Merthyr Vale - History

History

As the colliery was not the first developed in the area, and as colliery developers and owners were known to generally restrict spending on surrounding communities in which they housed their workers, Merthyr Tydfil council insisted on Merthyr Vale being developed with both adequate snaitation, as well as community infrastructure. Resultantly, planning regulations stipulated that the Parish had effective sanitary and water supplies from the beginning.

Commercial hotels, public houses and clubs, developed on an exclusive lease from the colliery owner, soon appeared to fill the leisure time and keep workers within the area. Religious buildings included chapels and churches for: Zion, Baptist, Calfaria, Welsh Baptist Bethel, Wesleyan Methodist, Disgwylfa, Calvinist Methodist and Trinity, Presbyterian. Zion and Calfaria merged in 1974 to form the modern Baptist Church at Nixonville, which contains the first fibre-glass Baptistry built in Wales. St Benedict’s Roman Catholic Church was built in 1932. The Anglican Church of St Mary and Holy Innocents was built in 1974; replacing the earlier church which was built, with help from Merthyr Vale Colliery, in 1926.

The former Merthyr Vale School was built in 1879, while the Mount Pleasant School dates from 1912. Merthyr Vale railway station opened in 1883. The Gordon Lennox Constitutional Club was built in 1901, by the proprietor of the Brown-Lennox Engineering Company in Pontypridd, also the President of the East Glamorgan Conservative.

In World War II, while on a training exercise from No.53 OTU, two Royal Canadian Air Force Supermarine Spitfires collided over the village on 7 July 1941. The aircraft (X4024) of Sgt Gerald Fenwick Manuel (R/69888), 25, from Halifax, Nova Scotia, crashed into the home of the Cox family, claiming the lives of Doreen Cox 33, and her two daughters Phyllis, 14 and Doreen, 3. Husband James Cox, who was a shift worker at a munitions factory and was asleep in the house at the time of the crash, was thrown to safety; their three boys, Donald, Thomas and Len, were out playing. Neighbours tried to rescue the family - who had just returned from a shopping trip - but the heat from the fire was too intense. The second aircraft (X4607) of Sgt Lois "Curly" Goldberg (R/56185), 27, from Montreal, crashed into a field in Mount Pleasant, Treharris. The bodies of Sgt Manuel and the deceased family members were buried two days later in Ffrwd Cemetery, Merthyr Tydfil, while the body of Sgt Goldberg was interned in the Jewish cemetery at Cefn-coed-y-cymmer. A mural was painted by local school children and unveiled by the Canadian High Commissioner shortly afterwards on the same site, while there is an ongoing campaign by the Cox family for a permanent memorial.

The village appears in Richard Fleischer's 1971 film, 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough and John Hurt. As Timothy Evans (Hurt) comes back to Wales, he is seen walking from the station, with various scenes then shot inside the main village.