Cae Penty or Cae-Pen-ty
History by Fire on the hill. Visit the site, click here
Many of Brymbo’s nineteenth century mines were rather small affairs. This was a period of poor or limited regulation, rapid industrial growth and of unbridled capitalism in general. As a result several collieries sprang up, were worked, went bust and vanished in short order, or reopened several times under different proprietors. One example of Brymbo’s less well-known mines is Cae Penty or Cae-pen-ty, once found just off the road of the same name a short distance from Ffrwd.
Cae-pen-ty means “house end field”, and the house in question was the vanished property known as the Gyfynys. For several centuries this house, and the estate surrounding it, had been the property of a well-connected Welsh family called the Powells, descendants of a Howel ap Llewelyn ap David ap Owen who lived there in the sixteenth century. By the mid nineteenth century, the Powells were nearly forgotten, and Cae Penty was simply a field known for the unusual number of snowdrops and violets that grew there. From the quiet rural feel of the area today, you might imagine that things had changed very little since that time, but for a twenty year period towards the latter half of the nineteenth century things were very different.
Cae Penty first starts to appear in records in the 1860s: the Wrexham Advertiser of February 26th, 1859, said that “a small new colliery is just about being opened at the Cae Pen-ty“. However, there may have been earlier coal works: an 1800 lease of the field between John Meller of Gatewen and Samuel Davies of Gwersyllt includes the right to sink a “coal pit”. In any case, the 1859 colliery was never a particularly large operation. The earliest OS maps showed a few surface buildings immediately north of Glyon Lane, almost opposite the Yord. There were several other mines in this part of Brymbo, notably those connected with James Sparrow’s Ffrwd ironworks, as well as the large colliery up the hill at Brynmally, once run by the Kyrke family and later by Thomas Clayton. During its history, Cae Penty raised coal from the Brassy, Main and Crown seams.
Cae Penty was not active for a long time and appears to have had a rather turbulent financial history: the London Gazette records its successive proprietors and the dates their partnerships were dissolved. The first record, of March 17 1871, lists the proprietors as John Powell, Peter Williams (who signed with a mark, rather than a signature) and Elizabeth Jones. I suppose this raises the question of whether Mr Powell was at all related to the Samuel Powell who was described, by Alfred Palmer, as owning Cae Penty field in the 1840s, and who was locally reputed to be a lineal descendant of the original Powell family of the Gyfynys. The colliery was bought, according to the Wrexham Advertiser, by a “London company”, who planned to expand it “on an extensive scale”. The manager, also one of the partners, was said to be William Higgins.
Philip Young was recorded as the resident mining engineer in 1873, while liquidators (J H Lawson and W F Butler) were appointed to the “Cae-Pen-Ty Colliery Company” in 1878. Butler was, presumably, civil engineer William Frederic Butler, who was to be the main figure behind the colliery for the remainder of its existence. A new shaft was sunk in 1881, with Butler’s wife ceremonially cutting the first sod. An OS map of this period showed larger buildings and spoil tips off Cae Penty Road, to the north-east of the original site.
The second Gazette record shows that a succeeding incarnation of the “Cae-Penty Colliery Company” was dissolved in June 1883, having been a partnership between Butler, Francis Colville Hyde, a landowner from Kent, and Charles Barton. Barton and Butler carried on until 1886, after which Butler alone was responsible for dealing with the company’s creditors and debtors. Despite its small size, Cae Penty was regarded as very productive. “For a small place“, wrote the Advertiser in 1884, “it is astonishing the quantity of coal that is turned out here“. However, its small take and high productivity meant that by 1887 the mine was described as “exhausted” and it was abandoned on May 21st of that year, throwing 70 men out of work. Butler and his manager Ioan Powell went on to other things, having become involved with the Vron and Old Talwrn Collieries after the departure of William Low, and may have been able to give at least some of the unemployed colliers another job, but the fields around Cae Penty slowly reverted back to nature.