Despite being a PE teacher, I sometimes have to step in to help with other things at school – especially as I now have a form of my own. It seems a bit soon for that, as I only started at this school very recently – but another teacher left suddenly. As I’ve settled in so quickly, they asked me to take over.
We’ve got to host an assembly next month, on local history, and I’m wondering which topic to focus on. It’s such a wide area. Though we might end up dealing with several, as even though 15 minutes sounds like a short time, I can already tell it’ll feel like ages!
I’m learning quite a few things I didn’t already know – and finding them surprisingly interesting. Porthmadog apparently started off as a port for exporting slate to England, in the early 1800s. You’d think it was older than that, but it’s very much a product of the industrial revolution. Well, in an indirect way – the cities in England were growing fast and needed slate for house roofs. Porthmadog had a good natural harbour, so the slate was put on to ships there bound for England, after being transported down from quarries.
The town started to spring up around the tramway tracks which carried the slate – and by the 1840s there were shops, a post office… and a pub, naturally! The name of the port was actually coined in the 1930s, as the founder was an Englishman named William Madocks. Though apparently there are some rumours that it was instead named after a character called Madog. The story goes that he was a Welsh prince who travelled to America 300 years before Christopher Columbus. I don’t know if I believe that, but it’s a fascinating story to explore!
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Tags: industrial revolution, local history, Porthmadog history, school assembly ideas, school form, Wales history