War Horse and Mr Lewis the Milk

We went to watch War Horse at the Theater Royal in Plymouth last night and it was a lot better than I had anticipated. The technology of the puppets was amazing and the puppeteers were obviously at the top of their game. I won't give anything away about the plot but I will say that it was unexpectedly gritty and even macabre in some parts. Well worth going to.

As the plot unfolded around the exploits of a cavalry unit, it occured to me that I was probably in the minority in the audience as being one who actually knew someone who had been in the cavalry in World War 1. And that got me thinking about Lewis the Milk and I thought I'd repost something I'd written about him a few years ago. I think it's worth retelling, if only to revive a little of the history of my home village, Bedwas.

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I helped on Kenvyn Lewis's milk round for a number of years. It sounds positively Victorian now to say that I started doing this when I was around 10 and finished when I was about 15. At the beginning, it involved collecting eggs, milking cows by hand at his farm (the wonderfully named Llywynllynffa half way up Bedwas Mountain) filling and capping the bottles and going out on the van delivering all around Bedwas and Trethomas. Ada the Milk joined us for the deliveries and their's was the original hate/hate relationship. They couldn't stand each other and rubbed along, just short of braining each other with a pint of steri every day. Initially I just worked weekends but it soon included all of the school holidays. Things changed significantly when a semi-automatic milking system was installed on the farm and all the milk went off to Cambrian Dairies for processing, coming back ready bottled for us to deliver. I can't remember how much I was paid but two old shillings for a weekend (6am - 2pm each day) springs to mind. Child labour? It didn't seem like it at the time. It was something I always enjoyed and, for a while, I had the accolade of being known as Deri the Milk.

Watching War Horse sent me down memory lane about those times, particularly about Mr Lewis - I never called him by his Christian name as it wasn't the done thing at the time. He had a rather irascible manner but I always got on well with him and he was easy to work for. He was a born gossip and I learnt more about some of the people we delivered milk to than I should have and probably more than someone of my tender years should have been aware of! He was also a fount of knowledge about the history of Bedwas and I was a willing audience for his tales. He had lead a colourful life and he told me bits and pieces when he was in the mood. It's worth recounting what I can remember and what I've been able to piece together over the years.

The Lewis Family showing the patriarch, Wyndham Garnett, in the centre. Kenvyn Lewis is on the right of the back row. I have a feeling that this photograph was taken near the abattoir at the back of W.G's butchers' shop in Church Street, Bedwas.

Francis John Kenvyn Lewis, to give Mr Lewis his full name, became a second-lieutenant in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, being commissioned in August 1914. He was ordered to France and fought on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, where he stayed for six months. He did tell me that he took part in a cavalry charge there but, at the time, I had no idea of the significance of this. He came though all that, plus Ypres and Passchendaele, and was finally invalided out with typhoid and put in hospital in Wandsworth. He next went with his regiment to Ireland. On 10th October 1918, intending to travel home from Ireland on leave, he boarded the RMS Leinster, which was sailing to Holyhead at 9 am. He went to his cabin, began to get sorted out, when the purser appeared with a telegram from the CO in Limerick, telling him to get back to base. So he disembarked. Sixteen miles out of Dublin, 43 miles west of Anglesey, the German submarine UB-123, which had sneaked around the Irish coast from Scotland, fired two torpedoes at the Leinster, which in a rough sea sank with the loss of 529 lives – most of them officers and other ranks from the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Mr Lewis often mentioned his good luck.

 After all these adventures and near misses, he was demobilised with the rank of captain, which he never seemed to refer to, at least to me. He became a JP and, as such, he had the dubious honour of being reputedly the last person to read the Riot Act - to striking miners in the early 1930s (my grandmother never forgave him for this). During WW2 he commanded the Bedwas Home Guard, which meant patrolling the railway bridges at the top of the village and taking up prime position in the saloon bar of The Church House Inn (the first place I ever had an underage pint). When Dad’s Army was first broadcast in the Sixties, someone (Mervin the Butcher was it?) told me that Arthur Lowe was Mr Lewis to a tee. On the milk round we used to stop for breakfast in Lui Rabiotti's Café in Trethomas and, every now and again, Mr Lewis, Mervyn  and Lui would exchange tales of their time in the Home Guard. And, yes, it did sound exactly like Dad's Army. Thank goodness the Rhymney Valley was not on Hitler's target list.

Mr Lewis's base was a small dairy farm on Bedwas Mountain called Llywynllynffa (I've always liked that name and we used it for our house in Westerham in Kent. We never did get our postman to pronounce it). As well as the normal outbuildings associated with agriculture, I remember the outside lavatory that had two wooden seats, side by side. I could never understand how or why two people would ever want to go and have a cosy defaecate like that, though it is true that even now ladies vanish into the toilets together and spend ages there. Doing what? No man knows. No man wants to know. No man needs to know.

Mr Lewis was married to the lovely Mrs Violet Lewis. She was a Woodruff from Machen, a family of iron foundry owners who had a mansion called The Vedw, which was already in a ruinous state by the 1960s. when I used to roam around it with friends. Mrs Lewis - never Violet or Vi - used to help us wash, fill and cap the milk bottles at Llywynllynffa but never came out delivering. The only other help on the farm was the very shy, almost invisible, farm labourer called John Burt, who lived in ramshackle corrugated tin shack at the top of the farm drive. He was very difficult to engage in any conversation and was always described as being "a bit twp". I don't know whether he was or just preferred to keep himself to himself.

Mr and Mrs Lewis had a tragic family life. Their first child, Richard, tipped a kettle over himself and died of burns after a pioneering skin graft treatment went wrong - or so my mother said (and she had a good memory for this sort of thing). Their other child, Rodney, had muscular dystrophy and died in his teens. I can just about remember him and the fact that Mr Lewis used to take Rodney upstairs to bed by carrying him on his back - again told to me by my mother. So that’s the First World War, reading the Riot Act, two children dead and then death by lung cancer. Not so lucky after all.

 

Mr Lewis was a chain smoker, a real chain smoker. His brand of choice was Kensitas and one of my regular chores as we went around was to buy his cigarettes for him. No proof of age necessary in those days. All I had to do was to say that "they are for Mr Lewis" and they went down his account. This was the time when cigarettes came with coupons and he was always saving up for something. The cabin of the milk van was always festooned with coupons and redemption books. To be fair, he always warned me of the evils of smoking and never offered me any. His illness meant that he had to sell the business (and he made sure that I was taken on by Dai Davies who took it over ....but that's a story for another time) and eventually killed him. I visited him once when he was on his deathbed, his chest wheezing and heaving and the oxygen tanks lying about the floor. I went to his funeral but only at the graveside in St Barrwg's in Bedwas. His family grave is not too far from where some of my forebears lie.

 Mrs Lewis lived on her own at Llywynllynffa for another twenty years or so. I say she lived on her own but she did have the shy cowherd to look after her. John Burt, or so my mother said (again), did all her shopping, tended to the garden and did all the odd jobs on the farm. In effect, he was her manservant. She died in Caerphilly Miners' Hospital. Thinking about it, it was a miracle that she wasn't more affected by depression after all she had been through during her married life (and the death of her beloved niece, Linda Woodruff, in a horse riding accident, in 1961 when she was only 12. I was in Bedwas Junior Mixed School with her). But she was always cheerful and lively. It was as if, blessedly not of a fractious disposition anyway, she'd deliberately cut herself off from her woes, which were never mentioned. But that's what people did back then, just got on with it. She deserves to be remembered.