Welsh Journals

FOUR GENERATIONS OF A DIRTY BOOT FARMING FAMILY THE MORRISES OF NANTMEL 1830-1992 S. T. MORRIS 'Iago Prytherch his name, though it be allowed, Just an ordinary man of the bold Welsh hills.' R. S. Thomas This is the story of a Radnorshire farming family, typical of many such of this border region of Wales. It was not until my father, John Morris, 1874-1956, was nearing the end of his farming career with no male heirs in sight, his six sons and a nephew had produced only daughters, thirteen in all, that I envisaged the family's demise in farming circles, suggesting that this would be an appropriate time to set down the story of this Radnorshire farming family. In the event it had to await my retirement, some twenty years on, before I could muster the time and resources to launch such a study. By now a generation of the family and their contemporaries who could have provided first-hand much of the information needed for such a study had gone. In part compensation there was emerging a growing interest in family histories leading to a mushrooming of organisations, with new and exciting provisions at local as well as at national level, for obtaining information: local history societies, archivists, national and local libraries, national and county record offices. I could have made 1928 the cut-off point to this story when John III severed the family's connection with the county by moving over the border to the Kington area of Herefordshire on purchasing a 220 acre farm, taking his whole family of six sons and three daughters with him: his only surviving Morris nephew had already moved to Herefordshire. John was now 54. Kington, while over the border, was very much Morris territory. He had been married at the Baptist church, Kington. The town had been the market venue for a generation of the family, when, as we shall see later, they farmed in the Gladestry area as tenants on a number of the Ormathwaite estate farms. That the family were of Nantmel I had gleaned from hearsay in my youth, when, as a school boy, I would be sent to help my elderly uncle Tom Lloyd on his little retirement holding overlooking the city of Hereford, specialising in fruit and poultry. Before his retirement, due to a breakdown in health, Tom had farmed a large holding in the Llangunllo area: before that at Wolfpits near New Radnor, with his father-in-law, Charles Powell. Tom was not related by blood to the Morrises, being the illegitimate son of Eliza Lloyd of Rhulen, who had married John Morris II of Nantmel. On one of my visits to 'Uncle Tom' he had casually mentioned that the Morrises were of Nantmel, that my great grandfather John Morris had died young leaving a widow and a family of several sons and several daughters; that some of the sons had emigrated to America; one, Edward, had migrated to the north of England, leaving only John II in Radnorshire. With this limited information carried in my memory bank over some sixty years, I had