Aberdare Boys Grammar School

This certificate, dated September 1911, belonged to George Maldwyn Maddy, of 83 Cardiff Road, Aberaman. This copy was sent to us by Maldwyn’s son Dr Alun Maddy of Edinburgh. Alun also attended the school, as did his mother.

Maldwyn Maddy attended the school from 1908 to 1912 before leaving to help at the grocery run by his father Thomas Maddy. The junior stage certificate of the CWB was normally taken after two years of secondary education at around the age of 14.

Maldwyn, better known as ‘Mal,’ was born in Aberdare, 28 August 1897 and died in 1976. He served in the RNVR 1916–1919, but was very badly injured during a heavy air raid on Chatham Naval Dockyard in 1917; however, he returned to active service after recuperation.

The signatories were all prominent in the field of education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sir Edward Anwyl was a distinguished Welsh academic, who after occupying chairs of both Welsh and of Comparative Philology at Aberystwyth became the first Principal of the Monmouthshire Training College at Caerleon. Owen Owen was the CWB’s first chief inspector, appointed in 1896. He held the position until 1915. Both men have biographies in the Online Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Edward Lyulph Stanley, fourth Baron Sheffield, was initially a London-based educationalist who was an advocate of the secular control of education. On his succession to the peerage in 1903 Stanley inherited estates in Cheshire and Anglesey, becoming chairman of the Anglesey Education Committee (1904–19), which in turn brought him into the administration of the CWB.