concerns the heroine of this well known nursery rhyme. Mary Thomas was born in 1842 at Ty Issa Farm, Llangollen. She came here, to what was then the British School, with over 200 pupils. With her she brought her pet lamb Billy who apparently caused mayhem in class and had to be put out into the playground. Mary’s schoolmates used to pat the lamb through the railings of the playground. In 1861 Mary married Thomas Hughes, a mining engineer from Cefn Mawr and they went on to have 11 children before Thomas died at 47. Mary lived to be 89 years old and died in Worthing.
She is buried in Worthing but comemmorated on a grave in Fron Bache cemetary, Llangollen, along with her father, John Thomas. One face of the tombstone is inscribed in memory of John Thomas. On another side is the inscription ‘Also in affectionate remembrance of his daughter Mrs Mary Hughes who died in Worthing in 1931, aged 89 years old. Heroine of the nursery rhyme Mary had a little lamb’.
This is a lovely folklore story, but sadly Mary Thomas of Llangollen was not the heroine of the nursery rhyme. Why she died believing she was is not clear. She was given a copy of the poem by visitors from London – did this copy lead Mary to believe that she was its heroine? The Mary of the rhyme was Mary Sawyer and the school was the Redstone Schoolhouse in Sterling Massachusetts, U.S.A. The original nursery rhyme was written in America in 1815 by John Roulstone, and was first published in a magazine called Juvenile Miscellany in 1830, 12 years before Mary Thomas of Llangollen was born!
