Casgliadau Arlein
Amgueddfa Cymru
Chwilio Uwch
Recordiad sain / Audio recording: Armando Cugno
Oral history recording with Armando Cugno. Recorded as part of the Italian Memories in Wales project (2008-10), delivered by ACLI-ENAIP and funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
00:00:01 Armando Cugno was born on the 30th October 1926 in Melilli; a small town near Siracusa in Sicily. When the interviewer asks Armando to talk about his family background, he responds that he only knew his paternal grandmother and that his father died when Armando was only five years old. He started work at the age of nine and his boss only gave him a piece of bread for lunch. He slept in a trough full of fleas. He had no shoes so he was forced to make them out of cotton and motorcycle tyres. He also remembers the sacrifices his mother made for the family; she would work as a cleaner for other families. Armando studied until the third year of primary school, he got his certificate from year five at twenty years of age. Years went by and then one day, as he was passing the employment office, Armando realised that they that they were looking for people to emigrate to other cities in the world for work. During the Second World War he knew an English soldier and so he decided to immigrate to Great Britain and worked in a tinplate factory in Luton. After having worked for this company he transferred to a tinplate factory in Wales.
00:06:44 Ultimately he went to work for British Telecom as a security guard for thirteen years. At the age of sixty-five he retired. The President of the Italy Republic awarded him with a maestro del Lavoro at the Italian Embassy in London, followed by a letter from Margaret Thatcher. When the interviewer asks Armando why he chose to move to Wales he notes that he chose to go to Great Britain, he didn’t know that Wales existed. Armando is now the only one left of his ten siblings still alive. Armando married in 1956 and in 1957 he brought his mother over to Wales, who spent her last years in Wales.
00:20:43 He continues to talk about his work on the land in Sicily; his boss didn’t treat him well, ‘You were nothing to him’ he says. He had to look after the cows seven days a week and sleep in the trough. He also has vivid memories of the war, when the British bombed Sicily him and his family hid in caves to protect themselves which nearly destroyed his town to the ground.