Monthly Newsletter
April 2026
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What’s On at The Met
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10th Apr 7.30pm Electrik Live Orchestra - prices from £23
15th Apr (+ 3 more) 7.30pm Made in Dagenham – prices from £12
24th Apr 7.30pm Supersonic Queen. Prices from £24
1st May 7.30pm Ceri Dupree Frock with Laughter Tour. Prices from £19
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For more information on these and more visit:
https://awenboxoffice.com/the-met/whats-on
or tel 01495 533195
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Museum Opening Times
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The Museum is open to the public, free of charge:
Thursday to Saturday 10 am – 1 pm
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Contact us
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Museum phone number 01495 211140
Email: abertillerymuseum@btconnect.com
Web: www.abertilleryanddistrictmuseum.org.uk
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/abertillerymuseum
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Contact Names
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Mr G Murphy Curator
Mrs P. Bearcroft Deputy Curator
Mrs E. Ewers Chair
Mrs K. Pratley Treasurer
​Mrs Jen Price Secretary
Mrs S. Murphy Newsletter
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Vice Presidents (Annual Subscription £25)
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Rev Roy Watson
Mrs Carol Brooks
Mrs Margaret Cook
Mrs Margaret Herbert
Ms Michele Dack
Mr Ross Leadbetter
Dr Graham Eyre-Morgan
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March 100 Club
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This month’s prize numbers were drawn by member Susan Davies and the lucky winners are:-
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No. 31 Hywel Roberts £20
No. 6 Kay Galloway £10
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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.
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EASTER FUN
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Our Easter Bunny and Egg Hunts are now on and will run throughout the school holiday. Just 50p per hunt, per child and everyone will get a chocolate egg on completion.
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Plus chance your luck with a ticket in our Easter raffle to win lots of chocolate goodies! And of course our café, gift shop and displays will be open as usual. We look forward to seeing you!
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Ongoing work
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If you have visited the museum recently you will have noticed the scaffolding restricting access to our main entrance and you would be forgiven for thinking we are closed. However we are still open though it may, at times, be necessary for visitors to enter through the fire exit on Market Street (opposite the now closed Burger Bar). We apologise for any inconvenience the work is causing and hope it will not deter you from visiting us.
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Condolences
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I am sad to report the death of long-standing museum supporter, Mrs Margaret Phillips. Margaret was a volunteer at the museum for many years and particularly enjoyed working in our café. When she was no longer able to attend the museum in person, she continued to support us by remaining a member as well as entering our 100 Club draws and supporting our raffles. Our thoughts are with Margaret’s family and friends at this sad time.
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​POKEMON AT THIRTY​​​
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We often have a ‘Pokemon’ Hunt at the museum during the school holidays but it might surprise you to learn that Pikachu and his friends are 30 years old this year! For those unfamiliar with Pokemon, in a nutshell, it’s a video game where players can catch weird and wonderful creatures and can even exchange them with other players.​​​
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The idea of Pokemon came from a Japanese video game designer by the name of Satoshi Tajiri. Tajiri was born in 1965 in a suburb of Tokyo and as a child he liked to discover and catch insects in and around ponds near his home. By 1983 he was studying electrical engineering and began publishing a gaming magazine called Game Freak. Game Freak went out of business in the late 1980s by which time Tajiri was a respected gaming journalist. In 1986 Tajiri and some fellow game enthusiasts, formed a company to develop new games and they called the company Game Freak after the magazine.
By the late 1980s, Nintendo was launching its GameBoy console. A handheld game machine that would revolutionise gaming and which had a ‘link port’ to allow, by way of a cable, two consoles to be linked together for two players to compete against each other.
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Tajiri and his team saw the potential of developing a game for the GameBoy console that would entail collecting creatures of differing degrees of rarity and allowing them to be exchanged with other players by way of the link cable. The game was initially to be called Capsule Monsters which was then changed to Pocket Monsters which would later evolve to Pokemon.
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They pitched their idea to Nintendo in 1989 who liked the idea and gave them a small budget to develop the game with a plan to launch it the following year. However the team soon realised the game they had envisaged would not be easy to develop and it was shelved until 1994 when Tajiri, who by now had a lot more experience of gaming, decided to take another look at it.
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By now Game Freak had taken on new employees, one of whom was Atsuko Nishida. Nishida was a graphic designer and it was he who designed
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​​It was another game designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, who came up with the idea of having two versions of the game, the ‘Red’ version and the ‘Blue’ version. Each version had a different set of creatures to find and capture which meant either buying both versions or using the ‘link port’ to collaborate with another player. The game finally launched in 1996 and gave a new lease of life to the by now aging GameBoy console. Trading cards were also launched that same year and became an instant success with a TV cartoon series soon to follow, the TV show being a first for Nintendo, and in 1999 Pokemon ‘Gold’ and ‘Silver’ games were launched.
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In 2016 Pokemon Go was launched as an app to be played on ‘Smart Phones’ and tablets followed by a new, live-action, film in 2019; The Pokemon Detective Pikachu. I think it fair to say that Pokemon is still popular today as can be seen from the number of children who visit the museum for our very own Pokemon hunts. Happy Hunting! Pika Pika!
Sally Murphy
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon
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REES' BAKERY
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Do you remember Rees' Bakery on Ty Bryn Road, Ty Bryn Hill as I always think of it? I have ‘Googled’ the name but nothing comes up. You have to wonder how what was a significant business in the town seems to have disappeared without trace. It was a significant bakery and its vans took baked goods all over South Wales.
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Mr Rees was very good when it came to giving older school pupils summer jobs and I worked for the company for three summers in my teens in the early to mid sixties. I never worked in the bakery itself and was glad of that as I understand that it was quite fast and furious at times. I recall a friend getting in a state because she had been put on a jam doughnut line and the doughnuts were coming along more quickly than she could get them off!
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The first summer I worked in the bakery shop which Rees' had in town, opposite Woolworths. I think it was my favourite of the summer jobs as the place had a very pleasant smell as you can imagine and being in the centre of town meant it was busy and convenient.
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I'm sure I had a white pinafore to wear. It was a bit of a baptism of fire as I very quickly had to learn the names of the different loaves – cob, tin, Swansea, wholemeal and so on. You didn't have fancy bread like sourdough or focaccia or ciabatta in those days but there were still a lot of breads to identify along with the names of the bread buns. Woe betide you if you gave someone a crusty bun instead of a soft one.
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I also had to learn the names of all the cakes. And of course you had to add up all the prices in your head and make sure you gave the correct change. It certainly honed your mental arithmetic skills.
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Another summer I worked in the general grocery store Rees' had at the bottom of Six Bells. I wasn't so keen on this as it was quite a long journey from Penybont where I lived and the hours were quite long, longer than in the bakery shop in town. I remember having to put up orders and every item had to be hand written in an order book with a carbon copy and then there was the dreaded adding up in pounds, shillings and pence. No easy matter without a calculator when there was a big order. A lot of people in those days had a running account and would settle up at the end of the week; all those purchases through the week also had to be written in the book along with the prices. It was the days when cheese came wrapped in cheesecloth and was cut with a wire – I was never allowed to do that or to use the machine that sliced the bacon – thank goodness.
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My third job with Rees' was in their warehouse next to the bakery on Ty Bryn. That was quite enjoyable as I seem to recall I did a bit of this and a bit of that, dressed in a brown overall. It was very dusty. So, that was my experience of Rees's Bakery. I have no idea when the bakery started or when it closed down but if one of our readers knows I would be glad to hear more.
Jen Price
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Quick Quiz (answers on next page)
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What is the birthstone of April?
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Who was the famous Danish Fairy tale author born in April 1805?
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Known as the Bard of Avon, which famous author was born April 1564?
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What happened in the North Atlantic sea on 14th April 1912?
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Who was shot and killed in Memphis 4th April 1965?
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What was the name given by the Romans for the month of April?
Photocopying
For all your photocopying needs, visit Abertillery Museum; charges below:
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A4
A3
Black & white
15p
20p
Colour
60p
£1
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Health and Safety – what was that?
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I am going to describe a route I used to take as a child. I am in my seventies now so those readers of a certain age may well recognise what I describe; I hope it isn't too boring for younger readers.
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There are no photos I'm sorry. In my childhood days photos were captured on cameras using a reel of film of (usually) just twelve shots and so every photo was precious and reserved for high days and holidays. My father had his first car when I was about twelve and from then on Sundays were 'days out' – Ogmore, the Forest of Dean, mid Wales....we used to go all over the place for our trips. Until then, I often went to Sunday School on Sunday afternoons, to West Bank Methodist Chapel It's gone now but it used to sit at the top end of Cwmtillery.
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I don't know if the buses didn't run on Sundays but I only ever remember walking to Sunday School. I lived in Penybont and this was my route. I lived in the terrace just below the former cobbler's and I would walk on up Tillery Road, past the cobbler's and as far as the former Coop. From there I would cut down over a grassy bank to Pen-y-bont Road and at the former Fountain Inn I would turn left down a track leading to the railway line at the bottom of the valley.
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This was the mineral line which took the coal down the valley from Cwmtillery Colliery. In order to get to Sunday School I had to cross that line and sometimes step over a steel rope holding a line of empty drams; I never liked that – in theory, nothing would move on a Sunday but I knew that if the rope moved the consequences would be very serious indeed.
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Once over the hazard of the railway line I continued up the track on the other side, turning right where it levelled off by the pithead baths and then left up a steep flight of steps just before the open working area of the colliery. As an aside, it seems unbelievable now that anyone, including children, could walk across the top of the pit, watch the comings and goings of the cage and the movement of drams, and carry on out the other side onto Ty-Dan-y Wal Road by The Lakes.
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But back to my walk. The steps came out onto Ty Dan-y-Wal Road between a former workmen's club and a row of cottages – was it Club Row?
The chapel was just up the road on the left hand side. It was a very plain chapel. The main area was upstairs and the Sunday School was in the schoolroom. It was quite well attended as I suppose most of us had nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon (boy but I enjoyed those Sunday picnics when my father got a car!).
One thing I particularly remember about the chapel was that if you wanted to go to the loo, you had to go down into the boiler room via a pair of large wooden trap doors. I used to avoid using the loo there unless I was desperate as it was a very creepy place!
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Sunday School over, I would often go home via Gwern Berthi Road and call in on my paternal grandparents. The front door was never locked; you would reach a hand in through the letter box and pull a chain to release the door catch. I usually had a cup of Camp coffee or hot Ribena and a biscuit and then I was on my way down Gwern Berthi Road.
It isn't there now, but I used to use a rough path which cut into an even rougher stony track with a stream in it; this track led down to Pen y Bont Road and then along Victor Road back to Tillery Road.
Of course, in those days the valley hadn't been filled in and so Pen y Bont Road crossed the rail line – that same rail line that I had crossed further up – and Victor Road ran past the former Pen y Bont pit; it wasn't in use other than a couple of buildings on Tillery Road, but various other buildings still were there to see. Everything has changed now and it is so lovely to see the beautiful lakes now in place in Cwmtillery instead of the black gloomy waters of my childhood days with that awful coal tip looming above on the top of the mountain.
Jen Price
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Quiz Answers
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Diamond
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Hans Christian Anderson
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William Shakespeare
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Sinking of the Titanic
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Martin Luther King Jnr
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Aprillis​​
