October 2025 Newsletter | Abertillery And Dist

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What’s On at The Met

AADMS presents:-

10th Oct 8pm Comedy with Terry Alderton £15

14th & 21st Oct, 4th Nov & 9th Dec 2-4pm

Tea Dance £4

For more information on these and more visit:

https://awenboxoffice.com/the-met/whats-on

or tel 01495 533195

Museum Opening Times

The Museum is open to the public, free of charge:

Thursday to Saturday 10am – 1pm

Contact us

Museum phone number 01495 211140

Email: abertillerymuseum@btconnect.com

Web: www.abertilleryanddistrictmuseum.org.uk

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/abertillerymuseum

Contact Names

Mr G Murphy Curator

Mrs P. Bearcroft Deputy Curator

Mrs E. Ewers Chair

Mrs K. Pratley Treasurer

Mrs S. Murphy Newsletter

Vice Presidents (Annual Subscription £25)

Rev Roy Watson

Mrs Carol Brooks

Mrs Margaret Cook

Mrs Margaret Herbert

Ms Michele Dack

Mr Ross Leadbetter

August 100 Club

This month’s prize numbers were drawn by visitor Carmen aged 8 and the lucky winners are:-

No. 54 Gareth Murphy £20

No. 56 Gay Fisher £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.

Halloween Festival

The museum will be open 10-6pm on Saturday 1st November to coincide with the town’s ‘Scare in Jubilee Square’. The museum will be hosting face painting as well as a pumpkin hunt. So don your best witches hat and cloak and come along for an afternoon of ‘spooktacular’ fun. And if you can’t make the 1st, our pumpkin hunt, will also be operating Sat 25th Oct, Thursday 30th October and Friday 31st October (all 10-1pm), 50p per child.

New Acquisition

Thomas William Wayne 26/06/1879 – 09/02/1959

We have recently acquisitioned the war medals of one Thomas William Wayne including his Boer War medal pictured below; a first for the museum. Thomas Wayne is believed to have been born in Brecon on 26th June 1879. He served in the Boer War and later as an instructor at Brecon Barracks during the first world war. After the war he kept a pub ‘The Drovers Arms’ in Brecon and also ‘The Castle Inn’ in Llangorse. At some point in his life he was a colliery winder as well as a Special Constable. He eventually set up shop as a dairyman in Adam Street Abertillery which later moved to 44 Penybont Road, Abertillery. He died 9th Feb 1959 aged 79 years and is buried at Cwmtillery cemetery. You’ll find his medals on display in our WW1 cabinet near the air raid shelter.

Bakestones or Welshcakes?

What do you call them – Bakestones or Welshcakes? I always call them bakestones unless I am speaking to my English friends who would wonder what on earth I was talking about if I asked them if they would like a bakestone. I have a proper bakestone for making the cakes but it has never worked well on my stoves. My grandmother used a traditional iron griddle but would use stones to lift it above the flames a little – a sort of griddle on legs. I must admit her bakestones/Welshcakes were delicious. Sometimes she made plain ones, extra thick, and would slice them in half when cool and spread jam on them. I don't have her bakestone recipe but I doubt she could have given it to me anyway as she didn't use scales, it was all done by eye and a favourite tablespoon.

I used to make mine in a cast iron pancake pan but the pan was quite small and making a batch took ages so now I use a non-stick frying pan and that seems to work well. Finding a reliable recipe has been a case of trial and error. At one time I used a recipe which included honey – the taste was lovely but they were inclined to burn. Then I tried a friend's 'foolproof' recipe; that didn't work at first. Her recipe specified margarine but as I always normally use butter for baking I substituted butter. Big mistake; I eventually tried her recipe with margarine and the results were much better. More recently I have been using the recipe of a dear friend who died last year – definitely the best recipe yet and I will add it into this article. Her recipe says butter or margarine; I use half and half and it works well. One variation is that because I like ginger, I use less mixed spice and add a teaspoon of ground ginger.

As this is the museum Newsletter, I'd better add a bit of history so here is what my internet searches say about the origins of Welshcakes. They aren't as old as I had expected – they apparently evolved from the plain flatbreads of medieval times using flour and water and sometimes honey. As people became a little more prosperous in the late 19th century it became the practice to add fat, sugar, spices and dried fruits and thus become the Welshcake which is now so familiar to us all.

Here is the recipe I want to share in memory of my dear departed friend:

Gaynor's Welshcakes

Ingredients

1lb SR flour

10oz margarine or butter (or half and half)

6oz sugar

6oz currants

1tsp mixed spice (or less mixed spice and 1tsp ground ginger)

1 egg, lightly beaten

1-2 tbsp milk

Method

Measure out the flour and add the fat, rub in to form a mixture with the texture of breadcrumbs.
Add sugar, currants and spice and stir to mix.
Add the egg and milk (go easy on the milk or it will be too sticky) and mix to form a dough.
Roll out the dough on a floured surface to about 1/4 inch thickness and cut out your cake rounds.
Put a very very small knob of lard in your pan and rub over the surface (just enough to stop the cakes sticking), heat to a low heat, and cook until golden brown and then flip to cook the other side.
Sprinkle with sugar as they come out of the pan.

TIP – take your Welshcake off the heat just before you think it is cooked, it will look a bit soft in the middle but will carry on cooking. Trial and error! Find what suits you best. Try one while it’s still warm, mmm, enjoy!

Jen Price

Corona

Hands up if you remember Corona? No, not the beer but the fizzy pop; mine is up, is yours? My wife had it delivered to her door while growing up in Abertillery in the 60s and 70s. She and her sister got through six bottles of the stuff (orangeade was their favourite) every single week. But it wasn’t recently that I realised it had all started in Wales…

The company was set up in the 1880’s by two grocers named William Thomas and William Evans with a view to cashing in on the non-alcoholic soft drinks market due to the rise of the Temperance Movement in the area and was originally called the Welsh Hills Mineral Water Factory. They originally intended to sell the produce to local pubs however this proved unsuccessful with no interest shown by the pubs so they took to selling it around the houses from the back of a horse and cart, a practise which continued until they became mechanised in the 1930’s and this practise survived until well into the 1980’s when the pop was sold by the local milkman.

As the pop was carbonated they needed a strong bottle to withstand the pressure so turned to a bottle designed in 1872 by an English inventor named Hiram Codd which was filled upside down and sealed by the pressure forcing a glass marble against a seal in the neck. This was known as a Codd Neck Bottle (the smaller of the two pictured here) and the bottles held at the museum have the names Thomas and Evans cast in the glass.

Not many of the bottles with the glass marble remain today as children would smash the bottles to play with the marbles!

In the early 1920’s they decided to expand abroad, to England(!) and, as the name the Welsh Hills Mineral Water Factory would have no meaning to the English, they held a competition to find a new name for the company, the winning name being ‘Corona’, the Latin word for crown, with the label design being 7 bottles fanned out in the shape of a crown.

The factory stayed in production, except for a short break due to the 2nd World War for many years and in 1950 launched a new brand named ‘Tango’ which is still in production today however, the Corona brand ceased production a number of years ago.

The company was eventually sold to the Beecham group in 1958 and the factory was closed in 1987 and was later converted into a music recording studio and art centre and is known as the Pop Factory. Gareth Murphy

October Quiz

What root vegetable was used for Jack ’O lanterns before pumpkins became popular in the UK?
What are baby Hedgehogs called?
The phrase ‘Double, double, toil and trouble’ comes from which Shakespearean play?
What was the name of the first artificial satellite to orbit earth, launched October 1957?
In October 1975 who fought in the ‘Thriller in Manilla’?

PLEASE SUPPORT US

The museum is run by volunteers and entrance is FREE, however we rely on donations and fundraising to stay open.

If you would like to help support the Museum then please:-

Join the Museum Society (annual fee £8 member, £25 Vice President) and receive a FREE hot drink in our café every month and for under 16s we have junior membership at just £4 per year and they can enjoy a free treasure hunt each month.
Join our 100 Club, just £1 per month and the chance to win cash prizes.
Visit our café and while you relax with a cuppa, your children or grandchildren can have fun with one of our treasure hunts for just 50p per child.
Visit the museum and leave a small donation.
Buy a souvenir of your visit from the museum gift shop.
We look forward to your visit!

Oakwood Park

Wales’ Biggest Tourist Attraction

Continuing our look at theme parks, this month is the turn of Oakwood Park which announced in March 2025 that it would not be re-opening, leaving Wales devoid of theme parks. At the height of its success Oakwood ranked in the top ten best theme parks in the UK and billed itself as ‘Coaster Country’…

The park opened in 1987 as a very small affair with just a few attractions such as go-carts, a bob-sleigh ride and assault courses. The car park was a fair distance from the attractions so a narrow gauge railway was used to transport visitors to the action just as Alton Towers uses its monorail to bring guests to the park entrance. The park grew slowly but steadily with Nutty Jake’s Gold Mine ride added in 1988 followed by the Treetops family rollercoaster in 1989 and the ‘Snake River Falls’ ride in 1994 which boosted visitor numbers so significantly it prompted the owners, the McNamara family, to invest in bigger thrill rides.

So, two years later in 1996, amidst much media hype, Megafobia, a huge wooden rollercoaster, opened and for the first time ever visitor numbers exceeded 500,000. Megafobia stood 85 feet tall and had a track length of nearly 3000 feet. It reached speeds of up to 50mph and at one time was ranked the 9th best rollercoaster in the entire world. This ride would be my daughter’s introduction to serious coasters when she rode it in 1997 at the age of 7.

With the launch of Megafobia, the park also launched its ‘After Dark’ event. This involved staying open until 10pm throughout the school summer holiday and visitors could enjoy the rides by night as well as live music and an end-of-night firework and dancing water fountain show before taking the narrow-gauge train back to the car park.

More big rides were to follow including a drop tower, ‘Bounce’, in 1997, a water ride ‘Hydro’ in 1999 and a metal coaster ‘Speed: No Limits’ in 2006. Speed: No Limits had a 97º drop and was the steepest rollercoaster in the UK at that time.

While classed as a theme park, the only ‘themed’ area was Jake’s Town, a wild west town where you could ride a wacky goldmine train, ‘pan for gold’ or rest your feet while enjoying Jake’s puppet music hall. The area was re-themed to New Orleans in 2000 with a new 3D ride called Voodoo Mansion and Nutty Jake’s Goldmine ride re-themed as Brer Rabbit’s Burrow.

But Oakwood was ultimately a summer attraction and the owner, William McNamara, had a vision of a year-round attraction and so, in 2008, Aspro became the new owners of Oakwood and McNamara, together with other partners, founded nearby Bluestone; a resort where its sub-tropical water park can be enjoyed all year, unhindered by the British weather.

But with it came changes for Wales’ biggest tourist attraction; in 2009 Aspro dropped the After Dark event and all entertainment. For me this was the beginning of the end. I last visited the park in 2010 and was disappointed in how run down it was.

It was unrecognisable as the park where my daughter had enjoyed her first BIG coaster ride, where we had enjoyed ‘Dove Dippers’ (ice-cream dunked to order in a vat of liquid galaxy chocolate – heaven on a stick!) And where we had rocked up home at 1am, tired but exhilarated, having stayed to the bitter end of the After Dark event despite having a 100 mile drive home! While Megafobia was still its best attraction that day in 2010, others were in decline with the 3D ride Voodoo Mansion (now re-themed Spooky 3D) having no 3D glasses! And the park clearly had a wasp problem as we spent the day swotting them away.

No visit to Oakwood was ever complete for us without a visit to the Canesten Bowl Centre which was literally next door. Also owned by Oakwood it housed not only ten-pin bowling but the Crystal Maze. Based on the TV gameshow hosted by Richard O’Brian, for around £4 each, visitors could play games in the four ‘zones’ which entailed scrambling through tunnels and swinging on ropes to earn ‘crystals’ each worth 5 seconds of time in the final ‘Crystal Dome’ game. But that day in 2010, we found that it too had closed just a few weeks earlier. A disappointing end to a disappointing day. So while I am sad that Oakwood Park is now gone, I cannot say I’m surprised.

Sally Murphy

Quiz Answers