User:PotentPotables/Industrial history

The town of Merthyr Tydfil in south Wales has a long industrial history, largely centred around its four ironworks: Cyfarthfa, Dowlais, Penydarren, and Plymouth.

Ironworks

Main articles: Cyfarthfa Ironworks, Dowlais Ironworks, Penydarren Ironworks, and Plymouth Ironworks

Canals and trains

Main article: Richard Trevithick § "Pen-y-Darren" locomotive

At first, horse drawn wagons were used to transport iron from Merthyr through the South Wales Valleys to Cardiff. The owners of the town's four ironworks worked together to construct a 25 mile canal running downhill from Merthyr to Cardiff, supplied by the River Taff. The canal was opened in 1795 and cost a total of £103,000, of which Penydarren's Samuel Homfray gave £40,000. The primary shareholder however was Cyfarthfa's Richard Crawshay, who demanded preference for his barges as the canal traffic increased. The other ironmasters, led by Samuel Homfray, were frustrated by this and instead began constructing a tramway to deliver iron, believing it to be far more efficient than the canal.

Samuel Homfray considered the idea that steam might be more useful as a transport method than horse drawn carriage and wrote to Richard Trevithick, the inventor of the first high-pressure steam engine, asking if he could make an engine to work on rails. Crawshay was doubtful of Homfray's idea, and they bet £500 each on the steam transportation of an iron shipment from Penydarren to the coast.

On 21 February 1804, Trevithick showcased his single-barrelled engine to a crowd; it was pulling ten tons of iron and seventy passengers in its cars. Travelling at 5mph, the locomotive successfully made the ten-mile journey from Penydarren to Abercynon down Tramroadside. Despite this success, Homfray abandoned the scheme; the engine's boiler broke on the return journey and several of the iron tracks were damaged from its pulsating movements. The engine was instead used to run a hammer within the Penydarren Ironworks.

1830s

By the 1830s, Merthyr had become the iron capital of the world. Between all its ironworks, it hired the largest number of workers and dominated track production.

1850s

Merthyr's iron trade peaked in the 1850s, described by George Borrow in 1854 as "the greatest mining place in Britain" and suggested it might be called the "capital of iron and coal".

Population

The population levels of Merthyr generally follow the rise and fall of its ironworks.

Year	Population	Ref.
1801	7,705
1851	46,378
1861	49,794
1871	51,949
1881	48,861
1891	58,080

Social effects

While the ironworks owners lived in estates like Cyfarthfa Castle, the workers lived in squalid conditions, receiving far less income than their masters.

Language and culture

During the Industrial Revolution, Merthyr became a hub of Welsh-speaking workers.

In 1891, roughly 70 per cent of the town's population spoke Welsh. However, the need for more labourers demanded immigration into the area, and by 1911 there were 400,000 English and Irish people in Glamorganshire's 1.1 million population. As those new residents failed to learn Welsh, English soon became the dominant language in Merthyr.

Child labour

In 1842, two inspectors interviewed working children across South Wales. When interviewing a girl employed as a doorkeeper at Plymouth Ironworks in Merthyr, they discovered her asleep after her lamp had run out of oil: she was worried that either rats or a person had stolen her food. Following the report, the Mines and Collieries Act 1842 was passed in Parliament and banned women and girls from working in mines.

Literacy rates

In 1841, it was recorded that out of the 32,968 people living in Merthyr, 11,774 could read and 5,709 could write.

Wages and working hours

Instead of being paid for hours worked, miners were paid by the quantity of coal that they had dug. It focused on the strength of each worker and allowed them to be paid more for doing extra work.

The Coal Mines Regulation Act 1872 was the first piece of legislation that enforced schedules for miners.

Housing

While houses were largely overcrowded and filthy in Merthyr, miners had the opportunity to rent cottages from their employers at a reduced rate.

Public houses

As an industrial town, Merthyr attracted large numbers of young men who required entertainment in their free time. This caused an increase in public houses and prostitutes; an area of the town known as "China" was effectively overrun with prostitutes, miners, and orphaned children who would bunk together in slummy conditions within public rooms. In 1805, there were over three hundred pubs within the town, a ratio of 1 pub per 24 dwellings. These pubs would be hubs of violence, where miners would engage in hand-to-hand contact frequently.

Sanitation

In 1849, Thomas Webster Rammell conducted an inquiry into the town's drinking water: he was suspicious of the lack of infrastructure development during the growth of the town amid. In the same year, around one thousand people in the town died of cholera. Newcomers to the town would build their houses wherever they pleased, causing problems with the escape of surface water and waste removal. It was suggested by Merthyr Central Library historian Carolyn Jacob that the town established proper building and water-supply regulations during the 1850s.

Emigration

Merthyr was not only an area that attracted the attention of immigrants, but one that focused on selling emigration to its own citizens too. Local businessman and personalities worked part-time as migration agents, advertising their emigration businesses in the local press and at public meetings. This business did not go unnoticed, with workers flocking to watch emigrants depart from railway stations and departure scenes being reported in the press. Two emigration societies were set up by workers in the town in 1868, the Cambrian Emigration Society and the Merthyr Tydfil Emigration Society, but neither were successful in the widescale emigration of their members.

The high levels of emigration from Merthyr were condemned by newspapers The Star and Y Fellten, who blamed ironmasters for not matching wage prices available to workers in the United States.

Legacy

In 2010, Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council announced efforts to have the Cyfarthfa Heritage Area added as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The efforts would recognise the town's four ironworks, alongside the Pont-y-Cafnau, and Cefn Viaduct.