Salem Eglywys Cymraeg (Carlton Salem Welsh Chapel 1902-1984)

from Songs from the Tin Tabernacle: A Roots Romance

Discovery of now archived traces of the ‘Tin Tabernacle’ that inspires this ancestral songs project, of this long-demolished corrugated iron Welsh chapel in a South Yorkshire pit village, happened for me over a year ago as I started to reflect on questions of my own musicality by getting to grips with a musical bloodline that I was only aware of before through patchy and largely anecdotal knowledge of strands of my family history.

Hywel Henry Menai Francis, my maternal Welsh grandfather was born on a poor farm on Ynys Môn (Anglesey), and the stories of his origins, his singing and self-taught classical piano & organ-playing was always a powerful presence at the back of my own mother’s music-making and behind her passion to create a musical household for me and my sisters so we could in turn inherit my grandfather’s gift… this was always around in my family and through my Yorkshire childhood.

But I was truly startled when the full name and title of his own Welsh father my great grandfather, who was barely a presence for me until then, came up in an online search for a B. Menai Francis. The Reverend Benjamin Menai Francis, Congregationalist Minister of Hillsborough, Sheffield thrillingly emerges in 1901, named on a fancy signed and sealed lease from the Earl of Wharncliffe, as the minister representing the building committee of a Welsh miners church community in Carlton, Barnsley, seeking a plot of land in the village to build their chapel on…

The rest will no doubt unfold through the richness of these our future-folk songs, but the Salem Eglywys Cymraeg Carlton becomes an emblematic repository, a reimagined performance place & cultural centre, now faintly echoing with the soundtrack of a new roots romance. Right in the heart of South Yorkshire’s coalfields, and fabricated in Sheffield, this iron church holds listed the names of its earliest congregations.

At its porch we kneel to scrape coal muck from our clogs and there’s muttered mourning of another pit loss as we too slip through the door, maybe squeeze up on a bench, and greet the spirits of the Jones, the Davies, the Llewelyns and the Williams, and perhaps with them catch a snatch of the gymanfa songs and the booming oratory of the Bards..

I have to declare I’m an atheist, but tell you that the weight & fervour of religious faith & devotion embedded in this C19th strand of my research has for now settled right next to me.