A Tale of Two Men

Past&

present

So it’s November and we’ve turned the clocks backwards an hour. British summer time... what a lovely, heart warming, evocative phrase... until it’s officially over and suddenly the afternoons are shorter and darker.

Morgan Lloyd – there’s a bold image of the former politician on the pub which bears his name

Shutterstock.com Credit: jax10289 /

The original idea of ‘changing the clocks’ was ‘daylight saving’, to give us all more time in the morning to get out of bed and get to work. ‘Early to bed and early to rise’... it was the American president Benjamin Franklin who coined the phrase, so that we’d all be ‘healthy and wealthy and wise’. Now it’s wintertime, and people complain that the number of road accidents increases as commuters come home from work, tired and frazzled and impatient in queues of traffic, in

the gloom of late afternoon.

So it’s dark in Caernarfon town square, or the ‘maes’ as it’s known, and it’s six o’clock on a Saturday evening. It’s so dark, it could be three o’clock in the morning. But the square is busy with people, young and not so young, in the early stages of what’s going to be a long session of merry carousing, migrating from pub to pub, from drink to drink until midnight and beyond.

Two eminent men of Caernarfon face each other across the square. One of them is solemn and somewhat soberly forlorn, poorly lit by a flickering neon bulb... a bronze statue, horribly

splashed all over his head and shoulders and his long frock coat by the messes of a thousand seagulls. Indeed, right now, as I pause to look at him and read the words engraved on the plinth, there’s a gull perched on top of his head.

He’s Sir Huw Owen, ‘a tireless philanthropist’. He was a formidable campaigner and activist, devoting a long career to improving the education system in Wales. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s he was a pioneer of higher education, advocating a policy of teacher training, helping to establish Normal College in Bangor and a college specifically for young

women teachers in Swansea – and he founded the university of Aberystwyth. In 1867 he formed a committee to buy the old Castle Hotel in Aberystwyth as its main building, and by 1872 the university was opened.

Sir Huw worked tirelessly to raise the necessary funds, to clear the debts already incurred and secure the future of the university. He was knighted in 1881, but he died a few months later. Now his statue stands on Caernarfon town square. The town’s secondary school is named in his honour, Ysgol Syr Huw Owen. But somehow, despite his eminence and outstanding philanthropy, he cuts a melancholy figure, with a

seagull on his head.

Not so, the other eminent man of Caernarfon, who glares at him from the other side of the square. Morgan Lloyd – there’s a big bold image of him on the pub which bears his name. A contemporary of Sir Huw Owen, he was first of all

a lawyer and Justice of the Peace, later elected as Member of Parliament for Beaumaris in 1874, as a Welsh Liberal. I’m struck by how different these two men seem to be, in their demeanour and the personality they project nearly 150 years since they lived. Sir Huw stands quietly alone, his head lowered, as though lost in his memories of an extraordinarily

Shutterstock.com Credit: Lukassek / Caernarfon town square

Credit: j Lukassek / Shutterstock.com Sir Huw Owen stands proudly to the right of Y Castell Hotel

THE TOWN’S SECONDARY SCHOOL IS NAMED IN HIS HONOUR, YSGOL SYR HUW OWEN

busy life. Morgan Lloyd is defiant, challenging the world to

remember him for his political achievements. Indeed, on this Saturday night in November, he’s brightly lit and there’s a throng of youngsters at the door of the pub... they’re raising their glasses and quaffing their beer with the unquenchable

appetite of youth, as though they’re toasting the man whose face looms over them.

Prodesse quam conspici... the phrase comes to me, all of a sudden. It was the motto of the school I went to, Rydal School in Colwyn Bay. Literally, ‘to accomplish rather than be conspicuous,’ it encouraged us to do our best without boasting of our achievements, to understand that we might be known for what we do rather than what we claim to have done.

It’s Saturday night in Caernarfon. The rain starts to fall. The slate glistens on the rooftops and on the wet, slippery pavements. Sir Huw Owen ponders his achievements with modest satisfaction, while Morgan Lloyd is toasted in a glare of the streetlights by a crowd of rumbustious drinkers. Two eminent men, remembered by the people of Caernarfon in quite different ways.

Next day, my wife and I go out for burgers and chips, on Pentir roundabout not far from Bangor. It’s a drive-thru, so we sit in the car and fall silent as we relish the juicy red meat, the saltiness of the fries and the strangely exotic tang of a gerkin. Messy me, I’ve got a lapful of breadcrumbs, so I buzz down the window and scatter them outside. In less than a minute, there’s a magpie, so brash and greedy he’s banging the side of the car with his great dagger of a beak. A swaggering, handsome fellow... not only black and white and unmistakeable, but shining metallic blues and greens in the autumn sunlight. there’s a flock of black-headed gulls screeching around their

heads. The birds drop to the water and squabble like greedy children... and then there’s a swirl and a flashing of silvery

flanks, when a fish comes to the surface.

The gulls, in a squall of vigorous competition... and the char in the deep lake, silent in the perpetual darkness, unchanged since the glaciers of the Ice Age gouged the mountains and rivers and lakes... how different in their ways of living.

It’s dark by the time we return to Caernarfon. It’s a Sunday evening, only six o’clock and the square is almost deserted. A

But then he’s gone, in a flurry of clattering and fluttering. And

in his place, as secret as a mouse, there’s a hedge sparrow. The dunnock, to give him his real name, the most modest and unobtrusively busy of all birds... without a sound, he picks up the crumbs of my burger and disappears into the hedgerow. How different, these two marvellous birds, in their essential being.

We stop at Padarn Lake on our circuitous drive home. A family of tourists are tossing their leftover chips onto the water, and

gull whirls by the floodlit walls of the castle, pauses as though

to alight on the bowed head of a statue and then glides past. No crowds outside the pub on the other side of the square, only a couple of solitary smokers. Summertime, and Saturday night, seem a long time ago…n

Stephen Gregory’s first novel, The Cormorant, which he wrote in Snowdonia 35 years ago, has been published several times in both the UK and the USA, and translated into German, Polish and Italian. The new edition, which is available from Parthian Books, is its tenth publication.