The Swansea Devil

In the 1890s, a Swansea architect lost the biggest job in town, and he never let it go.

When the contract to rebuild St Mary’s Church went to the acclaimed London architect Sir Arthur Blomfield instead of him, he bought up a row of cottages opposite the church, knocked them down and put up a red brick building that would house brewery offices. Then he commissioned a three-foot wooden carving of the Devil, set it on top, and turned it to stare straight across at the church.

As the carving went up, he is said to have made a prediction: “When your church is destroyed and burnt to the ground, my devil will remain laughing.”

Nearly half a century later, it came true.

For a man who went to such lengths to be remembered, it’s odd that nobody seems to know his name. Every telling of the story calls him simply “a local architect”. His carving, though, Swansea never forgot. Locals called it Old Nick, and the building it sat on stood roughly where the Quadrant Shopping Centre is today.

Over three nights in February 1941, German bombers tore the heart out of Swansea’s town centre, and St Mary’s was left a burnt-out shell. Just metres away, the brewery offices were damaged, but Old Nick came through without a scratch, grinning down at the ruins exactly as his maker had promised.

St Mary’s was rebuilt in the 1950s, once again to Blomfield’s designs. The brewery offices lasted until 1962, when they were pulled down, and Old Nick vanished with them. For the best part of 20 years, nobody in Swansea seemed to know where he’d gone.

One man did. Glyn Lewis, a retired telecommunications engineer who used to walk past the carving on his way to work, told WalesOnline in 2013 how he stumbled across it.

“In 1964, I was working in telecommunications at Hereford telephone exchange and I became friendly with another young man, Phillip Rees, and was invited around for tea.

“His parents had run the antique shop but had sold up and bought a coal business in Credenhill, near Hereford.

“Phillip said he had something to show me and took me into the yard and pulled back a tarpaulin sheet and there was Old Nick with a big crack in him.”

He did nothing about it for almost two decades. Then, in the early 1980s, home on a visit from working in Germany, he happened to spot a newspaper appeal from local historian Rowley Davies.

“I read an appeal in the newspaper from local historian Rowley Davies asking for information about the whereabouts of Old Nick,” he said. “I was probably the only person in Swansea who actually knew where he was and I got in touch and told him.”

By then the Quadrant, opened in 1979, sat on Old Nick’s old spot, but there was still a clamour to bring him back. The C&A store, Swansea Council and the South Wales Evening Post raised £300 between them to buy him, despite objections from some churchgoers, and he came home in the back of a claret and white Evening Post van.

He went up inside the Quadrant, as close as they could get him to his original perch. Over the years he was shuffled about a little, hiding in plain sight above the shoppers, most famously in the window over the Whitewalls entrance.

Not everyone was pleased to see him. In 1993, the Church of the Redeemer in Treboeth backed a 62-name petition urging Swansea Council to “consider the removal of the statue to a less prominent position.” Its minister, Jeremy Rees, argued that there would be a public outcry if anyone tried to put up a statue of someone like Saddam Hussein, yet a far more offensive figure, the Devil himself, was being tolerated.

That campaign got nowhere, so later the same year a second petition gathered 1,000 signatures. One of its organisers, Eric Champman, believed the carving was having a harmful effect on society and wanted rid of it for good. “Burn it and send him back to where he came from - hell,” he said. “It is not a frivolous matter, it is a serious one.”

Others had their own theories. Superstitious shoppers blamed Old Nick whenever they tripped or dropped their bags beneath him, though wet floors were the likelier culprit. And Mrs “Toots” Garton insisted he had never been the Devil at all.

“It isn’t a devil at all… My grandfather told me it was Bacchus, the God of Wine,” she told the South Wales Evening Post in 1993. For a figure who spent half a century on top of a brewery, she may have had a point.

Two years later, Old Nick was quietly taken down and put into storage for months before going back up. For all the fuss of the petitions, hardly anyone missed him. Quadrant manager Alan Wallace said that “only one member of the public has noticed.”

In June 2019, Old Nick was handed over to Swansea Museum, where conservation specialists could look after him properly. You’ll find him on the ground floor today, and the curators have positioned him so that he still faces St Mary’s.

The church is still standing. So is he.

Have you seen the Swansea Devil at the museum? What are your memories of him? Comment to let me know!