The lonely South Wales moors of Mynydd y Gwair are going to have a windfarm on land owned by the Duke of Beaufort’s estate, unless the local authority intervenes. The site, overlooking the Swansea Valley, rises to 370 metres, with views to the north as far as Careg Cennen castle in Carmarthenshire, and in the west to the Burry estuary and the Gower peninsula.
Mynydd y Gwair is in fact within Gower, which of course consists, historically, not only of the peninsula that adjoins Swansea, but includes a slab of connected countryside north of the city. The moorland is at the far end of it, nine or ten miles away.
Here, in the 1930s, a clever but fraudulent inventor, Harry Grindell Matthews, built a laboratory in which he claimed to be perfecting a death ray. Sometimes this became a ray that would stop internal-combustion engines. Either way it would have been a weapon to win wars with. Matthews convinced many people at the time, and may even have convinced himself. He had low-rise buildings constructed behind a high fence, and there were tales of passing cars that suddenly stopped without warning and started again five minutes later.
Nothing ever came of it. He was a fraud. People in Swansea knew him as ‘Death Ray Matthews’ and winked. An Air Ministry file about him from the 1920s, once secret, can be read at the National Archives in London. A young Government scientist called Henry Tizard, later famous, dismisses Matthews and tells colleagues that ‘the man is trying to bamboozle you.’
As a professional bamboozler, who lasted into the early 1940s, Death Ray Matthews might be worth an ironic memorial. Something dignified. like the blue plaques in London on houses saying ‘Sir William Dogsbody lived here,’ might be going a bit far. But Harry Grindell Matthews sought and failed to find the Death Ray here would go nicely at the base of a wind turbine.