“I suppose if you look back, I did a lot with my life, and here I am, 105. I can remember so much. My daughters think I should write it all down.”
Happy 105th birthday to May Ogden. She celebrated her special day on Sunday 27 April with a party with her family, including her daughters, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, as well as friends, and neighbours at Cwmbran House Care Home in Pontnewydd.
I visited the home on Five Locks Road yesterday and enjoyed an afternoon tea party laid on by the staff for May.
We had a lovely 25-minute chat sitting outside in the home’s sunny and shady garden.
Born in London
May said: “I was born right in the City of London. I used to go to St Bartholomew’s [the church]. The hospital was just across the road.
“We were tiny and I had to take my brother and sister to school and we had to walk through Smithfield Meat Market.
“The men carried great big joints [of meat].”
She remembers hearing the bells of St Paul’s Cathedral ringing out on Sunday morning.
“There was nothing like it is now with aircraft and hustle and bustle all the time.
“I loved every part of it [London]. I was very proud to be a Londoner.”
London County Council rehoused her family from “rooms in the City” to Shepherd’s Bush in West London.
May said: “We thought because we had this beautiful council house with the grass verges, we thought we’d gone to the country. I lived there until I got married.
“I had an exciting life really. I had lots of boyfriends. The one I chose [who became her husband], strangely enough, came from Fenland, Cambridgeshire.”
The pair moved to the Fens until John, her husband, changed career.
Alfa Laval
She said: “My husband always wanted to be an engineer. He didn’t want to be on the farm.”
While on the farm, he gained experience of working with dairy machines.
He successfully applied for an engineering job with Alfa Laval, who manufactured dairy farm products. The new job brought them back to London, where he worked for years before an opportunity came up to move to Wales with the company.
May said: “They offered him a good job opening the factory in Cwmbran [in Ty Coch]. I often say people find it very difficult to make big decisions.
“I never, ever, as a young person, thought I’d live in Wales.
“My husband started the factory up. We had a very nice house on the main Llantarnam Road.
“Some people don’t go from one town to another, do they?”
They were active members of the community at St Michael & All Angels Church in Llantarnam.
A codebreaker
I asked May about her career.
She said: “I left school on Friday afternoon and on Monday morning, I was in an office.
“There was ten of us and we sat in twos. And a big old lady sat in front, and she gave us this paperwork, and we had to decipher it.
“You put your head up and she’d say ‘are you finished?’, I’d say ‘not quite’ and she’d say ‘put your head down’. Oh so different.
“I worked in that office until I was 16 but that wasn’t for me, so I tried the General Post Office and I got a job as a telephonist. Now, in those days, the telephonists were revered. I worked where there was 300 girls and all these great big switchboards, all the way around.
“We used to get the plugs and plug in. We used to say ‘number please?’, they’d tell you the number. You’d repeat the number and say ‘I will try to connect you’ [and then], ‘I’m sorry but the number is engaged. I will call you back.’
“It was very, very special. And I was very lucky to be chosen as one of them to go into Whitehall. I worked in Scotland Yard for a couple of months on the switchboard.
“Because the war was coming up, communications were important, so I worked in the Home Office, I worked in the War Office.”
‘Selfridges, Whitehall 1234’
She remembered some of the popular numbers she had to connect callers to, even adding a ‘telephone voice’ as she told me.
“It used to be ‘Whitehall 1212 Scotland Yard’. The other one I always remember was Selfridges, ‘Mayfair 1234’.
“Lots of different numbers come into your head. You’re using them all the time.
“They used to call us the ‘happy, hello girls’. It was a good job. I loved it.”
Her early career was before switchboards had dials, and she remembered when this new technology was introduced.
She said: “When we started with the dial we were all given a pencil with a knob on the end that you could put in the dial and dial the number quickly.”
Her daily commute was a walk along Whitehall and through the front door of the Home Office near the Cenotaph.
And where did she work in Cwmbran?
She said: “I eventually got a job with South Wales Electricity [Board] and, of course, with the experience I had, they took me on as a telephonist. I worked there until I was 60, nice people.”
She shared a tragic story about one of her two sisters, who was killed at the age of seven when scaffolding collapsed as they walked past. May said their mum had dressed them both in “white dresses” for a party and “waved goodbye from the front door”.
The sisters walked along a high street where the scaffolding fell to the ground. At the court case, May recalled one of the barristers saying: “She was of no monetary loss whatsoever”. Her parents never received a “penny” in compensation.
‘I did a lot with my life’
May said: “I suppose if you look back, I did a lot with my life and here I am, 105. I can remember so much. My daughters think I should write it all down.”
May drove until she was 85 and lived independently in Llantarnam until she was 100.
Denise Watkins, a staff member at Cwmbran House, said: “She is lush. Me and May have been good friends since she came. I go in and we have a lovely chat. She tells me all the history. She’s lush, she’s lovely.”