YESTERDAYS 1941

It was recently announced in the London Gazette but Mr and Mrs Bowen received a telegram from their son over the weekend.

Volunteering for the Air Force at the age of 18, Bowen, pictured above, completed his training in this country and offered to serve abroad.

He has served in Singapore and Aden and has taken active part in 32 air attacks on enemy bases. He was educated in Llwynypia Council School and Porth County Boys’ School. CARDIFF shelters need bunks, so declared Miss Ellen Wilkinson, Parliamentary secretary, the Ministry of Home Security, before leaving Cardiff after her tour of inspection of South Wales facilities.

In an interview with the South Wales Echo, Miss Wilkinson said: “After a visit to Swansea and Newport, I was back in Cardiff when the guns were going hard and searchlights crisscrossed overhead.

“It seemed so like a London blitznight that I felt that the problems of Cardiff’s shelter at night were probably more nearly like London than we could probably have seen during the day.

“My secretary and I began a tour of the shelters that lasted till midnight.

“The strongest of the shelters in the centre of the city was so packed that I could only get in on production of my official pass. In spite of notices many men were smoking, the atmosphere was very thick. I saw a lot of young people were having an evening there so called back at 11.30pm. By then the regular shelterers had settled in.

“Women were sitting upon a narrow bench with babies in their arms. Men and women, who had work the next morning, were crowded on similar benches, yet shelters upstairs were empty. Some means of spacing these out should be found and bunks provided.

“Cardiff is having regular alerts now and that means people will want regular night shelters.

“Bunks mean sleep for children who have school and for workers who must work the next day, which they cannot do after sitting on narrow benches till 3am and 4am.” THE Breconshire Education committee has decided to vary the school holidays to enable older children to help planting potatoes.

The Whit-week holidays rearranged for the purpose. WHEN Mr James Davey, will be pictured right, a Cardiff Corporation farrier, retired today at the age of 65 he set what is believed to be a record in continuous service to the firm, having served for 52 years.

He started work as a flagboy when he was 13 years old. In those days the law demanded that the steam tractors, which were used extensively for haulage work, should be preceded by a flagboy.

Actually, Mr Davey was the flagboy for the tractor that was used to test the Clarence Road Bridge when it was opened in 1890.

When he started as a farrier the corporation had only 22 horses. He saw that rise to 120 and decline to the present total of 50. POSTWOMEN in all parts of the country are applying to the post office for an official issue of the trousers which they are now allowed to wear while on duty instead of the regulation blue skirt.

Already the trousers have been dubbed the “Camerons” – after 19-year-old Miss Jean Cameron, the