Response to a TMA question about the word Gambo
I was about five when we moved to the top of the Afan valley in the early sixties, and like your father one of the pastimes I enjoyed was playing gambo racing. The requirements were simple – A plank of wood about four foot in length, a couple of small wheels – approximately six inch diameter (these were by far the hardest item to obtain) , the back pair fixed , the front pair hinged so that they could move and thus steer the cart with a length of rope.
Any child whose father worked in the local pit could obtain the materials fairly easily, and within an hour or so you were mobile – Glyncorrwg has very steep and long hills so not only were you mobile, you were approaching break neck speeds – faster than light !! I think you are probably correct with regards the mutation of the word from an agricultural usage to a description of this simple toy. However, in Glyncorrwg the miners used to call the sleds that they used to pull coal down from the coalface – gambos. So the word would have been reused from the agricultural context into an industrial one and then used by the miner’s children to describe these carts.
The word was still in use when I left the valleys in the eighties and I contacted an old school friend Lynsey Milsom who still lives in Glyncorrwg, to see if the kids still played with gambos and or used the word. Gambos are still being made in Glyncorrwg !! .This started me wondering if it was just in use at the top end of the valley and whether the usage was wider than this small village.
I spoke with my two sons who are resident in Cornelly. While Cornelly is not strictly in the valleys, it is at the bottom of the Llynfi valley and has easy access to the Afan valley. Both of them knew the word from the “Great Annual Gambo Race” but stated that it was used in a very limited sense in the Cornelly area, but that the “Valley Commandos” from Glyncorrwg still used the word (supporting my discussions with people from Glyncorrwg and also demonstrating the inert snobbery of my two sons !!). The “Annual Race” is a charity event , where a number of rugby players from Pyle run around with gambos collecting money from The Prince , The Walnut , The Tap , The Angel , The Cornelly Arms and then back to the Rugby Club. Any one left standing can then lay their comrades on the gambos and push them down the first available hill.
After my discussions in Cornelly and Glyncorrwg I decided to broaden my own research and attempted to determine if the word was derived from a similar Welsh word. After discussions with Jeremy, I asked for assistance from some of the Welsh speakers on the course (due thanks to Sharon, Sue , Charlotte and to Paul for the instructions in Drayish), the results of this where less than conclusive. Anne has now covered that area extensively with her latest response and I leave it to you to debate the voracity of Anne’s arguments.
The OED did have entries for the word as far back as 1836 (Radnorshire), 1887 (Hereford) and even Dylan Thomas in 1945 “There’s his brown hen cluck in the gambo-swished mud”, and all referring to a “simple cart with no sides”. I was hoping to prove that the word was English in derivation and that the Welsh had borrowed it from English drovers on the English/Welsh marches so that I could prove that morphological hybridization had taken place in a contact relationship between the languages (Changing English, page 19, 39). That was a bit like putting the ceffyl before the gambrel and slinging a Welsh ‘o’ on the end for good measure. I was then going to end my response by proving that Dr Sony had then morphed the word from Gambo to Game Boy thus disproving your assertions about the word becoming extinct and aiding my hybridization theory. I’m glad I did’nt submit to that temptation.
