CCFCbarmybobbankers

Firstly A special thanks to the famous ARMCHAIRBLUE(Rivals messageboard guru, who is top of the Tawean hitlist.) For giving me some of his factual based material about Swansea and its fans.

Tales from the Duckpond

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people have investigated the odious odour of the duckpond

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Swansea's Contribution to the English Language.

Contrary to popular belief the City of Swansea has contributed to the way we speak. Maybe not the uninteligible mumble (Hence the area of Swansea called The Mumbles) but words used to describe acts of anti-social behaviour and poor service. Consulting a dictionary gives us the following selection of words. It is unfortunate that "Jack" is synonymous with cheap, shoddy, unreliable, loud, but they speak of you as they find you:

Jack: The male of certain animals esp ass or donkey.

Jack Plug: a female socket designed to receive a male plug.

Every Man Jack: used when you can't tell one from the other.

Jack: a remark indicating smug and complacent selfishness.

Jackal: a person who does menial tasks for another.

Jackal: a villain, esp a swindler.

Jackanapes: a conceited impertinent person.

Jackanapes: a mischievous child.

Jackanapes: a monkey.

Jackass: a male donkey.

Jackass: a stupid person; fool.

Jackboot: footware used by right wing supporters (Swansea is a recruiting ground for the BNP).

Jackdaw: a bird known for it's thieving habits.

Jackeen: a slick assertive lower class Dubliner..

Jacket: short coat from jaque peasant.

Jackfish: popular name for pike when small.

Jack Frost: a personification of frost or winter. A cold person.

Jackie: Austral. Offensive slang.

Jack in: To give up, abandon or leave.

Jack in office: a self important PETTY official..

Jack Ketch: a hangman.

Jacknife: A type of knife with folding blade. To lose control of an articulated lorry.

Jack of all trades: and master of none.

Jack o lantern. Hollowed pumpkin representing human face.

Jack Plane: Tool used for rough unskilled work.

Jackpot: to achieve success esp through luck..

Jacksie: slang buttocks or anus..

Jack the lad: slang a young man regarded as brash, loud show off.

Jack the rags: South Wales dialect. a rag and bone man.

Jack the Ripper: an unidentified murderer.

Jack up: Slang. to inject oneself with drugs.

Jack up: Australian to refuse to comply; rebel.

HiJack: to take over vehicle (esp plane)without permission.

If any proof be needed that the above associations with the word Jack are true consider the following: the club was sold to a Mr Petty for £1. Ask any Jack how much they bought it back for after Mr Petty sold off their best players and pocketed the money.

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London based jacks use a new form of travel

Swansea fans in London(S.E.A.L.S) have adopted a new form of travel for away games! They're getting a bit tired of the "gyppo" label, and feel travelling by transit tipper isnt good for their image.

This picture "1 of the 5 vehicle convoy" was taken by one of our 1927club members based in London. The convoy was led by Swansealoyalist, Yes you got it Shane C5!!!!

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National Survey reveals Demand for Viagra is biggest in Swansea

The sexual inadequacies of the Tawe people is well known and documented. The industrial pollution over the years with a complete disregard for health has had it's toll on the "male members" of that proto society. Whilst the abnormally high usage is now a scientific fact the whole story was not revealed. Recently Llanrumneybluebird was visiting the more westerly parts of the Principality and happened to visit a local hostelry for refreshment. Signs of the abuse of Viagra were everywhere but it was to be expected. But what was not expected was the strange behaviour of the local humanoids. They were openly using the tablets but instead of taking them orally in the traditional manner they were rubbing them into their eyes and inserting them behind the eyeballs.

Now Cardiff being the home of the University of Wales instils a scientific curiosity into it's inhabitants and Llanrumneybluebird was curious to find out the reason for this strange social behaviour. Despite the government warning not to approach Jacks he secured his wallet and waited for closing time. With only a couple of the Tawe remaining he approached the smallest of the two with a little trepidation in case he should frighten him off. Putting on a local dialect so as not to stand out Lb engaged the local in conversation trying hard not to give away his more fortunate upbringing. Pretending he was from Aberystwyth he was able to put the troll (Tawean)at rest and with the offer of a ciggie was soon accepted as a friend. Pretending ignorance of the purpose of Viagra Lb managed to find out the reasoning for the strange practice he had observed.

Historically Swansea has been known as the "Brighton" of Wales and a bit of a gay resort (see "Jackland" link for documented evidence). Brighton's recent reputation for limp wristedness started to worry the Taweans in case this suggested they (An aspiring Brighton) were also limp wristed and were incapable of doing the five finger shuffle, a local pastime that kept them occupied between visits to the ineptly named Job Centres. Having heard that Viagra had properties to enhance hardness those Taweans known as "Swansea Supporters" thought they were on to a good thing. Being still prepubescent, they were unaware of the true nature of Viagra. However, being what they were, they wanted so very much to look hard, to imitate those of the East of whom they were so envious that they developed a green hue to their skin which would not come off even at the annual bathing ritual. Looking the part was the most important aspiration of these immature wannabes. As the medication was ineffective on the intended parts it was thought that by rubbing it into their faces and eyes they could at least look hard to the outside world and not bring on comments of inadequacy. The side effects as shown in the picture do bring on the appearance of a ..... well I'll leave that to your imagination.

Tip for Cyril: Try some Viagra to straighten out that neck of yours !!!

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Swansea's new secret training facility

Brian Flynn is extremely concerned with the ammount of excess weight some of his 3rd division players are carrying.

Their fitness levels and the ammount of mobility some of his players have is another great concern.

Ex Swansea ballet dancer "Nomad" approached Flynn and suggested the Swansea squad take ballet lessons 2 nights a week, and also have a strict(Burger less)and no alchohol diet.

Swansea nutritionists "The Mentalist" and "Garyjack" have prepared a diet plan and will enforce that the squad members stick to it until Flynn is happy with the players levels!

Swansea is known to be a bit of a penny pinching club,and Flynn was a bit concerned as to how much this would set the club back?

But the 3 fans offered their services for free,and a suggestion was made that they use a secret hideout "a cave" somewhere on the Gower coastline. The added bonus of this is? It would be free, and other clubs wouldn't be able to observe this strange training method.

However one of our Swansea based Cardiff fans came across this secret hideout and took a photo to reveal these strange goings on to all!!!!!!!

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Don't be a Jack. Be Happy!!!

An Anthology of the Pig washery

people have shown an interest in Sweynsei (Swine Sea)

One wet and windy afternoon the Armchair felt in need of some exercise and learning. Having been assailed from afar he decided to go to the National Museum of Wales to learn more of the history of the predecessors of those otherwise known as "Cyrils". To his surprise there was no Greek connection here at all. All the urban legends concerning those of the mid west were laid before him. Better people than he had been there before and left their opinions to posterity. This was going to be easy he thought as he stumbled upon a book called A Swansea Anthology edited by James A. Davies ISBN1-85411-175-2.

Here was a rich treasury of what the educated thought of, what was once, a Pig washery.

One cannot reproduce the whole book here and I admit to being selective and putting in one or two twists and comments of my own (Context may be omitted). But this book is written by a Swansea man and if you should want to see the balanced view then I suggest you either buy or borrow the book.

Unlike many Swansea sites that pretend to provide facts this site provides references where people may check the facts for themselves. These writings are hardly a figment of the imagination but the first hand accounts from recognised witnesses.

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Swansea through the years

Talk about obscuring the truth !!! No wonder the Residents of the Pig Washery have such a short attention span. They couldn't even remember what their town was called. Once they settled on one name and stuck to it they were awarded city status (1969)as a reward for not messing up so many road maps and atlases. It is pretty clear from the sequence that the original name didn't go down too well with the Norman guests so they started to introduce changes by pretending to a more alluring place with some viking history. This does not obfuscate the more inquiring student to whom the real origins stand outlike a sore thumb. The majority of the early inhabitants were pigs. Some might say the same applies today but this is simply not true. The majority of Swansea citizens are respected members of Society (After the visit of John Wesley see below) and are not to be confused with the original inhabitants only some of which can still be found there. As with any endangered species their actual location will not be divulged for the purposes of preservation.

Pre Norman . . Swine Sea

1188 . . . . . . . .Sweynsei

1234 . . . . . . . .Sweinesheie

1278 . . . . . . . .Sweynesheie

1313 . . . . . . . .Sweyneseye

1433 . . . . . . . .Sweynesey

1463 . . . . . . . .Swaynesey

1553 . . . . . . . .Swaunesey

1569 . . . . . . . .Swanesey

1585 . . . . . . . .Swansey or Swanzey

1738 . . . . . . . .Swansea

All specific dates from The Swansea Guide by John Lewis (1851)

Now that the real origins of the name are clear one can begin to get a more realistic picture of the sort of place we are studying here.

It remains an "ugly-lovely town" says writer J A Davies, but what does the ugly refer to one might ask? This may come out later on but I fear that too early an exposure to this area of the city may traumatise without appropriate preparation.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Swansea tried to be a resort. "The Brighton of Wales" I ask you !! Who in their right mind would want to be the Brighton of Wales. You can imagine what all the men east of Swansea would have said about them. However for those who have seen the Simpsons episode where Homer tries to teach Bart how to be a man, it may seem that the Steel mill built close by in Port Talbot suggests that they were de facto the "Brighton of Wales".

As with many dens of vice and iniquity Swansea also attracted it's share of gifted writers, artists and musicians who would often meet at the Kardomah Cafe. The Germans hearing of the debauchery tried to stamp it out and bombed the place in 1941.

What is interesting to some is that whilst Wales is renown for it's artistic and literary prowess, Swansea's literary gems are in the English Language. Maybe this explains why, when Swansea people come to watch a Welsh football international, they shout for the English. The writer J A Davies recalls how some called Swansea The graveyard of Ambition, a description which is still as valid today as it was earlier in it's history.

Daniel Defoe writes that Swansea "supplied the City of Bristol with Butter in great quantity". "They export to all the ports of Somerset, Devon and Cornwal and also Ireland itself". One can see that Swansea's affiliations are more with the English than the Welsh and what with Gower being known as an "Englishry" should we be surprised that their Welsh roots are questionable.

Maybe it's in the water ? from "A tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain" (1724-6).

There are lately mineral waters found in Swanzy, which are reported to be of great efficacy in fluxes, and Haemorrhages of all sorts. Consumptions, if not too far gone, diabetes, palsies, rheumatisms, dropsies, and other distempers, are said to fall before these styptick and restorative waters. They certainly have very good effects in many difficult cases; but it is doing an injury to the reputation of any medicine in the world, to make it a Catholicon, and good for everything.

So evidence of Swansea's need to cure all sorts of disease prevelent in the town and already the reputation of doing injury across the world. Not my words but those of learned people who saw it with their own eyes.

Proof of the Swansea / Brighton link By no lesser person than John Wesley a devout preacher who having visited Swansea in August 1758 wrote of them:

"a plain, simple people" "Many gay and well dressed people among them."- (The brighton link again) "After preaching in Swansea I met those who desired to join in society with which they were quite unacquainted" This is quite a damning report. After all this is the late 18th century and Swansea still does not have a society ? "I wonder that any man of common sense should ever ride from Pembroke to Swansea" "Here all the people talk English"

Two Successive Tours Throughout the Whole of Wales(1798) Henry Skrine "After visiting Neath Abbey I crossed a hill to reach the North of Swansea where the numerous collieries and copper works blast the soil all around with their sulphurous influence, destroying the appearance of verdure, and preventing cultivation." Is this hint of sulpherous influence a pointer towards Satanism. After all the behaviour of some, if approached by clean wholesome people, would suggest a demonic lifestyle.

He goes on:

"The commodious shore for bathing have made it the summer resort of that gay tribe" The Head-land of the Mumbles is in general rocky and uninteresting."

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Extracts from the Poetry of Swansea:

Swansea Bay (A J Hatton) from poetic trifles (1811)

In vain by various grief opprest I vagrant roam devoid of rest With aching heart, still ling'ring stray Around the shores of Swansea Bay.

The restless waves that lave the shore Joining the tide's tumultuopus roar; In hollow murmours seems to say Peace is not found at Swansea Bay.

The meek-eyed morning's lucid beam The pensive moon's pale shadowy gleam, Still ceaseless urge - why this delay? Go, hapless wretch, from Swansea Bay.

Then Kilvey Hill, a long adieu I drag my sorrows hence from you: Misfortune, with imperious sway, Impels me far from Swansea Bay.

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Swansea people less than human ?

By one of their own: Walter Savage Landor, who wrote Gebir in Swansea in 1798.

"I lived among woods, which are now killed with copper works, and took my walks over sandy sea-coast deserts covered by thousands of nameless plants, trodden by the naked feet of Welsh peasantry. These creatures were somewhat between me and the animals, and were as useful to the landscape as masses of weed or stranded boats."

OOh!!! that hurts. What can one say ???

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It's no use speaking Welsh

by George Borrow from Wild Wales(1862)

I soon found myself in the suburbs of Swansea. As I passed under what appeared to be a railroad bridge I inquired in Welsh of an ancient looking man. He answered in the same language then instantly added in English:

"You have taken your last farewell of Wales, sir; it's no use speaking Welsh farther on."

I passed some immense edifices, probably manufactories, and was soon convinced that Whether I was in Wales or not, I was no longer amongst the Welsh. The women had much the appearance of Dutch fisherwomen. I spoke in Welsh to two or three whom I overtook.

"Why don't you speak Welsh" said I ? "Because we never learnt it. We are not Welsh." "Who are you then ?" "English -- Some call us Flemmings." "Ah, Ah!" said to myself; "I had forgot."

I have already said that the people of Swansea stand out in broad distinctness from the Cumry, differing from them in stature, langage, dress, and manners, and wish to observe that the same thing may be said of the inhabitants of every part of Wales which the Flemings colonized in any considerable numbers.

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Excerpts from "Cycling to Port Eynon"

A G Bradley In the March and Borderland of Wales (1905)

Swansea, though even more finely placed by nature than Neath, is quite the most untoward-looking town in South Wales. Whether the smelting of Copper is especially conducive to a dismal aspect I know not, but Swansea to the unaccustomed eye is doleful beyond words. It's well to do folk perched upon the mountain slopes around find infinite compensation up there, no doubt, for the hours expended in the murky hive below, which is said, moreover, to contain not a single first class street.

The Gower man outside the Welsherie is no more Welsh than a Devonian. His vices and virtues are entirely his own, and his language, like that of South Pembrokeshire, is an English vernacular evolved in isolation. It is enough for him that he is a Gowerman and not a Welshman. His racial aloofness a fact.

Henry de Newburgh, Earl of Warwick, took eight years to drive the Welsh off the peninsular. Soon after came those batches of Flemings dispatched by Henry I.

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Excerpts from "Swansea Village"

Edward Thomas from English Review (1914)

Another avers that the town smells, and that the inhabitants either do not know or do not care, some holding the opinion that one of the smells is beneficial. It is a sordid hag of a town, sitting shameless amid the ruins of it's natural magnificence. There is nothing new and grand or even expensive.

The town is a dirty witch. You must love her or hate her. (However)I do not go to see a woman pitching broken crockery out of her front door into a street where the children go barefooted; nor to smell the stale fat of the skin yard, and see shaggy cattle driven into the slaughter house, and a woman carrying a baby in a shawl after them; nor to hear midnighht quarreling in the Irish quarter - a woman first having it her own way, shouting louder and louder and drowning the man's interjections, then wildly screaming "Bastard, bastard" until the cry is smothered in noises of scuffling and throttling, and the victors voice rising for a moment as he strikes, and after that her sobbing and moaning, that ends in silence broken only by the child they awakened.

What counts most is the careless, graceless nature of Swansea, it's lordly assembly of chimney stacks. Cheapness, clapham-junction, squalor, or actual hideousness is everywhere in contrast with grandeur, and these qualities do not alternate, but conflict. The low waterside crowd of copper, steel, tin, zinc, silver, cobalt, manure, and other works is the real Swansea. Those works vomit the smoke which Swansea people either ignore or praise;for when the smell from the manure works pervades the town, they expect fine weather from a north or north east wind. Everywhere decay and ruin make their boast side by side with growth. Whole streets of houses too old at fifty or sixty, have been condemned, but are still used because they are, at any rate, warmer than the outer air. When new cottages are built they often stand against the ruined ones instead of taking their places. Old age and neatness seldom adorn the same house in Swansea. As it ages it falls into worse and worse hands; the garden is given over to wormwood, and a piece of semi-rustic slum is completed.

Swansea has as many views as smells. Compared with Cardiff, it is a Slattern.

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Dylan Thomas: Reminiscences of Childhood

I was born in a large Welsh industrial town at the beginning of the Great War: an ugly, lovely town (or so it was, and is, to me), crawling, sprawling, slummed, unplanned, jerry-villa'd, and smug-suburbed by the side of a long and splendid curving shore where truant boys and sandfield boys and old anonymous men, in the tatters and hangovers of a hundred charity suits, beachcombed, idled, and paddled, watched the dock bound boats, threw stones into the sea for the barking, outcast dogs.

I used to dawdle on half holidays along the bent and Devon-facing seashore, hoping for corpses or gold watches or the skull of a sheep or a message in a bottle to be washed up in the wreck; or where we used to wander, whistling and being rude to strangers, through the packed streets, stale as station sandwiches, around the impressive gasworks and the slaughterhouse.

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Barbara Hardy on Swansea Bay from Happy as a sandboy (Swansea girl 1994)

The sands were lovely to look at, dark brown from the tide or yellow in the sun, but littered and polluted with trippers' rubbish, mud dredged up from the channel, and sewage. The big sewage pipes ran at intervals into the sea, emptying their contents at high water, concluding in brown but sea smelling pools when the tide was out. We were told not to paddle in those pools, but the pipes were lovely for playing. Swansea Bay was really no good for bathing, the water was never clear. All kinds of bits and pieces floated round you.

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Bryn Griffiths Scarred Landscape

This is the scarred land where the soil is scorched almost beyond recall. This is the valley of the Towe where a river the colour of rust gropes through black banks of slag towards a sea fouled, as always by man.

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Don't be a Jack. Get an education.

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