All at sea:
Ruth Jones goes on a nautical journey in search of her past.
Gavin & Stacey actress Ruth Jones, who co-wrote the series with co-star James Corden and who plays the wonderful Nessa, is proud to be Welsh.
And as she traces her roots in the series Who Do You Think You Are?, she doesn’t have to roam far from her homeland.
“My journey was very much a Welsh one,” says Ruth, who grew up in the seaside town of Porthcawl.
“It is very similar to Barry Island, where Nessa lives. I’m the third of four children and we were really blessed with this massive playground, i.e. the beach.
“We had endless adventures and I had a very happy upbringing.
“My mum was a GP and my dad was a legal executive at the steelwork in Port Talbot. He died in 2017, quite suddenly. It was a huge shock to us, even though he was 89.
“I come back to Porthcawl a lot to see my mum and my siblings and it still is very much a part of our lives. My grandmothers both lived around the corner. We called them Big Grandma and Little Nanna and they were very involved in bringing us up.
“I never knew my grandfathers. They died before I was born. It feels like there is a missing piece because they have been these elusive figures in our family for so long. I would love to know more about them.”
And so she sets off to do just that. The first stop is at the house of her mum, Hannah. She hardly knew her father, Griffith Llewellyn, because he died when she was two.
Jones discovers that her mother’s side of the family were mariners. Her great great great grandfather,
Evan, owned and captained a ship that made local voyages along the Welsh coast, transporting goods and raw materials.
Jones is delighted to hear that they were Welsh speaking.
His son David, who was part of his father’s crew at the age of 19, went on to become part owner of a much bigger ship than his father had and sailed much further afield, transporting coal from the South Welsh mines to the likes of the East Indies, Burma, Mauritius, Uruguay and Western Australia.
Jones goes to see the house he lived in and is charmed to see the sea view from an upstairs window where his wife, Eleanor, could have looked out and seen him set off in the ship for as far as the eye could see.
Evan and his son David had the surname of Jenkins, which was a nice surprise for Ruth, who explains, “Without realising it, I took on the surname of Jenkins for Nessa, whose full name is Nessa Shanessa Jenkins. I imagine she’d have got on well with Evan and David.
“What David must have seen and what he must have learnt makes me think what little I know about life. He could be at sea sometimes for two or three years at a stretch and, yet, he had nine children.”
Jones’ mother, Hannah, inherited an old black-and-white family photograph of nine young men and women, taken on the beach at Neath, who would appear to have been David and Eleanor’s children.
“I think I worked out who my great-grandfather Griffith Owen was in the picture,” says Jones. “He died in 1915 when my grandfather was 15. The photo was gorgeous – a real captured moment of happiness with the nine siblings all together. But it was a bit of a shock to discover that within a year of it being taken, three of them had died. It made the image even more poignant, somehow.
“When I set out on this journey I’d been given some names by my mum and the photograph, and in a way it was a bit overwhelming because there were so many of them. I knew nothing about them.
“It’s like there was this closed door which I never thought to open and now I’ve opened it, gone through and found out all this lovely information and it’s been lovely to, sort of, posthumously meet these relatives. It feels incredibly enriching.”
Jones visits the family grave before setting off to find out about the other grandfather she never knew – her father’s father, Henry Richard Jones.
She is astonished and impressed to discover that Henry, from Neath, played a big part in running medical aid societies for South Wales in the 1930s and ‘40s, which was a forerunner of the National Health Service. He spent his later years running a care home in Porthcawl.
“I was very proud of him. He seemed to be a real defender of the underdog.”
Despite the impressive family achievements and the trips to far-off lands, their roots remained firmly in South Wales, and that’s just the way Jones likes it.
“It’s been such a joy and I am so comforted to find my journey ending where my life pretty much began and where I grew up. It’s been wonderful.”