Welsh Journals

The Mumbles Railway Story DAVID REES News of the House of Lords' discussion on the Mumbles Railway Bill means that this six-mile tramway from Swansea to the Mumbles Pier may soon be closed. The rail- way has a history which is liable to give even those quite insensitive to transport history a twinge of railway mania, for the first horse drawn goods tram plied between Swansea and the small fishing village of Mumbles in 1804 — year before Trafalgar. IN THOSE days Swansea was still a leisured holiday resort, a watering place of fashion and repute. It had been the home of the legendary dandy 'Beau' Nash, whose memory is ironically perpetuated in the town by the hideous Tudor-style 'Beau Nash House', justly the venue of a recent student anti-ugly march. Swansea was also the refuge of Richard Savage, as Dr Johnson has pointed out; the author of The Bastard wasn't the last hack to fly from his duns and emotional complications in London to Swansea. However, remnants of this faded eighteenth century elegance can still be seen in the rachitic Georgian houses near the Rutland Street terminus ot the Mumbles Railway. And only a hundred yards from this 'station'- there is no platform, merely an alighting place in the manner of the whistle stop-is the Royal Institution of South Wales. This striking neo-Classical building, Swansea's museum, was erected some thirty years after the opening of the railway, in what was then the centre of the town. It was the last monument of the Whiggish oligarchy of landowners and early industrialists which had controlled the town since the 1688 revolution. From the first of the Railway's halts along Swansea Bay, St. Helen's, just outside the famous Rugby football ground, and scene of a Dylan Thomas story, one sees the town from the vantage point of an eighteenth century engraver. But the Industrial Revolution of the last century did its work of destruction only too well. Coal hoists, warehouses and tall cranes crowd the skyline instead of sharply drawn sailing ships, etched against unfolding cartouches and gently floating putti. Only the hills behind the town are the same. A little farther along on one's journey