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The Victorian Market bustled with shoppers in an atmosphere of banter and patter as it still does today. Rival traders shouted their offers to bunches of eager bargain hunters, curious onlookers, domestic servants from the 'upstairs downstairs' houses in area, and the highly discriminating poor with shillings or pennies advanced by the Taff Street pawnbrokers. A trader holds up a fistful of goods: 'I won't ask you for ten shillings or even five....' His voice melts away into the babble of sounds in the market place. A pedlar played ballads on a concertina. Nearby, someone scraped on a violin as the sonorous peal of bells from St Catherine's church registered the happiness of a new bride and groom. Brass and silver bands of local collieries played at times in Market Square in front of the Arcade. Many stalls in Market Street were covered by white tarpaulins with flying pennants or by striped awnings like peppermint sticks. Stallholders satisfied endless needs for herbs, candles, clay pipes, bootlaces, whelks, metal polish, black lead, beeswax, leather goods, fly papers in sticky sheets and rolls, mousetraps, scrubbing brushes, toffee apples that drew wasps to their sweetness, egg timers, aspidistras in big jars, hair curling tongs, pocket watches, oil lamps, flat irons and cotton and woollen goods. Little taller than the basket from which he dispensed his claimed cures or reliefs for bronchitis, consumption or tuberculosis, and other chest ailments was Tom Thumb the Cough Candy Man. Dressed in a white apron and a top hat, he stood at a corner of Market Square to sell his medicated sweets - and his shouts echoed in the tree-fronted New Inn Hotel (now demolished and replaced by the large, red brick building housing the W.H.Smith bookshop, Olivers shoes and other shops). A quack promoted the reliability of his tooth powders by swinging a chair or heavy basket from his teeth. The Stocking Man swaggered through the crowds as he addressed them in the Welsh language. Hundreds of pairs of Welsh woollen stockings and socks, particularly favoured by miners, hung from a T-shaped piece of wood strung from his shoulders. Running into Market Square from the future Gwilym Evans corner shop and set high above the throng was a long plank supported on barrels. Along it scurried the 'Cheap Jack'. He banged his pots and pans together as he gave his eternal cry of 'Only a few left! Who'll give me ten shillings? Who'll give five bob? Come on, who'll say half-a-crown?' A dramatic clap of his hands would then seal a bargain for a shilling or a sixpence. Often seen walking among the market crowds to visit nearby patients until his death and cremation in January 1893 was a controversial man with a large nose and a flowing beard. Doctor William Price, the promoter of cremation, was instantly recognisable clad in his green suit with red and white trimmings or in a flamboyant red robe with green sleeves. And a head-dress of a fox skin with the legs hanging over his shoulders and the tail trailing down his back. His dress contrasted sharply with the drab clothes of some men and the women's usually dark dresses, capes and bonnets. Some women dressed in skirts and blouses and straw-boater hats or wore long dresses that swept the cobblestones; some wore the in-and-out-of-fashion bustle. Men turned out in three-piece suits with uncreased trousers and always wore caps or bowler hats while others wore blazers and straw-boaters. A sprinkling of frock coats and top hats breathed elegance. Conspicuous, too, was 'Grannie Cockles' who wore traditional Welsh national costume. Many shoppers called at her pitch near the old Corn Market for a chat and to heed her warnings of pickpockets when they were about. Pickpockets risked imprisonment or birching when they ruined many a shopping trip to Pontypridd. Punishment for lawbreakers was harsh - even for the very young: typically, two boys discovered hiding in the market overnight after breaking into a toy stall suffered ten strokes of the birch rod between them. Three under ten-year-olds each received nine strokes on a day they remembered sadly for their enterprise in stealing fifty oranges. © Don Powell 1996
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