Memories of Bryn Seiont hospital

Jul 24 2008 by Our Correspondent, Caernarfon and Denbigh Herald

CAERNARFON’S Bryn Seiont Hospital holds a mixture of memories for me from the time when I was a young man in the late 1940s. It is a link with a grim period in the 1930s when tuberculosis was a scourge in the district.

I have a Welsh paperback book which chronicled that chapter in local history. It is a play Diofal yw Dim by John Gwilym Jones, who undoubtedly had Bryn Seiont in mind as he spent nearly all his life in nearby Groeslon.

Its 1930s connection is proved by the fact that it won the drama prize at the 1939 National Eisteddfod.

It is a heartbreaking work whose terse title might be rendered in English as “To have nothing means having no worries either.”

Diofal yw Dim is an early work by John Gwilym Jones, who later became a leading Welsh-language dramatist and literary critic.

The Caernarfon district, particularly the cluster of slate quarrying villages, suffered badly from a high rate of tuberculosis. Bryn Seiont at that time, on its wooded site above the Seiont bridge, served as a sanatorium where an unusual feature was that the patients were housed in wooden cabins so that they would have plenty of fresh air.

FRANK THOMAS

Llandudno

BEFORE the Rochelles building was renovated, I was very vociferous about its appalling condition and the effect it was having on the appearance and perception of Caernarfon.

Now that the renovation is complete I would like to be vociferous in congratulating Lle Cyf and their contractors on a magnificent job.

The building is now an asset to the town.

MARTIN A KRESSMAN

Cwm y Glo