Welsh Memorial by Louise Williams

A Valley’s View Digital Story

Welsh Memorial Digital Story Transcript

The South Wales branch of the Western Front Association decided they were going to do this [memorial] and it came about from Tom Price from Brecon. This is probably one of the original articles. Before we built it we proposed the site of the memorial to the 38th Welsh division and that must be ’83 perhaps, ’84? Someone in the branch must have had a connection with him [Tom Price] probably Les Hughes who was chairman of the South Wales branch. So the South Wales branch decided we would raise the money for this. We actually raised £16000, the memorial cost £13000 and we had £3000 left for maintenance which has long since disappeared. Because I was interested in memorials anyway I was photographing local war memorials here in South Wales and someone said “will you be on the committee?” and I said yes. There was some fuss recently because the French have been producing souvenirs and they hadn’t paid any royalties to David Petersen. I think royalties were paid in retrospect and he donated it to the maintenance of the memorial. You know there is a new memorial up there don’t you? One they built last year in Ypres but there was less involvement with the South Wales branch. The other was very much the South Wales branch. We raised the money, we wrote to people, we wrote to various political branches, Prince Charles gave us a donation. The army took all the brick work over and helped assemble it so a lot of people gave their time.

Facebooktwitterpinterestby feather