Former grocery shop, Talgarth

PWMP logoFormer grocery shop, Talgarth

talgarth_william_f_d_williams

This corner building was once known as Westbrook House. Widow Mary Williams kept a grocery store on the ground floor. The property is now a private house – please respect the occupants’ privacy.

Mary’s son William Francis David Williams (pictured right) was fatally wounded on the Western Front in February 1917, aged 22. He had worked as a bank clerk in Abergavenny before joining the Bankers’ Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers. You can read our page in his memory here.

Mary’s father William Price had once kept the Horse and Jockey Inn in Talgarth. In 1874 he was taken to court, along with the owners of nine other local properties, for breaching the Public Health Act 1872. All were ordered to make sanitary improvements. He was not in particularly bad company: his co-defendants included the secretary of Talgarth’s British School and even the trustees of Trefeca Methodist college!

When Talgarth suffered serious flooding in 1880, one person drowned trying to save his donkey. His body was found by William Price, washed up in the Horse and Jockey’s orchard. William’s wife Ann died in 1886 and the pub closed around that time.

Photo of wheelwright William Price and familyWilliam was also a wheelwright. The lower picture (courtesy of David Jones) shows the family at around that time, at the wheelwright premises that backed onto the river Enig near the Horse and Jockey. The baby could be William Williams.

By 1891 William had moved to this house in High Street with four of his daughters by 1891. He was still living here with some of his daughters and his grandson (William Williams) in 1901. After his death that year, one of his daughters, Jane, remained in the property. She named the house after her husband’s birthplace, a farm near Hay. She died here in 1958.

Westbrook House was later home to a jewellers’ shop. After the Second World War it was merged with the adjoining cottage to form a single house, now known as Broken House. It is so named because it had no roof, no heating and no running water when it changed hands in 2007, so the new owners’ children referred to it as the “broken house”!

With thanks to David Jones

Postcode: LD3 0PG    View Location Map

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