What’s on at the Met Cinema
Mon 12th Feb 10am The Little Mermaid (PG)
Mon 12th Feb 6.30pm Fast X (12A)
Tue 13th Feb 6.30pm Heathers (15)
Fri 16th Feb 1.30pm Grease (PG) with ‘sing-a-long’ feature
Fri 16th Feb 6.30pm Miss Saigon (15)
Cinema tickets £3
For more information visit or Tel 01495 533195
Museum Opening Times
The Museum is open to the public, free of charge:
Thursday* to Saturday 10am – 1pm
January 100 Club
This month’s prize numbers were drawn by member Susan Davies and the lucky winners are:-
No. 32 Judith Williams £20
No. 25 Margaret Phillips £10
If you would like to join our 100 club and be in with a chance of winning, it costs just £1 a month. Ask at the museum for further details.
Annual Membership Reminder
If you have not yet renewed your annual membership please do so as we rely on your support to stay open. The fee is just £8 for standard membership and £25 for Vice Presidents and if you are a taxpayer, please come in and sign a Gift Aid declaration (if you have not already done so) so that we can claim another 25p for each pound given at no extra cost to you. Membership will entitle you to a free hot drink in our café each month and for under 16s there is our junior membership for £4 for the year which will include a free treasure hunt each month.
Meet Our New Mentor
The museum is pleased to announce we now have a mentor to advise us on museum matters. Her name is Carol Whittaker and she lives in Ceredigion. Carol, who has been involved with Abertillery museum in the past, paid us a visit on 18th January and has already helped us with regard to our accreditation return for which we are very grateful.
Cardiff Canal Update
Last month I reported on the newly uncovered Cardiff Canal Dock Feeder in Churchill Way and this month I’m pleased to report that an otter has apparently made it his (or her) home. So next time you are in Cardiff town centre, keep a look out for our new furry resident.
OTAC Scams
OTAC is short for One Time Authorisation Code and the information below came to me via my mobile operator O2 but their advice applies across all networks.
An OTAC (one-time authorisation code) is sent to by text to your number when you’re trying to access your account when you’ve forgotten your password. The scam occurs when a fraudster persuades a victim to hand over the OTAC, allowing them to gain access to a victim’s private accounts, networks or systems.
For example, a scammer might call you and pretend to be from O2, offering a tempting 40% discount on your phone bill. To get this supposed discount, they’d say that you need to share your OTAC with them. But they’d actually use this OTAC to access your account – and then order a brand new phone or device in your name.
Remember genuine callers WILL NEVER:
- ask for your OTAC or bank details
- ask you to ignore security warnings
- get angry if you ask to call them back on the official number
- pressure you into making a quick decision
- ask you to pay to return a device sent to you ‘in error’
And in case your phone should get lost or stolen, it is also a good idea to ensure:
- your phone is locked with a pin number
- and that the ‘preview’ feature of text messages is turned off because unless this feature is turned off an OTEC could be read while the phone itself is still locked.
If you feel you have been contacted by a scammer, report it to your service provider using their usually free number (for O2 this 202) and if you receive a text you think is from a scammer forward the text to 7726. Likewise suspect emails can be forwarded to report@phishing.gov.uk
World’s Most Remote Museum
Running a museum is not easy as any of our volunteers will tell you, but imagine running the most remote museum in the world, and it’s British…
South Georgia is an island, just 100 miles long by 20 miles wide, and lies in the south Atlantic Ocean about 870 miles east of the Falklands. The uninhabited island was discovered by the British explorer James Cook in 1775 and he claimed it in the name of Britain, naming it the ‘Isle of Georgia’ after the then monarch, King George III.
In olden days it was used as a whale and seal hunting base and it is these artefacts that now make up some of the exhibits at the South Georgia Museum that is only open in the southern hemisphere summer months (December to March). The museum’s curator, Jayne Pierce, and her staff are shipped there from Britain meaning an 8000 mile trip to work. The museum opened in 1992 and its only visitors, around 10,000 a year, are those visiting from cruise ships usually from Ushuaia on the southernmost tip of Argentina. As well as the hunting artefacts this free to visit museum also covers maritime and natural history, the history of the island itself and of course the Falklands war when the Argentine forces briefly occupied the island. Read more here and here.
Cadbury
Chocolate, who doesn’t love it? And if you’ve been watching the ads lately you would have noticed that Cadbury have taken an advert that has been running for a few years and have very cleverly changed it so that it switches seamlessly between today and olden days. I’m talking about the ad where a young girl wants to buy a bar of chocolate for her mum’s birthday but doesn’t have enough money so the kindly shopkeeper accepts her offering of using a few toys though he gives her back her much loved ‘unicorn’ by way of her change. In the revamped advert, the young’s girl appearance switches between modern and old while the chocolate bar itself appears in the old style wrapping. The camera then pulls back to reveal a corner shop with modern day cars on the right and horse and carts on the left. And the reason behind this revamped advert is that Cadbury is celebrating its 200th birthday this year.
Crème eggs launched in 1923 while Wispa was 1981
The Cadbury story all began in 1824 when John Cadbury, who was a Quaker, began selling tea, coffee and drinking chocolate in Bull Street, Birmingham. By 1831 he had his own factory producing a wide variety of drinking chocolates as well as tea and coffee but with the high price of raw materials his buyers were mainly the wealthy. By 1847 his brother Benjamin had joined him at the factory and the company became known as ‘Cadbury Brothers’. Their first actual chocolate bar was produced in 1849 but they weren’t the first to produce a bar of chocolate – that honour goes to their competitors, Fry’s of Bristol, who produced ‘Fry’s Chocolate Cream’ in 1847 and which is still available to buy today (Cadbury’s would merge with Fry’s in 1919).
In 1854 the brothers opened an office in London and received the Royal Warrant from Queen Victoria but despite all this the company went into decline.
In 1861 John Cadbury’s sons, Richard and George, took over the factory. By this time the workforce had halved and the factory was losing money. They turned things around by dropping tea and coffee and instead concentrating their efforts on chocolate and within five years they were back in profit again. Their major breakthrough came in 1866 when they imported a better quality of cocoa bean and, thanks to a new cocoa press developed in the Netherlands, they were able to remove some of the more unpalatable parts of the bean thereby giving a much improved smoother taste to their chocolate.
The company then went from strength to strength, producing boxed chocolates for special occasions such as Valentine’s Day and in 1875 they made their first Easter Egg though we would have to wait until 1923 for the first ‘Crème Egg’ though it was then known as ‘Fry’s Crème Egg’.
In 1878 they opened a new factory in the countryside just outside Birmingham with better access via train and canal to bring in raw materials and in 1879 they purchased the neighbouring 14.5 acre Bournebrook estate which they renamed Bournville. And so the Bourneville Factory was born though Chocolate would still be a luxury for the rich until the mid 1930s by which time it is estimated around 90% of the population were able to afford to it.
Today the Bournville Factory is a visitor attraction and is known as Cadbury World and since 2022 it has been run by Merlin who also own several attractions such as Alton Towers and Thorpe Park to name but two. As for Cadbury itself, it has been owned by the American firm Mondelez International since 2010 and is second only to Mars (another American company) as the largest chocolate manufacturer in the world.
Read the full Cadbury story here and here.
Sally Murphy
‘LOST’ IN THE POST
The problem with missing mail is that, unless you are expecting it, you are none the wiser when it fails to appear. It is estimated that half a million letters and parcels are lost every single day, most through unreadable or incorrect addresses and some through theft. So if your bank statement or payslip doesn’t arrive, would you report it to the Post Office? Chances are you would simply contact your bank or employer and ask for a replacement. What about a parcel from say, Amazon, that fails to arrive, would you report that to the Post Office? Again probably not as it’s simpler to contact Amazon and they will usually send out a replacement. This is why it is easy for postal workers to steal and get away with it, though it must be said that most of course are honest, decent, hard working people. But, with the Post office in the spotlight of late in its treatment of sub-postmasters over the faulty ‘Horizon’ software and while my experience of the Post Office’s ‘investigation team’ pales into insignificance in comparison, I thought it timely to recount the tale of the theft of my mail and the way the Post Office dealt with it…
In late 2008 we noticed a few items of mail failed to arrive; a bank statement here, a payslip there and a letter concerning a soon-to-mature life assurance policy also was a no-show. Then in late January 2009 myself, my husband and my father (who lived on an adjacent estate) all paid a visit to our local Nationwide branch and each of us opened new current accounts. It was suggested that we allowed Nationwide to handle the ‘switchover’ from our old bank accounts to our new but (fortunately) we all declined, choosing to do it ourselves at a later date, once the accounts were up and running. We were told to expect our new cheque books, debit cards and pin numbers to arrive by post in about seven days.
The following Monday we had a significant amount of snowfall, so much so that we had no post delivery. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday came and went again with no sign of the postman. By Friday the snow ploughs had been out and most roads were now passable but still we had no post. Then came Saturday and I saw the postman on our estate and was expecting quite a pile of post including a DVD our daughter had ordered online from ‘Play.com’, however all that landed on the doormat was a few pieces of junk mail!
Assuming the Post Office had a huge backlog to deal with following the disruption caused by the snow I left it a few days and then all three pin numbers arrived but still no cheque books, debit cards, or the DVD. That same day I popped into the Nationwide to report the missing cheque books and debit cards for all three of us and they promised to send out replacements and on my way home I popped in to my local Post Office and spoke to the sub-postmaster and asked for advice on how to report this missing mail. His advice was to speak initially to my postman. So the next morning, I lay in wait. I don’t know what I was expecting to hear but I was not prepared for what he told me…!
To be continued next month…
Top Of Page
© Abertillery & District Museum 2024 
