We continue our serialisation of the memories of Merthyr in the 1830’s by an un-named correspondent to the Merthyr Express, courtesy of Michael Donovan.
After Mawdesley left Dowlais, Mr Dodd came to the Ivor Works. He had previously been at engineering works in or near Glasgow, and it was then intended to make superior things. He brought some foremen with him from Scotland: one Mr Wm. Kemp stayed on, but the foreman fitter did not, and after his term of engagement was up Mr Dodd himself returned.
Lady Charlotte Guest. Photo courtesy of Cyfarthfa Castle Museum & Art Gallery
If able I should like to describe what can even now be very vividly remembered. It is a party of gentlemen and a lady: the lady was Lady Charlotte, the others Sir John, Mr E J Hutchins (his nephew), one whose name is forgotten now, and Mr Edward Divett. They were walking across the yard, and went into Dowlais House altogether. Mr Divett was the M.P. for Exeter. Mr Hutchins afterwards became member for Lymington. I almost think Kitson, the private secretary, was also of the party.
Why was such a thing impressed upon me? I will tell you. I had on a suit of fustian, and up to a short time previously had only consorted with broad cloth. I felt my position. I was a workman. David Davies was the foreman pattern maker; John Lewis, the foreman fitter; and John Price the foreman smith. Guess my surprise upon one occasion by being asked to give the equation of a curve of the second order by the owner of a brawny arm named David Jones. It was given him.
We youngsters were in the habit of giving each other mathematical questions. Alas, I think all are gone. H V Trump, who died a few years ago at Rhymney, was one; Wm. Llewellyn (who went to America) another; and Josiah Richards (a cousin), not of the same name, the brother of Windsor, a third. There was one workman in the fitting shop named Thomas Wheatley, the best handicraftsman ever met with. He was also the highest wageman, but his pay did not appear correct on the ticket. To avoid it being known he used to go to the office at stated times for the difference.
Dickenson, who became the chief Government inspector of mines was an underground surveyor. He married one of Mr Thomas Evans’ daughters. Thomas Evans’ son, Thomas, also became an inspector of mines. Shortly after his appointment an action was brought against the Dowlais Company for non-compliance with the Act of Parliament, and many experts were enraged. This “battle of the gauges” will be found pretty fully stated in the book of colliery law, written by the late John Coke Fowler., who was the stipendiary magistrate before whom it was brought.
Edward Williams began his career in iron making in Dowlais, and he was there with Menelaus, and some others can be remembered, but they must pass at the moment.
We continue our serialisation of the memories of Merthyr in the 1830’s by an un-named correspondent to the Merthyr Express, courtesy of Michael Donovan.
George Thomas Clark by Henry Wyndham Phillips. Courtesy of Cyfarthfa Castle Museum and Art Gallery
Without being positive, it was early in the forties Mr George Thomas Clark can be first recalled at Dowlais. It was an open secret that he was not very acceptable to the Evanses, but a thunder-clap broke, and was stated that Thomas [Evans] was going away; that he was in fact going to Rhymney. His salary was £1,000 a year at Dowlais, but was to be £1,500 at Rhymney, with residence, and the other usual agent’s privileges. No doubt he would have gone had not Mr Clark left, and his salary increased to the Rhymney rate. The Dowlais Company had also to pay £800 for expenses the Rhymney Company had gone to in preparing a residence for him. This is proof of the value Sir John set on Mr T Evans’ services. He died, and Mr Clark afterwards became supreme at Dowlais.
It is thought appropriate to give some things that reflect that honour. Dowlais was ever progressive. There was neither lack of capital or skill. One consulting man engaged was Rastrick of Birmingham. When the drift into the coal was made at the back of the blast furnace yard, Rastrick designed a pair of winding engines the like of which is unknown. They were of the vibrating kind, moving upon trunnions at the bottom of the cylinders, with winding gear above.
The engines were made at the Neath Abbey Works, fixed and started, but some old and opinionated persons whispered, “Oh it will never do”. “Then I’ll put another” said Sir John. It did work, however, for years, but alas, as other things also, it did not get the attention it ought to have had, and with the alteration in the working of minerals it was disused.
Somewhere in 1838 or ’39 Mr John Russell, the doctor, was leaving, and in order to get the best man to succeed him, Sir John asked his London physician to visit Dowlais so as to learn the real condition of things in order to select the most suitable man he knew of. John L White was the only one selected, but Mawdesly (who has already been mentioned as the engineer of the Ivor Works) was ill, and was sent for to Dowlais House. The physician examined him and strongly recommended Mawdesly’ wintering in Madeira.
Some four days after, Sir John spoke to him about it, and Mawdesly frankly said it was beyond his means. “Don’t let that stand in the way; you shall go is you would like to” was told him to his comfort and the everlasting credit of Sir John. Returning is the spring better, he soon found himself falling back, and Sir John sent him for another winter to Funchal. Not much benefitted, he returned in 1841, and after a while left, first for Southport, his native place, and, going to Wolverton for a while, passed away there.
Following on from the recent article about Gwaunfarren House (https://www.merthyr-history.com/?p=8282), here is a pictorial look at just ten of the magnificent ‘grand’ houses that we once had in Merthyr, but have been swept away by ‘progress’.
Firstly, the aforementioned Gwaunfarren House…
The home of the Guest family – Dowlais House…
The home of the Homfray family, Penydarren House….
The home of the Crawshay family (pre-Cyfarthfa Castle), Gwaelodygarth House….
Gwaelodygarth Fach…
Sandbrook House, Thomastown…
Gwernllwyn House, Dowlais…
Vaynor House…
Ynysowen House, Merthyr Vale…
Bargoed House, Treharris…
All photos courtesy of the Alan George Archive.
If anyone has any more information or any memories of any of these houses, please get in touch. Also, if anyone has any photos of other lost houses or landmarks in Merthyr, please let me know.
We continue our serialisation of the memories of Merthyr in the 1830’s by an un-named correspondent to the Merthyr Express, courtesy of Michael Donovan.
After Dowlais House there was, I think, a house, but it was enlarged for Mr George Martin, who lived there some years after. Then came the surgery, and the entrance to the furnace yard beyond. The railroad for bringing the limestone from the quarries crossed the turnpike here, and cottages continued for some distance on the road to Rhymney.
The road to the Ivor Works runs alongside the old limestone road, and just on the corner is the residence of Mr E. P. Martin, his brother, Mr H. W. Martin, occupying the smaller one adjoining.
An extract from the 1851 Ordnance Survey Map showing the two houses in question.
The first was built for Mr John Evans, and occupied for some years by him, but Mr Joseph Lamphier, who occupied the smaller, moved to Cwmavon, and both he and his sister (for he was a bachelor) rest in a grave there. My first visit to Mr John Evans’ house was when he resided at Gwernllwyn Isaf. His brother, Thomas, lived near, and also the rector, Rev Thomas Jenkins. There was also a school there – small, very small in comparison with the present, but there it was.
A short way further, and the Ivor Works are come to, but a road crosses leading up to the houses behind the works. These were built just after the starting of the works in ’33 or ’39, and several of them were the quarters of the military stationed there after the Chartist Riot at Newport. The captain had been abroad, and brought a coloured nursemaid back. This girl was was an object of curiosity to the tip girls, and, they being so much so, took an opportunity of inspecting if that was actually the colour of her skin beneath her clothes.
Instead of turning to the right, if we turned left we should be on the continuation of the road which is mentioned as turning up the side of the Dowlais Inn. Proceeding along this, we come to the stables on one side and the Market House on the other. The church is a short distance further on the same side as the stables.
An extract from an the 1851 Ordnance Survey Map showing the area in question
With the introduction of the railways, no doubt there has been some improvement, but the impression yet existing is that there is more squalor – perhaps less care for appearances. That some feeling of this kind did exist is shown by what was done when a great personage was there.
There was a large order for rails in the market, and the high position of the firm stood them in good stead. To understand my meaning, it is proper to state the town residence of Sir John Guest (8 Spring Gardens) was celebrated; it was here the episode of the balance-sheet took place as described in Roebuck’s “History of the Whigs”. The order was secured, and a Russian prince was coming to see the works. Between the entrance to the works, opposite the Bush and Dowlais House, on the left side of the road going up, were a lot of cottages. They were somewhat above the average at that time, but the gardens in front were not tidy, so Mawdesley, the engineer of the Ivor Works, was called on to design and erect an iron railing which was done.
In 1868 an epidemic of Typhoid and Typhus Fever started in Dowlais in 1868, and spread to Merthyr by April 1869.
Merthyr Guardian – 11 July 1868
The living conditions were poor; many houses were small and overcrowded, with no proper ventilation, having windows that could not be opened. One Dowlais family consisting of a mother and four children suffering from Typhus Fever were nursed in a bedroom that measured eleven- by seven-foot. Many were without proper toilet facilities, and others sharing facilities with three or four other families. The practice of throwing waste matter onto the road was still undertaken, thus polluting the vicinity, and many were fined for continuing to do so.
Fifty-three people died by the end of March; the reported cases of the diseases reached 360, during this epidemic, three of the four nurses employed and a doctor died after contracting the disease.
The Local Board of Health, under Section 37 of the Sanitary Act 1866, had the power to provide hospitals or temporary places for the reception of the sick, but not places for the admittance of people not affected by the disease. It was hoped that once they had provided a place for the sick to be nursed, the people that had been in contact with them could remain in their homes, if a policy was adopted of cleaning, whitewashing and disinfecting the houses from which the sick were removed.
The Board of Health decided that they had to open a hospital to stem the spread of the disease and try to relieve the appalling suffering of the local people. At first it was decided that a large tent would be ideal for the purpose, a committee member pointing out that tents had been well used by troops for years, but another member added that he knew where a building, or part of one, could be obtained for £1,000.
It was decided to go ahead with the purchase, and appoint carpenters for the erection of the buildings on the chosen site at Pantyscallog. Chris James, the farmer who owned the land, had a reduction of 10s per year on his land for releasing it through the Dowlais Iron Company for the hospital.
A map from the 1800s showing the site of the Pant (Dowlais) Fever Hospital
It was clear that the cases of Typhoid and Typhus fever should not be mixed – it was necessary to have separate hospitals for these diseases, and these again were sub-divided into male and female wards. Suitable rooms were erected as a kitchen and wash-house, and placed between the two hospitals to be used by both. To prevent trespassing on the adjoining grassland, fencing of post and rail was erected.
After the foundation was finished, the building took just four weeks to complete, being a wooden structure with a felt roof. During the building of the hospital, the death-toll had risen to 77, with the number of cases reaching 426. By the end of July, the furnishing of the hospital was complete, but by that time the epidemic had subsided, and it remained unused until the next epidemic.
The hospital was first named the Caeracca Fever Hospital, but was also referred to as the Pant or Dowlais Fever Hospital. It was able to accommodate 32 patients, and was only occupied when epidemics of the infectious diseases occurred – Typhoid, Typhus, Scarlet Fever, Smallpox and Measles.
Mrs Clark of Dowlais House obtained permission from the Board of Health for the private use of part of the hospital. Sixteen beds were allocated for eight male and eight female patients. There would be compulsory admissions – patients would only be admitted with their permission. This was a wise decision as the changes of recovery would be poor; if the patients were terrified of being admitted – believing they had been taken there to die instead of to recover. This fear was somehow connected with Mrs Clark’s hospital in Dowlais, and largely due to the ignorance of the people as to the type of nursing required.
Mrs Clarke’s hospital in Dowlais. Photo courtesy of the Alan George Archive
There was great concern among the committee as to whose responsibility it was to pay for the patients’ food. They wrote several times to the Home Office, and the Chairman of the Committee wrote privately to the Home Secretary dealing solely with the question of feeding. As no satisfactory answer was obtained, the Board of Health decided they would bear the expense themselves. When the question was asked “Who would pay for the beef tea?” the Clerk replied “Can’t you make the beef tea medicine?”. “We must”, came the reply, “and take the consequences”.
185 years ago today, a terrible explosion occurred at the Dowlais Ironworks. To mark the anniversary, eminent historian, and biographer of Lady Charlotte Guest, Victoria Owens, has written the following article.
Although nineteenth century industry relied heavily upon steam power, people were slow to recognise the dangers that it presented. In 1836, an accident occurred at Dowlais which showed just what elemental peril high pressure steam could present. Dowlais House, home of ironmaster Josiah John Guest and his family, stood on the very margin of the Dowlais Ironworks and in her journal Guest’s wife Lady Charlotte wrote a graphic account of the boiler explosion that took place one November morning.
An excerpt of the 1851 Public Health Map showing the proximity of Dowlais House to the Ironworks
Guest had risen early. His nephew Edward Hutchins hoped shortly to purchase a share in Thomas and Richard Brown’s Blaina Iron Company and the two men planned to visit the Browns’ Works on the Ebwy fach riverin the course of the day. Charlotte got up while her husband was breakfasting, and as she dressed, she distinctly felt the house tremble. At first, it reminded her of what she had read about earthquakes – not a phenomenon of which she had any direct experience – and she reasoned that ‘something – not perhaps very awful – must have happened at the works.’ Hearing a window rattle she assumed, undaunted, that her fourteen-month old son Ivor was amusing himself by shaking it.
A vast explosion, the crash of a falling stack and the sound of bricks cascading onto the roof of the house disabused her of her error, and hearing the sound of escaping steam, she guessed that a boiler had burst. It was, she realised, ‘the centre one of the New Forge Engine, and consequently very near the House, towards which all the fury of the explosion was directed.’ While it was not unusual for eighteenth and early nineteenth century industrialists to live close to their works, 1836 plans of the Dowlais Works show the New Forge with its engine actually bordering the gardens of Dowlais House which was left ‘strewn with bricks, cinders and broken glass.’ Amazed and appalled, Charlotte later found a brick in her bed and discovered a heavy piece of iron ‘weighing several pounds’ embedded in an internal wall. Apparently it had passed straight between two servants as they chatted in the first-floor corridor. Meanwhile, a couple of workmen on the charging platform by the furnaces had an equally lucky escape. According to Charlotte, a ‘steam pipe fell between them and the furnace they were charging upon the bar they were using, which it knocked out of their hand.’ If the sentence-structure is somewhat awkward, it may reflect her shock at recalling how she saw the projectile strike the bar used to thrust coke, ore and flux into the furnace mouth clean out of the men’s hands. George Childs’ 1840 depiction of Dowlais labourers gives an idea of the impact that the sight must have made on her. ‘Most thankful I was,’ she wrote later, ‘that we were all in the house together. Had Merthyr [her private name for her husband] been in the works (which he would have been a quarter of an hour later) my alarm would have been infinitely greater.’ Caught in the blast, the boiler stack seemed to rise from its base to pause, ‘as if poised,’ in the air before crashing down from its 120 foot height across the Guests’ lawn, breaking all their windows’ and killing a man and a boy as it fell..
Outside her bedroom, Charlotte found Susan the nursemaid with young Ivor in the passage. As they ran downstairs in search of John, they felt the whole building shake. John was, in fact, already hastening upstairs to look for them and husband and wife simultaneously realised, appalled, that neither of them knew what had happened to their two-year old daughter Maria. Charlotte thought she had been eating an early breakfast with her father while John, in the stress of the moment, could not remember what he had done with her or whether she had even been with him. After a few moments of numb alarm, they found the little girl safe with the housekeeper, neither hurt nor unduly frightened. Seeing a crowd surge across his garden John went out to comfort them as best he could, before seeking to assess the extent of the damage to the works’ buildings.
The following week’s edition of the Cardiff and Merthyr Guardian carried not only a report of the explosion but also a comprehensive description of the boiler. A new installation, it was apparently 42 feet long and 6 feet in diameter. Despite weighing 18 tons and being embedded in solid masonry, it had burst with enough force to thrust it clean off its foundation and carry it over some ten yards’ distance before coming to rest at right-angles to its original position. A large piece of flying masonry had hit a house nearby, home to seven people. The man who had been sleeping in the room into which it actually landed somehow avoided injury, but not all the inhabitants were so lucky. John Howe, a fireman, and the boys David Thomas and John Jones both lost their lives, while ‘the wife of Daniel James, founder’ was badly injured. Meanwhile the New Forge where the boiler had been located, was blown to smithereens – ‘damage’ which the newspaper estimated at not less than £1000, ‘without taking into account the loss occasioned by the suspension of the works.’
At the inquest following the explosion, the jury returned a verdict of accidental death upon the deceased. Significantly, the coroner explicitly ruled out any question of culpability on the part of the Dowlais Company’s chief engineer John Watt. Local opinion – and presumably Watt himself – linked the cause of the explosion to the rupture of a boiler-plate immediately over the fire. The Dowlais Company’s decision in 1838 to name a new plateway locomotive ‘John Watt’ may well reflect the esteem in which John Guest held his colleague.
Dowlais Ironworks in the 1840s by George Childs. Photo courtesy of the Alan George Archive
When the Taff Vale Railway between Merthyr Tydfil and Cardiff received its authorisation in 1836, the Act gave the Railway Company leave to construct a branch to the tramroad at Dowlais. For various reasons, the Railway Company procrastinated over the work, with the result that the Dowlais Iron Company eventually took responsibility for making the Branch themselves. The terms of the 1849 Dowlais Railway Act authorised them to build not only the line, but also a passenger station, situated close both to the Iron Works’ lower entrance gate and the Merthyr-Abergavenny road.
Sir John Guest
Although the 1849 Act allowed the Iron Company five years to complete the railway, it was in fact ready in three. Financed by Sir John Guest, MP for Merthyr Tydfil, promoter of the TVR and soon to be sole partner in the Dowlais Iron Works, at a mile and sixty-eight chains in length, the steep gradient of its route up Twynyrodyn Hill meant that its lower part operated as an inclined plane. The Newcastle firm of R & A Hawthorn designed a stationary engine capable of drawing trains of up to six carriages in length and 33 tons in weight over s distance of 70 chains and 30 links, up the 1 in 12 slope. It had two horizontal cylinders of 18 inch diameter and 24 inch stroke and worked at 50 strokes per minute. The steam pressure was 30 lbs psi.
Viewing its erection in March 1851, a local newspaper drily enquired whether in ten years’ time, a ‘chronicler of local events’ might have reason to report the completion of a notional line ‘from Dowlais to the extreme point of Anglesey.’
Modest it might be, but at the Dowlais Railway’s official opening in August 1851, Royalty graced the ceremony. Three days before the event, just as Sir John and his wife Charlotte were about the set off on a carriage drive, the horse-omnibus drew up outside their home, Dowlais House, bringing Charlotte’s cousin Henry Layard, known as ‘Layard of Nineveh’ on the strength of his recent archaeological discoveries in Assyria, and with him, his friend Nawab Ekbaled Dowleh, whom the newspapers called the ‘ex-King of Oude.’
With the help of Works Manager John Evans, Charlotte organised every stage in the celebration, from welcoming a party of Taff Vale Directors who had travelled down from Cardiff for the occasion, to pairing up her ten children to walk in the procession: ‘viz. Ivor and Maria; Merthyr bach and Katherine; Montague and Enid; Geraint [Augustus] and Constance; Arthur and little Blanche.’ Flanked, probably as much for show as for protection, by the local police, they made their way to the station, decked with greenery for the occasion, with the school-children and company agents following. The ‘trade of Merthyr and Dowlais’ joined them along the way, all to the accompaniment of music from the combined bands of Cyfarthfa and Dowlais.
An 1880 map of Merthyr and Dowlais showing the Dowlais Railway – shown in red from top right to bottom left
From Dowlais station, the passengers travelled to the top of the incline where their locomotive was uncoupled. Messrs. Hawthorn’s engine lowered the carriages down the slope, and the intrepid travellers made their way on to Merthyr. Some of them chose to continue by TVR to Abercynon, but the Guests and their visitors preferred to return to Dowlais.
Later in the day, a ‘small party comprising about five hundred ladies and gentlemen’ enjoyed a sumptuous meal at the Iron company’s Ivor Works, to be followed by speeches and dancing. Sir John, whose health was none too good, left the festivities early but Charlotte remained on hand to propose the healths the Directors of the Taff Vale railway and to open the dancing with Rhondda coal owner David William James as her partner. With Layard as his interpreter, the Nawab set the seal upon the day’s pleasures by expressing his delight at the hospitality that he had received in Dowlais and asserting that he had never enjoyed himself so much as he had during his ‘brief sojourn’ in Wales.
Although Sir John envisaged the Dowlais Branch primarily as a mineral line, he seems to have been perfectly happy with the requirement that it should also accommodate passenger traffic. Records indicate that over 1853,it came in for usage by 755 first class, 1884 second class and 7253 third class passengers but, sad to say, disaster struck at the end of the year. December 1853 witnessed an ugly accident when a passenger carriage over-ran the scotches to hurtle down the Incline unchecked and two passengers lost their lives, with five more suffering serious injuries. Officially speaking, passenger traffic on the railway ceased in 1854.
Unofficially, as Merthyr Tydfil writer Leo Davies would explain, it was usually possible – given a combination of unscrupulousness and agility- to obtain a lift. In an article of 1996, he described the whole unorthodox procedure in graphic detail. Access was obtained via the wingwall of a bridge and through some railings. The sound of the hawser gave advance warning of the approach of a train on the incline – ‘four ballast trucks, each half-filled with sand.’ Travelling typically at ‘a nice, sedate trotting pace’ there was evidently ample scope for the non-paying passenger to grasp the outside rim of the buffer, and ‘swing both legs up and around the buffer spring housing.’
An aerial view of the Twynyrodyn area. The Keir Hardie Estate is being built to the left and the route of the Dowlais Railway can clearly be seen running vertically in the photo. Twynyrodyn School is visible middle right. Photo courtesy of the Alan George Archive
The Dowlais Railway closed finally in 1930 and the trackbed would be filled in sixteen or so year later, over 1946-7. In the 1990s, when Leo Davies reminisced about the ‘Inky’ as he fondly calls it, the ‘straight, green, grass grown strip of land’ ascending Twynyrodyn Hill remained visible. Perhaps, with the eye of knowledge or faith it remains so. Admittedly, former pupils of Twynyrodyn School remember the old line’s route, but without local knowledge it is not easy to trace. Only a few yards of broad green path survive to mark the site – perhaps – of the old trackbed and the name ‘Incline Top’ given to a hamlet at the edge of a plateau of rough ground extending towards Dowlais and its great Ironworks commemorate the location of Sir John Guest’s last great enterprise.
It is probable that John Josiah Guest had Dowlais House built around 1818, possibly as a home for his bride Maria Rankin. It was a large, solid, well-proportioned structure. Her early death left him a widower until his marriage to Charlotte, daughter of the Earl of Lindsey, in 1833. Better known as Lady Charlotte Guest, she described her first visit to Dowlais House in her diary.
‘ By the time we had reached the House it was quite dark and the prevailing gloom gave full effect to the light of the blazing furnaces, which was quite unlike all I had ever before seen or even imagined. The interior of the house was precisely what Merthyr’s sketch of it had taught me to expect. My first impulse was to establish myself in the library, by far the pleasantest room in the house. We walked out as far as the limits of the garden, round the house and stood without the gate – the furnace gate-upon the steps leading to the Works’.
It is here that she succeeded in translating the Welsh tales the Mabinogion into English and within the short space of thirteen years she also gave birth to ten children in Dowlais House. No doubt it was partly on their account that she encouraged her husband in 1846 to buy Canford Manor in Dorset. Cholera in Dowlais made it essential for the young family to move from Dowlais House. However, on his death bed, John Josiah Guest insisted on returning to Dowlais House in 1852, so that he could die where he was born – in his beloved Dowlais.
Dowlais House then became the Dowlais residence of G. T. Clark, Esq. who took over as the manager of the Works. Dowlais House was converted to offices in 1894 after G.T. Clark retired from the business residence. The alterations which followed destroyed most of its older features as a private house, with the exception an attractive balustrade running up a stairs. Its proximity meant that the House featured in many photographs of the Dowlais Works. Prior to its demolition in the early 1970s, it was used as the employment exchange.
Dowlais House being demolished in 1973. Photo courtesy of the Alan George archive.
