About Me

Welcome to my site!

My name is Graham George Bennett.
I have been collecting artifacts since I was a child, I have always been fascinated by their history, the object and the story of its existence is like a window into the past. With the artifacts section I have tried to gather bits of everyday life that mattered to every different culture around the globe and to offer an insight into their way of life with the little things that they cherished. I have given some information behind each item and hope it helps to explain how they evolved.

With the fossils section I have brought together a wide sample of just about everything with a bit of information on every piece, I was very lucky in childhood to be born and brought up on the side of a mountain in South Wales, my home had an old coal level behind it and I had that and the mountain as a playground. We would dig for fossils and find old artifacts, my first find was a little pewter figurine of a Mermaid close to the entrance of one of the levels, (I still have the little ornament today) and the collecting bug stuck with me ever since. My fossil collection is not meant to be a concise A to Z data-base on fossil collecting just a wide-ranging glimpse of the early life forms from all over the world..

I later started work in the Rose Heyworth Colliery, Abertillery and experienced life below ground and to be part of the mining community.

When the collieries closed I didn’t want that part of life that was embedded into all miners to be forgotten. For the past 45 years I have worked hard collecting mining items, cleaning and restoring them and bringing them back to life and since the colliery closed, to keep their usage in the memory of those who used them on a daily basis and to anyone who would like to learn of their mining past.

Lastly, I have always liked the pop group The Electric Light Orchestra, E.L.O. While I was courting and starting work in the collieries this group was part of my life musically. The first record that I remember having heard was the LP “Showdown”, I borrowed “Telephone Line” and played it to death, the first record I purchased as as my own was the single “Turn To Stone”. I then had a goal to collect all their records, that was 47 years ago and the interest is still just as strong today, just as strong on all aspects of collecting really.

The E.L.O. collection is not complete and I doubt it will ever be, although it’s getting there.

Artifacts or Artefacts.
Finally, I added “artifacts” as opposed to artefacts as the former is the old spelling of the word which had been in existence for many years, artefacts with an “e” is a new word and used in its place only since 1979. So, it’s not a miss-spelling, it is the old original spelling of the word which I prefer.

If anyone has any questions on any part of this site please email any queries.

Thank you for looking.

ALL IMAGES OF MY COLLECTIONS ARE COPYRIGHT TO MYSELF. 

THE INFORMATION FEATURED ON THE SITE HAS BEEN PAINSTAKINGLY RESEARCHED AND WAS PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN AND WILL NOT BE FOUND ANYWHERE ELSE ON THE INTERNET, MUSEUMS OR IN PRIVATE COLLECTIONS ETC.