Page 33 - LOTN Advent issue 57

FAITH AND CULTURE

Deacon John's

Autumn

Reflection

1900’s railway station
large collection of artefacts, working vehicles and equipment,
which includes working trams and double decker busses from
the period, as well as a range of livestock, and a volunteer force
of approximately 250 people, many of whom wear period
costumes during visiting times.
It covers the period from 1820 to the 1950s, and the exhibition
sites include a 1900s colliery and pit village, a 1900s town and
railway station and two separate farms: one set in the 1940s
and the other from the 1950s, and finally a 1950s new town.
You could walk, or jump on a bus or tram to get you around
the various museum sites. Many of the sites brought back
memories of my early childhood, especially the rural aspects of
the museum, as well as the town and the railway station.
few weeks ago we had a weekend break in
Durham, the county town of County Durham, My earliest memories are from the very beginning of the
which is in the North East of England. The 1950s - living in a small village called Llanarth in the depths
A tre piece of the city is Durham Cathedral, of rural Monmouthshire in South Wales. The nearest town
cen
a magnificent building built by the Normans between 1093 was Abergavenny, and quite some way from the larger town of
and 1133 following their conquest of England in 1066. The Newport. After being "demobbed" from the army in 1946, Dad
Cathedral houses the shrine and tomb of St Cuthbert and had obtained a job as a handyman/chauffeur at a boarding school
the tomb of the Venerable Bede. in the village, and we lived in a semi detached bungalow called
Plas Ivor, on the school estate. To begin with things were very
basic. There was no electricity, but there was running water and
an indoor loo, which was quite uncommon out in the country
at that time. Before electricity was connected to the houses on
the estate, cooking was done on a fire grate made of cast iron,
which had three ovens built into it. To boil a kettle, the kettle
had to sit on a steel shelf directly in front of the fire. Mum used
the same shelf to heat an iron on, so she could iron the clothes
after they were dry from the weekly wash. Eventually, electricity

Looking across the valley to the Pit Village

While we were there we visited the Beamish Museum, a
regional, open air museum near the village of Stanley in County
Durham. The museum's guiding principle: "is to preserve an
example of rural England at the climax of industrialisation in the
early 20th century." The museum covers an area of 350 acres,
(140 hectares) and includes original and replica buildings - a Plas Ivor ca. 1950

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