Bread and fur in Merlin's town

A shopping trip to the county town of Carmarthen is a very occasional event for us. It's an old trading centre for West Wales with 14th century castle and the remnants of 19th century prosperity visible in its buildings but vanished now.

These elegant carved animals caught my eye today: above a former bakery (named for the legendary crazed prophet and said founder of the town, Myrddin, who became better known as the Welsh wizard Merlin) - above the shopfront but below the superimposed lettering is a stone frieze of wild beasts, beautifully rendered with flowing lines but with rather odd expressions (that beaver's head below the letter B can't be right, can it?) And what was the connection could there be with bakery?

I was so intrigued that when I got home I did an internet search - only to find nothing at all, no image and no mention anywhere. Fortunately I had the relevant volume of The Pevsner Architectural Guide to the Buildings of Wales which told me that the frontage of No 49 King Street Carmarthen had been made for the National Fur Company in the 1930s and what it depicts is an assemblage of animals that are exploited for their pelts. How shocking. It was an upsetting discovery.

I'm blipping it for several reasons. First, it's a fine piece of bas-relief sculpture that deserves respect both as an art work and as an item of social history: to think that furs were once so popular and so acceptable that a small Welsh provincial town could support a branch of a major national company (which was only wound up in the late 70s it seems) - the choice of such garments dictated by fashion, not climate.

Secondly, it chimes in with Guinea Pig Zero's recent blip about his research on a photo of a 1920s women's college rifle team in which the most intriguing member is wearing an eye-catching ocelot fur coat. There's no ocelot that I can see in the frieze but there are ermines, used to make this 1935 coat.

And thirdly, what little I know about my maternal grandmother's family suggests that, as Jews in Imperial Russia, they were furriers from way back. Although her father and her sisters became lowly toilers in the rag trade when they emigrated to the east end of London in the 19th century, a cousin of hers seems to have reached New York and established himself as a furrier on Fifth Avenue before going bankrupt in the 1900s and ending up in penury in Brooklyn.

A murky trade, a murky past. The Myrddin/Merlin connection? The earliest reference to the mad Welsh wizard has him wandering at large and living with the beasts of the forest, just like these.


*Although it is commonly thought that the town, Caerfyrddin in Welsh, is called after him, it seems that the name is actually derived from the Roman: Moridunum (sea fort).