Ashton Vale Iron Company
The Ashton Vale Iron Company Limited was registered on 17 June 1864 as the successor to a series of partnerships which included Baynton, Knight and Co., Knight, Abbots and Co. and Edwin Knight and Co.
The first directors were:
Henry Abbot, Abbot’s Leigh, Somerset, Gentleman
Edward Bush, Clifton, Engineer
Thomas Porter Jose, Royal York Crescent, Clifton, Esquire
Edwin Knight, Long Ashton, Colliery Proprietor
John Lucas, Redland, Merchant
William Henry Miles, Ham Green, Somerset, Esquire
John Lum Stothert, Bath, Engineer
Thomas Terrett Taylor, Stoke Bishop, Merchant
Archibald Vickers, Clifton, Gentleman
Robert Charles Ward, Bristol, Merchant.
The directors were empowered to purchase the leases of the Ashton Vale Colliery and Iron Works at Long Ashton, the Hopewell Iron Stone Pits at Kingswood and the buildings, machinery and plant of Edwin Knight and Co. At its peak the company owned Ashton Vale and South Liberty collieries, iron mines at Ashton Vale and Ashton Hill and a brickworks at South Liberty in addition to its iron works.
By the end of the nineteenth century, however, it seems to have been in decline. The ironworks appear to have closed in about 1893, followed in 1906 by Ashton Vale colliery. South Liberty closed in 1925, bringing the company’s involvement in the coal industry to an end, although it continued in business as a brick and tile manufacturer on the same site for a number of years.
By 1963, however, production had ceased and the plant was put up for sale. The directors of the company seem to have been particularly active in local politics; between 1868 and 1904, Henry Napier Abbot, William Wilberforce Jose and William Henry Miles all served as Conservative members of the City Council, with one of them always in office at any time between those two dates. Furthermore, it is possible that the company’s influence was even greater, since various other councillors shared the names of directors of the company but cannot be identified with any degree of certainty.
Bedminster Coal Company
The earliest record of the involvement of the Bennett family in mining at Bedminster is in the 1740s when a survey was carried out which proved that the seams works at Kingswood were also to be found to the south of the Avon. As a result of this the Bennetts went into partnership with the Smyth family of Ashton Court to form the Bedminster Coal Company which was responsible for the sinking of South Liberty colliery in 1748. The family’s mining activities were confined to the Bedminster area until the mid-1890s, when they acquired the pits formerly owned by Leonard, Boult and Co. Ltd.
A new company, Bristol United Collieries Ltd, was formed, although the business seems to have continued to trade as the Bedminster Coal Company. In 1888 the company was granted permission to work the coal under the New Cut, resulting in the statistical anomaly of coal from beneath Gloucestershire being included in the figures for Somerset. Despite this expansion of the area worked, Dean Lane’s reserves were running low and the pit was forced to close in 1906, following which the land occupied by the colliery reverted to the possession of the Smyth family and was converted into a park.
Bedminster, Easton, Kingswood and Parkfield Collieries Ltd
On 24 May 1900 Handel Cossham’s collieries were auctioned, the main lot consisting of Speedwell, Deep Pit, Parkfield and South Pit, together with the mineral rights to 2,420 acres.~ The properties were sold for £61,000 to Cuthbert R. Morris, an auctioneer and estate agent from North Curry, acting as agent for the Bennetts whose new company, Bedminster. Easton, Kingswood and Parkfield Collieries Ltd, is recorded as the owner in the List of Mines for 1900.
The scale of the business declined rapidly over the next few years, Dean Lane being abandoned in 1906 and Easton in 1911 - By 1914 the company was in receivership and the remaining collieries were then bought by the Beauchamp family.
Handel Cossham
Handel Cossham was born in Thornbury in 1824, the son of Jesse Cossham. The family, it has been claimed, had owned land and property in the area, but most of this had been lost. Cossham’ s involvement in the coal industry dates from 1845 when he began work at Yate colliery, although his exact position in the business is unclear. In 1848 he married Elizabeth Wethered, and in 1850 formed a partnership with her father, William, her brothers, Joseph, Henry and Edwin, and J.P. Bendall with the intention of developing a site at Pucklechurch that was eventually to become Parkfield colliery.
The source of the Wethereds’ capital is unknown, but since they came from Little Marlow in Buckinghamshire, it is possible that they were members of the well-known local brewing family. It has proved impossible to identify Bendall with any degree of certainty. The most prominent member of the Bristol family was Joseph Wethered, who has been categorised by Charles Harvey and Jon Press as one of an ambitious group of Bristol capitalists ‘united in their desire to increase their wealth and power,’ who were among the associates of George White.
Wethered’ s business interests outside his partnership with Cossham included a zinc smelting plant in Bristol (although this was last listed by Hunt in 1875), the Bristol Trainways Company and directorships of the Bristol and North Somerset Railway and the Netham Alkali Works. He was also a director, and from about 1885 chairman, of the Great Western Colliery Company; the company owned collieries in South Wales and Wethered’ s directorship is the only evidence found of the involvement of a local coal owner in another mining district?~’ It is a measure of the shortage of primary source material relating to the industry that one of the most substantial surviving records is a pocket notebook belonging to Cossham which records the early development of Parkfield.
Work seems to have begun in April 1851, and initially coal was produced at Cook’s Pit and Shortwood, whilst another pit was being sunk. The notebook lists eleven pits in the area, but it is unclear which, if any, of these were incorporated into Parkfield; Hunt’s list for 1854 includes Parkfield plus one of the other eleven, Brandy Bottom, (although that was then being worked by Jefferis, Walters and Co.), whilst omitting Cook’s Pit and Shortwood altogether. The notebook only covers the period from April 1851 to September 1853, during which time the total expenditure on Cook’s Pit, Shortwood and the new pit was £28,698, whilst the income from coal raised at the first two was £26,146, the great majority of which Came from credit sales.
In 1863 the partnership acquired Speedwell and Deep Pit at St George, this part of the business initially being run by Cossham and Wethered Ltd, and from 1867 by the Kingswood Coal and Iron Company Ltd.
In 1878 or 1879 Kingswood and Parkfield Colliery Company Ltd was formed to acquire the Wethereds’ interest, the business subsequently passing into the control of Cossham and Charles S. Wills (a member of the tobacco, family and the brother of Edward Payson Wills who was chairman of the Bristol Colliery Company Ltd, owners of Malago Vale colliery)
Cossham also had political ambitions; a Liberal, he represented the St Paul’s ward on Bristol City Council for some years during the 1860s, before moving to Bath where he also served on the council and was mayor in 1882-3 and 1884-5. - He stood for Parliament at Nottingham in 1866, Dewsbury in 1868 and Chippenham in 1874, before finally being elected as member for Bristol East in 1885 and 1886. - In 1890 he collapsed in the House of Commons and died the following day. The Bristol Times & Mirror estimated that some 30,000 people took to the streets on the day of his funeral and noted with some disapproval that: ‘Unfortunately, many of these allowed their curiosity to overcome their feelings of respect and reverence for the dead, and scenes were consequently enacted which everyone must deeply regret their boisterous conduct in the graveyard itself, which rendered it necessary for a solemn service to be gone through with undignified haste, was inexcusable.’
Cossham’s estate amounted to £59,127 and was left in trust to his wife for her lifetime, after which the collieries were to be sold and the proceeds used to pay for the building of a hospital ‘in or near Kingswood Hill’
When the collieries eventually came up for auction on 24 May 1900, the prospectus announced that the mineral rights for Speedwell and Deep Pit covered an area of 1,600 acres, all freehold. The two pits employed over 600 hands and during 1899 Speedwell had produced 54,000 tons and Deep Pit 77,000 tons.
There was also a coke works with 24 ovens at Deep Pit. The pits held contracts to supply the Midland Railway, the Somerset and Dorset Railway, the Bristol Guardians and Christopher Thomas Bros Ltd~ There were 400 acres of freehold mineral rights at Parkfield and another 420 acres leasehold, much of the latter being held under lease from Sir John Smyth and C.E.H.A. Colston, the proprietors of Coalpit Heath colliery. Nearly 400 hands worked here and the pit produced some 79,000 tons in 1899. Parkfield held contracts to supply Bristol Gas Company, Bath Gas Company and Weston-super-Mare Gas Company.
The collieries were bought for £61,000 by Cuthbert R. Morris, an estate agent and auctioneer who was acting as agent for the Bennett family.
East Bristol Collieries Ltd
East Bristol Collieries Ltd, formed in 1914 to acquire the remaining pits of Bedminster, Easton, Kingswood and Parkfield Collieries Ltd, was controlled by Frank Beauchamp, the major colliery owner in Somerset. This was not, apparently, the family’s first foray into the Bristol district, since Zebedee Beacham, who seems to have been Frank Beauchamp’ s grandfather, had owned Malago and Northside collieries at Bedminster during the 1850s.
Frank Beauchamp was a pillar of the establishment: a magistrate, a Conservative member of Somerset County Council from 1907 to 1946 and a Parliamentary candidate in 1910. In May 1915 he joined the army and, after eighteen months in Britain he was sent to the USA in what was described as ‘an advisory capacity’ to the War Department in Washington. He reached the rank of colonel and was created a baronet in 1918 and awarded the CBE in 1919. Sir Frank’s business interests were centred on Radstock, and he owned a number of collieries in the area, as well as a coal distribution business, a wagon works and a gasworks.
In 1925 he incorporated a number of these businesses in a new company, Somerset Collieries Ltd. In 1935 the company was renamed Radstock Collieries Ltd and in December of that year a new public company named Somerset Collieries Ltd was formed to acquire the assets of the old company and the remainder of Sir Frank’s Somerset ~ The Bristol pits had not been included in either of these amalgamations and East Bristol Collieries Ltd continued to be run as a separate company, the directors of which were Sir Frank and his son, Ian.
The businesses may well have been kept separate in anticipation of future problems, since the Bristol collieries had been in trouble for some years, and Hanham had been forced to close in 1926.
On 3 January 1936, Charles Gill, the agent of the Bristol Miners’ Association wrote to his Somerset counterpart, Fred Swift, that we are “full of troubles.” At one of Sir F’s pits about 120 men were discharged due to water troubles, and now in the other pit, in the two foot seam that the public fund was raised for in 1933 water has broken in and about 40 men are discharged there The next day Swift replied that he had spoken to Sir Frank and that he told me that he had decided to close his Bristol pits, as during the last few years he had lost at these pits £20,000 and he was not prepared to go on losing...
The public fund referred to is also mentioned by Fred Moss, who claims that it was set up by the Lord Mayor. The precise details of this are uncertain, since it is not mentioned in the minutes of the City Council or in the index of documents held by the Bristol Record Office, but it seems remarkable that a company should be subsidised by public subscription in this way, particularly in view of the funds which must have been available from Sir Frank’s other businesses.”Sir Frank had, in fact, threatened to close the pits in 1925 when faced with the threat of a strike but on this occasion he was not bluffing and Kingswood closed in February 1936, followed in August by Parkfield.”’
As Fred Swift observed, ‘Sir Frank can always be ugly, but I know that he or no one else will carry on in business if the balance is always on the wrong side.’
Leonard Boult & Co.
The firm of Leonard, Betts & Boult was first mentioned in Mathews’s Directory for 1833, where they were listed as the proprietors of Lower Easton Colliery. By 1836 the firm’s name had been changed to Leonard Boult & Co., although it seems to have traded as the Easton Coal Company.
The firm was based at Easton where there were initially two collieries, one owned by Davidson and Walters, and the other by Leonard, Betts and Boult. The two firms either went into partnership or merged to form the Easton Coal Company, after which Leonard, Betts and Boult’s pit closed, the other then becoming known as Easton colliery. The business expanded during the middle of the nineteenth century; Whitehall colliery was sunk during the 1860s and was linked underground to Easton, and Hanham colliery was acquired in 1872. By 1888 the company had also acquired Pennywell Road colliery which lay close to Easton, although by the following year the List of Mines noted that it was being used solely for pumping and ventilation.
Leonard Boult and Company Ltd was registered on 24 December 1879 with authorised capital of £70,000 in shares of £25, £47,500 of which had been subscribed and fully paid by 13 October 1884, with debentures of £12,000 later being issued. As the company was a private one, no accounts or reports were published, but The Stock Exchange Year-Book for 1894 noted that it was being wound up.’ The company seems to have been family-controlled, since the directors included, at various times, several members of the Leonard and Monks families (who were, it may be assumed, related, since one of their number was William Boult Monks). The difficulties of interpreting the official lists of mines and their owners is illustrated by the fact that it has not proved possible to ascertain whether the firm had any connection with the partnership of Leonard, Jefferies and Company, which ran Bull Hall and Hole Lane collieries or with Edward and John Monks of Lodge colliery.
The Smyth Family
The Smyth family of Ashton Court seem to have become involved in mining at Bedminster in the middle of the eighteenth century. They were still directly involved in the industry in 1841, when the Report of the Children’s Employment Commission noted that ‘The Bedminster collieries are conducted by “Sir John Smith & Co.”’ It is not certain when the Smyths withdrew from the business, but by 1876 the owner is listed as H. Bennet; they continued to receive royalties, however, and when Dean Lane colliery closed, the land reverted to them.
The family also owned royalties at Pucklechurch and Nailsea and may have been actively involved in mining at the latter. The Smyth family’s major interest in the coal industry, however, was at Coalpit Heath. The precise details of the ownership of the pits are unclear, but there seems to have been a partnership between one or more of the Smyths and Charles Edward Hungerford Atholl Colston, a descendant of Edward Colston’s sister, Mary, who was created Baron Roundway in 1916. A limited company, the Coalpit Heath Company Ltd, was eventually formed with the names Smyth and Roundway included amongst the directors. Although the family’s shareholding is not known, it is clear that they managed to maintain an active interest in the business until nationalisation.”
Bristol Coalfields before 1854
What may be the earliest reference to the use of coal in the area occurs in the works of the Roman writer Solinus, who wrote an account of the hot springs of Britain in which, apparently referring to Bath, he claimed that ‘... the foremost of these is dedicated to the goddess Minerva, in whose temple perpetual fires never die away to ashes, but instead turn to stones.’
Whatever the truth of this may be, it is known that coal was in use in the area during this period, since it has been found on Roman sites in Camerton and Clapton-in-Gordano in north Somerset. Although no remains of Roman mining activity seem to have been identified, it must be assumed that the coal was dug from local surface outcrops. The use of coal seems to have died out after the departure of the Romans and there is little further record of mining activity in Britain until the Middle Ages, although documents from this period must be treated with some caution, since the word ‘coal’ was often used to refer to charcoal.
We can, however, be certain that coal was in use in the Bristol area by the thirteenth century, since licences were being issued to dig for it in Kingswood Chase. It seems that, by the sixteenth century, mining was also taking place to the south-east of Bristol, around Brislington, Queen Charlton and Burnet, whilst the first records of mines at Bedminster date from the second half of the seventeenth century.
The rise in the fortunes of the coal industry has been attributed to increased domestic consumption as a result of a price advantage over wood, but it must also be borne in mind that, in the case of Bristol, the rise of industries such as soap making and sugar refining would have resulted in an increase hi demand. Whatever the causes of any increase in demand may have been, the transport of coal to Bristol was, in itself, a large-scale industry by 1675, when some 500 packhorses were employed in moving coal from Kingswood alone.
The trade was thought worthy of note by visitors to the city, such as Daniel Defoe, who remarked that: ‘Tis very remarkable, that this city is so plentifully supplied with coals though they are all brought by land carriage, that yet they are generally bought by the inhabitants, laid down at their doors, after the rate of from seven to nine shillings per chaldron.’ Whilst Celia Fiennes reported that, when she passed through Kingswood in 1698, she was met with a great many horses passing and returning laden with coals dug just thereabout; they give twelve pence a horse load which carry two bushels ...‘
By 1794, the coal industry had grown to such an extent that William Mathews’ Bristol directory noted that: ‘The advantages arising to the inhabitants from having plenty of coal so near to the City are very great, as well as from its use to families who burn it profusely, and to poor people who are rendered warm and comfortable by it, in the winter, as to the various manufactories of glass, sugar, spirits, iron and brass, in which there is a great consumption of it.’
Mathews refers to collieries at Bedminster, Ashton, Brislington and Kingswood, the latter providing the largest proportion of the city’s supply and being home to so many colliers that it had ‘the appearance of being one vast, rural suburb of Bristol.’
A number of historians have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to estimate the output of the British coal industry during the prestatistical era. Although their figures for Bristol and Somerset vary to some extent, there is general agreement that annual output did not reach 100,000 tons until the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, climbing to somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 tons by 1800, before reaching 1,050,500 tons, in 1854, the first year for which the actual figure is known.
The only separate figures available for the Bristol area are provided by J.U. Nef, who estimated that the annual output of Kingswood Chase in the decade 1551-1560 was 6,000 tons, whilst by 1781-1790 it had risen to 140,000 tons.” There is little room for comment on these figures here, except to emphasise that there are no really accurate output figures for the period prior to 1800.
The authors of the Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Several Matters Relating to Coal in the United Kingdom clearly did not agree with this, however, and in about 1868, as part of their investigation of the resources of the coalfield,they attempted to calculate the total amount of coal which had already been extracted; the results of their calculations are pure guess work.
One of the first detailed accounts of the Bristol and Somerset coal industry was written near the end of the pre-statistical era when both districts were described in the report of the Children’s Employment Commission. Although the report places great emphasis on the perceived moral and spiritual shortcomings of the colliers, it also provides a useful picture of the working conditions.’
There were no women or girls working in the pits, but boys as young as seven were being employed, the youngest operating ventilation doors or assisting with haulage. It was estimated that there were 260 boys under 13 and a further 40 between 13 and 18 at work in south Gloucestershire.
Corporal punishment was found to be common.’ The wages of boys under 13 were from 2s. to 6s. per week, whilst those between 14 and 18 earned 7s. to 12s. per week, but many of the younger boys were found to be receiving only 3d. or 4d. per day.
The adult wage for a full week varied from 18s. to 20s. The working day averaged eight hours at Sir John Smyth’s collieries at Coalpit Heath, but at his Bedminster pits ten to twelve hours was usual.
The commissioners paid particular attention to the use of the guss and crook, a device consisting of a rope which was worn around the waist, to which was attached a chain and hook which was used to pull a sled (known as a putt) loaded with coal.
Elijah Waring, the sub-commissioner for the area, commented that: ‘The mode of tugging tubs with the girdle and chain impressed me so painfully at first, that I was induced to examine closely into its effects on the frame, conceiving it to be a barbarous and unnatural mode of applying muscular power.’
After an examination of the physical state of the boys who used the guss and crook, however, he concluded that the situation was not as bad as he had at first feared, the most severe problems being encountered when it was first worn, but: ‘When I conversed on the subject with the under-ground manager of Sir J. Smyth and Co., he aptly compared the boys to young horses, whose shoulders are tender when first broken to the collar.”
At the Yate Common pits, where no horses were employed underground, it was found that ‘... the smaller boys do not tug more than 1 cwt. at a time; the carts generally hold about 2 cwt. each. The use of the guss and crook was to remain a controversial issue for many years after this. An unpublished Home Office report dating from 1913 also concluded that it had no harmful effect, whilst although a Mines Department committee of 1928 acknowledged that the technology was outdated, it could only suggest that the boys should be allowed to use wheeled putts in narrow seams. It is, perhaps, worth noting that the guss and crook remained in use at the worker-owned Marsh Lane colliery at Farrington Gurney until its closure in 1949.
The Scale of the Industry
After 1854
From the middle of the nineteenth century, the study of the coal industry becomes rather more straightforward with the publication of the first issue of Mineral Statistics of the United Kingdom of Great Britain anti Ireland, covering 1853 and 1854, and edited by Robert Hunt, Keeper of Mining Records for the Geological Survey of Great Britain.
Mineral Statistics, and the many other official publications dealing with the coal industry which followed, provide, for the first time, reasonable reliable figures for the number of collieries, workers and output and thus enable us to gain some idea of the scale of the industry. The output of the Bristol coalfield in 1854 was 1,050,000 tons (this figure, however, included the output of the Somerset pits and seems to have been partially estimated) and seventeen pits were listed in Bristol, Bedminster and South Gloucestershire, although it was noted that: ‘In addition to the collieries in the list ... there are many small ones; these are worked so irregularly that they can scarcely be estimated.
A further problem arises because there seem to have been different interpretations of the word ‘colliery’, with Hunt often counting the various pits of a single company as one. This was recognised as a problem by the report of the Royal Commission of 1871, where official statistics were criticised because ‘In some cases a number of pits are returned as one colliery; in other cases, each pit is given as a separate colliery.’23 Locally, for example, Hunt counts Coalpit Heath as a single colliery from 1854, although Waring, collecting evidence for the Children’s Employment Commission in 1841, found that the works consisted of eight pits.
The problem also occurs in the List of Mines which was published annually from the 1880s; in 1895, for instance, Argus and Malago pits at Bedminster are listed separately although they were, in fact, worked as a single concern.
The question of the size of the collieries is also problematic. It is not possible to classify them by output since there is no single year prior to nationalisation for which the output of every colliery in the area is known. It is therefore necessary to consider the number of men employed, although even this information is not available for every colliery until the late nineteenth century. Another official publication, the List of Mines, provides details of the number of workers at each colliery from the 1890s onwards, and both Roy Church and Barry Supple have analysed this data for certain years, although using different categories of pit size.
Their figures reveal that the majority of collieries employed between 100 and 500 men and the average colliery in the Bristol district was smaller than, although still in the same size bracket as, the national average. It has been suggested that,’ in 1889, the average colliery employed 600 to 1,000 men and produced 200,000 to 300,000 tons per year. It seems doubtful that any Bristol colliery then employed this many men, since, even by 1895, the largest colliery in the district, Parkfield, had only 426 workers; in view of this, and the fact that 15 collieries produced a total of 337,423 tons, it seems extremely unlikely, to say the least, that any of them produced as much as 200,000 tons.
It is notable that the large number of very small pits which were characteristic of the earlier phases of the area’s history and which were still to be found in the Forest of Dean had disappeared by the end of the nineteenth century; this may, perhaps, be accounted for by the exhaustion of the majority of the seams that could be worked by such undertakings, although some coal was extracted from outcrops at Kingswood, St George and Troopers Hill during the strike of 1926.
The largest colliery recorded in the List of Mines was Kingswood. which had 927 workers in 1913, although it might be argued that it should be regarded as two separate entities, Speedwell and Deep Pit, as had been the case in earlier years; furthermore, its size seems to have borne little relationship to its financial viability, since its owner, Bedminster, Easton, Kingswood and Parkfield Collieries Ltd, was in receivership by the following year.
It is difficult to know what conclusion to draw from this information. Roy Church has suggested that there was a close relationship between mine size, technology and the depth of pits, with owners sinking fewer and larger pits to keep their capital expenditure to a minimum, although he develops his argument using productivity data for individual pits, a source not available for Bristol.
The first reasonably accurate measure of the number of workers in the coal industry is provided by the censuses from 1841 onwards, although these must be regarded with some suspicion, since not only do they differ from the figures collected by the Inspectors of Mines from 1851 onwards (which are themselves known to be inaccurate), but they also have their own well-known inaccuracies in relation to occupation details.
City boundaries rather than any upsurge in mining activity, as the number of pits within the city was declining during this period. The small number of miners shown on the 1951 census presents something of a problem, as there were then no pits in the area and, assuming that this figure does not represent retired men, the most likely explanation is that they were working at Pensford and Bromley, to the south of the city.
