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A few months back, I looked at the early history of the colliery at Brynmally, formerly one of Brymbo’s main sources of employment, from its probable founding in the 18th century by Thomas Brock and Charles Roe to its development under the Kyrke family, who lived at Brynmally Hall. The financial troubles of George Kyrke led to the sale of the property in 1849 to Thomas Clayton, a young entrepreneur from Lancashire with existing experience and marital connections in the coal industry.
On February 24th 1894 the Wrexham Advertiser, always alert to stories of local interest, ran a small article on what it called the “first annual match of the newly-formed Brymbo District Ploughing Society“, which had recently taken place at Penrhos Farm. As the industrial past of our area is usually emphasised, it is easy to forget the agriculture that not only long preceded it, but continued very successfully alongside Brymbo’s most intense period of industrial development. Although ploughing matches still take place in Wales – you can attend the 57th All Wales Championship next September – I certainly imagine that little ploughing of any kind has taken place in Brymbo since the 1940s, after which most of the area’s farms went over to dairying. More recently many of them have, sadly, had to cease even that. However, there was little hint of this future in the inaugural Brymbo ploughing match, whose patrons (including J. R. Burton of Minera Hall, R H V Kyrke, Alfred Darby, Henry Beyer Robertson and even Sir Watkin Williams-Wynne himself) encompassed all the main landowners and industrialists of the district.
I have spent a lot of time talking about John Wilkinson, over the course of putting together this site. It is difficult not to, in many ways. But I am now going to say something controversial. I do not think that Wilkinson was the single most important figure in Brymbo’s history, at least in terms of the more modern era – that of the ironworks and the village and the beginnings of the landscape we see today. Wilkinson may be the person who gets on the school curriculum; he certainly made it into that of my primary school, and inspired some of my curiosity about my local area. He even seems to have inspired a (fairly dismal) poetic tribute, although unlike another local celebrated in song, Watkin Williams-Wynn, he never got as far as having a pudding named after him. But I think that a special place should be reserved for the one person who did more than anyone else to shape the community – often, though not entirely, for the good – and above all to create a permanent association between Brymbo and steelmaking. This was the Scottish engineer Henry Robertson.
The landscape of Harwood village was a product of its history and topography as commonland, and of the course of the Industrial Revolution in the north-east of Denbighshire. It left a patchwork of houses and workers’ cottages mingled with crofts and little intake fields; old farmhouses alongside small-scale industry; of old tramroads, hawthorn-bordered lanes, and walls of brownish Cefn stone. The village chapels were an integral part of that landscape, and their names – Bethania, Moriah, Bryn Sion – punctuate older maps, although most have disappeared over the past forty years. If the pits and the ironworks first set the village now known as Brymbo in position, the chapels – and the beerhouses – helped fix it there.
William Williams of Wern, 1781-1840. Eloquent, charismatic, and handsome, he was instrumental in the early history of Brymbo's Independent chapel. © The National Library of Wales 2014; used under Creative Archive Licence
Although the environment was not quite as hostile as in the mid 18th century, when as we have seen Moses Lewis of the Vron Farm was compelled to shelter a preacher from the attentions of the local authorities, nonconformity still existed in a sort of parallel world to that of the ‘official’ parish in the years before 1800. Brymbo had known some landowners of nonconformist sympathies, but the attitude of much of the local squirearchy can probably be summed up by a comment attributed to, I think, one of the Apperley family, who said that when a man became a Methodist it was usually “preparatory to his becoming a rogue“. The older and more respectable part of the parish nonconformists – the tradesmen and merchants of Wrexham – had their two chapels in the town, the Old and New Meeting Houses, the history of which Alfred Palmer has already given in detail. It was, however, amongst the newer communities of ironworkers and colliers, men with a reputation for riotousness and vaguely-described ‘immorality’, that the village chapels grew up, and in the process helped show these communities that they were equally as significant as their ‘betters’. Like the nature and ownership of those early cottages on the commonland, it was the sort of territory which official records did not really cover.
My previous post discussed the early history of the Brynmally estate and its colliery – which started operation in around 1753 or 1770, depending on which source you consult. We arrive on firmer ground with the appearance of the coalmaster Richard Kirk during the 1770s. Kirk, who ran or was involved with a number of pits in and around Brymbo and Broughton, was to be central to the district’s mineral developments for the next fifty years.
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The history of the township of Brymbo 