This page is just a sample of some of the interesting meetings our members have enjoyed over the past few months.

The Ballerina Brooch - Rachel Macdonald

Rachel’s mother took a brooch given to her by her husband to The Antiques Roadshow, a ballerina whose dress and headress were made of turquoise and diamonds. The expert expressed great interest but wouldn’t give further details at that stage, merely asking to be allowed to do further research. Having taken the brooch to Paris to an expert in the jewellers Cleef and Apel, she concluded that although it was not one of their known range of ballerina brooches, it was probably made by the same craftsman, as they were each allowed to make a copy of a piece of jewellery as long as they did not sell it. Rachel’s family were suddenly thrust into the public eye, but felt they then needed to sell the brooch.

 The Home Front in WW1 - Tesni Bevan

Tesni told us of the inspiration for her novel, Poppies Grow on Broken Ground – a family member who died in the First World War and was never talked of. She described the foundation of the Women’s Institute and the invaluable advice and support given to the women who were left behind when the men went to war, and who had to take over earning a living, food production, work in munitions factories, and nursing in hospitals. They shared the grief of receiving the telegrams, attending the funerals alongside the heavy work of ploughing, hedging, ditching, milking, working machines producing armaments including mustard gas, often in twelve hour shifts. They did get some respite in playing football (which was later banned in 1921) and they did gain a measure of liberty and confidence not enjoyed before.

  200 Years of the Menai Bridge - John Cole

The Eighth Wonder of the World as it was called in 1826. John took us back to the Romans who conquered Anglesey using a pontoon bridge of boats to cross from the mainland. They were followed by the Vikings and then the Normans, and crossing the Strait remained important as a means of accessing Ireland through Holyhead, and for the export from Anglesey of agricultural produce including cattle and pigs which swam across, obviously an unreliable form of transport. From the 1780s there was talk of building a bridge, and finally in 1819 an Act of Parliament authorised construction. Stone was quarried locally and Telford designed one of the first suspension bridges in the world, high enough to allow fully-rigged ships to pass beneath, and markedly cutting journey time from London to Dublin. It opened on 26 January 1826 in the early hours of the morning by the rather reluctant driver of the mail coach. Since that date almost everything has been repaired or replaced except the stone columns.

 Ancient Woodland and Ancient Trees - Brian Palmer

Brian is a volunteer with the Woodland Trust and active on other woodland conservation projects. He took us from the earliest ancient woodland comprising native species, birch, elder, willow, pine, hazel, elm, ash and beech seen on a map of woodland as it would have been in 16000 BC through the advent of agriculture around 4000 BC when 50% of trees were lost as land was cleared, to the present day when only 2% still survives in Wales.  He covered fencing of woodland to protect it from animals as it was more valuable than pasture, coppicing, pollarding, charcoal pits, and sayings which come to us from woodland management like ‘by hook or by crook’ and ‘top dog and underdog’ (in the sawpits), and he showed us where there is still ancient woodland in our area. There is no legal protection for trees as there is for buildings, and bodies like the Woodland Trust and Natural Resources Wales work to conserve what they can.

 Stranger in a strange land - Gill Russell

Gill lived in Japan for a number of years and described to us some of the big differences between life there and life here. The first revelation was immediately on arrival when taking the train from the airport – the trains are never early and never late! Swiftly followed by the discovery that Japanese addresses are given in a very different form which made finding their accommodation difficult. We learnt about the two religious traditions, Buddhist and Shinto, with their many festivals, about the kimono and the significance of its sleeve length, the form of the traditional Torii gates, the blossom and autumn leaf colour celebrations, the writing, and the art of silk painting, origami, wood block prints and calligraphy.

 Bee keeping - John Bowles

John is an enthusiastic bee-keeper who took us through the anatomy and life cycle of bees, and their importance for both honey, but much more importantly for pollination of so many of our food crops. It is estimated that the monetary worth of the work of bees in the UK is about £20 billion, but in the US it is more like $15 trillion, although he criticised the way bees are transported from one monoculture food source to another, rather than belonging to a specific area. We learnt that bees are social insects and the 40-45,000 or so residents of one hive act as one organism each with their own defined role, the queen laying about 2,000 eggs a day. She is genetically the same as the drones, and worker bees, but is fed differently in the first days of life. Truly an amazing species.

 Women of Substance of Upper Bangor - Shan Robinson

Shan is an archivist in the University of Bangor archive, and in her talk drew upon material held in that archive to tell us the stories of a number of important women in the mid to late 19^th and early 20^th centuries who were active socially, culturally, educationally and politically,  both in Bangor and also nationally. She covered for example Winifred Wartski of the jeweller family, Brenda Chamberlain the painter, Gwyneth Vaughan the writer, Mary Silyn Roberts peace campaigner and founder of the WEA in Wales, Mary Rathbone active in local government, Margaret Verney and Dilys Glynne Jones (the first ever to bear the name Dilys), both campaigners for girls’ education, and Charlotte Price White suffragette and also peace campaigner. Powerful women who challenged the norms of their time.

 The Size of Wales Garden - Dan Bristow

Dan took us through the development of his interest in garden design, from his childhood in Sudan where his father worked on re-forestation, through studying graphic design, to working as a gardener. His travels engendered a love of natural landscapes and shapes, and his completely self-taught interest in learning more about plant species, to the point where he began to design gardens. The charity ‘Size of Wales’ works with indigenous and local people to grow trees and to protect two million hectares of tropical forests, an area the size of Wales, and he worked with them to design a garden for the Chelsea Flower Show in the ‘All About Plants’ category, which won the Gold Medal for Best in Category. The project took two years to produce and contains 313 plant species, reflecting the number of tree species that can occur in just one hectare of tropical forest, and following its appearance in Chelsea it was transferred in its entirety to Treborth Botanic Garden.

 The Surrealist Inspiration behind the novel Swimming with Tigers - Kathy Hopewell

Kathy gave us the background to the Surrealist movement pointing out that the part played by women is often largely ignored, because they were seen by the men as important as muses, in the mould of the ‘femme enfante’ personified by Alice in Wonderland, but not as artists themselves. She told us a number of stories of the lives of some of the women artists, Dorothea Tanning, Leonor Fini, Meret Oppenheim and Leonora Carrington, and how she had taken some of these to construct the fictional character of Penelope Furr in Swimming with Tigers, also using the real men as inspiration for other characters.

 Return of the Beaver - Adrian Jones

Adrian is the Welsh Beaver Project Manager at North Wales Wildlife Trust and he began his talk with the Welsh legend of lake-monster Afanc, which was possibly based on beavers. He described the life and characteristics of beavers, native to Britain, their role as a keystone species in the natural world, and how they were hunted almost to extinction by the nineteenth century, for their valuable pelts, and medicinal uses. The dams they build to create deep water for hiding in both clean the water and slow the flow which benefits all kinds of wild life. They only live in certain types of rivers, and only travel a short distance from the river to find the trees they need to build the dams, felling them with their very sharp teeth and dragging them back to the riverbank. They are being re-introduced in Ceredigion.

 Dr Kathleen Carpenter and her fondness for fish - Catherine Duigan

Kathleen Carpenter, born in 1891, was a freshwater ecologist, a graduate of University College Wales, Aberystwyth, who became interested in the pollution of rivers as a result of the industrial revolution, and received funding from the government to return to Aberystwyth to carry out further research. She spent time in the USA and Canada studying similar river problems, latterly as professor at Washington College in the early 1930s, before returning to Britain to lecture at the University of Liverpool. She was another of those active determined women in the early twentieth century who supported the role of women in society as an early prominent woman scientist, as a supporter of the suffragette movement, and who thought way ahead of her time as a campaigner for solutions to problems of conservation.