“I remember the German bombers going over.”

- Stephanie Davies, farmer’s daughter (Rumney)

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Stephanie Davies (Nanette Hepburn)

“We cycled or walked everywhere,” says Stephanie Davies of Upper Newton Farm as she recalls life on the Levels and the disruption that war brought.

Hand milking the Davies family’s dairy herd and running a milk round without electricity (power didn’t reach these parts until the 1950s) was hard enough. But managing the little farm after it took a direct hit from a German bomb didn’t make life easier. “One cow, she was blown out of the shed by the blast! They found her wandering up the next morning with the chain still round her neck. Alive!”

The nonagenarian farmer’s daughter remembers the itinerant reen cleaners who came to stay once a year: “We’d put a bed up for them in the barn. They were very strong men and they kept the reens clean with just a spade and a fork.”

She watched army lorries bringing unexploded ordnance onto the Levels (“they must have dumped them in the mud on what we called the lynches”) and generous GIs dishing out sweets. “We always did very well for food despite the rationing, but,” she admits, “it made such a difference to the work when we finally had the electricity.”

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Life on the Levels

Life on the Levels Interview

Stephanie is the daughter of farmers from Rumney. She remembers the war and how it affected the area; her family home was bombed and they had to move out to other accommodation. She remembers the Home Guard on the seawall and many other fascinating details of this area.

“I’ve been involved with the history for over twenty years.”

- Marjorie Neal, local historian and farmer’s wife (Rumney)

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Marjorie Neal (Emma Drabble)

▶ Watch interview with Marjorie Neal

Living on the Levels has given Marjorie Neal an insight into the district’s past. As the local history group’s archivist, she’s drawn on her own family’s past. “I’m lucky really because branches of my family have been in Rumney for years.”

Farming families lead isolated lives – as a child “I didn’t have friends close by” - but she made the best of things, helping to bottle the farm milk, mastering her father’s Fergie during haymaking (“I remember driving the tractor from the age of eight)” or just watching waves breaking on the lynches beyond the sea wall.

War brought Land Girls to the farm and Americans to run the Rumney Sea Transport Stores: “It stored goods coming from America and goods and casualties - bodies - that were taken back.”

Listening to the Top Twenty on Radio Luxembourg (and being scolded for it by her grandparents) helped relieve the isolation until Peterstone opened a youth club. “I used to go down there on my bike a couple of nights a week.”

Sixty years on a family farm also helped her find forgotten field and reen names (Floker, Rhossoag Fawr and Search Light - “there was a search light on that field in the war”) and evidence of occupation from 2,000 years ago. “We’ve a collection of Roman pottery found on the foreshore.”

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Life on the Levels

Life on the Levels Interview:

Marjorie reflects on childhood and adult life in Rumney, close to the sea wall, Peterstone Youth Club and WI, hay making, dairy farming, life during the war, Wharf committee, and sea levels.