My Memories of The Memorial Hall

by Brian Lendon Berry, 1940–1947

Having only recently, in June 2009, discovered the School’s website, I am being brought up to date with some of the things that have happened since I left home in 1947 when I went off to do my National Service.  One thing that has made me very sad is to find that since then the Memorial Hall has gone.  Why, I wonder, was it destroyed?  In my time the Memorial Hall1 (it had not then, in the 1940s, acquired the diminutive “The Mem”), played quite a central part of our lives.

It was regularly used for dances, both youth and adult, with on special occasions a band led by the local trumpeter Billy Butler2, whose son Brian was about three years behind me in School.  Numerous church meetings and functions were held there, and for every church festival various groups put on plays based on the bible stories.  I can remember, as a small boy, having a walking-on part, as a shepherd or something, with a tea towel round my head which was poking out though a hole in an old sheet.

One play in the Memorial Hall which left an indelible memory in my mind came one Easter, when I might have been eleven.  A group who were probably in their late teens/early twenties put on a play about the Easter story.  The scene in which Judas was exposed as the man who had betrayed Jesus had Judas sweeping off the stage with the parting agonised cry of, “I go to hang myself in the potter’s field”.  I have no memory of who played Judas, but his anguished shout and dramatic exit, of truly professional quality, has never left me.

Towards the end of the wartime years we had several young curates join the church team.  One of them, the Rev George Parry Davenport, was completely hooked on Shakespeare, and he collected a group of us in our early to middle teens to act in a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Everyone presumed that it would be performed for one night only, in the Memorial Hall, and with homemade costumes.  However, Mr Davenport announced that he had reserved the Little Theatre, in Trecynon, for three nights, and was hiring costumes from a professional firm!

Most people predicted a ghastly flop and wondered who would be picking up the massive bill at the end.  In fact, it was a roaring success, with all three evenings packed out.  Two names that stand out in my mind as acting brilliantly in the Dream were Duncan Evans as Francis Flute, and Walter Ryan as Nick Bottom.  It was so successful that Mr Davenport went on to put on several more Shakespearian plays during his stay in Aberdare.  I remember Wally’s Shylock and Lyndon Harries’ (I believe) Malvolio as being another two eminently memorable performances.

Rehearsals were on several evenings each week in the Memorial Hall, and most of us went to them even if we weren’t needed, purely for the friendship that filled the Hall.  I wasn’t much good for the group as I was always too embarrassed to give a good performance.  I think it probably dated back to when I was about seven, and living in Surrey with my aunts.  My school there put on a play about King Midas, and I was cast as the princess’s maid.  I felt a complete idiot having to wear a long dress and a big head-dress, and my only lines were the comforting words, “Never mind”, when the princess was emoting about her father’s problem.

I kept being told throughout rehearsals that I must speak more loudly or no one would hear my quiet little voice.  When my part in the performance came, in the main hall in front of an audience of parents, I could see all the backstage people making “speak up” gestures at me, so I obliged with a very loud and deep “NEVER MIND”, which must have echoed throughout the school buildings, and which brought out a roar of laughter from the audience.  I can still remember being mortified that they laughed at me for obeying instructions!

Upstairs in the Memorial Hall was the church club, though quite a few of the regulars I didn’t recognise as churchgoers.  Indeed, one of my regular snooker opponents was Herbert Emsheimer, most of whose family had escaped from Nazi Germany just before the war.  Herbert was a good friend, as was his sister Hannah, and their mother was one of the kindest and most loving of people towards youngsters, always willing to allow our group to meet in her house.

Elsewhere on the web there is a photograph of a teenage group in the Memorial Hall, dated about 1962.  A similar group in my day would have looked very much like that, though less smartly dressed because of the shortage of money and severe rationing.  There was one exception to the likeness, though.  Two of the group were doing what the caption describes as “a relaxed jive”, which would have had us threatened with instant excommunication or worse.

When we were in our teens in the middle 1940s we saw films and newsreels of American servicemen ‘over here’ jitterbugging on the dance floors, which looked wonderful, and we enthusiastically tried it for ourselves.  However, in those days virtually everyone went either to chapel or to church, and some of us felt that we lived in a strict bible belt which disapproved strongly of most things we did, and also of those depraved American servicemen and everything about them!  The “Over-paid, over-sexed, and over-here” aphorism could well have been coined in Aberdare!

In the Memorial Hall or even in the Aberaman Hall, which seemed much more broadminded, when we tried simple jitterbugging steps the bouncers would move in fast, telling us that it was forbidden, and that if we didn’t stop immediately we would be escorted out and banned from returning.  We had to be holding on tight to each other in strictly ballroom style.  (No snogging allowed, either!)

One happy memory of the club, which I remember as being boys-only, came when one of the younger and very naive boys came in with a pipe he had bought to show how mature he had become.  One of the older members, completely straight-faced, asked him if he had matured it yet, which was to be achieved by urinating through it.  The lad happily stood in the toilet with us while about a dozen of us enthusiastically obliged, then having shaken it well as instructed, he sat down and smoked his first pipeful of tobacco.

It is so sad to think that today’s younger generations do not have that centre of such great love and friendship, and that it has not been replaced with a more modern centre aimed at helping them.

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1 Some information about The Memorial Hall can be found by clicking/tapping here (opens in new window)

2 Billy Butler’s band was well established. He also played for the annual dinner dances of the Past Students Association; his first appearance for them was in 1921, and he was still being hired much later in 1950. By then it cost 12 guineas to hire his band plus the cost of the sound amplifier! Mr Butler lived in Lambert Terrace in the Gadlys.