Xenophilia 2 - Ancestral Voices
by Mihangel
Segment 2
Cwmystradllyn 1854-57
The industrial revolution was in full swing. The population of Britain doubled in fifty years. The railways spread tentacles of iron across the land. Mining, textile and engineering centres expanded, almost exploded, into sprawls of factories and houses. New buildings need roofs, and the slate industry of North Wales had never had it so good. Many a new quarry was opened, and in 1854 a typical syndicate of Englishmen jumped on the bandwagon and formed a company to work Gorseddau quarry. No more than trial scratchings had taken place there before, but the speculators were persuaded by the glowing report of a German mining engineer of dubious expertise that riches awaited them.
Their authorised capital was ultimately £125,000, an enormous sum for such a purpose at such a date. Over the next three years the necessary land was leased or bought outright, and work began on opening up the quarry. Ambitions ran high. To carry the expected produce out, an eight-mile tramway was engineered down to the harbour of Portmadoc. For sawing blocks of raw slate into slabs, the massive mill of Ty Mawr was erected beside the tramway at Ynysypandy, a couple of miles below the quarry at the nearest point where decent water power was available. And, to accommodate the workforce, not only were barracks built in the quarry itself but, on a bleak and wind-swept hillside nearby, the brand-new village of Treforys. A kindly landowner gave the site for a small school, which also doubled for worship until a proper chapel was built.
The valley, before all this upheaval began, had been an isolated backwater with seven impoverished tenant farms and a population of forty six. But by 1856 nearly three hundred extra inhabitants had swarmed in, recruited by advertisement and by word of mouth. Very few were local, for the population was far too small to meet the demand. Most were lured here, by the prospect of above-average wages, from the established slate quarrying areas of Bethesda, Llanberis and Dyffryn Nantlle to the north, and even from as far as Anglesey.
As it turned out, few men came with their families, and the village was never fully occupied. Most, if they had families, left them back at home, wherever that might be. During the week they lived in the barracks or in empty houses in the village, and when work ended at midday on Saturday walked maybe twenty miles home, returning first thing on Monday morning. Those who did not have families - and there were many of them - spent the week in barracks and the weekends in the fleshpots of Portmadoc. The Gorseddau workforce included more disreputable and footloose characters than was usual.
The quarry lay at the centre of the amphitheatre which forms the head of Cwmystradllyn, a terrain of rock and heather on the mountain and of rushes and sour grazing on the flatter ground. It faced down the length of the valley and across a sizeable lake - dammed to supply water to the mill - towards the slightly lusher pastures of Eifionydd beyond. The slate vein lay awkwardly. Its strata were vertical and lacked the natural joints which in a good quarry allow the rock to be freed in reasonably small blocks. It merged imperceptibly into the bastard or useless slate, it was covered by much overburden, and it was criss-crossed by dykes of igneous rock of no use to anyone. The only way to attack it was horizontally from the front, in a series of galleries stepping up the hillside. Preparing the site for productive working - making it ready for the rockmen who extracted the slate itself - was a tedious job, difficult, expensive and dangerous. It was done by men who, though no underground burrowing was needed here, were called miners.
A little roofing slate had already been sent out from the quarry by cart, but in May 1857 the slab mill and the tramway were completed, and the whole concern moved into more serious production. To mark the occasion a ceremony was held at the quarry, attended by some of the directors who travelled up from Portmadoc in a brand-new passenger carriage specially built for them. James Brunlees the engineer was there too, and Edwyn Dixon the English over-manager, and Thomas Evans the Welsh under-manager or foreman, and all the two hundred-odd workmen. Florid speeches were made in English and in Welsh. To christen the tramway, off went the first train of laden wagons, rolling down by gravity with the horse to pull the empties back trailing along behind.
A rock cannon, the traditional home-made firework of the industry, had been prepared on a large flat rock half way up the quarry. Holes had been drilled in it in zigzag pattern, thirty-seven of them, six inches deep, all linked by a shallow groove. Each hole was charged with a measure of powder and stemmed with hard-packed slate dust. A powder-filled goose-quill fuse led through the stemming, and along the groove connecting the holes was poured a trail of powder covered with goose fat to keep out the air. The trail was lit at one end, the fire fizzed its way from hole to hole, and ignited each charge in turn in a deafening bang-bang-bang. This was the signal to broach the barrels of ale brought up from Porthmadog by tram. The real fun began, and not a few got drunk on the cwrw da.
The quarry was in business. The directors and the manager, in their innocence, waxed full of optimism. Most of the men, Thomas Evans included, who knew their slate far better, were well aware that the rock was crap and that the quarry could never pay. But they kept their counsel, for it gave them work.
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