History by Fire on the hill. Visit the site, click here

 

Located on the hillside near Wilkinson’s lead smelting works, alongside the Glascoed road, the Smelt possibly predated even Wilkinson, and certainly outlasted all the other mines in the area as it was worked until the late 1960s. It was also a day-level, driven sideways into Brymbo hill, although a shaft for coal was sunk in the 1840s. While the Smelt produced some coal after the 19th century, it was latterly mainly used for fireclay – used in the brickworks at Caello nearby – and was sometimes referred to as the “Clai-tan” (fireclay) pit as a result. By that time it was a rather small operation; a newspaper article in its last years describes it as “a country colliery for a country setting“, while even in the 1890s it was only employing 12 people.

 

An old photograph shows the pit to have had a small surface building with a stubby chimney and wooden headgear, which had been taken down by the 1960s when only the level was in use. The small spoil tips lay around the site and across the railway tracks. Until the 1990s the site of the Smelt was overgrown and fenced off with “danger” signs, but it has since then been reclaimed, and there is nothing to show a colliery was once there.

 

The 1842 report of the Royal Commission on the employment of children in mines, the North Wales section of which was written by H. Herbert Jones, contains some interesting accounts of what it was like to work the Brymbo Co. pits in the period just before the Company’s formation. Several people were interviewed at the “Brymbo Colliery and Ironworks” on 12th May, 1841. Amongst other statements are those of Edward Jones, aged 11 years and 9 months, who had already been at work for three and a half years, and operated an air-door for 6d. a day (a day in this connection would have been 12 hours of work). Another was John Womsley, 15, who had been at work for nine years. He was then a coal-cutter, and “[did] not consider it hard work”, but nevertheless “would be very glad to go to a school”.

 

Although conditions at Brymbo do not seem to have been as bad as some mines elsewhere in the country, where the Commission’s report details some truly horrific things, this section at least betrays the concerns of its time by focusing mainly on the morality of the workers, rather than the fact they were at work at all. The Reverend John Davies of Brymbo, interviewed on May 13th, is noncommittal on the subject of mines’ employment of children, and although he appears to approve of education adds that “I would not recommend that the lower orders have any education unconnected with religion”. Also interviewed was Samuel Jones, agent – almost certainly the man who sank the Blast Pit. Although he does not think 12 hours underground is too long a day for those over ten (he had, he stated, always worked 12 hour shifts himself in his 23 years as a collier) he does observe that “colliers [are] more delicate than many other classes of working people but does not exactly know the reason”.