I visited our friend in Cwmbran on her birthday on Saturday and also celebrating the meal was another friend from Chepstow who brought me a copy of your Forest of Dean and Wye Valley Review for February 4. She knew that I had served at the RNPF many years ago and thought I would be interested in the article on page18.

I was transferred from the Royal Naval Cordite Factory, Holton Heath, Poole in 1955 to join the Naval Ordnance Inspection Laboratory attached to the RNPF. I spent my first two years living in the 'Welfare Centre' at Caerwent and on its closure went into digs in Newport and eventually met my wife in Newport and we were married at Christchurch in 1960 and moved to our first house in Maindee.

I served at NOIL till 1966 when talks of the factory closure were about and in September that year returned to Holton Heath where the Admiralty Materials Laboratory had been set up on the former RNCF site.

Four of us employed in the various laboratories on site attended Newport Technical College and later Cardiff Tech to further our Chemistry studies. I have kept in touch with two of them – Phil Cole, of Caldicot, and Gerald Robbins, of Rogiet, now and then. I lost contact with John Rowlands the fourth of our gang.

We experienced the very cold weather in 1963 when our house froze up and many people failed to get to work for some days and also the first crossings of the first Severn Bridge (2/6d) and last trips of the Beachley Ferry on my trips from Newport to Dorset when arranging accommodation back in the south.

I would be interested to visit the site when the open day is planned.

Another member of my family, an uncle Arthur England, was one of the first people to come to the site, also transferred from Holton Heath, working in Crick House as the chief mechanical engineer's clerk while the factory was being built. I have a photograph of him when a member of the Home Guard battalion at the factory.

– John England, Wareham, Dorset.