Welsh Journals

Boyhood Memories of Aberbeeg by Howard Robinson To people driving down the Ebbw Valley, Aberbeeg barely encourages a glance. The new roads carry the vehicles smoothly and efficiently through the village. Yet not so many years ago, it was the epitome of a South Wales valley village. It had everything and deserves to be remembered. First memories of Aberbeeg are of whiteness and the huge snows of 1947. Looking through my bedroom window, I remember my father battling drifts eight feet high to make his way down the 'banking'. We lived in part of a conglomeration of dwellings set into the mountainside and surrounded by rough grass and silver birth. The houses were known in later years as "Peats" houses. Our home was two up and two down, and we had the proverbial blacklead grate and a scrubtop table. The houses are no more. Their remains lie behind and under the huge supporting walls of the new road to Warm Turn. As conditions became worse in '47, the adults' talk was of bread, bread and more bread. The village, to my knowledge, boasted three bakeries. One was situated at Old Woodland Terrace and was called Joe Day's Bakehouse, another at Thomas' shops on the top road from "Lan" (never Llanhilleth to Aberbeeg people), and the other about sixty yards to the south of the present flyover Kibby's bakery. I was sometimes sent to Thomas' shop. Compared to today there was very little traffic and it certainly wasn't as aggressive as it seems today. Certain things I recall about that shop the rows of glass-topped biscuit tins. Biscuits (as many will know, and many will not) were not sold in packets but were weighed on scales, as were most things in the late forties and fifties. I remember the wooden floor liberally strewn with sawdust and the sacks of sugar out of which was scooped the amount required, put into a royal blue paper bag, and weighed. On the way back from my errand, I would call into a little shop opposite the Hanbury Hotel. It was known to everyone as "Uncle Lou's". If I had a halfpenny, which was the usual change from my sixpence-a-day school dinner money, I would buy either a block of sherbert, or an Oxo cube which I would crumble and eat on the way home. Behind Uncle Lou's, which overlooked the packhorse bridge, which happily still exists, there was a barber's shop. Mr Jones looked like the proverbial barber. He never rushed, this master of his craft. He peered over his glasses, carrying out his day's work at a comfortable, enjoyable pace, more akin to the shire horse than to the blustering tractor, and that is the way it was. At the centre of Aberbeeg was the brewery, Webb's Welsh Ales, and, at the front of it, the Hanbury Hotel. In my mind, I was able to use this pub before its "oldness" was ripped out before the brass and copper, and the old smokers' chairs and the mahogany bars were replaced with plastic and polystyrene, Formica and chipboard. The other pub in the village was situated about 150 yards to the north, at the entrance to a small narow side valley called Cwmbeeg Dingle. The meeting of the brook which flows down the dingle and the River Ebbw gives us the name Aberbeeg. The pub was called The Ivorites after a friendly society of the Victorian period. It was demolished to