MY Great Great Great Grandfather!

I came recently across this short extract from the Tenby Observer (5 June 1908) a reminder of what people do when there’s no sick pay or pension available to them.

“An Octogenarian Manager
62 Years at Saundersfoot Colliery

John Thomas lived at Temple Bar on the parish boundary between Begelly and St Issells.

The quotations from Rev John Williams seem to portray a Welsh equivalent of “Merrie England”. What led to “sin and impropriety” in his eyes were no doubt ingredients of a good night out to be savoured by many.

By the 1850s, hard drinking had taken on a darker aspect. Reminiscing in 1934, the 90 year old Edward Thomas recalled the endemic drunkenness in the Stepaside area in the 1850s. So bad was it that women could not walk out alone in the evening “for if they were not molested, insults would be heaped upon them from all sides”. Others supported this view.

What had changed in the intervening 50 years or so?

“Spread Eagle”, Begelly (Picture courtesey of Gerry Brawn)

The combination of two factors explains the change. Firstly, the building of the harbour at Saundersfoot and the tramroad to Thomas Chapel in the early 1830s brought about a short boom in mining activity in the area. Population levels surged with the increase in Begelly and St Issells tracking the national trend rather than Pembrokeshire’s low-key growth. For the workers beer was the chosen drink as it was believed to be healthier for them. With the quality of local water supply so doubtful, there was some truth in this. More workers with more money represented a perfect opportunity for any seller.

The second factor was the Beer Act passed by Parliament in 1830. This relaxed the licensing laws by introducing a new class of retailer, the beer-shop owner. Unlike pub licensees, prospective owners did not need approval from magistrates to sell beer; rather they just paid a sum to the Excise for the privilege. The role of magistrates in controlling their communities had been paramount to local administration for 250 years and more. The magistrates sidelined, the floodgates opened: between 1830 and 1832, the number of people licensed for the sale of beer in West Wales leaped from 158 to 1226! In the face of so much competition, retailers had to fight for business with one key tactic being to sell strong beer cheaply.

Pits and Pubs in Begelly c. 1830-60 (Map: copyright Cassini Publishing Ltd) Click to enlarge

It will come as no surprise that various enterprising locals spotted the opportunity to turn a profit by establishing beer-shops** in the 1830s-1840s. The map of the mining part of Begelly parish illustrates what happened. Prior to the 1830 Beer Act, there had been just 2 pubs in the parish, the Spread Eagle and the Miners Arms, both on the Tenby turnpike. By the late 1840s the collieries at Thomas Chapel and Hackett had provided the stimulus for at least 4 new beer-shops all close to the pithead. These must have competed aggressively for the limited business of both the few locals and, more importantly, the 100 or so miners working in the Thomas Chapel area. With few alternative attractions, many no doubt preferred the companionship of their workmates and at least one too many beers.

This over-supply of beer seems as preposterous today as it was to some at the time. In 1854 James Mark Child of Begelly House, a local magistrate, complained that having beer-shops close to the collieries at Thomas Chapel (and Stepaside) was “highly demoralising” to the neighbourhood. But even in his official capacity he was powerless to shut them down en masse. Only local economic forces made the difference: apparently none of the beer-shops survived the closure of the last pit around Thomas Chapel in the late 1850s.

Notes

** The Swan might have been an alehouse, not a beer-shop.

Map used in second graphic: copyright Cassini Publishing Ltd. Maps available for purchaseeither as printed edition or by download.

Sources

Primary

Many and varied! Let me know if you have a specific question.

Narberth, Whitland and Clynderwen Weekly News

Pembrokeshire Herald

Secondary

Drink and Sobriety in Victorian Wales c.1820 – c.1895, W R Lambert, University of Wales Press, 1983

Industrial Saundersfoot, Martin Connop Price, Gomer Press, 1982

The Pubs of Narberth, Saundersfoot and South-East Pembrokeshire, Keith Johnson, Logaston Press, 2004

From around 1800 onwards miners had to dig deeper to get to unworked seams of coal. Locals must have feared that serious accidents would result. On the 16^th June 1838 their fears came true when six coalminers drowned in an accident at the Thomas Chapel colliery. It was the worst accident to date in the local coalfield – since 1732 anyway. What was their response?

A local newspaper report hints at raised emotions:

“A dreadful accident occurred at Mr Hughes’ colliery near Begelly Pembrokeshire on Saturday last in consequence of a very thoughtless…cutting in of water; by which means 6 poor men…were drowned. The quantity of water cut in was so great as to take the constant working of persons, night and day, at two pits, with the assistance of a steam engine at a third pit, from the day the accident happened, to Thursday morning, before the colliery was sufficient freed of water to get at the bodies of the poor sufferers…”

Scene of trial: Shire Hall (pale green building), Haverfordwest

No other report of the accident or the subsequent inquest has survived to corroborate the critical inference in the newspaper. However, a copy of the bill used in the prosecution of William Brace at the Pembrokeshire Assizes is extant. As manager of the pit, Brace was charged with the manslaughter of the six miners. Interestingly  the case was brought by James Thomas (of Thorny Park, East Williamston), father of one of the deceased. Alleging that Brace had “care…control and management” of the pit, Thomas believed that Brace had failed to exercise these properly in not using the correct equipment. In his eyes, this neglect caused the deaths.

The trial was held at Haverfordwest on 11 March 1839 with twelve experienced miners from the Begelly area ready to take the stand in support of the prosecution. But the case was not tried. At this time, Assize trials were subject to a two-step process. Firstly the case was examined before a Grand Jury to decide if there was sufficient evidence to hear it. Secondly, if this was proved, the case was tried in open court as we would expect today. However, the case failed to get beyond the Grand Jury where the examination was held in camera; no records survive to explain this.

The importance of this disaster for the local coalfield was that this was a unique prosecution. No doubt James Thomas’ anger at the manner of the loss of his young son was an important catalyst in bringing it. The failure of the case would have generated the same emotion throughout the community. More serious accidents, in terms of the number of deaths, followed with 40 killed at Landshipping in February 1844 and then three months later by seven men closer to home at Broadmoor colliery. Accidents such as these were a national problem and generated a national response: from the 1840s onwards, the government started to enact legislation that slowly brought the apparent recklessness of proprietors and managers under control.

Sources

Carmarthen Journal

Pembrokeshire Record Office: Haverfordwest Gaol records

The National Archives: Pembrokeshire Assize records

Notes

If you are interested in the details of the deceased take a look at the following site:

http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/wal/PEM/Pemcoaldeaths.html

Above image of Shire Hall: copyright “Cerdiwen” and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License.

The Child family was the dominant local resident gentry in the Begelly area for at least 150 years. Little is left now to mark their presence except their residence, Begelly House. As with many old houses, the date of its construction is not obvious to the untrained eye. Thankfully there are two sources of information provided by “trained eyes” that provide professional insight.

Begelly House (front) c 1910 (Copyright Jon Mein)

Firstly, investigators from the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales describe Begelly House as follows:

“The present house, a rather stark cube, was probably built/rebuilt in the second quarter of the nineteenth century…”

This is not much to go on. A second and more recent source is the Pembrokeshire edition of CADW’s “The Buildings of Wales” series. The authors describe the house as having a “mid-C19 refronting to a house built c. 1750” and comment specifically about a mid-1700s staircase.

Taken together these sources indicate a two-stage building process: the first in the mid-1700s followed by a second about 70 to 100 years later. How, if at all, do these dates correlate with what is known about the family’s history?

If the “mid-1700s” is taken as an accurate date range, the answer is the first date at least does tie in nicely with a change in circumstances for the family. John Child, then head of the family, died in 1734 leaving as orphans his four young children. Their guardian whisked the children away to Tenby, collecting rents from the estate but without investing any money to maintain the empty family house. One contemporary source stated that by the mid-1740s the house was “in decay” (TNA C 12/1801/3). So, it is probable that when John’s son, James Child, took control of the estate around 1748 he was forced to knock down the existing structure and rebuild from scratch. Short of money, James would have delayed building work until the mid-1750s at the earliest to accumulate the necessary funds from rentals and sales of coal.

Any correlation between the second phase of development and the family’s history is less clear-cut. The re-fronting may have occurred when the then family head, James Mark Child, stepped back from investing his own money in the local mines and turned to national politics instead: he stood for Parliament in 1841 and threatened to stand a second time in 1847. So it is possible he spent money re-fronting his house to provide the effect of a modern building befitting the grand political aspirations of a local businessman.

Other than the church, is Begelly House the oldest surviving building in the parish?

Sources

RCAHMW’s web site including description of Begelly House

http://www.coflein.gov.uk/en/site/265316/details/BEGELLY+HOUSE%2C+GARDENS+AND+ASSOCIATED+LANDSCAPING+FEATURES%2C+BEGELLY/

“The Buildings of Wales: Pembrokeshire”, Thomas Lloyd, Julian Orbach and Robert Scourfield, Yale University Press, 2004

Details of the sources for the Child family history available from the blogger.

Thanks for joining me!

Rev. Buckby-1839-1884 

“He was frequently at variance with Squire Child of Begelly House, but invariably had the better of the feuds. He kept his church well filled by practising his belief that as, a house going Parson, makes a church-going people! Passed at 82 yrs. March 1884.