Welsh Journals

RETURN TO GOWER. Some day I shall go back to Gower. Not to crowded Caswell Bay, or along Cefn Bryn's soft, green track. Nor shall I go along the banks of the stream, to Three Cliffs, or to lean on the wind on the far, lonely tip of Worm's Head. All of these popular Gower features have become reasonably familiar to me during the last thirty years or so. With my stick and my rucksack I shall set off one morning, and get back to that part of the peninsula from which the lesser half of me sprang, and in the little churchyard at Port Eynon I will peer among the weathering gravestones for account of the generations of Curtis's who lived and toiled around there, and now rest beneath the shading yews. It grows upon me that to have some claim to Gower descent, be it only on the distaff side, is something to be proud of. The people of the peninsula were among the last to yield to the Conqueror's rule, and when the rest of South Wales was becoming more or less obedient to the usurper, garrisons were being maintained in the castles of Swansey and Ostrameure as a guard against raids from the unsubdued Gowerians. He would, however, be a good Gower man who could follow the steps of his lineage right back to those warlike men who were such thorns in the sides of the Normans. Most people of true Gower descent are satisfied with claims much more modest, particularly when in the halcyon days before the first world-war, it was frequently but unkindly hinted that some scales of charges for the renowned Gower ham-and-egg teas revealed positive descent from a lawless ancestral strain. Anyhow, it is certain that no Curtis led, or even took part in any of those depredatory raids on the outskirts of Swansey. Their alibi is perfect and complete they just weren't there. Where and when did these Curtis's, Curteis's, or Courtois's, come in ? Possibly with one or other of the groups of Flemings settled in different parts of South Wales by Henry the Second, when their own country suffered from inroads of the sea. Or it may have been when, after the revocation of the Nantes Edicte, hundreds of French Hughuenot families, many of them good craftspeople, fled to this country. Anyhow, the first we hear of them is at Paviland, where old John Curtis, who to me has never been more than a bearded, tam-o- shantered," sharp-featured, portrait hanging on a wall, was nurtured. When old enough to leave the shelter of Paviland, he became a sea-going carpenter, and spent some time in Australia at the time of the diggings." A brother, the subject of a beautifully tinted Daguerrotype, a family treasure, remained down under" and started a line of Curtis's in or near Melbourne. To get back to Port Eynon. When John Curtis, home from the sea, took to wife Mary Williams of The Lock," Aberdulais, and brought her down to Port Eynon, things could not have been expected