Monthly Newsletter
February 2025

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What’s On at The Met

6th Feb 1pm Lunchtime Theatre play ‘Second Thoughts’ from £6

6th Feb 7pm, an evening of music with The Cory Band. Tickets from £10.

7th Feb 7.30pm Supersonic Queen. Prices from £20.

For these and more visit:

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

Tel 01495 533195

Museum Opening Times

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

Thursday to Saturday 10am – 1pm

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

Mr John Cavaciuti

Mrs Margaret Herbert

Mr Ross Leadbeater

Ms Michele Dack

100 Club

This month’s prize numbers were drawn by member Carol Edwards and the lucky winners are:-

No. 57 Paul Pratley £20

No. 34 John Davies £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 club for £4 for the year which will include a free treasure hunt each month.

Christmas Fayre

The number of sweets in the jars were as follows:

Adult’s sweet selection: 134 (winning guess was 139)

Children’s sweet selection: 259 (winning guess 260), and the name of the Teddybear was Jemina! All winners have been notified.

Damp Remediation

Regular visitors will know that the museum has had a problem with damp for many years. Rain has been soaking through the end wall which has caused a damp problem affecting the ladies / accessible toilet and the miner’s kitchen exhibit. As is always the issue these days, finding the money for such repairs is difficult, but I’m pleased to report that Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council, who of course own the building, have now secured funding and work has begun. The work will involve fitting ventilation inside the miner’s kitchen as well as cladding to cover the outside of the pine end wall. This means that we have had to empty and close the miner’s kitchen exhibit for the present. We offer our apologies to any visitors whose enjoyment of the museum is diminished by the ongoing work.

The Eiffel Tower

The Eiffel Tower with its 1710 steps and several lifts, has now been dominating the Paris skyline for 135 years, but perhaps you didn’t know that it was only intended to be a temporary structure and was due to be dismantled in 1909 after standing for just twenty years…

The Eiffel Tower, known locally as La dame de fer, (the Iron Lady) was named after the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company built the tower. Work began on the 330 metre (1083 ft) tower in 1887 and the main structural work was completed at the end of March 1889. It was built as the centrepiece of the 1889 World’s Fair and also to mark 100 years since the French Revolution. The base of the tower is square and measures 125 metres (410 ft) on each side and while 330 metres may not sound very tall on paper, it is equivalent to an 81 storey building!

On 31st March 1889 Gustave Eiffel led a party of officials on a tour of the tower’s three levels. The lifts were still a work in progress so the ascent had to be made on foot and took over an hour to climb with Eiffel stopping at the two lower levels to give a running commentary and for the guests to have a rest no doubt! Not all of the visiting guests made it to the top. The Tower opened to the general public on 15th May 1889, nine days after the opening of the World’s Fair and even then the lifts were still not working; the lifts eventually entered service on 26th May 1889. The tower proved an instant hit with the public making the 1889 World’s Fair the most successful ever. The tower was due to be demolished in 1909 but it was then realised that the top of the tower would be the perfect spot for a radio mast and indeed it proved its worth during world war one. In the second world war, with France occupied by the Germans, Hitler, ordered the tower be pulled down but the French refused and Hitler never enforced the order.

These days the Tower has two restaurants and six lifts. The lifts are by paid ticket only and make it to the top level (level 3) and there is a post office from where you can purchase and send a souvenir postcard. Also on level three is a weather laboratory as well as a secret room where Gustave Eiffel entertained VIP guests and this room is now available for the public to view. Make it to the top and you can also celebrate with a glass of champagne purchased from the Champagne Bar. After dark in 1889, the Tower was lit by hundreds of gas lamps; these days it is lit by over 20,000 electric light bulbs.

In 1991 the Eiffel Tower was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site and today still holds the record for the most visited monument with an entrance charge in the whole world.

All photos shown here are courtesy of Stacey Hopkins and Sarah Murphy who visited the tower in December 2024, and you can see more of their photos, including some videos from level two, on the museum’s Facebook page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower

https://facts.uk/facts-about-the-eiffel-tower/

by Sally Murphy

POSTCODES

We all have one, we all use them but where did they come from and how and when did it all start…?

As far back as early 19th century post towns and county names were used to help delivery of mail and then as it increased a more comprehensive system was needed. To start with Cities like London were just broken into districts based on the points of the compass, and gradually it was adopted across other towns as well as cities. The territory of United Kingdom is broken down into 121 postal areas.

The Alphanumeric code or Postal Address File to give it its official name (PAF) was adopted nationally between October 1959 and 1974 and devised by the Post Master General at the time, Ernest Marples, who trialled the 6 digit codes that we still use today in Norwich as an experiment to see if it could be used to allow sorting by m\chine. An Alphanumeric code was designated to a geographical area to identify a group of addresses or major delivery point to assist with delivery of mail and parcels. Generally the codes start with the first letter of the major town or city that it covers such as B for Birmingham.

London being the capital though covers so large an area it has many versions with the first letter referring to a point on the compass E1, W1, etc. Northern Ireland uses BT for all its areas based on Belfast being the capital city.

Sometimes a combination of smaller towns will be used and postcodes do not generally align with county or local authority boundary lines. The general rule starts with the centre of the town or city as 1...Birmingham city centre is B1, and moving out in rising numbers as the distance from the centre increases. As new houses, towns, villages get developed then new postcodes have to be made and there seems to be no set of rules to explain how they go about this!

Even the British forces overseas have their own postcodes starting BFPO! This is also used now as a virtual postcode to enable service personnel overseas to access online products and services that the rest of us take for granted.

The Christmas mail of 1970 were all stamped at the sorting offices with ‘Remember to use the Post Code’ and in 1971 people started getting letters with their postcode reminders to share out to all correspondents.

Now the postcode is used for so many other things as well as postal deliveries such as designated destinations in route planning, SatNav systems, insurance calculations, to name just two areas used. Today more than 37,000 businesses plus over 64 million British residents rely on PAF every day.

Consignia, the former mail sorters, says postcode mail can be sorted 20 times faster and much more accurately than by hand. Modern machines use the latest technology to read postcodes then convert it to a barcode, print it on the envelope for automatic sorting. They say that valuable or lost items that have postcodes are much easier to return to owners.

Our local postcode of NP refers to the city of Newport, However originally the postcode was NPT and, as the areas grew, it evolved to NP1, NP2 etc. The structure is variable in length from six to eight characters, each postcode is divided into two parts by space giving an outward code and inward code. The outward code corresponds to the postcode area and postcode district while the inward code generally represents a street or group of properties. This is why when we need to give our address to a business, fill in a form online, etc all that is needed is our postcode and house number or name – the rest will be automatically generated!

Quick Quiz

What happened in Britain on 15th February 1971?
In a Leap year February always starts with the same day of the week as which other month?
What popular tradition is celebrated in US and Canada on February 2nd – also the title of a film from 1993?
In the sporting calendar what usually happens on 1st Sunday in February?
What is the birthstone for February?
The month of February is named after the Latin term Februum...which means what?

(answers below)

Property Fraud

If you have been watching BBC’s Rip off Britain recently, you will have seen the shocking case of the man who nearly had his house stolen! His house was just days away from being sold at auction without his knowledge but fortunately, the gentleman’s daughter was an estate agent and it was she who spotted her father’s house (where he was still living I hasten to add) was about to go under the hammer.

A quick search by the daughter with Land Registry revealed that, shockingly, her father was no longer the legal owner of his home and she was able to alert her father who in turn contacted a solicitor who was able to stop the sale. Others have not been so lucky and have returned home to find that someone else is now the new ‘legal’ owner having bought the house in good faith. So who is at risk of this type of fraud and what can you do to protect yourself?

Fraudsters are looking for properties that are mortgage free; in other words, owned outright and preferably empty though, as mentioned in the case above, living in the property does not mean you are entirely safe. These days the deeds to a property are kept digitally at Land Registry and to change the Registry entry is quite simple if you can prove ownership.

So to steal your home, a thief must first steal your identity. The gentleman in the case above had an external letterbox at the end of the garden which made it easy for the thief to steal his mail. Then, armed with information obtained from the stolen mail, the fraudster was able to convince a solicitor that he was the owner of said house and wanted the ownership transferred.

Once the Land Registry Title had been changed, the thief was then able to put the house on the market. Had the sale gone through, the house would then have been registered again, this time with the purchasers details at Land Registry and the true owner would be none the wiser until I guess the ‘new’ owner turned up expecting to move in.

But there are things you can do to protect yourself from this type of fraud. Firstly, it is far safer to have a letterbox in the door than an external one and secondly and most importantly, sign up to the governments FREE Property Alert Service using the link at the end of this article. It is absolutely free and you will be alerted if anyone applies for a search on your property. And if you’re not ‘on-line’ then sign up by telephone on 0300 0060478. Do it today.

https://propertyalert.landregistry.gov.uk/

The episode of Rip Off Britain featuring this story is episode 28 of series of 16 and is available to watch on BBC iPlayer using the link below:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0025f5k

Forgotten Child Trust Funds

If you are one of the 6 million children born between 1st September 2002 and 2nd January 2011 then you would have been given £250 by the UK government of the day.

It was given in the form of a voucher which a parent or guardian could then use to open an account for the child which could not be accessed until the child turned 18 though it could be managed by the individual from the age of 16. The account, which could be added to by the parents or guardian at any time, would earn interest and would hopefully amount to a decent sum come the child’s coming of age.

It is estimated that there are over 700,000 children who have now reached 18 years of age but who have not accessed their account probably because he/she is unaware of its existence or was aware of it but has since forgotten about it. These unclaimed accounts are thought to be worth around £2000 on average thanks to additional contributions from relatives over the years and collectively are worth around £1.4billion.

In addition there are around half a million vouchers that were issued to parents who took no action to set up an account for their child and these are now worth over £500m alone. If you think you may be one of those who has a ‘lost’ account or you know someone who might not be aware they have a child trust fund, then the following link may help:

https://www.gov.uk/child-trust-funds/find-a-child-trust-fund

And there’s more information here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjr82gejlxno

Quiz Answers