Joseph Harries -- Pembrokeshire's best known "cunning man"

 

We should perhaps refer to Joseph Harries, the Wizard of Glan-y-Mor........

I have in my possession -- courtesy Stephen Evans of Glan-y-Mor and Hywel Bowen-Perkins -- assorted notes and copies of pages from Joseph Harries's notebooks that were literally recovered from a skip.......  He was a meticulous record keeper.  In his notebook entries dating from 1873 to 1889 (copied by Hywel) we see that he most often saw just one patient per day -- and hardly ever more than three in a day.  He recorded their names and addresses, symptoms, previous treatment from local doctors, prescribed remedies and details of recovery or reactions.  Hywel records that he was very precise in his observations and diagnoses, and gave very sophisticated treatments -- often, but not always, based on herbal preparations that he mixed himself. Some sources say that he was qualified as a chemist or pharmacist but not as a doctor -- so some in the medical profession would have seen him as a "quack doctor" and would have resented his involvement in the care of the sick people of the community. He was registered as a chemist on 29 June 1869 -- but that does not mean he was qualified (the Royal Pharmacological Society registered all practising chemists as an amnesty, and were afterwards much more carful about those accepted as qualified practitioners).

Joseph lived from 1830 to 1890,  and was just 59 when he died. He never married. Virtually nothing is known about his childhood or his life as a young man.  Where was he educated?  Did he have a mentor? Where did he learn his skills as a chemist and and as a physician?  Was he self-taught?  

He is referred to as living at Werndew, but  his family also owned Glan-y-Mor and he appears to have spent much of his life there, on the main Newport-Dinas road, rather than in the cottage up on the mountainside. He travelled widely -- "a little man on a grey mountain pony" -- and sold his services to those who needed them over a distance of 20 miles to west, south and east, incorporating Cardigan, Haverfordwest and Fishguard.  The "renowned doctor" was feared and respected in equal measure.  He comes over as someone rather disreputable, and rather frightening and intimidating......

I am intrigued by his association with Gideon Chapel, where he was a deacon.  How "religious" was he?  Not very, by all accounts, since he is reputed to have fathered at least two local children as a result of liaisons with unmarried local girls.  Nonetheless, he left £1,500 to the chapel in his will.

Joseph's father William (who died in 1857) was first married to Ann, and their first son David inherited Werndew when his father died.  Joseph was 37 at the time, and his mother was Mary, William's second wife.  We don't know all the details, but it appears that he and David did not get on well, and in 1857 he set about building Glan-y-Mor as a home for himself and his widowed mother. It took a long time -- most of the work was done between 1861 and 1871; maybe they lived there while the work was going on.  It was like a lodge down on the main road, connected to Werndew by a driveway. The driveway is still in use today.  The family must have owned an extensive tract of land, including Felin Werndew to the east along the Newport Road.  In 1887 Joseph inherited Werndew on the death of his brother, and moved back there -- and that is where he spent the last 3 years of his life.  So we can assume he was at Glan-y-Mor for 30 years. There are records of his surgery and dispensary there.  

Joseph had an interesting relationship with Rev Benjamin Rowlands, who was ordained in 1885 and immediately took up his post as minister of Gideon Chapel, not far from Werndew and Glan-y-Mor. He was a lodger at Glan-y-Mor between 1885 and 1887, and resigned his post at Gideon in 1892 prior to moving with his new bride to Saron Chapel in Clydach. He died in Dinas in 1902, having left Clydach in 1899.  He was only 44 years old -- and locals blamed his early demise on the evil influence of Joseph Harries the wizard.......    He left a "deposition" in March 1892 relating to various spooky events that occurred after Joseph's death.  He was not always complimentary about his erstwhile landlord; nonetheless,  Joseph left him a pony and trap in his will when he died in 1890.

The most solid of the stories relating to Joseph Harries are these:

The building of Glan-y-Mor

The Conjuror and the Hornets

Joseph and the familiar hare

The killing at Clyn

The smashed windows of Gideon Chapel

The robber on Trenewydd Mountain

Joseph and the jewel thief

Joseph and the salty bones

The Ghost of Joseph Harries

When I visited Werndew a few years ago the lady then in residence told me that she had recently cleared out a room that had been used (presumably about a century earlier) by Joseph Harries as a dispensary.  She had thrown away assorted old bottles full of medicines and potions -- what a sad loss to science and folklore.......!!

As far as I am aware, there are no photographs of Joseph Harries in any of the local collections.

See:  "Folklore and Folk Stories of Wales" by Marie Llewellyn, 1899

Note:  When I collected together assorted folk tales for my Pembrokeshire Folk Tale Trilogy (in 4 volumes) I found some confusion relating to Joseph Harries and Abe Biddle, who lived near Haverfordwest.  Some folk tales have been transferred from the one to the other, and who knows where the truth lies?

Werndew, where Joseph Harries was born and where he died

Outbuildings at Werndew

There are some interesting insights here:

http://daibach-welldigger.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-chapels-of-dinas-cross.html

........in the section on Gideon Chapel, Dinas.  The chapel was built in 1830 (the year of Joseph's birth) but Mrs Harries Werndew is listed as one of the leading lights in the growing "independent" congregation.  So we can assume that Joseph's mother was very active in the chapel and was committed to the cause.  She must have contributed to the building costs, and to improvements to the chapel in 1843 together with an extension to the cemetery.  One wonders what Joseph's feelings were about the chapel, the ministers and the great revival in the local area in 1859?  He was eventually a deacon, but it does not appear that he was the architypal "good Christian gentleman......."

John Davies was the minister from 1843 to 1877.  Then came John Francis, who was driven out in 1881 because of the bitterness of a small number of persons in the congregation.  One wonders what that was all about.  When he left, the chapel may have been without a minister for a while, until the young single minister called Benjamin Rowlands arrived, and he was still in post when Joseph died.

One person who studied the life and reputation of Joseph Harries was Rev Towyn Jones, who died in 2019.  He gave a talk to the Dinas Cross Historical Society on 20 Jan 2003, and Stephen Evans took some rough notes of what he said.  It's not known whether there was a transcript of the talk.  Towyn picked up some information from Joseph Thomas of New Moat, who knew a lot about Joseph Harries's deeds and reputation -- the Welsh Folk Museum taped his recollections.

The depositions about JH collected by the rector of Newport may be somewhere in Cambridge, together with an 1892 photo of Glan-y-Mor.........

Rev Towyn Jones (1942-2019), who had a great interest in the supernatural and who wrote extensively about wizards, ghosts etc in the Welsh language.