Cardiff Golf Club 100  

Cyncoed Golf Club and Course in WW II

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These are some recollections of someone who grew up near and on Cyncoed Golf Course for the whole of the 1939-45 war. The events are not necessarily in chronological sequence and I did not have any sources to refer to other than memory. So they are set up more as “stream of consciousness” than historical record,though many incidents may be checked via the newspaper records, e.g. the Spitfire crash.

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The city of Cardiff was heavily bombed between 1941 and 1943, so often indeed that schoolchildren like me went home after school dinner to avoid the bombs which would fall in late afternoon in winter. In my family we would all seek shelter under the stairs singing hymns (for my brother and I were in All Saints Cyncoed choir and songs from the First World War, which will my mother led.

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Dad, like many others in the village — and local golfers — were in the Home Guard. The unit used to train on the golf course, digging defensive trenches and setting up pillboxes with wide fields of fire. There was a machine-gun post on the number one fairway, a steel dome which could (in theory) fire as far as Lianedeyrn crossroads. There was also a firing range on the left of the green on the number five fairway, where they used to practise with tommy and sten guns, as well as 202s. My sister used to carry billy-cans of tea to the men shivering in their slit trenches and weapon pits — had, of course, the Wehrmacht been in the vicinity, it would have been a tragic giveaway of their position.

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That is not as fanciful as it sounds; there was a very marked invasion scare in 1941-42, the country lanes had secreted roadblocks, even drums of oil which could be rolled across the road and ignited. A number of these were next to the golf course on its northern boundary — then known as Edwards Lane. I used to dream of skies ful! of German parachutists,

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The clearest sign of the invasion preparations was the re-erecting of 6- to 7- foot concrete posts all over the fairways to prevent the safe landing of German gliders. We also became obsessed with spies and I can remember digging up some disturbed soil in the woods alongside number nine hole expecting to find a buried parachute, only to discover the rotten stinking carcass of a sheep.

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That was another aspect of the war effort, the fairways were being grazed with hundreds of sheep and benefiting us in at least two ways — providing pasturage and food, and cropping the grass, thereby saving the mowing by tractor by the head greenkeeper, a Mr Sharrett and his assistant Mr Thomas, and saving precious diesel fuel.
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The other way in which Cyncoed Golf Club helped the war effort was having whole fairways ploughed up for wheat (mainly the 16th hole) and potatoes (mainly the sixth). As boys we were actually involved in the harvesting. I remember my school being taken by lorry one day to lift potatoes on our golf course and being paid a shilling a hundredweight for our efforts — the record-breaking potato harvester was a boy called Norman Nokes whose father was a tenant farmer at Pentwyn Farm in Lianedyrn, now the Pentwyn estate.

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Now I come to the most dramatic incidents of the war on the golf course. The saddest was the Spitfire crash. It seems that a young pilot, who had just got his wings after training at St Athan, had celebrated by flying over his mother’s house in Celyn Avenue, Cyncoed. He did a victory roll but went into a dive from which he must have blacked out. A part of the tail fell off into a piece of woodiand alongside Westminster Crescent, but the rest plunged nose first into the golf course at the bottom of the 10th fairway (I think); it was buried right up to the cockpit and bits of the pilot’s body were scattered around. Mr Thomas tried to pull the pilot clear — there was no fire. The place of that impact canstill be seen by the discerning eye. It deserves a commemorative plaque.

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Higher up that fairway one can still make out where two landmines exploded. At the time they caused enormous craters and, although severely damaged, the houses on Pen-y-bryn Road and Brynawelon Road were saved by the barrier of trees on the left of the 17th. The mines came down by parachute and were blown north of the city by favourable winds that night. The silk and silken ropes were very collectable to us though in tatters — better them than us!

 

Other favourable winds (or was it the oil fire decoys at Lianedeyrn?) caused many nights of incendiary bombing, mostly falling north of Cardiff — one fell through the roof of a house on Pen-y-bryn Road and was extinguished by the local fire-fighting team with stirrup pumps and buckets. And one was found intact at number 7 Pen-y-bryn Road, presumably it failed to detonate by falling on a hedge. The boys whe lived there, and I was one of them, soon and dangerously had it dismantled to extract the thermite which was used in our own bomb-making. Incendiary bombs were made of aluminium which burns furiously, as the Admiralty rediscovered to its cost in the Falklands War. Thousands of burning incendiary bombs made an enchanting sight sparkling over the goif course, farmers’ fieids and the southern slopes of Mynedd Llysfaen — it was a bit like the Planetarium in London. The “fin” of the bomb was usually unconsumed and also very collectable, as were the showers of shrapnel from anti-aircraft shells.

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As the war came to a close, so too did all this excitement for us — the closing scene was the training for the invasion in 1944 when we helped our Tommies and even Gls to manoeuvre their ways around the golf course and surrounding countryside. The Gls were from a US camp alongside Rhydypenau Junior School and were not a patch on our chaps — even to small boys they seemed indisciplined and shambolic.

 

So this is mainly what I remember and hope it may be interesting to current members of Cyncoed Golf Club.

 

Footmete: the club captain around that time was D. W. Richards who lived in Cyncoed and was manager of the Labour Exchange in Charles Street; the secretary was a Mr Jones, who suffered from epilepsy. The professional was a Mr.Smalldon. There may be some existing older members of the club who can remember and add to all of this.

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This description of Cyncoed Golf Course during WWII was written by John Inwood, during August 2006, shortly before his death.

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