This photograph would seem to confirm the oft related story that the ravens that occupy the Tower of London came from South Pembrokeshire cliffs.

Here portrayed in the photograph is a 'raven collection party' at work on cliffs on the Stackpole Estate in the late '20s, with Colonel Campbell (Lord Cawdor) looking on while Estate workers place a young raven into a suitable bag. Holding the bag is Walter Morris, while his brother Frank Morris, with a stout rope tied around his waist, has just returned from hanging over the cliff to reach a raven's nest situated in a cleft below. A number of young ravens where collected in this way and sent by rail to London.

The ravens at present in The Tower are the descendents of these birds and may now have gained Cockney accents, but I often, in talks to local history groups viewing the Pembroke Town Hall murals, say that if they should visit the Tower and a raven comes up to them and says "How't be gwain boy"? They should respond with "Notsa bad... Fair to middlin."

John Russell, the well-known South Pembrokeshire former estate manager and auctioneer, who has a vast fund of local stories, tells of the time when he and his family visited at The Tower a certain Rev. Michael, a former vicar of Monkton, who was at the time a chaplain to The Queen and who resided in The Tower, which of course has its own chapel. While there, the Russell family enjoyed a fine steak meal at his table while he told them that he was given an allowance to buy steak to feed the ravens, but how he kept the 'steak money' and bought them cheaper 'shin beef' which he said they enjoyed equally well and was certainly better than they would have got back home on the Castlemartin Peninsular.

The two estate workers in the photo were brothers of my grandfather, George Morris, of Sageston.

George Lewis