Slate industry in Wales
Encyclopedia
The slate industry in Wales began during the Roman period
when slate
was used to roof
the fort at Segontium, now Caernarfon
. The slate industry grew slowly until the early 18th century, then expanded rapidly until the late 19th century, at which time the most important slate producing areas were in northwest Wales
, including the Penrhyn Quarry
near Bethesda
, the Dinorwic Quarry
near Llanberis
, the Nantlle Valley
quarries, and Blaenau Ffestiniog
, where the slate was mined
rather than quarried
. Penrhyn and Dinorwig were the two largest slate quarries in the world, and the Oakeley mine at Blaenau Ffestiniog was the largest slate mine in the world. Slate is mainly used for roofing, but is also produced as thicker slab for a variety of uses including flooring, worktops and headstone
s.
Up to the end of the 18th century, slate was extracted on a small scale by groups of quarrymen who paid a royalty to the landlord, carted slate to the ports, and then shipped it to England, Ireland and sometimes France. Towards the close of the century, the landowners began to operate the quarries themselves, on a larger scale. After the government abolished slate duty in 1831, rapid expansion was propelled by the building of narrow gauge railways to transport the slates to the ports.
The slate industry
dominated the economy of north-west Wales during the second half of the 19th century, but was on a much smaller scale elsewhere. In 1898, a work force of 17,000 men produced half a million tons of slate. A bitter industrial dispute at the Penrhyn Quarry between 1900 and 1903 marked the beginning of its decline, and the First World War
saw a great reduction in the number of men employed in the industry. The Great Depression
and Second World War
led to the closure of many smaller quarries, and competition from other roofing materials, particularly tile
s, resulted in the closure of most of the larger quarries in the 1960s and 1970s. Slate production continues on a much reduced scale.
, Ordovician
and Silurian
. The Cambrian deposits run south-west from Conwy to near Criccieth
; these deposits were quarried in the Penrhyn and Dinorwig quarries and in the Nantlle Valley. There are smaller outcrops elsewhere, for example on Anglesey
. The Ordovician deposits run south-west from Betws-y-Coed
to Porthmadog
; these were the deposits mined at Blaenau Ffestiniog. There is another band of Ordovician slate further south, running from Llangynnog to Aberdyfi
, quarried mainly in the Corris
area, with a few outcrops in south-west Wales, notably Pembrokeshire
. The Silurian deposits are mainly further east in the Dee
valley and around Machynlleth
.
The virtues of slate as a building and roofing material have been recognized since the Roman period. The Roman fort at Segontium, Caernarfon, was originally roofed with tiles, but the later levels contain numerous slates, used for both roofing and flooring. The nearest deposits are about five miles (8 km) away in the Cilgwyn area, indicating that the slates were not used merely because they were available on-site. During the mediaeval period, there was small-scale quarrying of slate in several areas. The Cilgwyn quarry in the Nantlle Valley dates from the 12th century, and is thought to be the oldest in Wales. The first record of slate quarrying in the neighbourhood of the later Penrhyn Quarry was in 1413, when a rent-roll of Gwilym ap Griffith records that several of his tenants were paid 10 pence each for working 5,000 slates. Aberllefenni Slate Quarry
may have started operating as a slate mine as early as the 14th century. The earliest confirmed date of operating dates from the early 16th century when the local house Plas Aberllefenni was roofed in slates from this quarry.
Transport problems meant that the slate was usually used fairly close to the quarries. There was some transport by sea. A poem by the 15th century poet Guto'r Glyn
asks the Dean
of Bangor
to send him a shipload of slates from Aberogwen, near Bangor, to Rhuddlan
to roof a house at Henllan, near Denbigh
. The wreck of a wooden ship carrying finished slates was discovered in the Menai Strait
and is thought to date from the 16th century. By the second half of the 16th century, there was a small export trade of slates to Ireland from ports such as Beaumaris and Caernarfon. Slate exports from the Penrhyn estate are recorded from 1713 when 14 shipments totalling 415,000 slates were sent to Dublin. The slates were carried to the ports by pack-horses, and later by carts. This was sometimes done by women, the only female involvement in what was otherwise an exclusively male industry.
Until the late 18th century, slate was extracted from many small pits by small partnerships of local men, who did not own the capital to expand further. The quarrymen usually had to pay a rent or royalty to the landlord, though the quarrymen at Cilgwyn did not. A letter from the agent of the Penrhyn estate, John Paynter, in 1738 complains that competition from Cilgwyn was affecting the sales of Penrhyn slates. The Cilgwyn slates could be extracted more cheaply and sold at a higher price. Penrhyn introduced larger sizes of slate between 1730 and 1740, and gave these sizes the names which became standard. These ranged from "Duchesses", the largest at 24 inches (609.6 mm) by 12 inches (304.8 mm), through "Countesses", "Ladies" and "Doubles" to the smallest "Singles".
s and a royalty on the slates produced. The first landowner to take over the working of slates on his land was the owner of the Penrhyn estate, Richard Pennant, later Baron Penrhyn
. In 1782, the men working quarries on the estate were bought out or ejected, and Pennant appointed James Greenfield as agent. The same year, Lord Penrhyn opened a new quarry at Caebraichycafn near Bethesda, which as Penrhyn Quarry would become the largest slate quarry in the world. By 1792, this quarry was employing 500 men and producing 15,000 ton
s of slate per year. At Dinorwig, a single large partnership took over in 1787, and in 1809 the landowner, Thomas Assheton Smith
of Vaynol
, took the management of the quarry into his own hands. The Cilgwyn quarries were taken over by a company in 1800, and the scattered workings at all three locations were amalgamated into a single quarry. The first steam engine
to be used in the slate industry was a pump installed at the Hafodlas quarry in the Nantlle Valley in 1807, but most quarries relied on hydropower
to drive machinery.
Wales was by now producing more than half the United Kingdom's output of slate, 26,000 tons out of a total UK production of 45,000 tons in 1793. In July 1794, the government imposed a 20% tax on all slate carried coastwise, which put the Welsh producers at a disadvantage compared to inland producers who could use the canal network
to distribute their product. There was no tax on slates sent overseas, and exports to the United States gradually increased. The Penrhyn Quarry continued to grow, and in 1799 Greenfield introduced the system of "galleries", huge terraces from 9 metres to 21 metres in depth. In 1798, Lord Penrhyn constructed the horse-drawn Llandegai Tramway to transport slates from Penrhyn Quarry, and in 1801 this was replaced by the narrow gauge Penrhyn Quarry Railway
, one of the earliest railway lines. The slates were transported to the sea at Port Penrhyn
which had been constructed in the 1790s. The Padarn Railway
was opened in 1824 as a tramway for the Dinorwig Quarry, and converted to a railway in 1843. It ran from Gilfach Ddu near Llanberis to Port Dinorwic at Y Felinheli
. The Nantlle Railway
was built in 1828 and was operated using horse-power to carry slate from several slate quarries in the Nantlle Valley to the harbour at Caernarfon.
s was not abolished until 1833. The Ffestiniog Railway
line was constructed between 1833 and 1836 to transport slate from Blaenau Ffestiniog to the coastal town of Porthmadog, where it was loaded onto ships. The railway was graded so that loaded slate waggon
s could be run by gravity downhill all the way from Blaenau Ffestiniog to the port. The empty waggons were hauled back up by horses, which travelled down in 'dandy' waggons
. This helped expansion at the Blaenau Ffestiniog quarries, which had previously had to cart the slate to Maentwrog
to be loaded onto small boats and taken down the River Dwyryd
to the estuary, where it was transferred to larger vessels. There was further expansion at Blaenau when J. W. Greaves, who had been running the Votty quarry since 1833, took a lease on the land between this quarry and the main Ffestiniog to Betws-y-Coed
road. After years of digging he struck the famous Old Vein in 1846 in what became the Llechwedd quarry
. A fire which destroyed a large part of Hamburg
in 1842 led to a demand for slate for rebuilding, and Germany became an important market, particularly for Ffestiniog slate.
built branches to connect Port Penrhyn and Port Dinorwic to the main line in 1852. The Corris Railway
opened as the horse-worked Corris, Machynlleth & River Dovey Tramroad in 1859, connecting the slate quarries around Corris and Aberllefenni with wharves on the estuary of the River Dyfi
. The Ffestiniog Railway converted to steam in 1863, and the Talyllyn Railway
was opened in 1866 to serve the Bryn Eglwys
quarry above the village of Abergynolwyn
. Bryn Eglwys grew to be one of the largest quarries in mid Wales, employing 300 men and producing 30% of the total output of the Corris district. The Cardigan
Railway was opened in 1873, partly to carry slate traffic, and enabled the Glogue quarry in Pembrokeshire to grow to employ 80 men.
Mechanization
was gradually introduced to make most aspects of the industry more efficient, particularly at Blaenau Ffestiniog where the Ordovician slate was less brittle than the Cambrian slate further north, and therefore easier to work by machine. The slate mill evolved between 1840 and 1860, powered by a single line shaft
running along the building and bringing together operations such as sawing, planing and dressing. In 1859, J. W. Greaves invented the Greaves sawing table to produce blocks for the splitter, then in 1856 introduced a rotary machine to dress the split slate. The splitting of the blocks to produce roofing slates proved resistant to mechanization, and continued to be done with a mallet and chisel. An extra source of income from the 1860s was the production of "slab", thicker pieces of slate which were planed and used for many purposes, for example flooring, tombstones and billiard tables
.
The larger quarries could be highly profitable. The Mining Journal estimated in 1859 that the Penrhyn quarries produced an annual net profit
of GB£
100,000, and the Dinorwig Quarry £70,000 a year. From 1860 onwards slate prices rose steadily. Quarries expanded and the population of the quarrying districts increased, for example the population of Ffestiniog parish increased from 732 in 1801 to 11,274 in 1881. Total Welsh production reached 350,000 tons a year by the end of the 1860s. Of this total, over 100,000 tons came from the Bethesda area, mainly from the Penrhyn Quarry. Blaenau Ffestiniog produced almost as much, and the Dinorwig Quarry alone produced 80,000 tons per year. The Nantlle Valley quarries produced 40,000 tons, while the remainder of Wales outside these areas produced only about 20,000 tons per year. By the late 1870s, Wales was producing 450,000 tons of slate per year, compared with just over 50,000 tons for the rest of the United Kingdom, which then included Ireland. In 1882, 92% of the United Kingdom's production was from Wales with the quarries at Penrhyn and Dinorwig producing half of this between them. Alun Richards comments on the importance of the slate industry:
The prosperity of the slate industry led to the growth of a number of other associated industries. Shipbuilding
increased at a number of coastal locations, particularly at Porthmadog, where 201 ships were built between 1836 and 1880. Engineering companies were set up to supply the quarries, notably De Winton
at Caernarfon. In 1870, De Winton built and equipped an entire workshop for the Dinorwig Quarry, with machinery powered by overhead shafting that in its turn was driven by the largest water-wheel
in the United Kingdom, over 50 feet in diameter.
The bad rockmen and rubbish men were usually paid by the ton of material removed, but the quarrymen were paid according to a more complicated system. Part of the payment was determined by the number of slates the gang produced, but this could vary greatly according to the nature of the rock in the section allocated to them. The men would therefore be paid an extra sum of "poundage" per pound's worth of slate produced. "Bargains" were let by the setting steward, who would agree a price for a certain area of rock. If the rock in the bargain allocated to a gang was poor, they would be paid a higher poundage, while good rock meant a lower poundage. The first Monday of every month was "bargain letting day" when these agreements were made between men and management. The men had to pay for their ropes and chains, for tools and for services such as sharpening and repairing. Subs (advances) were paid every week, everything being settled up on the "day of the big pay". If conditions had not been good, the men could end up owing the management money. This system was not finally abolished until after the Second World War.
Because of this arrangement, the men tended to see themselves as independent contractors rather than employees on a wage, and trade union
s were slow to develop. There were grievances however, including unfairness in setting bargains and disputes over days off. The North Wales Quarrymen's Union (NWQMU) was formed in 1874, and the same year there were disputes at Dinorwig and then at Penrhyn. Both these disputes ended in victory for the workers, and by May 1878, the union had 8,368 members. One of the founders of the union, Morgan Richards, described in 1876 the conditions when he started work in the quarries forty years before:
In 1879, a period of twenty years of almost uninterrupted growth came to an end, and the slate industry was hit by a recession
which lasted until the 1890s. Management responded by tightening rules and making it more difficult for the men to take time off. Labour relations
were worsened by differences in language, religion and politics between the two sides. The owners and top managers at most of the quarries were English-speaking, Anglican
and Tory
, while the quarrymen were Welsh-speaking
and mainly Nonconformist
and Liberal
. Negotiations between the two sides usually involved the use of interpreters. In October 1885, there was a dispute at Dinorwig over the curtailing of holidays which led to a lock-out
lasting until February 1886. At the Penrhyn Quarry, George Sholto Gordon Douglas-Pennant
took over from his father Edward Gordon Douglas-Pennant
in 1885, and in 1886 appointed E. A. Young as chief manager. A more stringent management regime was introduced, and relations with the workforce deteriorated. This culminated in the suspension of 57 members of the union committee and 17 other men in September 1896, leading to a strike
which lasted eleven months. The men were eventually obliged to go back to work, essentially on the management's terms, in August 1897. This strike became known as "The Penrhyn Lockout".
There was an upturn in trade in 1892, heralding another period of growth in the industry. This growth was mainly at Blaenau Ffestiniog and in the Nantlle Valley, where the workforce at Penyrorsedd reached 450. Slate production in Wales peaked at over half a million tons in 1898, with 17,000 men employed in the industry. A second lock-out or strike at the Penrhyn Quarry began on 22 November 1900 and lasted for three years. The causes of the dispute were complex, but included the extension of a system of contracting out parts of the quarry. The quarrymen, instead of arranging their own bargains, would find themselves working for a contractor. The union's funds for strike pay
were inadequate, and there was a great deal of hardship among the 2,800 workers. Lord Penrhyn reopened the quarry in June 1901, and about 500 men returned to work, to be castigated as "traitors" by the remainder. Eventually the workers were forced to return to work in November 1903 on terms laid down by Lord Penrhyn. Many of the men considered to have been prominent in the union were not re-employed, and many of those who had left the area to seek work elsewhere did not return. The dispute left a lasting legacy of bitterness in the Bethesda area.
The First World War hit the slate industry badly, particularly in Blaenau Ffestiniog where exports to Germany
had been an important source of income. Cilgwyn, the oldest quarry in Wales, closed in 1914, though it later reopened. In 1917, slate quarrying was declared a non-essential industry and a number of quarries were closed for the remainder of the war. The demand for new houses after the end of the war brought back a measure of prosperity; in the slate mines of Blaenau Ffestiniog production was almost back to 1913 levels by 1927, but in the quarries the output was still well below the pre-war level. The Great Depression in the 1930s led to cuts in production, with exports particularly hard hit.
The quarries and mines made increasing use of mechanization from the turn of the century, with electricity
replacing steam and water as a power source. The Llechwedd Quarry introduced its first electrical plant in 1891, and in 1906, a hydro-electric
plant was opened in Cwm Dyli, on the lower slopes of Snowdon
, which supplied electricity to the largest quarries in the area. The use of electric saws and other machinery reduced the hard manual labour involved in extracting the slate, but produced much more slate dust than the old manual methods, leading to an increased incidence of silicosis
. The work was also dangerous in other ways, with the blasting operations responsible for many deaths. A government enquiry in 1893 found that the death rate for underground workers in the slate mines was 3.23 per thousand, higher than the rate for coal miners
.
The outbreak of World War II in 1939 led to a severe drop in trade. Part of the Manod (Cwt-y-Bugail) mine at Blaenau Ffestiniog was used to store art treasures from the National Gallery
and the Tate Gallery
. The number of men employed in the slate industry in North Wales dropped from 7,589 in 1939 to 3,520 by the end of the war. In 1945, total production was only 70,000 tons a year, and fewer than 20 quarries were still open compared with 40 before the war. The Nantlle Valley had been particularly hard hit, with only 350 workers employed in the entire district, compared with 1,000 in 1937. Demand for slate was dropping as tiles were increasingly used for roofing, and imports from countries such as Portugal
, France and Italy were increasing. There was some increased demand for slates to repair bombed buildings after the end of the war, but the use of slate for new buildings was banned, apart from the smallest sizes. This ban was lifted in 1949.
Total production of slate in Wales declined from 54,000 tons in 1958 to 22,000 tons in 1970. The Diffwys
quarry at Blaenau Ffestiniog
closed in 1955 after almost two centuries of operation. The nearby Votty and Bowydd quarries closed in 1963. In 1969, the Dinorwig Quarry was closed, and over 300 quarrymen lost their jobs. The following year the Dorothea Quarry in the Nantlle Valley
and the Braichgoch Slate Mine
near Corris
announced their closure. The Oakeley mine at Blaenau Ffestiniog closed in 1971, but was later reopened by another company. By 1972, the number of men employed in the North Wales slate industry was down to under 1,000. There was little alternative employment in the slate-producing areas, and the closures resulted in high unemployment and a drop in population as younger people moved away to find work. In 1979, after a long struggle, the government recognized silicosis
as an industrial disease meriting compensation. There was an increase in demand for slate in the 1980s, and although this came too late for many quarries there was still some production in the Blaenau Ffestiniog area at the Oakeley, Llechwedd and Cwt-y-Bugail quarries, though the bulk of roofing slate production was at the Penrhyn Quarry. Further mechanization was introduced, with a computerized laser
beam being used to aid the sawing of the slate blocks.
is still producing slate, though at a much reduced capacity from its heyday at the end of the 19th century. In 1995, it accounted for almost 50% of UK production. It is currently owned and operated by Welsh Slate Ltd (a subsidiary of Lagan Building Solutions), which also owns and carries out some operations at the Oakeley quarry at Blaenau Ffestiniog, the Pen yr Orsedd quarry in the Nantlle Vale, and the Cwt-y-Bugail quarry. In March 2010 the company announced its decision to mothball the Oakeley quarry because of subsidence at the site.
The Greaves Welsh Slate Company produces roofing slates and other slate products from Llechwedd, and work also continues at the Berwyn Quarry near Llangollen
. The final large-scale underground working to close was Maenofferen, associated with the Llechwedd tourist mine, in 1999: part of this site, now effectively amalgamated with Votty / Bowydd, is still worked by untopping. The Wales Millennium Centre
in Cardiff
uses waste slate in many different colours in its design: purple slate from Penrhyn, blue from Cwt-y-Bugail, green from Nantlle, grey from Llechwedd, and black from Corris.
Part of the Dinorwig Slate Quarry is now within the Padarn Country Park, and the other part houses the Dinorwig power station
in caverns under the old quarry workings. The National Slate Museum is located in some of the quarry workshops. The museum has displays including Victorian slate-workers' cottages that once stood at Tanygrisiau near Blaenau Ffestiniog. As well as many exhibits, it has the multi-media display To Steal a Mountain, showing the lives and work of the men who quarried slate here. The museum has the largest working water wheel in the United Kingdom, which is available for viewing via several walkways, and a restored incline formerly used to carry slate waggons uphill and downhill.
In Blaenau Ffestiniog, the Llechwedd Slate Caverns
have been converted into a visitor attraction. Visitors can travel on the Miners' Tramway or descend into the Deep Mine, via a funicular railway which uses an old incline, to explore this former slate mine and learn how slate was extracted and processed and about the lives of the miners. The Deep Mine, opened in 1979, is accessed by Britain's steepest passenger railway, with a gradient of 1:1.8 or 30°. In the chambers, formed by slate extraction, sound and light is used to tell the story of the mine and mining. The Braichgoch slate mines at Corris have been converted into a tourist attraction named "King Arthur's Labyrinth" where visitors are taken underground by boat along a subterranean river. They then walk through the caverns to see audiovisual presentations of the Arthurian
legends and stories from the Mabinogion
and the tales of Taliesin
. The Llwyngwern slate quarry near Machynlleth
is now the site of the Centre for Alternative Technology
. A number of the railways which carried the slates to the ports have been restored as tourist attractions, for example the Ffestiniog Railway and the Talyllyn Railway.
from a caban at the Llechwedd mine at Blaenau Ffestiniog for 1908–10 records discussions on Church Disestablishment
, tariff reform
and other political topics. Eisteddfodau were held, poetry composed and discussed and most of the larger quarries had their own band
, with the Oakley band particularly famous. Burn calculates that there are around fifty men judged worthy of an entry in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography
who started their working lives as slate quarrymen, compared to only four owners, though obviously there was also a distinct disparity in the numbers of the two groups.
A number of Welsh writers
have drawn on the lives of the quarrymen for their material, for example the novels of T. Rowland Hughes. Chwalfa, translated into English as Out of their night (1954), has the Penrhyn Quarry dispute as a background, while Y cychwyn, translated as The beginning (1969), follows the apprenticeship
of a young quarryman. Several novels by Kate Roberts, the daughter of a quarryman, give a picture of the area around Rhosgadfan, where the slate industry was on a smaller scale and many of the quarrymen were also smallholders. Her novel Traed mewn cyffion
(1936), translated as Feet in chains (2002), gives a vivid picture of the struggles of a quarrying family in the period between 1880 and 1914. Y Chwarelwr ("The Quarryman") produced in 1935 was the first Welsh-language film. It showed various aspects of a slate quarryman's life at Blaenau Ffestiniog.
Roman Britain
Roman Britain was the part of the island of Great Britain controlled by the Roman Empire from AD 43 until ca. AD 410.The Romans referred to the imperial province as Britannia, which eventually comprised all of the island of Great Britain south of the fluid frontier with Caledonia...
when slate
Slate
Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade regional metamorphism. The result is a foliated rock in which the foliation may not correspond to the original sedimentary layering...
was used to roof
Roof
A roof is the covering on the uppermost part of a building. A roof protects the building and its contents from the effects of weather. Structures that require roofs range from a letter box to a cathedral or stadium, dwellings being the most numerous....
the fort at Segontium, now Caernarfon
Caernarfon
Caernarfon is a Royal town, community and port in Gwynedd, Wales, with a population of 9,611. It lies along the A487 road, on the east banks of the Menai Straits, opposite the Isle of Anglesey. The city of Bangor is to the northeast, while Snowdonia fringes Caernarfon to the east and southeast...
. The slate industry grew slowly until the early 18th century, then expanded rapidly until the late 19th century, at which time the most important slate producing areas were in northwest Wales
Wales
Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...
, including the Penrhyn Quarry
Penrhyn Quarry
The Penrhyn Slate Quarry is a slate quarry located near Bethesda in north Wales. At the end of the nineteenth century it was the world's largest slate quarry; the main pit is nearly long and deep, and it was worked by nearly 3,000 quarrymen. It has since been superseded in size by slate quarries...
near Bethesda
Bethesda, Wales
Bethesda is a town lying on the River Ogwen and the A5 road on the edge of Snowdonia, in Gwynedd, north-west Wales, colloquially called Pesda by the locals.- History :...
, the Dinorwic Quarry
Dinorwic Quarry
The Dinorwic Slate Quarry is a large former slate quarry, now home to the Welsh National Slate Museum, located between the villages of Llanberis and Dinorwig in north Wales. It was the second largest slate quarry in Wales, indeed in the world, after the neighbouring Penrhyn Quarry....
near Llanberis
Llanberis
Llanberis is a village in Gwynedd, North Wales, lying on the southern banks of Llyn Padarn in Snowdonia. It takes its name from Saint Peris, an early Welsh saint.According to the United Kingdom Census 2001, the population of Llanberis was 1,954...
, the Nantlle Valley
Nantlle Valley
The Nantlle Valley is an area in Gwynedd, north Wales, characterised by its large number of small settlements.Around 80% of the population of the Nantlle Valley speak Welsh as their first language. Some of the communities came into being as a result of slate quarrying in the late eighteenth or...
quarries, and Blaenau Ffestiniog
Blaenau Ffestiniog
Blaenau Ffestiniog is a town in Gwynedd, north-west Wales. It has a population of 5,000, including Llan Ffestiniog, which makes it the third largest town in Gwynedd, behind Caernarfon & Porthmadog. Although the population reached 12,000 at the peak of the slate industry, the population fell due to...
, where the slate was mined
Slate industry
The slate industry is the industry related to the extraction and processing of slate. Slate is either quarried from a slate quarry or reached by tunneling in a slate mine. Common uses for slate include as a roofing material, a flooring material, gravestones and memorial tablets, and for electrical...
rather than quarried
Quarry
A quarry is a type of open-pit mine from which rock or minerals are extracted. Quarries are generally used for extracting building materials, such as dimension stone, construction aggregate, riprap, sand, and gravel. They are often collocated with concrete and asphalt plants due to the requirement...
. Penrhyn and Dinorwig were the two largest slate quarries in the world, and the Oakeley mine at Blaenau Ffestiniog was the largest slate mine in the world. Slate is mainly used for roofing, but is also produced as thicker slab for a variety of uses including flooring, worktops and headstone
Headstone
A headstone, tombstone, or gravestone is a marker, usually stone, that is placed over a grave. In most cases they have the deceased's name, date of birth, and date of death inscribed on them, along with a personal message, or prayer.- Use :...
s.
Up to the end of the 18th century, slate was extracted on a small scale by groups of quarrymen who paid a royalty to the landlord, carted slate to the ports, and then shipped it to England, Ireland and sometimes France. Towards the close of the century, the landowners began to operate the quarries themselves, on a larger scale. After the government abolished slate duty in 1831, rapid expansion was propelled by the building of narrow gauge railways to transport the slates to the ports.
The slate industry
Slate industry
The slate industry is the industry related to the extraction and processing of slate. Slate is either quarried from a slate quarry or reached by tunneling in a slate mine. Common uses for slate include as a roofing material, a flooring material, gravestones and memorial tablets, and for electrical...
dominated the economy of north-west Wales during the second half of the 19th century, but was on a much smaller scale elsewhere. In 1898, a work force of 17,000 men produced half a million tons of slate. A bitter industrial dispute at the Penrhyn Quarry between 1900 and 1903 marked the beginning of its decline, and the First World War
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
saw a great reduction in the number of men employed in the industry. The Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
and Second World War
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
led to the closure of many smaller quarries, and competition from other roofing materials, particularly tile
Tile
A tile is a manufactured piece of hard-wearing material such as ceramic, stone, metal, or even glass. Tiles are generally used for covering roofs, floors, walls, showers, or other objects such as tabletops...
s, resulted in the closure of most of the larger quarries in the 1960s and 1970s. Slate production continues on a much reduced scale.
Beginnings
The slate deposits of Wales belong to three geological series: CambrianCambrian
The Cambrian is the first geological period of the Paleozoic Era, lasting from Mya ; it is succeeded by the Ordovician. Its subdivisions, and indeed its base, are somewhat in flux. The period was established by Adam Sedgwick, who named it after Cambria, the Latin name for Wales, where Britain's...
, Ordovician
Ordovician
The Ordovician is a geologic period and system, the second of six of the Paleozoic Era, and covers the time between 488.3±1.7 to 443.7±1.5 million years ago . It follows the Cambrian Period and is followed by the Silurian Period...
and Silurian
Silurian
The Silurian is a geologic period and system that extends from the end of the Ordovician Period, about 443.7 ± 1.5 Mya , to the beginning of the Devonian Period, about 416.0 ± 2.8 Mya . As with other geologic periods, the rock beds that define the period's start and end are well identified, but the...
. The Cambrian deposits run south-west from Conwy to near Criccieth
Criccieth
Criccieth is a town and community on Cardigan Bay, in the Eifionydd area of Gwynedd in Wales. The town lies west of Porthmadog, east of Pwllheli and south of Caernarfon. It has a population of 1,826....
; these deposits were quarried in the Penrhyn and Dinorwig quarries and in the Nantlle Valley. There are smaller outcrops elsewhere, for example on Anglesey
Anglesey
Anglesey , also known by its Welsh name Ynys Môn , is an island and, as Isle of Anglesey, a county off the north west coast of Wales...
. The Ordovician deposits run south-west from Betws-y-Coed
Betws-y-Coed
Betws-y-Coed is a village and community in the Conwy valley in Conwy County Borough, Wales. It has a population of 534. The name Betws or Bettws is generally thought to be derived from the Anglo-Saxon Old English 'bed-hus' - i.e. a bead-house - a house of prayer, or oratory...
to Porthmadog
Porthmadog
Porthmadog , known locally as "Port", and historically rendered into English as Portmadoc, is a small coastal town and community in the Eifionydd area of Gwynedd, in Wales. Prior to the Local Government Act 1972 it was in the administrative county of Caernarfonshire. The town lies east of...
; these were the deposits mined at Blaenau Ffestiniog. There is another band of Ordovician slate further south, running from Llangynnog to Aberdyfi
Aberdyfi
Aberdyfi , or Aberdovey is a village on the north side of the estuary of the River Dyfi in Gwynedd, on the west coast of Wales....
, quarried mainly in the Corris
Corris
Corris is a village in the south of Snowdonia in the Welsh county of Gwynedd. Although the Snowdonia National Park covers much of the area around Corris, the village is not within the park. The name is possibly derived from the English word "quarries", and the extensive slate quarries that surround...
area, with a few outcrops in south-west Wales, notably Pembrokeshire
Pembrokeshire
Pembrokeshire is a county in the south west of Wales. It borders Carmarthenshire to the east and Ceredigion to the north east. The county town is Haverfordwest where Pembrokeshire County Council is headquartered....
. The Silurian deposits are mainly further east in the Dee
River Dee, Wales
The River Dee is a long river in the United Kingdom. It travels through Wales and England and also forms part of the border between the two countries....
valley and around Machynlleth
Machynlleth
Machynlleth is a market town in Powys, Wales. It is in the Dyfi Valley at the intersection of the A487 and the A489 roads.Machynlleth was the seat of Owain Glyndŵr's Welsh Parliament in 1404, and as such claims to be the "ancient capital of Wales". However, it has never held any official...
.
The virtues of slate as a building and roofing material have been recognized since the Roman period. The Roman fort at Segontium, Caernarfon, was originally roofed with tiles, but the later levels contain numerous slates, used for both roofing and flooring. The nearest deposits are about five miles (8 km) away in the Cilgwyn area, indicating that the slates were not used merely because they were available on-site. During the mediaeval period, there was small-scale quarrying of slate in several areas. The Cilgwyn quarry in the Nantlle Valley dates from the 12th century, and is thought to be the oldest in Wales. The first record of slate quarrying in the neighbourhood of the later Penrhyn Quarry was in 1413, when a rent-roll of Gwilym ap Griffith records that several of his tenants were paid 10 pence each for working 5,000 slates. Aberllefenni Slate Quarry
Aberllefenni Slate Quarry
Aberllefenni Slate Quarry is the collective name of three slate quarries, Foel Grochan , Hen Chwarel and Ceunant Ddu, located in Aberllefenni, Gwynedd, North Wales. It was the longest continually operated slate mine in the world until its closure in 2003...
may have started operating as a slate mine as early as the 14th century. The earliest confirmed date of operating dates from the early 16th century when the local house Plas Aberllefenni was roofed in slates from this quarry.
Transport problems meant that the slate was usually used fairly close to the quarries. There was some transport by sea. A poem by the 15th century poet Guto'r Glyn
Guto'r Glyn
Guto'r Glyn was a Welsh language poet and soldier of the era of the Beirdd yr Uchelwyr or Cywyddwyr , the itinerant professional poets of the later Middle Ages...
asks the Dean
Dean (religion)
A dean, in a church context, is a cleric holding certain positions of authority within a religious hierarchy. The title is used mainly in the Anglican Communion and the Roman Catholic Church.-Anglican Communion:...
of Bangor
Bangor, Wales
Bangor is a city in Gwynedd, north west Wales, and one of the smallest cities in Britain. It is a university city with a population of 13,725 at the 2001 census, not including around 10,000 students at Bangor University. Including nearby Menai Bridge on Anglesey, which does not however form part of...
to send him a shipload of slates from Aberogwen, near Bangor, to Rhuddlan
Rhuddlan
Rhuddlan is a town and community in the county of Denbighshire , in north Wales. It is situated to the south of the coastal town of Rhyl and overlooks the River Clwyd. The town gave its name to the Welsh district of Rhuddlan from 1974 to 1996...
to roof a house at Henllan, near Denbigh
Denbigh
Denbigh is a market town and community in Denbighshire, Wales. Before 1888, it was the county town of Denbighshire. Denbigh lies 8 miles to the north west of Ruthin and to the south of St Asaph. It is about 13 miles from the seaside resort of Rhyl. The town grew around the glove-making industry...
. The wreck of a wooden ship carrying finished slates was discovered in the Menai Strait
Menai Strait
The Menai Strait is a narrow stretch of shallow tidal water about long, which separates the island of Anglesey from the mainland of Wales.The strait is bridged in two places - the main A5 road is carried over the strait by Thomas Telford's elegant iron suspension bridge, the first of its kind,...
and is thought to date from the 16th century. By the second half of the 16th century, there was a small export trade of slates to Ireland from ports such as Beaumaris and Caernarfon. Slate exports from the Penrhyn estate are recorded from 1713 when 14 shipments totalling 415,000 slates were sent to Dublin. The slates were carried to the ports by pack-horses, and later by carts. This was sometimes done by women, the only female involvement in what was otherwise an exclusively male industry.
Until the late 18th century, slate was extracted from many small pits by small partnerships of local men, who did not own the capital to expand further. The quarrymen usually had to pay a rent or royalty to the landlord, though the quarrymen at Cilgwyn did not. A letter from the agent of the Penrhyn estate, John Paynter, in 1738 complains that competition from Cilgwyn was affecting the sales of Penrhyn slates. The Cilgwyn slates could be extracted more cheaply and sold at a higher price. Penrhyn introduced larger sizes of slate between 1730 and 1740, and gave these sizes the names which became standard. These ranged from "Duchesses", the largest at 24 inches (609.6 mm) by 12 inches (304.8 mm), through "Countesses", "Ladies" and "Doubles" to the smallest "Singles".
Growth (1760–1830)
Methusalem Jones, previously a quarryman at Cilgwyn, began to work the Diffwys quarry at Blaenau Ffestiniog in the 1760s, which became the first large quarry in the area. The large landowners were initially content to issue "take notes", allowing individuals to quarry slates on their lands for a yearly rent of a few shillingShilling
The shilling is a unit of currency used in some current and former British Commonwealth countries. The word shilling comes from scilling, an accounting term that dates back to Anglo-Saxon times where it was deemed to be the value of a cow in Kent or a sheep elsewhere. The word is thought to derive...
s and a royalty on the slates produced. The first landowner to take over the working of slates on his land was the owner of the Penrhyn estate, Richard Pennant, later Baron Penrhyn
Baron Penrhyn
Baron Penrhyn is a title that has been created twice. The first creation came in the Peerage of Ireland in 1783 in favour of Richard Pennant, who had previously served as a Member of Parliament for Petersfield and Liverpool. This creation became extinct on his death in 1808...
. In 1782, the men working quarries on the estate were bought out or ejected, and Pennant appointed James Greenfield as agent. The same year, Lord Penrhyn opened a new quarry at Caebraichycafn near Bethesda, which as Penrhyn Quarry would become the largest slate quarry in the world. By 1792, this quarry was employing 500 men and producing 15,000 ton
Ton
The ton is a unit of measure. It has a long history and has acquired a number of meanings and uses over the years. It is used principally as a unit of weight, and as a unit of volume. It can also be used as a measure of energy, for truck classification, or as a colloquial term.It is derived from...
s of slate per year. At Dinorwig, a single large partnership took over in 1787, and in 1809 the landowner, Thomas Assheton Smith
Thomas Assheton Smith
Thomas Assheton Smith was an English landowner and all-round sportsman who played a major part in the development of the Welsh slate industry....
of Vaynol
Vaynol
Vaynol or Y Faenol , is a country estate dating from the Tudor period, near Y Felinheli in Gwynedd, North Wales . There are of park, farmland, and gardens on the estate, with over thirty listed buildings, surrounded by a wall which is long...
, took the management of the quarry into his own hands. The Cilgwyn quarries were taken over by a company in 1800, and the scattered workings at all three locations were amalgamated into a single quarry. The first steam engine
Steam engine
A steam engine is a heat engine that performs mechanical work using steam as its working fluid.Steam engines are external combustion engines, where the working fluid is separate from the combustion products. Non-combustion heat sources such as solar power, nuclear power or geothermal energy may be...
to be used in the slate industry was a pump installed at the Hafodlas quarry in the Nantlle Valley in 1807, but most quarries relied on hydropower
Hydropower
Hydropower, hydraulic power, hydrokinetic power or water power is power that is derived from the force or energy of falling water, which may be harnessed for useful purposes. Since ancient times, hydropower has been used for irrigation and the operation of various mechanical devices, such as...
to drive machinery.
Wales was by now producing more than half the United Kingdom's output of slate, 26,000 tons out of a total UK production of 45,000 tons in 1793. In July 1794, the government imposed a 20% tax on all slate carried coastwise, which put the Welsh producers at a disadvantage compared to inland producers who could use the canal network
Canals of the United Kingdom
The canals of the United Kingdom are a major part of the network of inland waterways in the United Kingdom. They have a colourful history, from use for irrigation and transport, through becoming the focus of the Industrial Revolution, to today's role for recreational boating...
to distribute their product. There was no tax on slates sent overseas, and exports to the United States gradually increased. The Penrhyn Quarry continued to grow, and in 1799 Greenfield introduced the system of "galleries", huge terraces from 9 metres to 21 metres in depth. In 1798, Lord Penrhyn constructed the horse-drawn Llandegai Tramway to transport slates from Penrhyn Quarry, and in 1801 this was replaced by the narrow gauge Penrhyn Quarry Railway
Penrhyn Quarry Railway
The Penrhyn Quarry Railway first opened in 1798 as the Llandegai Tramway; it became the Penrhyn Railway in 1801 although on a different route. Constructed to transport slate from Lord Penrhyn's slate quarries at Bethesda to Port Penrhyn at Bangor, Wales. The railway was around six miles long...
, one of the earliest railway lines. The slates were transported to the sea at Port Penrhyn
Port Penrhyn
Port Penrhyn is a harbour located just east of Bangor in north Wales at the mouth of the River Cegin. It was formerly of great importance as the main port for the export of slate from the Penrhyn Quarry, the largest slate quarry in the world at the end of the nineteenth century...
which had been constructed in the 1790s. The Padarn Railway
Padarn Railway
The Padarn Railway was a narrow gauge railway line in Wales, built to the unusual gauge of . It was built to carry slate from the Dinorwic Quarry to Port Dinorwic. It opened in 1842, replacing the previous Dinorwic Railway. The Padarn Railway closed in 1961 .An unusual feature of the railway were...
was opened in 1824 as a tramway for the Dinorwig Quarry, and converted to a railway in 1843. It ran from Gilfach Ddu near Llanberis to Port Dinorwic at Y Felinheli
Y Felinheli
Y Felinheli is a village lying beside the Menai Strait between Bangor and Caernarfon in Gwynedd, north-west Wales. The population is about 2,200.-Etymology:...
. The Nantlle Railway
Nantlle Railway
The Nantlle Railway was a Welsh narrow gauge railway built to carry slate from several slate quarries in the Nantlle Valley to the harbour at Caernarfon for export by sea. The line received its Act of Parliament in 1825 and was constructed by Robert Stephenson, brother of George Stephenson. It...
was built in 1828 and was operated using horse-power to carry slate from several slate quarries in the Nantlle Valley to the harbour at Caernarfon.
Expansion at Blaenau Ffestiniog
In 1831 slate duty was abolished, and this helped to produce a rapid expansion in the industry, particularly since the duty on tileTile
A tile is a manufactured piece of hard-wearing material such as ceramic, stone, metal, or even glass. Tiles are generally used for covering roofs, floors, walls, showers, or other objects such as tabletops...
s was not abolished until 1833. The Ffestiniog Railway
Ffestiniog Railway
The Ffestiniog Railway is a narrow gauge heritage railway, located in Gwynedd, Wales. It is a major tourist attraction located mainly within the Snowdonia National Park....
line was constructed between 1833 and 1836 to transport slate from Blaenau Ffestiniog to the coastal town of Porthmadog, where it was loaded onto ships. The railway was graded so that loaded slate waggon
Slate waggon
Slate waggons are specialized types of railway waggons designed for the conveyance of slate. The characteristics of this stone led to the development of small open cars that carried the slate in its various forms. These were first developed on the narrow gauge railways serving the slate industry...
s could be run by gravity downhill all the way from Blaenau Ffestiniog to the port. The empty waggons were hauled back up by horses, which travelled down in 'dandy' waggons
Dandy waggon
The dandy waggon is a type of railroad car used to carry horses on gravity trains. They are particularly associated with the narrow gauge Festiniog Railway in Wales where they were used between 1836 and 1863.- The challenge :...
. This helped expansion at the Blaenau Ffestiniog quarries, which had previously had to cart the slate to Maentwrog
Maentwrog
Maentwrog is a village and community in the Welsh county of Gwynedd, lying in the Vale of Ffestiniog, within the Snowdonia National Park. The River Dwyryd runs alongside the village...
to be loaded onto small boats and taken down the River Dwyryd
River Dwyryd
The Afon Dwyryd is a river in Gwynedd, North Wales, which flows principally westwards draining to the sea into Tremadog Bay south of Porthmadog....
to the estuary, where it was transferred to larger vessels. There was further expansion at Blaenau when J. W. Greaves, who had been running the Votty quarry since 1833, took a lease on the land between this quarry and the main Ffestiniog to Betws-y-Coed
Betws-y-Coed
Betws-y-Coed is a village and community in the Conwy valley in Conwy County Borough, Wales. It has a population of 534. The name Betws or Bettws is generally thought to be derived from the Anglo-Saxon Old English 'bed-hus' - i.e. a bead-house - a house of prayer, or oratory...
road. After years of digging he struck the famous Old Vein in 1846 in what became the Llechwedd quarry
Llechwedd quarry
Llechwedd quarry is a major slate quarry in the town of Blaenau Ffestiniog, north Wales. At its peak in 1884 it produced 23,788 tons of finished slate per year and had 513 employees. It continues to produce slate on a limited scale and is the location of the Llechwedd Slate Caverns tourist...
. A fire which destroyed a large part of Hamburg
Hamburg
-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...
in 1842 led to a demand for slate for rebuilding, and Germany became an important market, particularly for Ffestiniog slate.
Mechanization and increased production
In 1843, the Padarn Railway become the first quarry railway to use steam locomotives, and the transport of slate by train rather than by ship was made easier when the London and North Western RailwayLondon and North Western Railway
The London and North Western Railway was a British railway company between 1846 and 1922. It was created by the merger of three companies – the Grand Junction Railway, the London and Birmingham Railway and the Manchester and Birmingham Railway...
built branches to connect Port Penrhyn and Port Dinorwic to the main line in 1852. The Corris Railway
Corris Railway
The Corris Railway is a narrow gauge preserved railway based in Corris on the border between Merionethshire and Montgomeryshire in Mid-Wales....
opened as the horse-worked Corris, Machynlleth & River Dovey Tramroad in 1859, connecting the slate quarries around Corris and Aberllefenni with wharves on the estuary of the River Dyfi
River Dyfi
The River Dyfi is a river in Mid Wales. The Dyfi estuary forms the border between the counties of Gwynedd and Ceredigion.- Source :...
. The Ffestiniog Railway converted to steam in 1863, and the Talyllyn Railway
Talyllyn Railway
The Talyllyn Railway is a narrow-gauge preserved railway in Wales running for from Tywyn on the Mid-Wales coast to Nant Gwernol near the village of Abergynolwyn. The line was opened in 1866 to carry slate from the quarries at Bryn Eglwys to Tywyn, and was the first narrow gauge railway in Britain...
was opened in 1866 to serve the Bryn Eglwys
Bryn Eglwys
Bryn Eglwys was a remote slate quarry located near Abergynolwyn in Gwynedd mid-Wales.- History :The quarry was first worked on a small scale in the early 1840s. In 1864 William McConnel leased the quarry, forming the Aberdovey Slate Company Limited. McConnel planned to increase production at Bryn...
quarry above the village of Abergynolwyn
Abergynolwyn
Abergynolwyn is a village in southern Gwynedd, Wales, located at the confluence of the Nant Gwernol and the Afon Dysynni.Historically, the village was part of Merionethshire and its main industry was slate quarrying and the village was founded in the 1860s to house workers at the nearby Bryn...
. Bryn Eglwys grew to be one of the largest quarries in mid Wales, employing 300 men and producing 30% of the total output of the Corris district. The Cardigan
Cardigan, Ceredigion
Cardigan is a town in the county of Ceredigion in Mid Wales. It lies on the estuary of the River Teifi at the point where Ceredigion meets Pembrokeshire. It was the county town of the pre-1974 county of Cardiganshire. It is the second largest town in Ceredigion. The town's population was 4,203...
Railway was opened in 1873, partly to carry slate traffic, and enabled the Glogue quarry in Pembrokeshire to grow to employ 80 men.
Mechanization
Mechanization
Mechanization or mechanisation is providing human operators with machinery that assists them with the muscular requirements of work or displaces muscular work. In some fields, mechanization includes the use of hand tools...
was gradually introduced to make most aspects of the industry more efficient, particularly at Blaenau Ffestiniog where the Ordovician slate was less brittle than the Cambrian slate further north, and therefore easier to work by machine. The slate mill evolved between 1840 and 1860, powered by a single line shaft
Line shaft
A line shaft is a power transmission system used extensively during the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the widespread use of electric motors small enough to be connected directly to each piece of machinery, line shafting was used to distribute power from a large central power source to machinery...
running along the building and bringing together operations such as sawing, planing and dressing. In 1859, J. W. Greaves invented the Greaves sawing table to produce blocks for the splitter, then in 1856 introduced a rotary machine to dress the split slate. The splitting of the blocks to produce roofing slates proved resistant to mechanization, and continued to be done with a mallet and chisel. An extra source of income from the 1860s was the production of "slab", thicker pieces of slate which were planed and used for many purposes, for example flooring, tombstones and billiard tables
Billiards table
A billiard table or billiards table is a bounded table on which billiards-type games are played. In the modern era, all billiards tables provide a flat surface usually made of quarried slate, that is covered with cloth and surrounded by vulcanized rubber cushions, with the whole elevated above...
.
The larger quarries could be highly profitable. The Mining Journal estimated in 1859 that the Penrhyn quarries produced an annual net profit
Net profit
Net profit or net revenue is a measure of the profitability of a venture after accounting for all costs. In a survey of nearly 200 senior marketing managers, 91 percent responded that they found the "net profit" metric very useful...
of GB£
Pound sterling
The pound sterling , commonly called the pound, is the official currency of the United Kingdom, its Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, British Antarctic Territory and Tristan da Cunha. It is subdivided into 100 pence...
100,000, and the Dinorwig Quarry £70,000 a year. From 1860 onwards slate prices rose steadily. Quarries expanded and the population of the quarrying districts increased, for example the population of Ffestiniog parish increased from 732 in 1801 to 11,274 in 1881. Total Welsh production reached 350,000 tons a year by the end of the 1860s. Of this total, over 100,000 tons came from the Bethesda area, mainly from the Penrhyn Quarry. Blaenau Ffestiniog produced almost as much, and the Dinorwig Quarry alone produced 80,000 tons per year. The Nantlle Valley quarries produced 40,000 tons, while the remainder of Wales outside these areas produced only about 20,000 tons per year. By the late 1870s, Wales was producing 450,000 tons of slate per year, compared with just over 50,000 tons for the rest of the United Kingdom, which then included Ireland. In 1882, 92% of the United Kingdom's production was from Wales with the quarries at Penrhyn and Dinorwig producing half of this between them. Alun Richards comments on the importance of the slate industry:
The prosperity of the slate industry led to the growth of a number of other associated industries. Shipbuilding
Shipbuilding
Shipbuilding is the construction of ships and floating vessels. It normally takes place in a specialized facility known as a shipyard. Shipbuilders, also called shipwrights, follow a specialized occupation that traces its roots to before recorded history.Shipbuilding and ship repairs, both...
increased at a number of coastal locations, particularly at Porthmadog, where 201 ships were built between 1836 and 1880. Engineering companies were set up to supply the quarries, notably De Winton
De Winton
De Winton & Co were engineers in Caernarfon, Wales. They built vertical boilered narrow gauge locomotives for use in Welsh slate mines and other industrial settings. At least six De Winton locomotives have been preserved...
at Caernarfon. In 1870, De Winton built and equipped an entire workshop for the Dinorwig Quarry, with machinery powered by overhead shafting that in its turn was driven by the largest water-wheel
Water wheel
A water wheel is a machine for converting the energy of free-flowing or falling water into useful forms of power. A water wheel consists of a large wooden or metal wheel, with a number of blades or buckets arranged on the outside rim forming the driving surface...
in the United Kingdom, over 50 feet in diameter.
Workers
There were several different categories of worker in the quarries. The quarrymen proper, who made up just over 50% of the workforce, worked the slate in partnerships of three, four, six or eight, known as "bargain gangs". A gang of four typically consisted of two "rockmen" who would blast the rock to produce blocks, a splitter, who would split the blocks with hammer and chisel, and a dresser. A rybelwr would usually be a boy learning his trade, who would wander around the galleries offering assistance to the gangs. Sometimes a gang would give him a block of slate to split. Other groups were the "bad rockmen" who usually worked in crews of three, removing unworkable rock from the face, and the "rubbish men" who cleared the waste rock from the galleries and built the tips of waste which surrounded the quarry. One ton of saleable slate could produce up to 30 tons of waste.The bad rockmen and rubbish men were usually paid by the ton of material removed, but the quarrymen were paid according to a more complicated system. Part of the payment was determined by the number of slates the gang produced, but this could vary greatly according to the nature of the rock in the section allocated to them. The men would therefore be paid an extra sum of "poundage" per pound's worth of slate produced. "Bargains" were let by the setting steward, who would agree a price for a certain area of rock. If the rock in the bargain allocated to a gang was poor, they would be paid a higher poundage, while good rock meant a lower poundage. The first Monday of every month was "bargain letting day" when these agreements were made between men and management. The men had to pay for their ropes and chains, for tools and for services such as sharpening and repairing. Subs (advances) were paid every week, everything being settled up on the "day of the big pay". If conditions had not been good, the men could end up owing the management money. This system was not finally abolished until after the Second World War.
Because of this arrangement, the men tended to see themselves as independent contractors rather than employees on a wage, and trade union
Trade union
A trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...
s were slow to develop. There were grievances however, including unfairness in setting bargains and disputes over days off. The North Wales Quarrymen's Union (NWQMU) was formed in 1874, and the same year there were disputes at Dinorwig and then at Penrhyn. Both these disputes ended in victory for the workers, and by May 1878, the union had 8,368 members. One of the founders of the union, Morgan Richards, described in 1876 the conditions when he started work in the quarries forty years before:
Labour disputes
Recession
In economics, a recession is a business cycle contraction, a general slowdown in economic activity. During recessions, many macroeconomic indicators vary in a similar way...
which lasted until the 1890s. Management responded by tightening rules and making it more difficult for the men to take time off. Labour relations
Labor relations
Industrial relations is a multidisciplinary field that studies the employment relationship. Industrial relations is increasingly being called employment relations because of the importance of non-industrial employment relationships. Many outsiders also equate industrial relations to labour relations...
were worsened by differences in language, religion and politics between the two sides. The owners and top managers at most of the quarries were English-speaking, Anglican
Anglicanism
Anglicanism is a tradition within Christianity comprising churches with historical connections to the Church of England or similar beliefs, worship and church structures. The word Anglican originates in ecclesia anglicana, a medieval Latin phrase dating to at least 1246 that means the English...
and Tory
Tory
Toryism is a traditionalist and conservative political philosophy which grew out of the Cavalier faction in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. It is a prominent ideology in the politics of the United Kingdom, but also features in parts of The Commonwealth, particularly in Canada...
, while the quarrymen were Welsh-speaking
Welsh language
Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa...
and mainly Nonconformist
Nonconformism
Nonconformity is the refusal to "conform" to, or follow, the governance and usages of the Church of England by the Protestant Christians of England and Wales.- Origins and use:...
and Liberal
Liberal Party (UK)
The Liberal Party was one of the two major political parties of the United Kingdom during the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a third party of negligible importance throughout the latter half of the 20th Century, before merging with the Social Democratic Party in 1988 to form the present day...
. Negotiations between the two sides usually involved the use of interpreters. In October 1885, there was a dispute at Dinorwig over the curtailing of holidays which led to a lock-out
Lockout (industry)
A lockout is a work stoppage in which an employer prevents employees from working. This is different from a strike, in which employees refuse to work.- Causes :...
lasting until February 1886. At the Penrhyn Quarry, George Sholto Gordon Douglas-Pennant
George Sholto Gordon Douglas-Pennant, 2nd Baron Penrhyn
George Sholto Gordon Douglas-Pennant, 2nd Baron Penrhyn , was a landowner who played a prominent part in the Welsh slate industry as the owner of the Penrhyn Quarry in North Wales....
took over from his father Edward Gordon Douglas-Pennant
Edward Gordon Douglas-Pennant, 1st Baron Penrhyn
Edward Gordon Douglas-Pennant, 1st Baron Penrhyn was a Scottish landowner in Wales, and politician. He played a major part in the development of the Welsh slate industry....
in 1885, and in 1886 appointed E. A. Young as chief manager. A more stringent management regime was introduced, and relations with the workforce deteriorated. This culminated in the suspension of 57 members of the union committee and 17 other men in September 1896, leading to a strike
Strike action
Strike action, also called labour strike, on strike, greve , or simply strike, is a work stoppage caused by the mass refusal of employees to work. A strike usually takes place in response to employee grievances. Strikes became important during the industrial revolution, when mass labour became...
which lasted eleven months. The men were eventually obliged to go back to work, essentially on the management's terms, in August 1897. This strike became known as "The Penrhyn Lockout".
There was an upturn in trade in 1892, heralding another period of growth in the industry. This growth was mainly at Blaenau Ffestiniog and in the Nantlle Valley, where the workforce at Penyrorsedd reached 450. Slate production in Wales peaked at over half a million tons in 1898, with 17,000 men employed in the industry. A second lock-out or strike at the Penrhyn Quarry began on 22 November 1900 and lasted for three years. The causes of the dispute were complex, but included the extension of a system of contracting out parts of the quarry. The quarrymen, instead of arranging their own bargains, would find themselves working for a contractor. The union's funds for strike pay
Strike pay
Strike pay is the name of payments made by a trade union to workers who are on strike as help in meeting their basic needs while on strike, often out of a special reserve known as a strike fund...
were inadequate, and there was a great deal of hardship among the 2,800 workers. Lord Penrhyn reopened the quarry in June 1901, and about 500 men returned to work, to be castigated as "traitors" by the remainder. Eventually the workers were forced to return to work in November 1903 on terms laid down by Lord Penrhyn. Many of the men considered to have been prominent in the union were not re-employed, and many of those who had left the area to seek work elsewhere did not return. The dispute left a lasting legacy of bitterness in the Bethesda area.
Decline in production
The loss of production at Penrhyn led to a temporary shortage of slates and kept prices high, but part of the shortfall was made up by imports. French exports of slate to the UK increased from 40,000 tons in 1898 to 105,000 tons in 1902. After 1903 there was a depression in the slate industry which led to reductions in pay and job losses. New techniques in tile manufacture had reduced costs, making tiles more competitive. Eight Ffestiniog quarries closed between 1908 and 1913, and the Oakley dismissed 350 men in 1909. R. Merfyn Jones comments:German Empire
The German Empire refers to Germany during the "Second Reich" period from the unification of Germany and proclamation of Wilhelm I as German Emperor on 18 January 1871, to 1918, when it became a federal republic after defeat in World War I and the abdication of the Emperor, Wilhelm II.The German...
had been an important source of income. Cilgwyn, the oldest quarry in Wales, closed in 1914, though it later reopened. In 1917, slate quarrying was declared a non-essential industry and a number of quarries were closed for the remainder of the war. The demand for new houses after the end of the war brought back a measure of prosperity; in the slate mines of Blaenau Ffestiniog production was almost back to 1913 levels by 1927, but in the quarries the output was still well below the pre-war level. The Great Depression in the 1930s led to cuts in production, with exports particularly hard hit.
The quarries and mines made increasing use of mechanization from the turn of the century, with electricity
Electricity
Electricity is a general term encompassing a variety of phenomena resulting from the presence and flow of electric charge. These include many easily recognizable phenomena, such as lightning, static electricity, and the flow of electrical current in an electrical wire...
replacing steam and water as a power source. The Llechwedd Quarry introduced its first electrical plant in 1891, and in 1906, a hydro-electric
Hydroelectricity
Hydroelectricity is the term referring to electricity generated by hydropower; the production of electrical power through the use of the gravitational force of falling or flowing water. It is the most widely used form of renewable energy...
plant was opened in Cwm Dyli, on the lower slopes of Snowdon
Snowdon
Snowdon is the highest mountain in Wales, at an altitude of above sea level, and the highest point in the British Isles outside Scotland. It is located in Snowdonia National Park in Gwynedd, and has been described as "probably the busiest mountain in Britain"...
, which supplied electricity to the largest quarries in the area. The use of electric saws and other machinery reduced the hard manual labour involved in extracting the slate, but produced much more slate dust than the old manual methods, leading to an increased incidence of silicosis
Silicosis
Silicosis, also known as Potter's rot, is a form of occupational lung disease caused by inhalation of crystalline silica dust, and is marked by inflammation and scarring in forms of nodular lesions in the upper lobes of the lungs...
. The work was also dangerous in other ways, with the blasting operations responsible for many deaths. A government enquiry in 1893 found that the death rate for underground workers in the slate mines was 3.23 per thousand, higher than the rate for coal miners
Coal mining
The goal of coal mining is to obtain coal from the ground. Coal is valued for its energy content, and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use coal as a fuel for extraction of iron from iron ore and for cement production. In the United States,...
.
End of large-scale production (1939–2005)
National Gallery, London
The National Gallery is an art museum on Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The gallery is an exempt charity, and a non-departmental public body of the Department for Culture, Media...
and the Tate Gallery
Tate Gallery
The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...
. The number of men employed in the slate industry in North Wales dropped from 7,589 in 1939 to 3,520 by the end of the war. In 1945, total production was only 70,000 tons a year, and fewer than 20 quarries were still open compared with 40 before the war. The Nantlle Valley had been particularly hard hit, with only 350 workers employed in the entire district, compared with 1,000 in 1937. Demand for slate was dropping as tiles were increasingly used for roofing, and imports from countries such as Portugal
Portugal
Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...
, France and Italy were increasing. There was some increased demand for slates to repair bombed buildings after the end of the war, but the use of slate for new buildings was banned, apart from the smallest sizes. This ban was lifted in 1949.
Total production of slate in Wales declined from 54,000 tons in 1958 to 22,000 tons in 1970. The Diffwys
Diffwys
Diffwys is a mountain in Snowdonia, North Wales, near Barmouth and forms part of the Rhinogydd. On the north side is an exposure of the Caerdion Syncline. It is technically a subsidiary summit of Y Llethr, missing Marilyn status by 2m. It is therefore like Rhinog Fach a sub Marilyn.The summit has a...
quarry at Blaenau Ffestiniog
Blaenau Ffestiniog
Blaenau Ffestiniog is a town in Gwynedd, north-west Wales. It has a population of 5,000, including Llan Ffestiniog, which makes it the third largest town in Gwynedd, behind Caernarfon & Porthmadog. Although the population reached 12,000 at the peak of the slate industry, the population fell due to...
closed in 1955 after almost two centuries of operation. The nearby Votty and Bowydd quarries closed in 1963. In 1969, the Dinorwig Quarry was closed, and over 300 quarrymen lost their jobs. The following year the Dorothea Quarry in the Nantlle Valley
Nantlle Valley
The Nantlle Valley is an area in Gwynedd, north Wales, characterised by its large number of small settlements.Around 80% of the population of the Nantlle Valley speak Welsh as their first language. Some of the communities came into being as a result of slate quarrying in the late eighteenth or...
and the Braichgoch Slate Mine
Braichgoch Slate Mine
Braichgoch Slate Mine was a large slate mine located in Corris Uchaf, north Wales. It was worked continuously from 1787 until closure in 1970, apart from a hiatus in the 1900s...
near Corris
Corris
Corris is a village in the south of Snowdonia in the Welsh county of Gwynedd. Although the Snowdonia National Park covers much of the area around Corris, the village is not within the park. The name is possibly derived from the English word "quarries", and the extensive slate quarries that surround...
announced their closure. The Oakeley mine at Blaenau Ffestiniog closed in 1971, but was later reopened by another company. By 1972, the number of men employed in the North Wales slate industry was down to under 1,000. There was little alternative employment in the slate-producing areas, and the closures resulted in high unemployment and a drop in population as younger people moved away to find work. In 1979, after a long struggle, the government recognized silicosis
Silicosis
Silicosis, also known as Potter's rot, is a form of occupational lung disease caused by inhalation of crystalline silica dust, and is marked by inflammation and scarring in forms of nodular lesions in the upper lobes of the lungs...
as an industrial disease meriting compensation. There was an increase in demand for slate in the 1980s, and although this came too late for many quarries there was still some production in the Blaenau Ffestiniog area at the Oakeley, Llechwedd and Cwt-y-Bugail quarries, though the bulk of roofing slate production was at the Penrhyn Quarry. Further mechanization was introduced, with a computerized laser
Laser
A laser is a device that emits light through a process of optical amplification based on the stimulated emission of photons. The term "laser" originated as an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation...
beam being used to aid the sawing of the slate blocks.
Quarries still producing slate
The Penrhyn QuarryPenrhyn Quarry
The Penrhyn Slate Quarry is a slate quarry located near Bethesda in north Wales. At the end of the nineteenth century it was the world's largest slate quarry; the main pit is nearly long and deep, and it was worked by nearly 3,000 quarrymen. It has since been superseded in size by slate quarries...
is still producing slate, though at a much reduced capacity from its heyday at the end of the 19th century. In 1995, it accounted for almost 50% of UK production. It is currently owned and operated by Welsh Slate Ltd (a subsidiary of Lagan Building Solutions), which also owns and carries out some operations at the Oakeley quarry at Blaenau Ffestiniog, the Pen yr Orsedd quarry in the Nantlle Vale, and the Cwt-y-Bugail quarry. In March 2010 the company announced its decision to mothball the Oakeley quarry because of subsidence at the site.
The Greaves Welsh Slate Company produces roofing slates and other slate products from Llechwedd, and work also continues at the Berwyn Quarry near Llangollen
Llangollen
Llangollen is a small town and community in Denbighshire, north-east Wales, situated on the River Dee and on the edge of the Berwyn mountains. It has a population of 3,412.-History:...
. The final large-scale underground working to close was Maenofferen, associated with the Llechwedd tourist mine, in 1999: part of this site, now effectively amalgamated with Votty / Bowydd, is still worked by untopping. The Wales Millennium Centre
Wales Millennium Centre
Wales Millennium Centre is an arts centre located in the Cardiff Bay area of Cardiff, Wales. The site covers a total area of . Phase 1 of the building was opened during the weekend of the 26–28 November 2004 and phase 2 opened on 22 January 2009 with an inaugural concert...
in Cardiff
Cardiff
Cardiff is the capital, largest city and most populous county of Wales and the 10th largest city in the United Kingdom. The city is Wales' chief commercial centre, the base for most national cultural and sporting institutions, the Welsh national media, and the seat of the National Assembly for...
uses waste slate in many different colours in its design: purple slate from Penrhyn, blue from Cwt-y-Bugail, green from Nantlle, grey from Llechwedd, and black from Corris.
Visitor attractions
Dinorwig power station
The Dinorwig Power Station is a pumped-storage hydroelectric scheme, near Dinorwig, Llanberis in Snowdonia national park in Gwynedd, north Wales...
in caverns under the old quarry workings. The National Slate Museum is located in some of the quarry workshops. The museum has displays including Victorian slate-workers' cottages that once stood at Tanygrisiau near Blaenau Ffestiniog. As well as many exhibits, it has the multi-media display To Steal a Mountain, showing the lives and work of the men who quarried slate here. The museum has the largest working water wheel in the United Kingdom, which is available for viewing via several walkways, and a restored incline formerly used to carry slate waggons uphill and downhill.
In Blaenau Ffestiniog, the Llechwedd Slate Caverns
Llechwedd Slate Caverns
Llechwedd Slate Caverns is a visitor attraction in Blaenau Ffestiniog, Gwynedd, Wales. Visitors can travel on the Miners' Tramway or descend into the Deep Mine, via a funicular railway, to explore the former Llechwedd slate quarry and learn how slate was extracted and processed and about the lives...
have been converted into a visitor attraction. Visitors can travel on the Miners' Tramway or descend into the Deep Mine, via a funicular railway which uses an old incline, to explore this former slate mine and learn how slate was extracted and processed and about the lives of the miners. The Deep Mine, opened in 1979, is accessed by Britain's steepest passenger railway, with a gradient of 1:1.8 or 30°. In the chambers, formed by slate extraction, sound and light is used to tell the story of the mine and mining. The Braichgoch slate mines at Corris have been converted into a tourist attraction named "King Arthur's Labyrinth" where visitors are taken underground by boat along a subterranean river. They then walk through the caverns to see audiovisual presentations of the Arthurian
King Arthur
King Arthur is a legendary British leader of the late 5th and early 6th centuries, who, according to Medieval histories and romances, led the defence of Britain against Saxon invaders in the early 6th century. The details of Arthur's story are mainly composed of folklore and literary invention, and...
legends and stories from the Mabinogion
Mabinogion
The Mabinogion is the title given to a collection of eleven prose stories collated from medieval Welsh manuscripts. The tales draw on pre-Christian Celtic mythology, international folktale motifs, and early medieval historical traditions...
and the tales of Taliesin
Taliesin
Taliesin was an early British poet of the post-Roman period whose work has possibly survived in a Middle Welsh manuscript, the Book of Taliesin...
. The Llwyngwern slate quarry near Machynlleth
Machynlleth
Machynlleth is a market town in Powys, Wales. It is in the Dyfi Valley at the intersection of the A487 and the A489 roads.Machynlleth was the seat of Owain Glyndŵr's Welsh Parliament in 1404, and as such claims to be the "ancient capital of Wales". However, it has never held any official...
is now the site of the Centre for Alternative Technology
Centre for Alternative Technology
The Centre for Alternative Technology is an eco-centre in Powys, mid-Wales, dedicated to demonstrating and teaching sustainable development. CAT, despite its name, no longer concentrates its efforts exclusively on alternative technology, but provides information on all aspects of sustainable living...
. A number of the railways which carried the slates to the ports have been restored as tourist attractions, for example the Ffestiniog Railway and the Talyllyn Railway.
Cultural influences
The Welsh slate industry was essentially a Welsh-speaking industry. Most of the workforce in the main slate-producing areas of North Wales were drawn from the local area, with little immigration from outside Wales. The industry had a considerable influence on the culture of the area and on that of Wales as a whole. The caban, the cabin where the quarrymen gathered for their lunch break, was often the scene of wide-ranging discussions, which were often formally minuted. A surviving set of minutesMinutes
Minutes, also known as protocols, are the instant written record of a meeting or hearing. They typically describe the events of the meeting, starting with a list of attendees, a statement of the issues considered by the participants, and related responses or decisions for the issues.Minutes may be...
from a caban at the Llechwedd mine at Blaenau Ffestiniog for 1908–10 records discussions on Church Disestablishment
Disestablishmentarianism
Disestablishmentarianism today relates to the Church of England in the United Kingdom and related views on its establishment as an established church....
, tariff reform
Protectionism
Protectionism is the economic policy of restraining trade between states through methods such as tariffs on imported goods, restrictive quotas, and a variety of other government regulations designed to allow "fair competition" between imports and goods and services produced domestically.This...
and other political topics. Eisteddfodau were held, poetry composed and discussed and most of the larger quarries had their own band
Brass band
A brass band is a musical ensemble generally consisting entirely of brass instruments, most often with a percussion section. Ensembles that include brass and woodwind instruments can in certain traditions also be termed brass bands , but are usually more correctly termed military bands, concert...
, with the Oakley band particularly famous. Burn calculates that there are around fifty men judged worthy of an entry in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography
Dictionary of Welsh Biography
The Dictionary of Welsh Biography is a dictionary of biographies of Welsh men and women who have made a unique contribution to Welsh life over seventeen centuries...
who started their working lives as slate quarrymen, compared to only four owners, though obviously there was also a distinct disparity in the numbers of the two groups.
A number of Welsh writers
Literature of Wales (Welsh language)
After literature written in the classical languages literature in the Welsh language is the oldest surviving literature in Europe. The Welsh literary tradition stretches from the 6th century to the twenty-first. Its fortunes have fluctuated over the centuries, in line with those of the Welsh...
have drawn on the lives of the quarrymen for their material, for example the novels of T. Rowland Hughes. Chwalfa, translated into English as Out of their night (1954), has the Penrhyn Quarry dispute as a background, while Y cychwyn, translated as The beginning (1969), follows the apprenticeship
Apprenticeship
Apprenticeship is a system of training a new generation of practitioners of a skill. Apprentices or protégés build their careers from apprenticeships...
of a young quarryman. Several novels by Kate Roberts, the daughter of a quarryman, give a picture of the area around Rhosgadfan, where the slate industry was on a smaller scale and many of the quarrymen were also smallholders. Her novel Traed mewn cyffion
Traed mewn cyffion
Traed mewn cyffion is a novel by Kate Roberts, written in the Welsh language and first published in 1936.-Plot summary:...
(1936), translated as Feet in chains (2002), gives a vivid picture of the struggles of a quarrying family in the period between 1880 and 1914. Y Chwarelwr ("The Quarryman") produced in 1935 was the first Welsh-language film. It showed various aspects of a slate quarryman's life at Blaenau Ffestiniog.
Further reading
- Burn, Michael. 1972. The Age of Slate. Quarry Tours Ltd., Blaenau Ffestiniog.
- Holmes, Alan. 1986. Slates from Abergynolwyn: the story of Bryneglwys Slate Quarry Gwynedd Archives Service. ISBN 0-901337-42-0
- Hughes, Emrys & Aled Eames. 1975. Porthmadog Ships. Gwynedd Archives Service.
- Jones, Gwynfor Pierce & Alun John Richards. 2004. Cwm Gwyrfai : the quarries of the North Wales narrow gauge and the Welsh Highland railways. Gwasg Carreg Gwalch. ISBN 0-86381-897-8
- Jones, R. Merfyn. 1981. The North Wales Quarrymen, 1874–1922 (Studies in Welsh history; 4.) University of Wales Press. ISBN 0-7083-0776-0
- Lewis, M.J.T. & Williams, M. C. 1987. Pioneers of Ffestiniog Slate. Snowdonia National Park Study Centre, Plas Tan y Bwlch. ISBN 0-9512373-1-4
- Lindsay, Jean. 1974. A History of the North Wales Slate Industry. David and Charles, Newton Abbot. ISBN 0-7153-6264-X
- Pritchard, D. Dylan. 1946. The Slate Industry of North Wales: statement of the case for a plan. Gwasg Gee.
- Richards, Alun John. 1994. Slate Quarrying at Corris. Gwasg Carreg Gwalch. ISBN 0-86381-279-1
- Richards, Alun John. 1995. Slate Quarrying in Wales Gwasg Carreg Gwalch. ISBN 0-86381-319-4
- Richards, Alun John. 1998. The slate Quarries of Pembrokeshire Gwasg Carreg Gwalch. ISBN 0-86381-484-0
- Richards, Alun John. 1999. The Slate Regions of North and Mid Wales and Their Railways Gwasg Carreg Gwalch. ISBN 0-86381-552-9
- Williams, Merfyn. 1991. The Slate Industry. Shire Publications, Aylesbury. ISBN 0-7478-0124-X