“Jason the lion loved ice cream”

- Animal keeper Margaret Gutteridge

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Margaret (right) (Emma Drabble)

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Margaret was introduced to Whitson Zoo by the lion that no-body wanted. Born in Goldcliff, Margaret was the daughter of a First World War veteran who became a steel worker at Lysaght’s.

“I went to St Joseph’s Convent and then college to do typing, book keeping and shorthand.” She learned to drive and was delivering bread around Goldcliff, Whitson and Nash when she encountered Olive Maybury’s Whitson Zoo and the loveable lion cub.

“He came from a children’s home in Chester. They didn’t want him so Mrs Maybury said, ‘All right, we’ll have him.’ He arrived with the children in their mini bus.” Margaret learned to bottle feed the cub - “he used to like an ice cream” - and was soon caring for other exotics.

There was the goat that climbed into a workman’s van: “She’d sat in the driving seat and wouldn’t get out! She was a terror, but she was gorgeous.” Then there were the two Himalayan bear cubs rescued from a Newport pet shop window after protests from the public.

The zoo closed in the 1980s and Jason joined the lions of Longleat. He fared better than the Himalayan bears which could not be re-homed. They were put to sleep and sold to a taxidermist from Dolgellau.

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Life on the Levels

“If we don’t teach our children, they won’t teach anybody else.”

- Sue Waters, historian (Whitson)

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Sue Waters (Emma Drabble)

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Sue Waters has a passion for the past: “I always used to listen to the old people. My father would say: ‘Oh, she’s got her ears flapping again!’ and he was right.”

Schooled at St Joseph’s convent when it was based at Tredegar House, Sue grew up black-berrying, trading orchard plums by the roadside (“tuppence a pound and we’d sell everything we’d got”) and secretly sampling the farmhouse cider when dispatched to bring a jug full to the supper table. “It was horrid!”

She moved into one of the oldest farmhouses on the Levels when she married David Waters. She remembers ‘casters’ like Bill England, Alf Stevens and Hubert Jones who, she thinks, did a better job of cleaning the reens than modern machinery; the Levels’ fodder trade that fed the pit ponies working the Valleys collieries; and all the landowners, from the monasteries and Eton College to Tredegar House estate and the steel works, that occupied the Levels.

She’s currently compiling her history of the Levels in the firm belief that the past can inform our futures: “I wasn’t interested in the past until my latter years. But then you lose someone who has passed their local knowledge down and you realise it’s the end of an era.”

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Life on the Levels

Life on the Levels Interview:

Sue was born in Nash. After junior school she received Catholic secondary schooling based at Tredegar House and later married into a farming family. She describes the disappearance of houses and farmsteads as the power station is built, WWII and camps of soldiers.

“My father was an Italian prisoner of war.”

- Mike Mazzoleni, former Llanwern steel worker (Whitson)

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Mike Mazzoleni (Emma Drabble)

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“My father was an Italian prisoner of war and he was brought over to Llantarnam, a large Italian POW camp, after being captured in Europe somewhere. Every day the prisoners would be allocated to certain farms in this area. And after several appearances on Court Farm here in Whitson, they decided to keep him. So he never returned to Italy. And then that’s when he met my mother at the local dance down at the Farmer’s Arms in Goldcliff, and that’s how I came to be in Whitson today.”

Mike followed in his father’s footsteps by also working at Court Farm, Whitson, as a young man: “I’ve followed in his footsteps. I loved to work. I used to work on Court Farm… we could start baling at 8 o’clock in the evening. Oh my god it was hard work. I didn’t need anything to put me to sleep in those days, I was so tired. I had a job to climb the stairs… looking back on it, we had nothing, but god, I loved it.”

“All of a sudden in the 1950s they decided to build Llanwern [steelworks] and Court Farm was compulsory purchased… the saddest day of my life because they had an auction. I had to go back in the evening to open the gates… and it was silent. No cows, no chickens, and I cried like a baby.

“Strange thing is I started working at Llanwern. My dad made a few calls to some Italian friends in Newport, and I found my way into the steelworks.”

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Life on the Levels