Connections

Connections: Members’ Night 2012

December is the month of Christmas and it is also the month of our annual members’ night. This year the theme of this traditionally relaxed meeting was that of “connections”.

John Viriamu Jones

The Secretary, Trefor Jones began the meeting by looking at connections in his life with historical characters. This involved a whimsical tale of how he assumed that he had won a prize at college named after the daughter of John Viriamu Jones, the acclaimed polymath and first principal of University College, Cardiff. It appeared after much research that this was not so, and Amanda Jones was actually a much humbler individual.

This was followed by the contribution of David Woosnam, who showed that he did have a real claim to a historical connection. It appears that as a young boy in war ravaged London he suffered from a stammer. The person who treated him for the problem was none other than Lionel Logue, who sped to fame as the speech therapist of George VI in the 2010 film “The  King’s Speech”.

The film - "The King's Speech".

Mr Glyn Davies, who is shortly to publish a book on the history of Resolfen then gave an impromptu seminar on the connections of a collection of photographs with Resolven. The Society is also very grateful to Glyn for the donation of some 360 additional photographs for the Society archive.

The next series of connections involved a contribution of Mr Gwyn Thomas to the meeting on the subject of the game of quoits. Mr Thomas explained that his home village of Banwen had preserved an old quoits pitch near the site of the previous Pantyddraenen Arms. The game, which had originated from throwing horseshoes had once been extremely popular in the area and had now died out. It was great to see Gwyn back on form after a long illness.

                                    The game of quoits 

The meeting finished with the now customary festive quiz.  Luckily, the mulled wine and minced pies were served at the end of the meeting since the members proved at times to be totally incapable of making any connection between question and answer.

The Society now looks forward to its Christmas trip on Saturday 15th December to Bryngarw House, Maesteg.

 The next meeting is on Monday, January 14th when we look forward to the annual contribution of our President Mr Phylip Jones