Eighty years ago, Ann Pinkey, Veronica Mahoney and John Cunningham were classmates in Our Lady of the Angels RC Primary School.
The three friends are all 84, and last Friday they were guests at a party in the parish hall in Old Cwmbran to celebrate the school’s 100th birthday.
Veronica said: “It’s been a wonderful day. I taught in Our Lady’s for 40 years. I was a child here, left when I was 11 because I passed the 11-plus, and I went to grammar school and then I went on.
“And then in 1961 I came back as a teacher and left in 2000, so I know the school very well and it is a lovely school.
“It was brilliant [the show]. The children were lovely. It was a good way to do it.”
John, who stood down as Torfaen’s longest-serving councillor in 2017 after 40 years, joked: “It’d only been open 20 years when we got here. I know I don’t look old, but there we are.
‘Cwmbran Celtic’
“This is the existing hall that was built by the unemployed Catholic members of the parish and they built it together. And they formed a football team, called Cwmbran Celtic. And you had to be unemployed to be a member of it. There’s a picture in the Celtic [Club on Oak Street] of the actual team, and my father is on there, two uncles are on there, all team members, all participating in the building of this hall.
“I think I remember most of the headteachers except one. One I remember was related to my father, my father’s cousin and her name was Stella Reardon, an Irish red-headed woman. She didn’t do me any favours, although we were related.
“Strangely enough, the first headmistress of the school owned the Star pub in Star Street, which they converted into two cottages, and we as a family had one of those cottages.
“Cwmbran linked in with everybody, didn’t they
‘Father Daniel [Parish Priest: Fr. Daniel Stanton] says to me ‘you must be related to everybody in Cwmbran?’. In the old Cwmbran, we were, I suppose, by marriage or whatever.”