Tom Hanks writes letter backing rural war museum

You might not expect a Hollywood superstar to take much interest in a tiny museum in a rural part of Wales.

But Tom Hanks - star of films including Forrest Gump, Saving Private Ryan and Big - has written a letter endorsing a mobile Second World War Museum in Meinciau, Carmarthenshire.

Seimon Pugh-Jones began the project with his father, Stephen, to tackle issues surrounding mental health.

"Good fortune with your museum-making," said the letter written by the two-time Oscar winner.

Mr Pugh-Jones, 58, worked on the set of the 1998 blockbuster Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, the 2001 mini-series that Hanks was an executive producer on.

He brought a 1933 clockwork camera - which is his favourite item in his collection -to the Band of Brothers set and was asked to film the sequences, involving actors Dexter Fletcher, Donnie Wahlberg and Michael Fassbender.

He was later told it was so realistic, "Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg have seen the footage and thought it was undiscovered colour footage from the war".

Mr Pugh-Jones became close friends with Alan Tomkins, an Oscar-nominated art director who died in 2020 and left him items in his will, including newspapers clippings about space exploration.

Aware of the Apollo 13 star's past work with Tomkins and his interest in space, Mr Pugh-Jones sent Hanks some of the clippings and a letter about their friend.

"I posted the package off to Tom and a couple of weeks later I got a notification saying the package could not be delivered, it said to tell the recipient to pick it up," he said.

"I thought 'I can't ask Tom Hanks to go and collect a package', so I thought it was lost to the post."

However, last month Mr Pugh-Jones received a letter from Hanks, written on a typewriter.

"The start of the letter reminisces about Alan and his contributions to the film industry, then he wishes me good luck with the mobile museum," Mr Pugh-Jones told BBC Radio Wales Breakfast.

"It's just a very, very nice letter. It's short and full of sentiment."

Mr Pugh-Jones and his dad Stephen, 83, began their museum as a project to improve their mental health just over a year and a half ago.

He said: "Covid, combined with some difficult life experiences, led to a very dark place for me. Almost to a place of no return.

"When Dad had his leg amputated in August of 2021, coming home to care for him did give me a sense of purpose, however I had lost my way regarding my creative side.

"When we decided to create the mobile museum as a winter project and made it public, it forced me to give myself that need to be creative again... and it worked."

The 58-year-old initially wanted to display his paintings of characters from Dylan Thomas' most famous work, Under Milk Wood, and so they bought a trailer and spent six months building.

"One side of it looks like my great grandmother's bakery which she had in 1914, then the other side of it has two double doors which open up in the middle," he said.

When they finished their project, the 80th anniversary of D-Day was closing in and Mr Pugh-Jones thought it was a great time to show off his World War Two memorabilia collection.

A pair of boots from this collection recently featured in Ellen Kuras' Lee, starring Kate Winslet.

The mobile museum works with a community called Men's Sheds on mental health, but also operates as a mobile theatre.

Now the father and son duo are taking their museum to schools and other groups to talk about history.

"People can bring stuff to it, whether its art, photography, theatre or history, all the components are there to move forward in a quirky way," he said.

"It's all about creativity, wellbeing and connecting people.

"The whole idea is promoting mental health and how to take care of it and how to evolve in projects that take the pain away.

"So Michael Sheen if you're listening, give us a call."