Museums

In 2022, a couple of years before my years of working at the chalkface came to its blessed end my school held a craft fair in an evening during the summer term. I was offered a stall and I sold a couple of paintings and a couple of prints. Lovely jubbly, thank you very much. Now one of the stallholders came up and invited me to take a stall in another craft fair, nothing to do with the school, being held in a couple of weeks in Neath. I had to take out some public liability insurance, and this meant that I was going to need to sell more pictures than I’d sold in the school to make any kind of profit. But hey, she told me, it was being held in a much bigger venue, for longer, all day rather than a couple of hours in an evening and it was being well advertised, locally.

Well, it was certainly a bigger venue and there were more stallholders. I don’t know how well it had been advertised, though, because there was hardly anybody there all day. I sold precisely nowt. Adding insult to injury the organisers came round asking stallholders for donations to charity. I replied that I would gladly make a donation as soon as I broke even for the day, knowing full well that this was unlikely to happen.

The only good thing about the day was that it did enable me to meet and start to get to know a real-life costumed hero. Captain Beany. If you don’t know about the captain, it’s probably a safe bet to say that you don’t come from Port Talbot or the local area, or you haven’t lived there for a long time, or you don’t visit it a great deal. We’ve all heard of national treasures. Well, Captain Beany is a Port Talbot local treasure. By his own efforts, he has become something of a legend.

Which is not something I would have predicted 40 years ago. I moved to Port Talbot on Friday 12^th September 1986, having got married on the 10^th. On the 15^th I started the primary school observation stage of my PGCE teaching certificate. Quite a week. One item of local news that same weekend was an eccentric gentleman called Barry Kirk and his attempt to break the world record for sitting in a bathful of beans. He succeeded too, as I recall, and from then on he and his alter ego Captain Beany from the Planet Beanus would become a fact of life in Port Talbot that just was not going to go away. Beany legally changed his name by deed poll to Captain Beany in 1991. Over the years he has raised tens of thousands of pounds for charities and good causes in the area.

In 2009, Beany opened his Baked Bean Museum of Excellence in his own council flat. It was opened by TV’s Danny Wallace, who featured it in one of his TV shows. Hunter Davies, the man who wrote the official biography of the Beatles, visited and wrote about it. At one stage it was Trip Advisor’s most popular attraction in Port Talbot. Beany invited me to visit, but I never quite got my act together to do this before the museum closed in 2023, when the council sent Tai Tarian in to renovate the flats.

I love museums. Whenever I’m off on a trip somewhere one of the first thing I do is google to see what museums are there. But somehow I seem to have missed out on a lot of the strange museums you can find in different places, even when it would have taken little or no effort to get there, like Beany’s. Just off the top of my head, I missed out on the Devil Museum in Kaunas when I visited in 2018. That wasn’t strictly my fault, having said that. It was Easter time, but Spring had come later in the Batlic than it did in the UK that year, and it was bitterly cold for most of the time I was there, and like an awful lot of places, the museum was closed when I went.

Then there was Reykjavik’s Phallological Museum. Yes, that word Phallological does mean what you think it means. Sorry, but I just didn’t fancy popping in when I had so much else to do and see in my short time in Iceland. My daughter and son-in-law went to Reykjavik the same year. My daughter gave it a miss, but James, my son in law did have a look. When I asked him about it he said, ”I found it quite interesting . . . even if it was just a load of willies.” There you go.

I mention all of this chaff because I took a long weekend on leave from work last week and made a visit to the Helicopter Museum in Weston Super Mare. It was one of a few museums I’ve never visited that I think would make a nice trip in a single day. The Helicopter Museum won out because it is closest to my home and is home to the few remaining bits of the Fairey Rotodyne. The Fairey Rotodyne was one of a number of aviation initiatives post war Britain came up with and somehow managed to make the least of. Basically the Rotodyne combined a rotor that was powered by jets on the tips of the blades during take off and landing, but spun free like an autogyro during level flight. It performed very well in tests, but there were concerns over the noise the jets made during take off and landing, and only one prototype was built then the government pulled the plug before any orders were received. I’ve become a little obsessed with it I suppose and even painted it a couple of weeks ago.

The other museums on the list? Well, I would really like to go to the Hovercraft Museum in Lee on Solent and have long meant to visit the Tank Museum in Bovington. Which sets me wondering, is there any mechanical means of transport that there is NOT a museum dedicated to in the UK? Did you know that there is a Lambretta scooter museum in Weston Super Mare? No, me neither or I might well have been tempted to make it part of a double header when I went to Weston last week. The National Cycle Museum is in Llandrindod Wells, a place well worth a visit in it’s own right. Amazingly , there is even a Bubblecar Museum! It’s in Lincolnshire, near Boston. Now that’s too far for a day trip for me, but it’s a definite addition to my must-see list. Sorry, but I absolutely love the Isetta, Messerschmidt and Heinkel bubblecars. Should I ever win the lottery – highly unlikely since I never buy a ticket – I want one of each.

Entrepreneurs might note that there is not yet a Segway Museum nor a Space Hopper Museum, so it Is still possible to get in on the ground floor with those.