GONE... BUT NOT
Former residents remember communities which were demolished
S
ITTING in south Llanelli, the Machynys Peninsula boasts a 7,121-yard golf course, golf club and spectacular coastal views reaching as far as Gower.
Tourists and golf enthusiasts travel from every corner of Wales to play the course or walk along the adjoining Millennium Coastal Path.
But while planting their tees or swinging their clubs, many may not know that they are standing on the memories of a community lost to most, except those who once lived there.
The story of Bwlch y Gwynt and Machynys, two working class communities and home to dozens of families, can be likened to Llanelli town centre’s struggle to compete with nearby new developments in the Trostre area.
But while today the competition is between shops, in the mid 1900s tinplate works and production factories were vying against each other.
In 1872, a time when Llanelli’s tinplate industry and steelworks were growing, a tinplate works was built in Machynys.
Two others tinplate factories then followed on the peninsula in 1910 and 1912, with most of the tinplate being exported to America. During that period workers’ housing was built and the two distinct communities, Bwlch y Gwynt and Machynys, were born.
Like most communities, they were made up of family homes, watering holes, local shops and farmland.
But more than that was the sense of close-knit community that all past residents recall as their favourite thing about living there.
Now 80 years old, Delfryn Owens was born in Bwlch y Gwynt in 1940 and said spending his childhood in the community was a blessing.
“I lived on Embankment Road for 10 years and it was a dream to be a child there. All the kids would be playing in the streets, we were all very close,” said Mr Owens.
“It was like living in a huge playground because we had two farms – we’d call them top farm and bottom farm. We were near the beach and there was a shooting range we used to call ‘the butts.’ American soldiers used to use ‘the butts’ to practise shooting.
“I’ll never forget my childhood there, we used to have so much fun and we used to see who was guarding the works and try to sneak in during the evenings,” he laughed.
Along with the industrial works, the area also had the Machynys School, Joppa Chapel, bus and train links and the Globe Inn – the industrial workers’ main drinking haunt after a long day at the works.
But while the tafarns were the main meeting point for the workers, the canteen served as a gathering place for the children.
Eira McKibbin, who was born in Machynys during the 1940s, said the community really was something special and she still had clear memories of days she spent there as a young girl.
Recalling days meeting friends in the canteen she said: “I can almost smell the baking of pastries, pies and pasties, which we could buy cheaply or most of the time have for free, as there were always some left over after each shift.
“It was our meeting place for young lovers and sometimes future husbands.”
Although a rural area and a heartland for the Welsh language, throughout the community Welsh, English and Italian could be heard after many Italians migrated to work in the tinworks after the war.
But while the tinworks united families across the community and children grew up as friends because their fathers worked in the factories together, there was a clear rivalry between the neighbouring Bwlch y Gwynt and Machynys communities.
Mrs McKibbin, whose mother and grandmother gran were also born in Machynys, said: “You’d always say you were one or the other, there was rivalry and competition between the two.”
Caroline Rees Rogers, another past resident, reiterated that sense of competition: “If I said I lived in Machynys instead of the Bwlch I would have been told no, you live in the Bwlch. They were very much different places, even though they were right next to each other.”
Families living in the community described it as like living in a bubble, isolated and cut off from the rest of the world.
Residents recalled leaving their doors unlocked and even bathing in a tin bath in the back garden.
In a book recalling her memories of living in the community, Mrs