Our vision is of a place where local people of all ages can come together, feel part of our community, learn from each other and celebrate our remarkable heritage.

We want to give the Caerphilly Miners back to the community!

Marjorie talked about a few of her holiday jobs.  She enjoyed working in the post office at Christmas.  She also had a job working for an insurance company.  She had to collect a big ledger, collect insurance money from people in the locality, go on a bus with all the money and hand it and the ledger over to the insurance company in Pontypridd.  Her first holiday job was in Butlins – 4 of them shared a bedroom for a month.  Her job was to wheel in the trolleys of food and take it to the people in the dining room.  She also had a job in the Corona Pop Factory in Porth.  She mixed up packets of tea, and worked as a Silver Service waitress to pay for her seaside holiday. 

Jane was a secretary in a life insurance company.  She worked in a department store and in the college of technology.  She also did some teaching.  She very much enjoyed all the jobs she had.  After the children went to school, she went to help out in the local comprehensive in Nottingham for 3 weeks and stayed 9 years.  She also did freelance secretarial work and became a medical secretary in the local hospital and found that she was working all summer and autumn to cover for people who had to take their holidays.

Alan remembers one of his staff changing her hair colour every week.  One week she turned up with her natural brown colour, and when he asked her why, she said she was going to visit her grandmother and didn’t wish to frighten her.

Andy remembered two occasions.  The first was when the band dressed up as Roman soldiers as part of a Roman season of Royal Shakespeare Company.  They used to fill in the time between scenes by going to a pub in Covent Garden where they sold Youngs beer.  One day they got back rather the worse for wear with 5 of them standing against the scenery.  They started swaying and the scenery started swinging behind them and eventually the whole show had to be stopped.  They were all fired. 

The second occasion he was in a show and had to play a couple of bars on the trumpet, once the actor had said ‘Hark I hear a trumpet.  However, he got his timings mixed up and wasn’t there on cue – so the word got around – ‘Hark I might hear a trumpet’.

Jenni had a very tedious job in a factory making transistor radios.  They had to thread twine through two holes at the bottom of what looked like a Lego brick.  Then she got a job in a restaurant – lots of food hygiene issues arose there!  She remembered having to put peas in the eyes of the trout.  When she was 21 she went to work in a bar, and met a young man with dark hair who ended up as her husband. 

Joan remembers working in a hospital laboratory, working on rhesus factors.  There were 4 of them and they had all the different blood groups.  O+, AB, A-, and B.  that’s very unusual.

Katherine remembered being taken on by a typing agency and being sent as a girl Friday to a team of Crown Agents.  Amongst her duties was to man the switchboard.  She couldn’t work out how this machine worked and spent the first day cutting everyone off every time a new call came in.  She also edited all the badly written engineers’ reports and put them into plain English, much to the horror of the authors as they all had to be retyped.  Fortunately, the normal secretary was away for only two weeks and their nightmare came to an end.