Edward Williams was my Great Great Grandfather. I copy below an obituary of him. It is worth noting that his tombstone at St Cuthbert’s Marton bears the following inscription ” The friend of the widow and the fatherless”. A Victorian industrialist with a social conscience.
EDWARD WILLIAMS, son of Taliesin Williams, a schoolmaster of Merthyr Tydfil, Glamorganshire, and grandson of another Edward Williams, well known throughout Wales as Iolo Morganwg„ was born on the 10th of February, 1826, and died at Cleveland Lodge, Middlesbrough, on the 9th of June, 1886.
Iolo Morganwg was by trade a stonemason, as his father had been before him, but being of a very studious, as well as restless disposition, he spent most of his life wandering over South Wales, and backwards and forwards between there and London—always on foot—publishing poems in English and Welsh ; attending Eisteddfodan ; incurring the hostility of the English Government for his radicalism and his correspondence with the French Revolutionists ; acquiring a variety of languages and other learning, but especially in gleaning every scrap of Welsh tradition and literature.
Taliesin Williams also learned the trade of a mason, and further distinguished himself as an antiquary and bard. In his school—one of the best known of those days in South Wales—was educated his son Edward, along with several others who afterwards achieved distinction. Helping his father from an early age, both in and out of school, he had, as he himself once said, “but little childhood.”
At one time a nomination was offered which would have taken him to Jesus College, Oxford, and in all probability ended, as he always supposed, in his taking holy orders; but this was not accepted. He had always felt a strong inclination towards the iron trade of the district, and at the age of sixteen he entered the Dowlais Iron Company’s service, the then general manager of Dowlais, Mr. Thomas Evans, having offered his father to give him “something to do.” When he went to the offce, the General Mana.ger was engaged. He waited hour after hour; at last the General Manager came out and saw the lad he had quite forgotten ; whereupon, taking him into the general office, he called to the head of it: Here, Harrison ; give this young fellow something to do ; shut the door, and was gone.
So the boy was started; but having once got grip, he never let go. His first introduction to the out-door work came by writing reports for one of the staff who was illiterate. In the year 1845, being still under twenty years, he was chosen to look after the Company’s shipping-matters at Cardiff. Dowlais had been a rough school, where none but those who had plenty of energy could live ; and Cardiff was by no means a bed of roses. A small place with rapidly growing shipping, all the labour at the boats was claimed as an hereditary monopoly by a certain class of men, who demanded exorbitant pay, and even then would not do the necessary work : he engaged outsiders, and thereby incurred their hatred. One night, going home to his lodgings (his way was a lonely one by the waterside), he observed, before he was clear of the streets, that some of his enemies were skulking along and dogging his steps. He turned back, and slept that night at a friend’s lodgings, thereby in all probability saving his life.
After three years in Cardiff, he insisted upon returning to Dowlais, even against the wish of the Company. His father died about this time, 1847, and leaving his family as ill provided for as a student and schoolmaster usually does, left a heavy burden upon his eldest son. Fighting against this, and against endless disappointments of his just hopes at Dowlais, he became at length, in 1855, forge and mill manager. This was when the general managership became vacant, and passed to the late William Menelaus, his senior by several years, who had previously been engineer; but Edward Williams took the second place, and bore thenceforward no small part with his friend in the management and development of the works. He was thoroughly master of every detail of wrought-iron making as then understood, and even in later years would take the tongs and show an obstinate workman exactly how a rail should be rolled ; but at the same time he was ready for new ideas, and often carried out experiments upon his own initiative and authority.
One evening in 1856, reading, as he always did, The Times, he found that a Mr. Bessemer, in a Paper before the British Association, at Cheltenham, had declared that by blowing cold air into molten iron, it was possible, without any fuel, to make it hotter and produce steel. Forthwith he put up a little furnace, expecting to prove the falseness of this. To his surprise, the iron really became hotter, instead of growing solid. He had no notion when to stop blowing but when at length, the stuff was rolled into a bar, with wonderful readiness to seize a great result, he turned to a leading hand beside him and said ” Tom, puddling’s done ! ” —all this within some three or four days of the reading of the Paper. The bar, however, when cold proved as brittle as earthenware, and piling and annealing, &c., &c., made it no better. Dowlais took up the Bessemer process, and Edward Williams worked hard to bring it to a practical result. After Sir Henry Bessemer, he was the first who made Bessemer steel; and, in 1858, he rolled at Dowlais, from ingots supplied by the inventor, the first rails ever made of that material. Only a few weeks before his death, his efforts in this direction were recognized by the presentation to him of the Iron and Steel Institute’s Bessemer Medal for 1886.
In 1864 he left Dowlais. From practical iron-making he went to manage the commercial part of the firm’s business, as head of their London house of Guest and Co. In this new line, his ability and success were as conspicuous as they had always been in the old ; but in little more than twelve months he accepted the post of General Manager to the new limited company which had just taken over the vast concerns of Messrs. Bolokow and Vaughan. Henceforward he lived in Middlesbrough. He was now thirty-nine years old, and had from the first perhaps nine thousand men under him, with charge of collieries, mines, blast-furnaces, mills, &c., and not only were the various undertakings of the company remodelled and modernized by him, but they constantly grew. New mines, new collieries, new furnaces; a Bessemer steelworks at Gorton, near Manchester, were among the additions, and just as he was about to commence, in lieu of the last, a steelworks at Eston, he resigned his position. The ten years and a half of his management began with the commercial gloom of 1866, but they were wonderful years of prosperity for the whole trade, and scarcely for any firm so much as for Bolckow, Vaughan and Co. He controlled its widespread concerns with as much success as he had achieved in a narrower sphere. One of his first tasks was to fight the terrible twenty weeks’ strike, and lock-out of 1866, but there never was another of anything like so great moment in his time. He was an incomparable manager of men; they found him stern and hot tempered, but always just, kind-hearted and merciful.
Mr. Williams, in the year 1871, with the late Mr. Menelaus, Sir W. T. Lewis and others, purchased the Forest Furnaces at Pontypridd, and subsequently, in connection with other influential persons connected with the iron and steel trades, acquired the Tredegar Iron Works, both of which establishments were entirely remodelled and successfully carried on for iron- and steel-making. From the beginning of 1876, he acted as adviser to many undertakings, and in the year 1879 purchased the Linthorpe Blast Furnaces at Middlesbrough, which he carried on with great energy up to the time of his death.
He had been the first to use waste heat from coke ovens in burning bricks, ; he had experimented considerably with Mr. Menelaus in mechanical puddling, and under his supervision the early machines of Tooth, Walker, and others were thoroughly tested at Dowlais, whilst later he was one of the Committee appointed by the Iron and Steel Institute to investigate the whole subject. He was one of the earliest advocates in this country of taking thee molten iron from the blast-furnace to the converter. His last great work was designing the Cyfarthfa Steelworks, and superintending their erection and starting. The old Cyfarthfa wrought-iron works were admittedly unsurpassed in their day, and it is believed the same may now be said—not in respect of size, but so far as convenience of arrangement and cellence of plant are concerned—of the steelworks which occupy their site. In spite of sadly-failing health he stuck to this task, and saw it completed and put to the test of a year’s working. Others would have given up under a small part of the physical suffering which he unfortunately disregarded.
As a young man he was Secretary to the South Wales Institution of Engineers, of which, indeed, he was one of the founders. In 1881, he renewed his more intimate connection with that Society on being elected its President for the twenty-fifth year of its existence. None were more prominent than he among those who in 1869 organized the Iron and Steel Institute. He was from the first a Member of the Council, and succeeded the late Sir William Siemens as President in 1879—81. He was elected a Member of this Institution on the 19th of May, 1868, and was connected with many other technical and scientific societies. His Papers ” On the Manufacture of Rails,” read before the Iron and Steel Institute at Middlesbrough, when it held its first provincial meeting in 1870, on the Progress of Iron and Steel Making from 1869—79, when he first sat as President of the same society, and his inaugural address as President of the South Wales Institution of Engineers* all contain matter very valuable at the time and likely to remain so in the literature of iron and steel.
He several times acted as arbitrator in wages disputes, and had always a generous sympathy with the aspirations of the labouring classes. Nothing irritated him more than to hear them decried ” by a fellow who looked as if he had just come out of a bandbox.” His energy and interest were by no means to his business. He inherited a large part of the family inclination to literature, and was a most admirable public speaker. He took an active part in municipal affairs and in politics.
His quick temper occasionally led him into saying and doing things none regretted more than he did himself. His sense of justice was so keen, that on the spur of the moment he may have given utterance to words that sometimes vexed, but he never lost a friend and never made an enemy. His quiet unostentatious but real charity was great, and under his apparent roughness he hid most tender, loving heart. His good sound advice to young people commencing their career, was often accompanied by liberal assistance of another kind, and his loss was deeply deplored by all who knew him.
Edward Williams was my Great Great Grandfather. I copy below an obituary of him. It is worth noting that his tombstone at St Cuthbert’s Marton bears the following inscription ” The friend of the widow and the fatherless”. A Victorian industrialist with a social conscience.
EDWARD WILLIAMS, son of Taliesin Williams, a schoolmaster of Merthyr Tydfil, Glamorganshire, and grandson of another Edward Williams, well known throughout Wales as Iolo Morganwg„ was born on the 10th of February, 1826, and died at Cleveland Lodge, Middlesbrough, on the 9th of June, 1886.
Iolo Morganwg was by trade a stonemason, as his father had been before him, but being of a very studious, as well as restless disposition, he spent most of his life wandering over South Wales, and backwards and forwards between there and London—always on foot—publishing poems in English and Welsh ; attending Eisteddfodan ; incurring the hostility of the English Government for his radicalism and his correspondence with the French Revolutionists ; acquiring a variety of languages and other learning, but especially in gleaning every scrap of Welsh tradition and literature.
Taliesin Williams also learned the trade of a mason, and further distinguished himself as an antiquary and bard. In his school—one of the best known of those days in South Wales—was educated his son Edward, along with several others who afterwards achieved distinction. Helping his father from an early age, both in and out of school, he had, as he himself once said, “but little childhood.”
At one time a nomination was offered which would have taken him to Jesus College, Oxford, and in all probability ended, as he always supposed, in his taking holy orders; but this was not accepted. He had always felt a strong inclination towards the iron trade of the district, and at the age of sixteen he entered the Dowlais Iron Company’s service, the then general manager of Dowlais, Mr. Thomas Evans, having offered his father to give him “something to do.” When he went to the offce, the General Mana.ger was engaged. He waited hour after hour; at last the General Manager came out and saw the lad he had quite forgotten ; whereupon, taking him into the general office, he called to the head of it: Here, Harrison ; give this young fellow something to do ; shut the door, and was gone.
So the boy was started; but having once got grip, he never let go. His first introduction to the out-door work came by writing reports for one of the staff who was illiterate. In the year 1845, being still under twenty years, he was chosen to look after the Company’s shipping-matters at Cardiff. Dowlais had been a rough school, where none but those who had plenty of energy could live ; and Cardiff was by no means a bed of roses. A small place with rapidly growing shipping, all the labour at the boats was claimed as an hereditary monopoly by a certain class of men, who demanded exorbitant pay, and even then would not do the necessary work : he engaged outsiders, and thereby incurred their hatred. One night, going home to his lodgings (his way was a lonely one by the waterside), he observed, before he was clear of the streets, that some of his enemies were skulking along and dogging his steps. He turned back, and slept that night at a friend’s lodgings, thereby in all probability saving his life.
After three years in Cardiff, he insisted upon returning to Dowlais, even against the wish of the Company. His father died about this time, 1847, and leaving his family as ill provided for as a student and schoolmaster usually does, left a heavy burden upon his eldest son. Fighting against this, and against endless disappointments of his just hopes at Dowlais, he became at length, in 1855, forge and mill manager. This was when the general managership became vacant, and passed to the late William Menelaus, his senior by several years, who had previously been engineer; but Edward Williams took the second place, and bore thenceforward no small part with his friend in the management and development of the works. He was thoroughly master of every detail of wrought-iron making as then understood, and even in later years would take the tongs and show an obstinate workman exactly how a rail should be rolled ; but at the same time he was ready for new ideas, and often carried out experiments upon his own initiative and authority.
One evening in 1856, reading, as he always did, The Times, he found that a Mr. Bessemer, in a Paper before the British Association, at Cheltenham, had declared that by blowing cold air into molten iron, it was possible, without any fuel, to make it hotter and produce steel. Forthwith he put up a little furnace, expecting to prove the falseness of this. To his surprise, the iron really became hotter, instead of growing solid. He had no notion when to stop blowing but when at length, the stuff was rolled into a bar, with wonderful readiness to seize a great result, he turned to a leading hand beside him and said ” Tom, puddling’s done ! ” —all this within some three or four days of the reading of the Paper. The bar, however, when cold proved as brittle as earthenware, and piling and annealing, &c., &c., made it no better. Dowlais took up the Bessemer process, and Edward Williams worked hard to bring it to a practical result. After Sir Henry Bessemer, he was the first who made Bessemer steel; and, in 1858, he rolled at Dowlais, from ingots supplied by the inventor, the first rails ever made of that material. Only a few weeks before his death, his efforts in this direction were recognized by the presentation to him of the Iron and Steel Institute’s Bessemer Medal for 1886.
In 1864 he left Dowlais. From practical iron-making he went to manage the commercial part of the firm’s business, as head of their London house of Guest and Co. In this new line, his ability and success were as conspicuous as they had always been in the old ; but in little more than twelve months he accepted the post of General Manager to the new limited company which had just taken over the vast concerns of Messrs. Bolokow and Vaughan. Henceforward he lived in Middlesbrough. He was now thirty-nine years old, and had from the first perhaps nine thousand men under him, with charge of collieries, mines, blast-furnaces, mills, &c., and not only were the various undertakings of the company remodelled and modernized by him, but they constantly grew. New mines, new collieries, new furnaces; a Bessemer steelworks at Gorton, near Manchester, were among the additions, and just as he was about to commence, in lieu of the last, a steelworks at Eston, he resigned his position. The ten years and a half of his management began with the commercial gloom of 1866, but they were wonderful years of prosperity for the whole trade, and scarcely for any firm so much as for Bolckow, Vaughan and Co. He controlled its widespread concerns with as much success as he had achieved in a narrower sphere. One of his first tasks was to fight the terrible twenty weeks’ strike, and lock-out of 1866, but there never was another of anything like so great moment in his time. He was an incomparable manager of men; they found him stern and hot tempered, but always just, kind-hearted and merciful.
Mr. Williams, in the year 1871, with the late Mr. Menelaus, Sir W. T. Lewis and others, purchased the Forest Furnaces at Pontypridd, and subsequently, in connection with other influential persons connected with the iron and steel trades, acquired the Tredegar Iron Works, both of which establishments were entirely remodelled and successfully carried on for iron- and steel-making. From the beginning of 1876, he acted as adviser to many undertakings, and in the year 1879 purchased the Linthorpe Blast Furnaces at Middlesbrough, which he carried on with great energy up to the time of his death.
He had been the first to use waste heat from coke ovens in burning bricks, ; he had experimented considerably with Mr. Menelaus in mechanical puddling, and under his supervision the early machines of Tooth, Walker, and others were thoroughly tested at Dowlais, whilst later he was one of the Committee appointed by the Iron and Steel Institute to investigate the whole subject. He was one of the earliest advocates in this country of taking thee molten iron from the blast-furnace to the converter. His last great work was designing the Cyfarthfa Steelworks, and superintending their erection and starting. The old Cyfarthfa wrought-iron works were admittedly unsurpassed in their day, and it is believed the same may now be said—not in respect of size, but so far as convenience of arrangement and cellence of plant are concerned—of the steelworks which occupy their site. In spite of sadly-failing health he stuck to this task, and saw it completed and put to the test of a year’s working. Others would have given up under a small part of the physical suffering which he unfortunately disregarded.
As a young man he was Secretary to the South Wales Institution of Engineers, of which, indeed, he was one of the founders. In 1881, he renewed his more intimate connection with that Society on being elected its President for the twenty-fifth year of its existence. None were more prominent than he among those who in 1869 organized the Iron and Steel Institute. He was from the first a Member of the Council, and succeeded the late Sir William Siemens as President in 1879—81. He was elected a Member of this Institution on the 19th of May, 1868, and was connected with many other technical and scientific societies. His Papers ” On the Manufacture of Rails,” read before the Iron and Steel Institute at Middlesbrough, when it held its first provincial meeting in 1870, on the Progress of Iron and Steel Making from 1869—79, when he first sat as President of the same society, and his inaugural address as President of the South Wales Institution of Engineers* all contain matter very valuable at the time and likely to remain so in the literature of iron and steel.
He several times acted as arbitrator in wages disputes, and had always a generous sympathy with the aspirations of the labouring classes. Nothing irritated him more than to hear them decried ” by a fellow who looked as if he had just come out of a bandbox.” His energy and interest were by no means to his business. He inherited a large part of the family inclination to literature, and was a most admirable public speaker. He took an active part in municipal affairs and in politics.
His quick temper occasionally led him into saying and doing things none regretted more than he did himself. His sense of justice was so keen, that on the spur of the moment he may have given utterance to words that sometimes vexed, but he never lost a friend and never made an enemy. His quiet unostentatious but real charity was great, and under his apparent roughness he hid most tender, loving heart. His good sound advice to young people commencing their career, was often accompanied by liberal assistance of another kind, and his loss was deeply deplored by all who knew him.