The Jamess

A Memory of Tirphil.

I was born at 8 School Steet, Tirphil. 1928.  Parents were Jane Jones from Merthyr and Lewis Rees James of Railway Terrace, Tirphil.  My mother had left Merthyr to run a small shop opposite 8 School Street. Mother was pregnant with second child, Billy and running the shop, when she had appendicitis. I was passed back aged 10 months to the family home in Merthyr. Father broke his back? in a pit accident and went, with the compensation money - £200 so the story goes - to London, to make his fortune. Unfortunately he met a widow woman and that was the last my mother saw of him. Billy died when he was four and my mother sold up, and went to work in hotels as a maid. I was still with my grandparents who by this time had moved to Oxford.

I visited Tirphil again about thirty years ago and met Lewis's brother and his wife, I've forgotten their names, still living in Railway Terrace. The family, Grandfather Isaac and several of his brfothers had moved to Tirphil from Beaufot.

Does anybody know anything  of the James's please? The people in the pub, thirty years ago, knew exactly who I was and of the 'scandal' of my father's visit to London.  "Naughty boy he was".

Eva Catchpole, nee James

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