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Nearly every town in Wales has a street named after a neighbouring town or city, with Cowbridge Road in Cardiff or Carmarthen Road in Swansea just two of hundreds of examples. But one Welsh town has a street named after a Merseyside town more than 150 miles away. The origins of Ammanford's Heol Wallasey, revealed in the essay Mercy from the Mersey by Terry Norman and Martin Rhys, stretch back to the poverty- stricken 1920s. And this month marks the 50th anniversary of the day in 1957 when Ammanford minister D Tegfan Davies dedicated the street to the Merseysiders who in 1928 "adopted" the mining town.
The authors said the life-saving help from the North-West of England should never be forgotten.
In 1925, when the French returned the Ruhr coalfields to the Germans, South Wales' mines struggled to compete and, in the same year, Chancellor Winston Churchill returned Britain to the Gold Standard monetary system.
The cumulative effect was deflation, unemployment, pit closures and the 1926 General Strike.
Unemployment in Ammanford soared to 33% by 1927 and by 1928 only one of the Ammanford area's...