In the winter of 1943, a violent snowstorm shook the hills above Tregaron. Flashes of lightning illuminated the sky and loud thunderclaps could be heard throughout the night. By morning, however, it became clear that it was not just thunder and lightning that the people of Tregaron had heard. Amidst the storm, an aircraft had dropped bombs in the nearby hills.
Idris Jones grew up on his parents’ sheep farm, near the hill where the bombs fell. He vividly remembers officials from the Air Ministry coming to the house that morning and being guided to two enormous craters by his father. Each of these craters, created by the dramatic impact of bombs hitting the ground, was the size of a detached house.
Idris remembers that the officials were very secretive about their findings. He believes that the bombs were dropped by an aircraft trying to lose weight quickly to avoid crashing into the hills but, to this day, he doesn’t know if they were dropped by an allied or enemy aircraft. What he does know, however, is that if the bombs had been dropped just four seconds earlier, the farm would have been blown up – and his family along with it.
This was not, however, the only aircraft which experienced difficulty in the area during World War Two. Idris also recalls watching from his school as an RAF training aircraft flew low over the building with its wheels down and circled the area, looking for somewhere to land. He and the other children watched as the plane disappeared behind the school and ran to the spot where it went down. The aircraft had crash-landed with its undercarriage in the air and slid along the ground, ploughing the field as it went but, fortunately, the pilot escaped unscathed.
He also remembers that the area around Tregaron was used as a training base for the British Army in the run-up to D-Day. He specifically remembers General Wavell staying in the Talbot Hotel while he was in command of the troops and that the square was, at times, packed with tanks. Moving these could, however, be a dangerous affair and Idris remembers that members of the crews were sometimes injured or killed by tanks as they lay sleeping beside the road.
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| Tregaron town centre during World War Two, courtesy of Will Troughton, NLW |
Undeterred by these early experiences, he went on to join the military himself in 1950, enlisting in the Royal Air Force at the age of seventeen and qualifying as an armoured mechanic. He was posted to 245 Squadron, based at West Raynham and Horsham St Faith where he worked on the guns on the squadron’s jet fighters and assisted in rescue efforts following the North Sea Flood of 1953.
Idris left the RAF in 1955 but remained on the reserve list for another ten years. He returned to Ceredigion where he worked for Dowty Rotol as an engineer – making parts for planes like the ones he had worked on in the RAF – until their Llanbadarn factory closed in the early 1980s. He then worked as the school caretaker in Tregaron until his retirement.
But his is just one of the stories held by the West Wales Veterans’ Archive.
The WWVA was established to collect accounts of military service from veterans, aged 65+ and living in Ceredigion, Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire. It is designed to be a valuable, authoritative and sustainable learning resource for schools and independent researchers, among others. In addition, the project seeks to train veterans in collecting oral histories and conducting social history research. The archive is managed by Age Cymru Dyfed and supported by a grant from the Armed Forces Covenant Fund Trust.
If you are a veteran of the Armed Forces and would like to contribute your story of military service or volunteer to interview other veterans about their experiences, please contact Hugh Morgan (email: hugh.morgan@agecymrudyfed.org.uk; phone: 01970 615151).
