Annual Members Night

Members Night

The usual practice in Resolven of not organising competing events seems to have been neglected this year since our annual members’ night clashed with the communal carol service at Sardis Chapel, which would normally take place on a Wednesday or Thursday. Yet, this did not affect the attendance with all the laid out seats taken.

The meeting began on a sad note as Chairman Gwyn Thomas made reference to the sad passing of life member Josie Duke. After a minute’s silence, Phylip Jones spoke of her early life and of her contribution to the success of the History Society. In tribute to Josie, Trefor Jones read a poem written by her on “The Village bakery”, from Resolfen Recalled, and followed this by reading an account of “The Joys of Lowland Farming”, which proved that heavy rain and flooding are not new, though a lack of resilience certainly is.

Colin Evans gave the first contribution to the meeting. His topic was Toc H ( see recent article) and after giving a brief background asked for memories from the membership of the Toc H branch which once flourished here. He was rather mischievous in doing this in that the scout master at the time was none other than a certain Phylip Jones, who duly added some detail by stating that he still had some of the log books in his possession.

The second contributor was John Watson. He took the recently closed Clyne School as his topic, since both his wife and mother in law had worked there. He used a booklet from 1996 which had been published to mark the centenary of the school. The booklet held many often comical anecdotes from past staff and pupils regarding life at the school. The practice of farm children jumping on to passing barges at Ynysbyllog  to get to school, 'mitching' and the one armed ‘whipper in’, bad weather and school attendance ( at one time the school had nearly 250 pupils) and visits to the Buffalo Bill Show in Neath.

The remainder of the meeting was taken up by the frivolity of the annual Christmas quiz .The rules are rather different with the aim being to gain the “honour”, of winning a Christmas cracker should three consecutive questions be answered correctly. Quiz-master Trefor Jones had a rather bigger bag of sweets than usual and it took over an hour to place twelve festive hats on the members’ lucky heads. The quiz was punctuated by an interval for mulled wine and minced pies which rather dulled the collective IQ, prolonging the quiz and leading to some very obvious hints from the front. A very good time was had by all.

Chairman Gwyn Thomas thanked everyone who had taken part and wished everyone a happy Christmas and a prosperous new year.

NADOLIG LLAWEN A BLWYDDYN NEWYDD DDA.