Porthkerry Park and Viaduct

Beneath the towering structure of Porthkerry Viaduct, a bugler summons a shooting party who make their way through the snow. The cold weather has made ice rinks of large puddles in the park and family/friends of Henry Gethin Lewis senior and junior try out their skates. Henry senior, his wife Ann and 8 children lived at Porthkerry Rectory, Barry [it became the Egerton Grey Country House Hotel]. Henry junior later lived in Penarth, at ‘Clifffside’ [now demolished].

Film from a family of Glamorgan High Sheriffs. Henry Gethin Lewis (1872-1945) held the role in 1920, his son, a squadron leader, in 1958. Henry senior owned a company which hired out railway wagons on a very successful scale. He used some of his wealth to support cultural institutions, bestowing a house on the fledgling Coleg Harlech and becoming a governor of The National Library of Wales for which he bought the E.C. Quiggin Celtic Collection. Henry junior passed the family films on to a local boy in the 1970s, having met him when his frisbee sailed over the ‘Cliffside’ wall. The boy lived nearby, in Forrest Road, in a property that once housed the staff who, in his heyday, worked in Henry’s home.