Glyncastle Colliery

Near Resolven, Vale of Neath (84620203)

At Resolven, two Levels; Lefal y Gwydab and Ffaldydre were opened in 1837 by J. W. Lyon. Whether they were the same or new levels, Messrs. Jones & Jenkins worked a level called Tyllwyd in Cwm Clydach in 1854, but it was up for sale in 1855.

There then followed the Cardiff & Merthyr Steam Company and then Thomas Cory & Frank Ash Richard and John Yeo who were well versed in the mining industry from their efforts in the Swansea area They purchased the Resolven collieries in 1871, in 1873 they morphed into the Cardiff & Swansea Smokeless Steam Coal Company along with John Davenport Shakespeare and two successful coal exporters, Richard and John Cory ventured into the coal mining business.  They first started in the Rhondda Valley and then expanded into the Ogmore Valley and the Vale of Neath.   At that time they were having problems with their levels due to the poor quality of the coal which was soft and friable and decided to sink two shafts to the deeper seams.

The No.1 Pit was started in September 1879 and the No.2 Pit in June 1880, both shafts were 15 feet in diameter eventually the No.1 (downcast ventilation shaft and the winding pit) sunk to a depth of543 yards, with the No.2 used for ventilation only and sunk to a depth of 669 yards. All was not well with their mines in the area and all levels, with the exception of the Cwm No.5 and the Tyra were closed in 1881 due to poor quality.  On top of this there was a strike of the workforce which lasted six months.  Further disappointment came when they struck to No.2 Rhondda seam –it was also too soft to sell, so down they went to the No.3 Rhondda seam in 1883 and encountered the same problem. The mine was closed in 1886 but the owners then decided to sink deeper in 1887 to the Middle and Lower Coal Measures which consisted of steam raising coals. In 1889 they opened up in the Six-Feet seam but were still dogged with bad luck, this seam had a band of thick clod above it which fell with the extraction of the coal giving a dirty product.  This was the final straw and the company went into liquidation in 1891, only to be replaced by the Cory Brothers owned Gelli & Tynybedw Collieries Company and then in 1893 by the Cory Brothers directly. They were back in production in 1894 producing 110,656 tons in that year.

In 1896 this mine employed 201 men on the surface and 51 men underground and was managed by W. Waplington. In 1908 it was managed by William Jones and employed 161 men underground and 48 men on the surface. In 1913 the Glyncastle and Rheola employed 371 men, with the company employing overall 3,432 men in 13 different collieries.  The General Manager at that time was W.D. Wight.

The Cory Brothers expended significant amounts of money at Glyncastle and erected the most modern surface plant available at that time.  This was recognized by its peers in the mining industry and in the seventeenth meeting of the Federated Institution of Mining Engineers at Cardiff a paper called, Anthracite Coal Breaking and Sizing Plant at Glyncastle Colliery was read out by Mr. Wight.  In opening his speech Wight commented that it was only recently that anthracite colliery owners were waking up to the fact that it was possible to create a trade for their coals in the domestic market.  Stoves were now being built with special requirements to meet the needs of anthracite coals:

The benefit to the community especially in great cities, arising from the use of an absolutely smokeless combustible must not be lost sight of.  Experience had shown that the size of coal usually called nuts was most suitable for domestic stoves, and the plant which had been erected at Glyncastle Colliery had been designed to manufacture that size.

Following strikes over pay in 1921 & 1925 and the 1926 General Strike, Glyncastle resumed working only to close again in April 1928 and was not reopened until May 1929 due to the difficulty in finding markets for its coal during the recession times.

On Nationalisation in 1947 the colliery was placed in the National Coal Board’s, South Western Division’s, No.1 (Swansea) Area, and at that time employed 89 men on the surface and 222 men underground working the Six-Feet seam. The manager was still R. Rosser.  He was still there in 1949.

In 1950 the newspapers reported that Glyncastle coals were not only used for heavy industry;

USE OF COAL IN BREWING LORD GRETTON. chairman of the brewing materials committee of the Brewers Society. a delegation from his industry to Swansea yesterday to inspect Glyncastle Colliery and the National Coal Board’s laboratory at Cwmbwrla. In which they are interested because of the importance of anthracite to the brewing industry. The delegates had technical discussions with divisional and area officials of the N.C. B. including Mr. H. Lyn Jones. deputy divisional chairman

In 1952, 30% of the men employed underground at Glyncastle Colliery were foreign workers from Poland, Italy, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Lithuania and Estonia. The chief difficulty, says manager H.R. Davies, is to keep them in such a rural district, but he reports that they worked well together. This was shown in 1956 when the pit produced 70,515 tons of coal, their best result since nationalisation.

In 1954 the colliery was still working the Six-Feet seam but by now manpower had dropped to 85 on the surface and 170 underground, and the mine was in the No.9 (Neath) Area, Group No.1.

At Glyncastle, in the same valley the colliery surface plant is in the valley, the shafts on the mountainside. Men travel from the baths to the shaft by a combined bus and spake service and coal is brought down the mountain by an endless rope haulage. A reorganisation now being planned will replace the shafts with slants located nearer the colliery surface plant and baths – thus cutting out a long and laborious journey for both men and coal. The coal will be locomotive hauled along level roadways to the bottom of the slant.

Glo Magazine (National Mining Museum of Wales) published this article from a surface worker at Glyncastle:

I was born in December 1925, in the early 1930’s I remember my father coming home from work putting his wages on the kitchen table and being very distressed. My mother said ‘Go out and play Desmond, I’ll call you when tea is ready’. In later years I knew that my father had not earned the minimum wage as his stall was too difficult. We had an open fire with a big fireguard around it on which the working clothes were draped to dry. I remember my mother laughing because she could make my father’s moleskin stand up on their own because they were so stiff with dried sweat.

On January 1st 1940 I started work in the screens at Glyncastle Colliery. By then my father was very short of breath and unfit to work underground anymore and was directed by the Essential Works Order to work on the railways which probably did him good as he was working outside in the fresh air. He had pneumoconiosis and silicosis. When he died in 1972, the autopsy showed that he only had half of one lung.

The dust in the screens was dreadful. All the new boys worked on the conveyors picking slag and debris off the belt – even brushing the dust off the coal ordered by Mitchell & Butlers Brewery. The small coal was washed and graded into nuts, beans, peas and so on. A point to be made here is that the small coal dropped between spaced bars and was weighed and deducted from the collier’s tonnage so the colliers were never paid for the expensive washed coal.

It wasn’t long before we were given other jobs to do. One of them was to make mortar for the building department from a mixture of ash, water and lime all ground up in a machine with great big rollers. Men of call-up age had to join the forces and soon there were not many older teenagers working on the surface. We had bus-loads of unemployed men transported down from the Merthyr area and I had to show one of them how to make mortar. He hadn’t worked for ten years and said he had heard of one man who hadn’t worked for fourteen years.

By now I am sixteen years and there are other boys around the same age and we did everything, weighing the drams as they came up from the pit, hitching them onto the endless rope, working with the blacksmiths when needed, i.e. straightening rings (arched roof supports) with a thirty-ton hydraulic press, sharpening, hardening and tempering the coal cutter teeth and mandrels, fitting new handles to sledge hammers picks and other tools. The only time I went underground was with the blacksmith to check the pit winding chains. The old blacksmith liked us boys with good eyesight to see the cracks in the links.

By 1944 we had the Bevin Boys who were young men of call-up age who were drafted into the mines rather than the armed forces. They were very critical of the working conditions in the mines. I went to many of their meetings and management, unions and miners all came in for a right going over. Their spokesman was an Oxford student who was a marvellous speaker and very rebellious. They couldn’t believe that men worked under such awful conditions.

At twenty-one years of age, I went to work in the sawmill, here we made tramline sleepers, cog timbers, from three-foot logs of elm, and pit winder brake blocks from elm wood 8 x 6 x 5 feet long, lined with Ferodo brake linings. By the time the National Coal Board had taken over we had thousands of tons of marvellous Norway timber delivered to us. I also remember two brand new coal cutters being delivered and the colliers came down and unloaded them off the trucks themselves and supervised their transportation up to the pit. We’d never seen such brand-new gear before the pit was nationalised, it was always second-hand from some other colliery.

Then all of a sudden the Essential Works Order was lifted on January 1st 1950. My father was proud of the fact that I had never gone underground although I had many offers to do so and I could have earned big money.

In 1955 out of a total manpower of 266 men working at this colliery, 102 of them worked at the coalfaces, in 1956 these figures were 259/105 respectively, while in 1961, 106 men were employed at the coalfaces and 279 men overall.  The manager at that time was H.R. Davies.  The colliery had its own coal preparation plant (washery) and was a depot for coalface prop repairs.

The colliery abandoned the Nine-Feet seam in 1942, the Yard and Brass Veins in 1946 and the Six-Feet seam on closure.   In April of 1964, the NCB indicated their desire to close this pit quoting disturbed ground and the inability to keep men working at the pit as the reasons.  All attempts at power loading on the coalfaces had failed. From making a profit of up to £1.50 per ton of coal raised in the period 1953 to 1959 it was losing £2 per ton in 1960.  Out of the 263 men transferred there since 1962 only 121 remained.

The NCB went on to state that although there were 83 million tons of coal left a breakdown of these reserves showed; fifteen million in the White Four-Feet seam which had two feet of dirt in a three-feet four-inch seam and was unsaleable.  The Six-Feet seam had 22 million tons and could be worked.  The Lower-Four-Feet seam had 14 million tons of coal but was subject to faults, rolls and washouts.  The Nine-Feet had 21 million tons of coal but was only thick enough to work in patches.  The Peacock seam had 11 million tons left but was subject to high gas emissions.

Glyncastle and Rheola Pits were closed on the 3rd of April 1965 as being uneconomic.

The dates the coal seams were worked were as follows:

• 1886 to 1887 – No.1.
• 1888, No.1 & Six-Feet
• 1903 to 1908, Six-Feet
• 1909 to 1911, Six-Feet, Four-Feet.
• 1912, Nine-Feet.
• 1912 to 1917, Six-Feet, Four-Feet, Nine-Feet.
• 1918 to 1922, Upper-Four-Feet.
• 1923, Lower-Four-Feet, Yard.
• 1924 to 1926, Yard, Lower-Four-Feet, Six-Feet, Upper-Four-Feet.
• 1927, Yard, Lower-Four-Feet, Upper-Four-Feet.
• 1928, Yard, Lower-Four-Feet, Six-Feet,
• 1929 to 1934, Yard, Lower-Four-Feet, Six-Feet, Nine-Feet.
• 1935 to 1938, Yard, Lower-Four-Feet, Six-Feet,
• 1947 to 1951, Six-Feet
• 1952 to 1954, Six-Feet, Upper-Four-Feet
• 1955 to 1963, Six-Feet.

Some Statistics:

• 1896: Manpower: 252.
• 1899: Manpower: 297.
• 1900: Manpower: 263.
• 1901: Manpower: 254.
• 1902: Manpower: 273.
• 1903: Manpower: 281.
• 1905: Manpower: 91.
• 1907: Manpower: 231.
• 1910: Manpower: 88.
• 1911: Manpower: 204.
• 1913: Manpower: 371.
• 1916: Manpower: 120.
• 1918: Manpower: 158.
• 1920: Manpower: 192.
• 1919: Manpower: 130.
• 1923: Manpower: 84.
• 1925: Manpower: 110.
• 1926: Manpower: 270.
• 1927: Manpower: 336.
• 1928: Manpower: 404.
• 1930: Manpower: 288.
• 1931: Manpower: 420.
• 1933: Manpower: 702.
• 1934: Manpower: 801.
• 1937: Manpower: 538, underground only.
• 1938: Manpower: 655, underground only.
• 1944: Manpower: 388.
• 1945: Manpower: 352.
• 1947: Manpower: 311.
• 1948: Manpower: 303. Output: 85,000 tons.
• 1949: Manpower: 292. Output: 65,000 tons.
• 1950: Manpower: 242.
• 1953: Manpower: 243. Output: 55,400 tons.
• 1954: Manpower: 255. Output: 63,629 tons.
• 1955: Manpower: 266. Output: 65,863 tons.
• 1956: Manpower: 259. Output: 70,691 tons.
• 1957: Manpower: 268. Output: 69,326 tons.
• 1958: Manpower 266. Output: 67,292 tons.
• 1960: Manpower: 315. Output: 58,831 tons.
• 1961: Manpower 279. Output: 33,703 tons.

Information supplied by Ray Lawrence and used here with his permission.