David Cuthbert Thomas 1895–1916
The death of a soldier from Carmarthenshire had an enormous impact on two English writers
David Cuthbert Thomas was the son of Rev Evan Thomas and his wife Ethelinda of Llannon in Carmarthenshire. He was educated at Christ College in Brecon and was an accomplished sportsman – in June 1914 he attracted the attentions of selectors for Glamorgan Cricket Club.
However, cricket gave way to war. He enlisted, initially as a private in the Public Schools Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers (RWF). But David Thomas was officer material, and he was commissioned as 2nd Lieutenant in May 1915, attached to the 3rd Battalion RWF. They were stationed at Litherland Camp outside Liverpool, and it was there that he met the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves.
Thomas arrived in France in late 1915, the
battalion being sent to Fricourt on the Somme. It was while supervising the repair of defences that he was shot by a sniper. Wounded in the neck he died from his injuries on 18 March 1916. Following the funeral, Sassoon commented “When the parson had finished (and the machine guns kept making his words inaudible) a big thing fell about 150 yards away and burst with a final smash. And so my Tommy went away, happy and stainless.”
Robert Graves in his memoir Goodbye to All That (1929) wrote, “I felt David’s death worse than any other since I had been in France”, while Sassoon is believed to have based the character Dick Tiltwood in his novel Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) on his fallen colleague.
with Welsh culture, you might not appreciate that for many of our ancestors, Welsh or Cymraeg was their first language and English something learnt. For example, my own father only spoke English regularly when he began grammar school. This has obvious implications in terms of Welsh being the language of many chapels, but less obvious ones in understanding memorial inscriptions and place names. Census enumerators were consistently inconsistent when recording place names, sometimes using the Welsh version and at other times its anglicised twin. However, do not despair for in this great internet age help is at hand – see John Ball’s online guide to translating gravestone inscriptions at jlb2011.co.uk. The website www.genuki.org.uk is also a valuable resource if your geography is a bit rusty.
Of the ‘home nations’ Wales differs in migration patterns. History does not record any great Welsh diaspora, but rather patterns both of emigration and
‘Census enumerators were consistently inconsistent with place names’
immigration. Until the exploitation of the South Wales Coalfield and the development of associated industries, there had been comparatively little population movement. The natural division of the country by the hills of mid-Wales led to travel on a west–east axis rather than north–south. For example, if you have ‘lost’ a family from Carnarfonshire, they might very well have left for a better life in Liverpool. Similarly, the inhabitants of poorer areas such as Cardiganshire might be found working in the dairy trade in London. Before the advent of public transport, many would have followed the traditional drovers’ roads used to drive cattle to market. Generally domestic migration features more frequently in Welsh ancestral research than emigration. However, if your ancestors did leave for pastures new, they might very well have gone to the USA or to Australia to work in mining or agriculture.
Perhaps surprisingly,
63 per cent of the people
living in the Welsh coalfields at the time of the 1911 census were born in England. The industrial powerhouse of South Wales attracted labour from within and outside the country. From England, miners arrived from the Forest of Dean and also travelled across the Bristol Channel from Cornwall. Irish communities began to spring up in towns such as Newport, Swansea and Cardiff, many typically from Cork and the south-east, especially following the Great Hunger of the 1840s.
Before the arrival of the railways from the 1850s, people travelled along the coast by boat and even tiny villages were known for their seafaring inhabitants.
For example, the Radcliffe shipping line was established by a family from the small village of Aberporth. Coastal services ran regularly from towns in North Wales to Liverpool and in the south to Bristol. Many small towns were registered ports and centres of shipbuilding such as Amlwch in Anglesey, Porthmadog in Carnarfonshire and Aberaeron in Cardiganshire. If your ancestor was a Welsh mariner, many resources exist both online and offline, such as the Welsh Mariners Index at welshmariners.org. uk. In addition to national records such as Board of Trade registers, there are local records such as crew agreements that can be found at county record offices.
Also, Shipping Intelligence reports detailing arrivals and departures were published in local newspapers, which can be searched for free on the National Library of Wales’ site: library.wales/informationfor/family-historians/newspapers.
Metalworkers And Miners
Many of us researching Welsh ancestors will encounter a mining or metalworking connection. The southern coalfield stretched from Pontypool in the east to St Brides Bay in the west, a distance of about 100 miles. Smaller-scale mining and mineral-extraction industries existed in Anglesey (copper); Cardiganshire (lead); Chirk near the Dee Estuary (coal); and Snowdonia (slate). The railways were built to move coal, coal was used in the ironworks, and dockers loaded it for export in the big new ports at Cardiff and Newport. The records from the mineworkers’ lodges, unions and educational institutes are included in the South Wales Coalfield collection held by the University of Swansea: swansea.ac.uk/swcc.