Newtown - Y Drenewydd — An Elegant Sufficiency

If you have been following our varied travels in Wales from time to time, you'll know that most Welsh places have two names. That can be confusing for non-Welsh speakers (like me) especially when following signposts. Newtown - or Y Drenewydd in Welsh - is one and the same place of course. It's the largest town in mid-Wales, in the county of Powys and is where my Hero spent his teenage years.

When planning our route from Builth Wells, site of the Royal Welsh Showground, we chose to stopover here in Newtown, mostly because it was on our route towards the north west corner of Wales, where we'd planned to spend a few days. But I'll admit, there was a small amount of nostalgic curiosity involved too. I had never been here and last year, when we'd driven along a nearby road, we found ourselves on the town by-pass, so didn't even get to drive through. Anyway, we booked one night at Parkers and I added it to my online map.

I usually do a little research before setting off and this time, I noted a museum to the philanthropist Robert Owen, I immediately thought of New Lanark which we'd visited on a post-Covid road trip to Scotland. Might this be one and the same man?

Well yes, it certainly is. Robert Owen was born here in Newtown and there on the corner of the adjacent street to our B&B was a fine memorial.

It's particularly Robert Owen's founding of the Cooperative Movement that's commemorated here; an organisation which my Grandparents and many of their generation supported enthusiastically. My Nan was a loyal member of the local Co-op and bought most of her groceries from the shop around the corner and larger items from the big department store in the city centre. Every one of her purchases counted towards her “dividend” (which she called her “divvy”), a regular bonus which she saved for special occasions. I remember the jar of large, metal tokens in her pantry and how she'd put one or two on her doorstep each morning to be exchanged for pints of milk when the Co-op milkman did his rounds.

Leaving Newtown the following morning, a sign on a tall building close to the Railway Station caught my eye.

The name was familiar and I recalled my Hero telling me about Pryce-Jones on a previous occasion. “Wasn't he the Victorian mail order catalogue man?” I asked.

Indeed he was! A quick look up on my phone as we drove out of the town confirmed that in the mid 19th century a great combination of circumstances, i.e. a great Welsh product in the form of woollen flannel, the nearby railway and the development of the new parcel post enabled him to develop the very first mail-order business, which soon grew into a world-wide trade. Pryce Pryce-Jones was quite the entrepreneur of the day.

By the time I had finished googling, we were beyond the town and into the countryside, approaching Caersws and the house where my Hero had lived. We had passed this same house on our trip last year but had approached it from the opposite direction. I had a far better view of it this time around.

We chatted about the circumstances which had brought the family from Dorset where his father had been Commandant of a Police Training Centre to here in Mid-Wales, where he'd been promoted to lead the local Police Force. I was thinking of Bettine, now 100, but then in her forties, who'd left a home set within a community for this isolated house on the edge of a Welsh village. With two children out at school each day and a husband working long hours, how did she spend her time? She didn't drive, I don't think there was frequent public transport and my guess is that it would have been hard to settle there. Undoubtedly, she and many Welsh housewives like her would have been Pryce-Jones’ target customers!

The countryside around here is certainly beautiful and totally unspoiled. My father in law was very happy here, taking the dog out walking for the day and being out in the fresh air.

We enjoyed the meander northwards, observing how frequently our sat-nav bobbed in and out as the internet connection dropped and connected again. Would living in the area be very different now from when Bettine moved into Caersws, we wondered?

There was a distinct change in the weather as we drove over the pass down to Dolgellau and passing signs for the Red Bull Hard Line event this weekend, we hoped it would improve before then.