Author Archives: Curious Scribbler

Aberystwyth’s raunchy war memorial

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by The Curious Scribbler

There is a very chilly naked woman emerging from a thicket on the sea front at Aberystwyth.   She faces the sea, in the teeth of every westerly gale, on the margin of the ground once occupied by the Norman castle.  She is, to say the least, a well built girl, larger than life and fashioned in bronze.  No wispy maiden she, but a flesh and blood woman with strong thighs, pert, full breasts, large capable hands and a purposeful expression.

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The bronze figure at the base of Aberystwyth war memorial

 

As the authors of the recent Pevsner sedately remark, “ Unexpectedly sensual for a Non-conformist country”.

For this huge empowered woman is the lower ornament on the Aberystwyth War Memorial, erected to commemorate the dead of the First World War.  Rising from her octagonal plinth is a  tapered shaft of stone, and on top of it a pretty, rather fey angel with billowing dress and an elegant pair of wings.  She appears to be about to lob a wreath of laurel, hoop-la style, onto the head of her companion below.

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The Winged Victory atop the column throws a wreath of laurel

 

The memorial is the work of an Italian sculptor, Mario Rutelli, and was erected fairly long after the close of war, in 1923.  The angel above is, apparently, the Winged Victory, whilst the powerful nude represents Humanity emerging from the Horrors of War.  The bronze thicket from which she strains to escape is thought by some to be seaweed, by others to be rifles transmuted back into bushes.

Later tablets on the plinth commemorate the Aberystwyth dead of the Second World War, and the monument is the final destination of the Poppy day parade.

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The memorial stands in the full blast of the westerlies off Cardigan Bay

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The memorial stands in the full blast of the westerlies off Cardigan Bay

The winter sun goes down over Cardigan Bay

The winter sun goes down over Cardigan Bay

This western extremity of the headland north of the harbour is a place of great beauty, commanding views along the coast southward to the sharply truncated cliff of Alltwen.   Framed by woodland a little inland from the sea squats a grey stone mansion, recently released by its new owner from a dense surrounding of self-seeded sycamore and ash.  This was the home of Matthew Lewis Vaughan Davies, later Lord Ystwyth, Liberal MP for Aberystwyth from 1895 to 1921.  Lord Ystwyth was a bit of a philanderer in his life and died at the great age of 94.   Posthumously, historians have judged him harshly.  However he was undoubtedly a mover and shaker in his time, founder among other organisations, of the Royal Welsh Agricultural Show, and in 1923 he was made Honorary Freeman of the Borough of Aberystwyth.  It appears that it was his influence which provided his home town with what is surely the least sombre war memorial in the land.

War memorial sculpture by Mario Rutelli

A handsome girl, Humanity emerging from the Horrors of War, Aberystwyth

Twelfth Night

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by The Curious Scribbler

We took down the Christmas tree today.

The tree bears witness to six decades of decoration styles

It seems there is a certain amount of debate as to when you start counting the nights of Christmas and when the children were small we usually took it down on the 6th, Epiphany. No serious bad luck attended this oversight I’m glad to say.  Now there is a wealth of advice on the web which explains that Twelfth Night is really the 5th of January, though an exception is often made for decorations featuring the crib, since the wise men are not scheduled to rock up until the 6th.

So the boxes are retrieved from the loft and I spend the afternoon dusting and putting away the Christmas treasures each in their own flimsy sectionalised cardboard box.   For our tree represents a sixty-year accumulation of treasures: gaudy Czechoslovakian blown glass baubles, clip-on glass birds with glass fibre tails, wooden toys, metal musical instruments, American painted wood hummingbirds dangling on long white strings, glass candles, foil flowers and angels, and twisted bi-coloured metal strips which hang from the branches turning in the slightest air movement.  Almost every year a box or at least a few items have been added to the tree.

This year I will show you the oldest baubles we have: five British-made Austerity baubles from 1945. My newly married parents spent the last two years of the war in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and then moved to smoke-stained and dispirited York, a far cry from the brightly burnished tourist town of today.   Burnished decorations were also in short supply, the Czech glass industry  all but extinguished.

But someone in Britain had sought to fill the gap, with ornately moulded glass not seen before or since, and my mother bought a box of five.  The little caps with the spring legs which slot into the neck are far solider than in normal baubles, and with an inconveniently tiny eyelet which makes them difficult to thread.  And they are quite drab-coloured, rather than the familiar mirrored glass, one is misty blue, one red, one green.   Their opacity resembles Roman glass retrieved from the sea. Two smaller ones are mirrored silver, probably indeed made like mirrors, and like old mirrors the silvering has slipped and tarnished.   But these wartime baubles held their own as the glossier foreign goods reappeared and have always had a special place in my affections.  Those who grew up reading the Tim books by Edward Ardizzone will remember when Tim went to sea and Ginger, the cabin boy, illicitly drank of the first mate’s patent hair-growing medicine.  The blue bauble has always, for me, represented the flask of the dreaded hair tonic in the book.  And the other baubles have ridges, grooves and ornamental bosses unlike anything which has been produced since.  Neither the largest nor the brightest, these ornaments set the stage for the continuous collecting of the following years.

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The blue moulded bauble reminded me of Ardizzone’s hair tonic bottle.

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The Green glass bauble

The mirror glass baubles have not aged well

Also from 1945, showing signs of age

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The red bauble moulded in the same form as the green one

Czech glass appeared in glittering heaps and bins in the upstairs section of W.H.Smiths by the late 50s. I remember the year my mother bought a golden glass trumpet with the metal reed set in its flaring bell, which we were each allowed to blow, just once, before it was hung on the tree, and I remember the year I was allowed to select my own novelty bauble and I chose a copper coloured kettle with handle and spout, about two inches tall.  I treasure it still.

My Copper kettle - A Czechoslovakian glass bauble from the later 1950s

My Copper kettle – A Czechoslovakian glass bauble from the later 1950s

 

Not enough disability in Aberystwyth?

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by the Curious Scribbler

Another independent shop has closed its doors in Aberystwyth’s picturesque Eastgate Street. The windows, masked in brown paper give it a depressing  air.

Closed shop in Eastgate, Aberystwyth

The now closed Snowdrop Care and Mobility shop in Eastgate Street

However the message posted to the customers gives pause for thought, for it reads “ We would like to thank all our customers for their support and we are sorry there were not enough of you”.

Snowdrop Care and Mobility sold walking aids and wheelchairs, lift-and-recline chairs and beds, mobility scooters, ramps, stair-lifts, continence aids and extra wide footwear for swollen feet.   Not equipment many of us are eager to need. Can we conclude that Aberystwyth’s population is, in the main, ageing more healthily than the commercial predictions suggested?  I hope so.   Certainly there are plenty of the elderly out and about leading busy lives.

Those less fortunate, it is implied (and I hope there are not too many of them) will have to shuffle off to Haverforwest  ( a round trip of 125 miles).   On the other hand they may resort, as we all increasingly do, to doing their shopping on the internet.  I understand that an extensive range of this equipment can be obtained through Lloyds Pharmacy.

Customer told they were insufficiently numerous for the retailer

A reproachful notice to customers of the now-departed shop

Reflections on dementia

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by The Curious Scribbler

My mother was never considered to be suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.  Indeed her death certificate (for she died, a week ago, aged 94) has a slightly farcical ring about it.  Her certified causes of death are Hypertension, Old Age and Memory Loss.  It reads as if she just forgot to go on living.   More likely vascular dementia played a part.  Abnormalities of this sort were detected in a brain scan about seven years ago, and her final years were marked by a number of TIAs (Transient ischaemic attacks) or mini strokes, from which she usually physically recovered, though there were new lapses in memory and ability.

But what is more striking than what she lost is what she retained:  an iron certainty that she was right, and that the only way of doing things was her way.  In my last blog this certainty applied to the control of the items on her overbed table and to her method of achieving quality control on her diet of chocolate buttons.

Here she is five years ago in another white-knuckle account I wrote then:

Shopping for my elderly mother: The quest for the perfect toothbrush                     13 February 2007

I have searched every chemist in town for a small-headed Maclean’s toothbrush like the worn one I have been compelled to carry around in my handbag for the last week.
Eventually I go to the dentists’ and queue to ask if they have any of these toothbrushes (this is where Mummy says they come from, – but because they are no longer on visible display she did not ask for them when she went to the dentist last week). They sell me an OralB small-headed toothbrush which is very similar to the Maclean’s one. The assistant has worked there for eight years. She is quite definite that they have never sold Maclean’s toothbrushes.

I took the toothbrush round to my mother and handed it to her.
She gazed at it and laughed merrily.  “Ha,Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.” She chuckled.

 I couldn’t muster such a cheerful peal however hard I tried.
She drew breath and laughed again.
“What,” I asked calmly “is so funny about it?”
“Oh, I’ve never seen one like it!” she replied.

I point out its similarity to her present Maclean’s tooth brush, which I fetch from upstairs. The small head is exactly the same size. The handle has one blue flash rather than three diagonal stripes. The handle, she says is very long. She has never seen such a long toothbrush.

I hold them side by side:  once you subtract the packaging, the two toothbrushes are exactly the same length.
So now we come to the bristles. This new toothbrush has the tufts of bristles cut on a slight diagonal so that they are longer at the front. The toothbrush she has just started using has them cut square. The manky brown-stained ex-toothbrush in my handbag has alternate pairs of long and short tufts.

But I can tell, it is not, and never will be, satisfactory. I tell her that the assistant at the Dentists’ says that they never did stock Maclean’s toothbrushes. She shakes her head emphatically with a knowing grin. She knows when she is being told a whopper.

 ***********

Was this a symptom of dementia?  Or was she just being herself?

 

A Degree of Dementia

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by The Curious Scribbler

She is awake in her chair and watching the TV.  The sound is off.  If it were on she would not hear it.  She is deaf.

On her table is a substantial stack of broken fragments of chocolate buttons.  There is also a pool of tea.  The lipstick which always props up the chocolate-smeared emery board is particularly heavily smeared with chocolate.

I tackle the problem.

“You look in a bit of a mess here,” I say.  I point to the buttons.  “Do you want these?”

“No,” she replies, “they are old ones.”

“They are only broken” I say, “You are throwing away perfectly good chocolate.”  But I collect a paper towel from the bathroom and clear up the heap of mauled chocolate.  I wash the lipstick case in warm water and return it to its place.  She seems accepting rather than grateful.

The situation is worse than I thought.  A layer of milky tea has spread across the table, soaking under the lizard from Lanzarote, the Chinese serpentine frog on a lily-pad, the birthday cards from me and from my sister-in-law.  I pick each up and wash the table with more paper towels.  A j-cloth would be handy but Health and Safety regulations in the Nursing Home determine that only disposable materials may be used for cleaning by us amateurs, the relatives.  We don’t even have the use of a drying up cloth or a washing up brush in the kitchen for fear we might spread contamination.  As a result all the personally owned mugs become rimed with tannins, brownish in their crevices.

The tea on her table derives from my mother’s obsession with placing her empty mug on its side when it is finished, or in her words “dead”.  It is not invariably completely empty when she makes this decision.

As I clean I pause to speak distinctly and slowly in her ear.  “This- happens- because- you- insist-on putting- your -mug -down-on-it’s-side.”  I say.  She hears the words.  “Possibly,” she replies, “ but I have found that it is best this way.”

When I am done, I water the flowers, restock her mini fridge with six packets of Cadbury’s Giant Chocolate Buttons, and her cupboard with three bottles of Maple Syrup.  Dementia likes sweet flavours.   She has long taken maple syrup on her porridge. Now she demands it on her soup and pureed meals as well.  One of the nurses is pregnant, nauseous, and cannot bear to feed my mother this mixture.   She delegates lunch and supper feeding to other carers.

Poor old lady you think, unable to feed herself.  But she is able. She simply elects not to.  That is what the carers are there for.

Her room tidied, I sit down on the bed beside her.  My gorge rises.  There on the table is a new stack of nine or ten chocolate button fragments.  With her right thumbnail she is deftly prizing two fused chocolate buttons apart and discarding the pieces.  Little wonder many are stuck together.  All day she sits with the bag tucked down beside her thigh.  The buttons become warm. They stick together.  She refuses to have them placed on a plate or little bowl on her table.

“You-are-breaking-your-buttons-again.” I state clearly.

“Yes, these are not suitable ones,” she replies, “they are old.  I must throw them away.”

There is a response on the tip of my tongue.  But I confine myself to telling her that she would never have allowed a child to waste food in this way.  I, as a child, was not allowed to leave the table until I had eaten everything on my plate. “Waste is anathema to me.” she used to say.

She is unmoved by my reasoning.  I am not sure that she remembers what a child is.  I firmly suggest putting the buttons back in the fridge for a while so they will become firm again.

With dignity and force, she refuses. “No,” she says.  “ I find it works better this way.”

Cadbury's Giant Chocolate Buttons

Cadbury’s Giant Chocolate Buttons

 

What is a Lhasa Apso?

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by The Curious Scribbler

Several people have commented on the joyful puppy on the banner of this blog, so the time has come to explain. The picture is of Otto, and Otto is a Lhasa Apso.  In that picture he was three months old.

Now he is over two years and has a full long coat which almost touches the ground.  If he were a show dog it would do so, but in order to be a show dog you need to spend less time getting tangled in undergrowth and wearing off the ends of your hair and nails.

Otto, freshly groomed

Otto, freshly groomed

He has a bath and a major detangle about five times a year, the last bath was for the wedding, at which he wore a little costume to match the groom and the ushers and was the comic turn of the day.

Otto in costume at the wedding

Otto, a Lhasa Apso, attends a wedding

However this picture would give a false impression of the Lhasa Apso.  Inside the flowing hair he is all dog, with an enthusiasm for other dogs, deep puddles, rivers, sticky mud, sand dunes and the beach.  Lhasas are proud independent little dogs who bustle along at a trot or a gallop and appreciate a couple of miles walk a day.

Otto in mud

Otto, A Lhasa Apso in mud

Otto, a Lhasa Apso, in the sea

Otto in the sea

Otto in the sea

 

 

Otto, a Lhasa Apso, in hay field

Otto, a Lhasa Apso, in hay field

In the home Lhasa Apsos like to audit the visitors but having been introduced and added them to their acquaintance list they generally treat them with dignity.  They seldom bark.  For the inner circle of family members a full greeting is performed, much whirling, wriggling and standing on his hind legs waving his paws.   Lhasas are said to have their origins as Tibetan monastery dogs, perhaps as the reincarnation of monks not quite making the grade for Nirvana.   They like to sleep in an elevated bed, or indeed along the back of the sofa cushions will do.

Otto is deeply in love with his cats, Boris and Bertha.  When they were tiny kittens they hissed ferociously at him, and most downcast he would retreat a few inches and lie watching them, his chin on his big fluffy paws.  Within a week they had relented, and were rewarded with much affectionate dog licking.  We felt we should intervene as Boris became quite spikey and wet with saliva.  But when we tied up the dog to give respite from this degree of love, the kitten just marched up and demanded more.  Over a few weeks the licking abated.  When Otto feels the urge he captures a kitten, presses it to the ground and snuffles it.  When the cats choose, they lure him into wild chasing games around the house.

When I was trained many years ago in Animal Behaviour we were discouraged from naming animals anthropomorphically and taught to see their behaviours as purely adaptive mechanisms which further their survival.  Emotions were not supposed to be an animal attribute. Anyone who lives with pets soon doubts this mantra.  The dog and the cat have long contributed to the domestication of man, and have a wide repertoire of endearing behaviours of little other value.  They gain much from this co-existence, for their appeal to humans has ensured their food and comfort for millennia.  Otto, Boris and Bertha have welded themselves into a little multi-species family, in which there is no friction and a great deal of warmth.  When we sit down at the end of the day they expand the group to embrace us too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bring in the bulldozer!

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By The Curious Scribbler

There is a smallholding for sale not far from Aberystwyth near Lledrod.  With customary overstatement the local agent, Jim Raw Rees begins their particulars “Rarely does such an opportunity come to the market..”     The price has been reduced to £150,000 for 12 acres, a bungalow and outbuildings.

But what buildings!  If there is something that Ceredigion has excelled at in the 20th century it is mean rural dwellings.  Set on a south facing slope is a small red brick bungalow of repellent appearance, not that old, just small and ugly, but with planning permission to become less so.  Paul White, who has devoted much of his life to photographing ruins in Wales, both grand mansions and modest farms and outbuildings has been along to take these evocative photos in black and white.   He suggests it looks like a railway cottage escaped from its natural habitat.

The derelict red brick bungalow at Lluest Newydd, near Lledrod
Copyright Paul White

Blocking the view, or more poetically  “in the eye of the sun” to quote Raw Rees, is a range of even stranger out-buildings – part masonry, part corrugated iron.   Why those three tall doorways and above each the domestic style upstairs window? Why does the roof sit directly upon these windows?  Is this one of those abortive self-build projects which ran into despair?

If the whole site were razed to the ground the south facing hillside would warm the cockles of a horse or goat owner, or make a happy field for a great assortment of poultry.  And today far more attractive modern vernacular buildings are being put up for more enlightened owners.

Paul’s pictures distil what is ugliest about Lluest Newydd.  It has a place in history, but let us hope is soon loses its present foothold on the hillside.  According to Zoopla it has received 500 hits in the last month.  Surely salvation, notwithstanding our almost incessant rain, is in sight?

Outbuilding at Lluest Newydd

Outbuilding at Lluest Newydd

 

Pictures copyright Paul White see http://www.welshruins.co.uk

 

The Joy of Cats

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by The Curious Scribbler

It is lovely having cats in the house again.   I make my morning cup of tea and take it back to bed.  Up the stairs with heavy tread come Boris and Bertha, six month old siblings.  Boris bags the prime position on my chest, purring vigorously, Bertha winds her tail around my face and settles down beside him.  It is difficult to guide my tea mug to my lips.

Boris and Bertha

Boris and Bertha, the kittens

You’ll be hearing more about Boris and Bertha, the latest in a line of distinguished tabby cats to live in our stone house in the hills.

The first was Tomcat.  Unimaginatively named by us he was a big tabby, proud possessor of his testicles, who marched into our house one day and stayed.  My young daughter was entranced.  My baby son, seated in his Maclaren buggy, took immediate offence –  holding his breath until he turned blue, and then emitting a square-mouthed wail of affront.  But it wasn’t long before Tomcat and he were snuggled amicably upon a beanbag, the latter grasping the former’s silky ear in his fat little fist.  Tomcat spent the days at home and the nights in feral pursuits.  Some mornings he’d return with a rabbit, his fur rimed with dew from the long grass and the edges of his ears laced in black with a new crop of rabbit fleas, reluctantly rehomed from his cooling prey.  I kept flea powder for these occasions.

Tomcat grew old and eventually left us, probably to die.  Before he went he brought home a successor, a skinny teenage tom of the same colouring.  For two days they ate together and slept together in the same bed.  Then Tomcat disappeared.  We called the newcomer Kevin.  He proved to be a superb addition to the family.

Then there were Sharon and Darren,  Kevin’s kittens by a feral farm cat he brought home.   They streaked around the house chasing, rolling and scaling curtains and sofa backs.  Darren was beautiful, a mackerel tabby with intricately striped body.  Sharon had the circular target on her flank.  We called her, affectionately, the little limited cat.  There hadn’t been quite enough material to make Sharon, and she had to go to the vet as a kitten to repair an abdominal hernia.  We thought she had been slightly short-changed in the brain department too, but we loved her.

Dolores was our next cat.  A feisty young tabby female from an eccentrically run private animal sanctuary.  She was not as soppy  as her predecessors – someone somewhere perhaps had closed a door on the tip of her tail and the end vertebra  was crooked and sensitive.  You couldn’t run your hand up to the tip of Dolores’ tail.

You may detect a strand of tabby racism in this narrative.  And the story reached yet farther back.  This house has always had a tabby cat.  One day a knock on my door revealed a lovely lady from Wisbech who had passed the war years with her mother as a blitz refugee in this house.  She came with photographs.  And there was her mother, seated with her hosts Mr and Mrs Daniels, against the pine end of the house.  Standing behind them is their schoolteacher daughter, Mary Ann Daniel, holding in her arms a big Cardiganshire tabby, the very image of the indomitable Kevin and very possibly a direct ancestor.

Mary Ann Daniels holds the family tabby in 1940. Seated in front are her parents and their evacuee guest

Mary Ann Daniels holds the family tabby in 1940. Seated in front are her parents and their evacuee guest, the photographer’s mother.

So while feral cats of other shades and patterns pass through the neighbourhood, perhaps contributing to the squalling spats or eerie yowlings in the night, Tomcat, Kevin, Sharon, Darren and Dolores saw our children from babyhood to independence, and when Dolores died of a septic foxbite, the house was strangely bereft.   Boris and Bertha now continue the tradition.  They were born in May a few miles up the river where their mother was in the care of the Cats Protection League.  A couple of months ago they re-encountered her.  She was leaving the vet with her fresh operation scar, a microchip and a new name.  She looked with disinterest at her mewing kittens in my cat carrier, waiting for their immunizations.  She was going back to her new home.

 

High on Henbane? The Welsh Witch and her broomstick

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by The Curious Scribbler

Simon Goodenough, the new Curator of the National Botanic Garden of Wales came to speak this week to the Cardiganshire Horticultural Society.    For my less local readers: Cardiganshire is the old County name for this county, now properly known as Ceredigion.  Dyfed, a mystifying administrative amalgam  of Cardiganshire, Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire was created in 1974 and abolished in 1996, but lives on in address databases and in the title of the police force.

Anyway, the Cardiganshire Horticultural Society ( or CHS) was founded in 1968 before Dyfed was invented and is a flourishing local society bringing together some 200 members of wide and often learned interests.  The National Botanic Garden is over our borders in Carmarthenshire, and was a major millennium project, 507 acres of historic landscape now centred on Norman Foster’s famous glasshouse, nestling like a giant insect’s eye in the rolling green landscape.  We have always maintained a keen interest in its progress.

Norman Foster's Great Glasshouse at the centre of the Middleton estate

Norman Foster’s Great Glasshouse at the centre of the Middleton estate

Simon described his many plans for the enhancement of the gardens.  One theme concerns pharmaceutically useful medicinal herbs, currently represented by the Apothecaries’ garden, which celebrates the traditions of healing attributed to the Physicians of Myddfai, three brothers living in the nearby hamlet of Myddfai in the 13th century.  While he is enthusiastic about the ancient traditions of herbal cultivation in this area, known to reach back to Roman times and beyond, Simon was sceptical about the Myddfai story.  Scholars have suggested it may well be something of a folk fiction of fairly recent origin. This would not surprise me: we have quite a tradition of embellishing the facts in Wales.  Iolo Morgannwg , for example is, now recognised to have been a most prolific inventor of druidical history, while Lady Llanover can be credited with singlehandedly creating the picturesque Welsh peasant costume we still dress children in to celebrate  St David’s day.

Simon went on to show us a picture of henbane (Hyoscyamus niger), a British native herb with powerful psychoactive properties which crops up in coastal locations and on disturbed ground.  It is in the garden’s collection and may well have been utilised in Myddfai

The poisonous and psychotropic herb, Henbane

The poisonous and psychotropic herb, Henbane

Apparently henbane can make you feel you are flying.  According to tradition it was pulped and mixed with porkfat, smeared upon the end of a handy broomstick, and applied vaginally where the moist skin and rich capillary bed allowed the active chemicals to reach the bloodstream and the brain.  This, we learnt is what was really meant by witches flying on a broomstick.  I do not know the origin of this scholarly insight, and can only speculate as to where wizards might have put their broomsticks.  If true, it is most satisfactory, and if false it joins the ancient tradition of tall tales in Wales.

 

A Welsh gentleman’s link with the Chelsea Physic Garden

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by The Curious Scribbler

When I visited the Chelsea Physic Garden a couple of years ago I received a charming little ticket inscribed in the blank middle ‘Admit One’. The 18th century engraved decoration of the card showed exotic palms, banana trees, agaves, a well-built and scantily clad lady, ( The Goddess Flora I presume?) and a sturdy and equally flimsily veiled cherub, or more accurately, a putto. Flora rests her bare foot upon the works of Philip Miller, (gardener of the Physic Garden and author of eight editions of the Gardener’s Dictionary 1732-1768) and of Hans Sloane, the garden’s benefactor.

Day entry ticket for Chelsea Physic Garden

Day entry ticket for Chelsea Physic Garden

I had seen this design before. Amongst the ephemera of one of Ceredigion’s great houses I came across an original, in which, instead of the terse “Admit One” the central panel reads:
Mr David Lewis The Bearer, a Member of the Society of Apothecaries of London, is intitled to visit their Garden at Chelsea, as often as he pleases, at convenient Hours. No servant is to receive from him any acknowledgement on that Account.

Membership pass: Mr David Lewis, a member of the Society of Apothecaries of London

On the reverse were written three names: Hugh French, Master, E.D.G. Fafield, and Wm. Henry Higden, Wardens.

The reverse of the card names the Master and Wardens
The Archivist at the Chelsea Physic Garden was able to tell me that the Society of Apothecaries appointed a new Master annually, so Mr David Lewis’s card was issued in 1807-1808.
Lewis is not a rare name in Wales, but this David Lewis was almost certainly a local gentleman, the owner of a 199 acre estate, Cefn yr Yn, which was located about 12 miles inland from Aberaeron in the fertile Aeron Valley. His estate was surveyed in 1787 and showed it divided into four tenanted farms, two of which had very extensive gardens which may have produced herbs.
His membership pass to the Apothecaries Garden ended up in the archives of Nanteos (see last post) amongst unsorted papers dating from the life of William Edward Powell. W.E. Powell inherited Nanteos, one of the four great estates of Ceredgion, in 1809 at age 21 and promptly set about an extensive program of house and garden improvements, egged on by the influence of Welsh architect John Nash and his circle. Very possibly he borrowed David Lewis’ membership card in order to familiarise himself with the most fashionable trees and plants in London. Certainly a Tulip tree, a gigantic Ginkgo and an Oriental Plane are among the prestigious trees which mark out Nanteos as a historic garden of distinction.

Nanteos in 1995 before its recent refurbishment as a country house hotel

Nanteos in 1995 before its recent refurbishment as a country house hotel