The Ferryman of the Tawe 🚣

On a November morning in 1908, furnaceman Augustus Mutfley stepped onto the landing stage of the White Rock ferry after finishing his shift at the Hafod Copperworks - and fell straight into the River Tawe.

The landing stage had flipped because the iron "dogs" that should have fixed it in place hadn't been fastened. He dislocated his shoulder, bruised his arm, lost eight weeks' wages - and sued the ferryman, John Llewellyn, for £50.

It's a mishap that preserved one of the most vivid glimpses we have of a crossing that, for over a hundred years, connected the east bank of the River Tawe to the industry that had made Swansea the copper capital of the entire world.

This week, we tell the story about the halfpenny ferry that kept it all moving.

I'll catch you on Sunday! Andrew

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To understand why the ferry mattered, you need to picture what Swansea looked like at the height of its industrial power - and how awkward the River Tawe made everyday life for the people who lived and worked beside it.

The copper industry had grown up in the strip of flat land between the river and the Swansea Canal on the west bank, where raw materials could arrive by both water and road.

On the other side of the Tawe, housing had spread through Pentrechwyth, Grenfelltown (within modern day Bon-y-maen), and Foxhole (a village located at the base of Kilvey Hill, long since abandoned). Without the ferry, workers faced a long detour through roads already clogged with industrial traffic and wagons.

The ferry - a flat-bottomed boat, sculled from the stern, carrying around twenty passengers at a time - was not a scenic or comfortable mode of transport, but definitely a quicker (and cheap) way to get to work than the alternative. On the east bank, there was a small boathouse where spare oars were kept and tea was brewed, and where passengers would wait and chat before the crossing.

When the ferry wasn't running, the consequences were felt immediately. On one such occasion reported by the local press in January 1928, a storm sent tree trunks, branches and frozen lumps of snow crashing down the Tawe, making the crossing too dangerous to operate. Workers arriving at the landing stage that morning had to make a wide detour - some facing a trek of over two miles to Morriston to cross the nearest bridge to where they were stationed.

By the time John Llewellyn was running the ferry in the early 1900s, the works it served had been running at extraordinary scale for the better part of a century.

John Vivian had established the Hafod Copperworks between 1808 and 1810 on the west bank of the Tawe, and by 1823 it contained eighty-four furnaces running day and night. Ten thousand of Swansea's fifteen thousand residents depended on the copper industry in one form or another - two thirds of the entire town.

The physical reality of working there was brutal in ways that are hard to picture now. The valley was covered in works buildings and slag heaps, and above it hung a low cloud of poisonous gases from a forest of chimneys - sulphur dioxide from the smelting process that killed the vegetation on the surrounding hills and gave the landscape a scorched, almost lunar quality that shocked visitors who had never seen anything like it.

The White Rock ferry (which took its name from the White Rock Copperworks, which sat on the east bank of the Tawe at Foxhole) was first run by the Owens and Leyshon families on behalf of Vivian & Sons - though much less survives about their individual lives. It's the second family line where the story comes into focus.

John Llewellyn - the same man Augustus Mutfley sued in 1908 - lived at Quarry Houses near White Rock Arch, a short walk from the landing stage. A local memoir records him as a familiar figure to everyone in Pentrechwyth, charging a halfpenny a crossing and, when the tide was running high, putting his back into what one account describes simply as "quite a good pull across."

In bad weather or flood, a wire was rigged across the river to stop it being swept downstream - and on that same January morning in 1928 mentioned earlier, the Herald of Wales reported that one of the boats moored overnight had been swamped by the rising river and sunk.

After John came David "Dai" Clarke, his half-brother, who took over the crossing and moved his family into Samlet Row - the same cluster of cottages built into the hillside immediately above the works and the ferry landing, where generations of ferrymen had lived before him. Dai was also a fish and chip shop owner - apparently, running a ferry and a chip shop weren't incompatible occupations in early twentieth-century Swansea!

His son Alfred followed him onto the ferry in the early 1930s, and Alfred's wife Olive later recalled the working rhythm of the crossing in an oral history interview: it started at 6.30am, ran until 7pm, then restarted at 9.45pm for the ten o'clock shift. Among the regulars, she remembered, were Saturday passengers who had taken a drink and were inclined to try their luck at avoiding the fare.

Ken Frederickson, another descendant interviewed by the Friends of White Rock, remembered his grandfather working the crossing between White Rock, Foxhole and the Lower Hafod, and being allowed as a boy to help work the boat on calm days - until the day his grandfather decided he wasn't yet ready. "My grandfather wouldn't let me take it across on my own until I could swim," he recalled.

The Clarke family ran the crossing through the 1930s and into the Second World War, and family memories record shift work continuing into the early years of the Blitz, with the Clarke family bombed out of their nearby home on Owen's Row in 1941. The Clarkes were the last family to run the ferry, handing it over to the Swansea Corporation in 1942, who kept it going with dock workers until final closure in 1945. Olive Clarke, Alfred's wife, was later described as the widow of the last of the White Rock ferry families - and a road in Llanamlet still bears the family name: Clarke Way.

The ferry served a much wider community than the copper works alone. It was used frequently by shoppers heading into town at a time when High Street was the main shopping area in Swansea, and Dylan Thomas used the crossing to reach Sunday School at Canaan Chapel in Foxhole at the foot of Kilvey Hill.

In May 1940, with the ferry's future in doubt, 300 people who used the crossing petitioned to keep it running. Swansea's Parliamentary Committee agreed, noting that if the bridge at Morriston broke down, there would be "no other means of crossing the river except in town."

Not everyone made it across safely. On Christmas Eve 1942, during a storm, a fourteen-year-old apprentice named Arthur Rees fell from the ferry into the river and drowned. He was an apprentice at Aeron Thomas's timber yard, heading home for Christmas. George Clarke, who happened to be home on leave from war service, was asked to help locate the body.

By the time it did close, the world the ferry had been built to serve was already gone. Copper smelting at Hafod had ended in 1924, and the industry that had employed thousands and turned the Lower Swansea Valley into one of the most productive - and most poisoned - landscapes in the world had been in decline for decades, undercut by cheaper smelting overseas and exhausted ore supplies closer to home.

The Quarry Cottages where the ferry families lived are long gone. The landing stages have gone. The works on both banks have largely gone, though the surviving Hafod Copperworks buildings are now being carefully restored, with the Penderyn Distillery and plans for a visitor centre and potential restaurant on the site.

What remains is Clarke Way and the oral histories recorded by the Friends of White Rock, which preserve the voices of the people who crossed, worked and grew up beside a small boat on a tidal river in what was once the copper capital of the world.

I’ll catch you on Sunday!

Andrew.

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Sources:

Primary source material from the Friends of White Rock oral history project and West Glamorgan Archive Service.