I was born at 3 East View (red arrow) in the hamlet of Brithdir, in the Rhymney Valley, on 24 September 1938. The picture shows the house where I was born (red arrow) and my first school (yellow arrow). My father’s station is just off the picture on the left. In 1938 the scene was nothing like this. There were few trees. The floor of the valley was covered in railway lines and marshalling yards full of coal wagons, and a large coalmine occupied the middle distance. An overhead dram cable system carried the waste to a slag tip on the mountaintop. The predominant colours for the scene were black and grey. Even the river at the valley bottom ran black with thick coal dust in suspension.
 
It was a very poor community generally with pockets of extreme poverty. Children sometimes played in bare feet and sometimes wore only one item of clothing - a dirty ragged vest. Good money could be earned down the mine but too frequently earnings were spent on beer. Pubs were full with men often drinking eight or ten pints in an evening and boasting about it. Nearly everybody smoked heavily.
 
Coal dust filled the air and permeated everything. Our windows had to be kept shut at all times, even during the summer. There were no flowers around since mountain sheep roamed the streets chumping at anything green. Gardens were stripped bare by sheep even if surrounded by a high wall. It was also noisy. There was the shunting of wagons outside my bedroom window day and night.
 
I probably caught all of the childish ailments going, including Scarlet Fever, which had me in bed and in the dark for six weeks.
 
My mother and sisters considered that the move into the coalfield was a mistake by my father (who we called Pop) although in effect he did become his own boss. So long as the trains ran and the money taken was sent on time to Cardiff, Pop was only inspected by Head Office once a year. He had a staff of dozens.
 
We did not have lots of money but we had enough to buy the best of what was available were we lived and, of course, during most of the time we were in Brithdir the Country was at war with Germany and food was limited.                    

In 1947, after six weeks of deep snow that drifted to a depth of twelve feet, we moved down the valley to Llanbradach. This was another colliery habitation, but much larger. I lived there until 1961 when I moved to London. Neither Brithdir nor Llanbradach had existed before the 1880s when the mine shafts were sunk.

The house I have marked is where we lived in Llanbradach.
 
The next picture is of the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel.
 
The next picture is of my school in Llanbradach. It is a difficult building to photograph because it is surrounded by a high wall. In 1947 there was a boy’s school and a girl’s school, and the boys and girls were separated by a similarly high wall. Coed-y-brain means blackbird-wood.
 
In 1949 I passed the eleven-plus exam and then attended the Caerphilly Boy’s Grammar School. The only photograph I can find of this school is one that does not do it justice. But it does show a classroom left of the door where I spent my first year and the balustrade to the steps where I bumped my head on my first day. I was unconscious for a couple of hours covered in blood (and I still have the scar). 
 
Of course, in the 1940s, the railways were busy with general freight and coal. Today the mines have closed and the freight goes by road, so there is no requirement for Station Masters. My father was firstly responsible for Brithdir station and a couple of halts, of which Cymsyfiog was one. There were main lines on both sides of the valley, the line on the east side went to Newport and the line on the west side went to Cardiff.
 
The next photographs are of Llanbradach station. The first was taken in the mid-nineteen sixties and the second photo is recent. We can see how Llanbradach station has been simplified. The tall signal box, the station buildings and the goods yard have gone. Thankfully, they still have trains. The down platform is shown. The up platform starts at the other side of the footbridge. On the left is a reservoir of water for the steam engines. On the right is a goods yard.
 
After I left railway employment in 1961, they closed all the collieries in the valleys, ripped up half the railway track (or more), flattened stations and signal boxes and blew up (the last thing I reconstructed as resident site engineer) a viaduct in Pontypridd. The valleys are now almost rural.
 
Looking back to my very young days I realise that I had a middle class upbringing. I was taught the Victorian social manners. We travelled first class. I had my hair cut in Cardiff and my mother and I had tea in the rather grand Louis’ teashop where we were known to the management and well looked after. My father refused to go shopping with my mother and so she took me along for company from a very early age. Pop was unique in our family because he enjoyed sport. In Llantrisant he played for the town cricket team and also the tennis team. In Llanbradach he had a passion for playing bowls and played every day. He became the Club Secretary and (it was probably in his genes) organized the building of a social club from scratch obtaining the necessary funds from the Brains Brewery. It made a good profit and made possible the excellent facilities enjoyed by the private bowls club that quite frequently became Welsh Private Green champions.
 
Before we had a car of our own we were taken for rides by friends and family from outside the area in Rolls and Bentleys. It was good in those days to tour around the scenic areas and coast of the Vale of Glamorgan.
 
The down side of having new and clean clothes and shining shoes, when going to school in the valleys, was that I spent my days fighting with would-be bullies who considered me different. And since I had a violent temper I am very thankful that I did not kill anybody. I did not start making good friends until I left school.
 
I now know my mother was very unhappy living in Brithdir. No matter what sympathy we might feel for the poor there was a distinct problem with hygiene, the preponderance of fleas prevented us buying the cheaper seats in the cinemas and even then we usually took home an unwanted guest. And then the language of other’s was mainly swearwords and vulgarities. Conversations could be nothing other than trivial because many were illiterate. Probably realising how dull their lives were, people thought it necessity to invent the most outrageous lies to create interest. My mother was accused of having an affair with an army Major. This was as a consequence of one of my mother’s many cousins visiting us when Pop was at work. The fact the people’s furniture sometimes consisted of railway sleepers and tea was drunk from jam jars was not a problem in itself. My mother who had a degree and quite an artistic upbringing with a father who had been a preacher with a very strict code of behaviour, was alone except for Pop and myself, my sisters having left for university. Llanbradach was an improvement on Brithdir but the edges of the village were still very rough.
 
James Lukey was a preacher with very strong religious beliefs. He did not permit any work on a Sunday even to the picking of flowers from the garden. However, it was essential to cook the lunch to which visiting clergy were invited. (Sunday lunch was usually of the best roast Welsh beef or a leg of Welsh lamb.) It is therefore a little surprising that in my time we did not attend at church or chapel until we moved to Llanbradach. Then I went to the Wesleyan Methodist chapel Sunday School and sang in the choir. Even though in Llanbradach there were eight chapels of various denominations and one fine stone church, which had an excellent peel of bells on which hymns were played, our chapel was full on Sundays and the singing was wonderful (which is a speciality of the Welsh). In contrast there were poor facilities in Brithdir where the church (of Wales) was a corrugated iron shed, no bigger than a double garage, sited on waste ground.
 
Although you could not call my mother outwardly religious she had absolute faith in prayer and it worked for her. Naturally I followed in this practice and it has helped me through my life. The last thing my mother ever said to me was don’t lose your faith.
 
I was always top of the form at the Coed-y-Brain school but not at the grammar school where it was compulsory to learn languages - I was bad at languages and Welsh was also compulsory. I started grammar school a year earlier than I should have done and had to stay in year five for two years which put me off school completely. Although I entered year six I left before completing my A-levels because I had an offer of an interesting job on the railway - in the District Engineers Office in Cardiff. I loved this job and the people there were very friendly - I still meet up with two of my contemporaries. After the first year I was given surprising responsibility of being responsible for half of the bridge reconstructions on the district. The bridges were of standard design and made elsewhere but were delivered to us (me) on wagons. It was up to me to do all that was necessary to replace the old bridge with the minimum disruption to services - not that easy really. The last bridge I replaced was a viaduct across the valley at Pontypridd which comprised steel girders on stone pillars on a gradient and  transition curve, seventy-five feet above roads and the river Taff. The setting out was an exercise in 3D geometry for which I had an early electro-mechanical calculator to help me, along with seven figure log tables.
 
For this job I had a small site office for six months. Although there were safety nets suspended under the bridge where possible, Health and Safety was not considered as important as it is today. I wore a suit and tie and not a high-visibility jacket and helmet. The 'spider monkeys' would have their fun by coming into my office saying they had a problem. This often meant it was necessary for me to follow them up tall ladders, walk along twelve inch wide girders, without safety nets, and then down more ladders to the tops of piers to answer some stupidly contrived question of no consequence. I was the youngest person on the job but had the respect of everyone. I made a good job of it and received a letter of congratulations from the big boss. This would have given me promotion but with this task completed I left the railway and went to London to join a firm of Consulting Engineers.
 
My sister, Moira, had found me this job with her best friend Alan Grant of Alan Grant and Partners. At first I stayed with Moira in Mill Hill and worked in Grosvenor Gardens near Victoria Station in the centre of London. All went quite well. I was in an office with three other people. One was from Trinidad, one was from Iraq and Ysaf in charge was from Pakistan, who had been to universitys in the USA and spoke with a strong American accent. Relationships were difficult however. Hermon from Trinidad regarded me as his best friend and I spent time with him socially. Moushi from Iraq was very friendly too and brought in Iraqi tit-bits for my elevenses. Ysaf told me that we were brothers. The crazy thing was that the three would not speak to each other. Ysaf would say: tell Herman to do this that or the other. Herman would say: Tell Ysaf I can't do that because of this, that or the other - and we were in the same room! It was an international nightmare. We bumped along getting things done well enough until we were given the task of doing the structural designs for Ham church.
 
Ham church would be constructed of concrete and brick but all contained under one large timber roof consisting of hyperbolic parabolas arranged together to form the six pointed star of David. The entire roof was to be supported on only six reinforced concrete columns at the intersection of the basic shell shapes. Now the idea of a hyperbolic parabola roof is an interesting one and simple. It is a shell roof created by straight line generators and can cover quite large areas at minimal cost. It also looks good. Unfortunately the simplicity of the idea is completely lost if the projection of the roof onto a horizontal plane is not a square. The architect had tilted the basic shape and squashed it into a diamond shape to fit with the star of David and so the resulting geometry was complicated beyond belief. I was the only one to see this. Ysaf, who had more letters after his name than would fit on two lines of A4, did not have a clue - but he pretended. After a frustrating week or so of argument I went to see Alan Grant and advised him that the work we had done to date was rubbish. This was on a Friday. He told me to start work in the Cobham office on the Monday. Over the weekend he looked at the work done with his partner and they agreed with me. On the Monday in Cobham I had the task of designing the timber roof from scratch.
 
It was a difficult roof. Even the timber contractors who specialized in these roofs ignored parts of my drawings believing they knew better. But when their changes resulted in things not fitting they were very embarrassed and it cost them. I regarded Ham Church as my church and Carol and I were married there by special license.
 
Cobham was too far to travel to from Mill Hill which is at the top of the Northen Line, so for a while I took lodgings in Claygate and bought a little car - a Renault Dauphine. Lodgings were horrible so Alan Grant very kindly allowed me to live at Cobham Park, in a flat at the top of the main building. The rooms were big - my sitting room was thirty feet by twenty feet. I had a bathroom but the kitchen was in the basement down one hundred and one stone steps. The house had a ghost. I had not believed in ghosts until that time - but that's a different story.
 
The Ham church troubles triggered a significant change in my relationship with Alan Grant. I was sent with senior staff on a computer course. At the end of the first day we were set a programming task in Algol. We were given thirty minutes for the task. I completed it correctly in five minutes and was the only person to finish. I was given the opportunity to write short programs for structural analysis which were run at a computer bureau - and they worked. Within a short while Alan Grant bought me 'my own' computer which filled a room as big as the whole of Kuala Muda. He said it was the most expensive present he had ever bought anybody. And it was, but we used it well running it 24/7 and I developed programs for structural analysis including earthquake loading and floating structures and by 1970 we had worn it out. So far as could be ascertained these programs were the first in the world for the size and complexity of the problems solved. We did talks on World Radio and I did  talks at London University. In time MIT caught me up!
 
I was not actually qualified in engineering although I had done day-release and evening classes, also learning by correspondence. I had a handicap and could not see in artificial lighting, and if I tried I would get a severe migraine that could last a week. So all of that was a nightmare. Doctors did not understand this but gave me morphine for the severe pain. The only solution for me was to avoid working in electric light. To do my job the computer room and associated offices were fitted with lighting that was run on direct current so did not flash at 50htz.
 
To compensate for my little better than basic education I had a natural ability to invent ways of doing things which were effective in computing since much of what I did had not been done before. And I read a lot of books on programming, engineering and mathematics. I was a workaholic and greatly enjoyed what I did.
 
My computer programs were exhaustively tested by teams building models because frequently the results were a surprise to them - but I was always right because I took the job very seriously and checked everything two are three times before making it available to others. The secret of my success was rigorous checking, knowing I could easily make mistakes - and checking other peoples work as well. 
 
The company designed and built some very large and complex structures around the world which could not be designed without a computer - and few companies had the computing facilities we had in the 1960s. The company was known for this work which is why my friend David Button applied for a job with the firm.
 
In January 1969 I exchanged my Triumph 2000 for a nearly new E-type first registered that same month.
 
In March 1970 I took my first holiday in ten years and on a cruise around the Mediterranean, out of Venice, I met Carol.
 
   
Carol and I were married in Ham church at midday on the 28th November 1970. There were some rain showers but these did not affect proceedings. We had the reception in Esher and returned to Kuala Muda for tea. Before dark we drove away towards the sunset for our honeymoon at the Manor House in Castle Combe where we arrived in time for dinner. We had a very grand bedroom with an old four-poster bed into which we climbed with the aid of wooden steps. After three nights we continued our honeymoon in Porlock Weir.
 
We rented a dormer bungalow in Stoke D'Abanon for the first six months of our marriage and moved into Coppers, Pyrford Heath in June 1971.
 
Giles was born to us on 17th February 1974, Louisa 5th December 1975 and Verity 5th March 1978.