Autumn Tour 1995 - Swansea, 27-29th October
And so it was that Swansea (or more accurately, Neath) became the unfortunate town to be selected for the descent of the Welsh Colleges Society on their 1995 Autumn tour.
The weekend started with a successful quarter peal of 4 spliced on Friday afternoon at Swansea's St Mary's tower. Then following a jaunt around the impressively renovated Swansea docks, the first real test of the tour began - finding our accomodation for the weekend - the scout headquarters in Neath. Some hour or so later and after a number of mobile phone communications with various members of the society all drviing around different parts of Neath in the search for the hall, we duly arrived at the sauid premises.
As is usual, the meeting point on Friday night was the local alehouse, the landlord of which appeared to be equally taken aback by the quantity of people descending upon him on Friday night, as with their ability to quash reasonable quantities of his real ale. In fact so great was the society's ability to quench a thirst that the pub was drunk dry of a number of their best brews. Also, so good was the ale, that a number of our Cardiff members enjoyed the beer several times over (Karen and Mark should know what I mean!)
Saturday dawned (or didn't in some cases) all to quickly and we were off to the first ring. Towers visited during the day included Sketty, Gorseinon, Swansea St Mary, Neath, Baglon and Aberavon. Ringing proved to be of a very reasonable standard and a good variety of methods were rung during the course of the day, including that old favourite - original. The day progressed smoothly with no hitches - just what we have come to expect wit the very efficient Karen being in her second term of office.
Saturday evening, (well Sunday morning really), proved unusual for a couple of reasons; firstly, during the early hours of Sunday morning , three of our keener members completed a handbell quarter peal. Nothing too remarkable in that I hear you say (except that it is for WC tours), but to preserve the quiet in the main hall (since this was rung at 2am), the venue was the Gent' toilet!
Our second event of the night occured at 4am when we were visited by the local constabulary. The diligent officers were somewhat surprised when they looked through a window into the second (small) hall to find a body sleeping there. This was nothing compared to their surprise when they came round to the main hall and saw 30 or so bodies in the land of nod. Fortunately the whole incident was tactfully handled by our John Nicholls, so much so, that the majority of members were totally unaware of our early morning visit!
Sunday saw us ringing for morning services at a number of local towers, before migrating to Cardiff for lunch and to ring for Evensong at Llandaff Cathedral.
All good things must come to an end, and everybody then dispersed to their various corners of the country. It was particularly good to see so many new faces on the tour with students from Cardiff, Aberystwyth and Swansea universities joining us for the first time - we hope you all enjoyed yourselves and look forward to seeing you on the next Welsh Colleges extravaganza - the annual dinner on 17th Feb 96. Many thanks to all those who worked so hard to make the weekend enjoyable, particularly Pat, Karen and the catering officers.
