- 1 - OAKELEY SLATE The History of The Oakeley Slate Quarries, Blaenau Ffestiniog PART ONE 1800-1889 From Beginnings to the Great Fall J G ISHERWOOD To be continued in:- PART TWO 1889 – 1920 From Amalgamation to the Great War and PART THREE 1920 – 1968 From Peace to War and Back again - 2 - CONTENTS of Part One 1. Oakeley & Gloddfa Ganol 2. Wild Wales 1800-1824 3. A Land Dispute 1820-1825 4. The Welsh Slate Copper and Lead Mining Company 1825-1826 5. Holland Vs The Company 1825-1839 6. The 1838 Lease 1838 7. Hollands’ Quarry 1838-1869 8. Rhiwbryfdir Quarry 1838-1870 9. The Welsh Slate Company Succeed 1825-1870 10. The Quarries and The Railway 1838-1872 11 The Paths Divide 1865-1869 12. The Welsh Slate Company’s New Lease 1869-1870 13. The Slippery Slope 1870-1878 14. Oakeley and Rhiwbryfdir 1870-1882 15. Prelude to Disaster 1878-1882 16. Railways Again 1872-1889 17. The Doom of the Welsh Slate Company 1883-1884 18. The Quarries in Court 1884-1887 Note: References to figures in the text may not altogether correspond to the actual figures in this version, they will be updated as soon as possible. My apologies for any confusion. GI - 3 - 1. LOCATION AND OVERVIEW When visitors to North Wales, or Gwynedd, to give the ancient country the correct title, take the A470 from Betws y Coed for Dolgellau they drive up through what is arguably one of the most beautiful valleys in the principality, that of the Afon Lledr. The roadside views are ever varying, often great vistas of hill or mountain, little clearings among the great trees of the Forestry Commission plantations, isolated hamlets glimpsed up tracks and across the ravines of the river. Amidst all the beauty man hardly seems to have made an impression, yet peeping out from the encircling trees are the scars of past endeavours; tips and open quarries long since abandoned bear mute testimony to the handiwork of man the quarrier and miner. Now the efforts of both man and nature serve to hide these old remains from sight. From Dolwyddelan the road climbs steeply and the visitor is rewarded by the sight of the open hillsides and the distant peaks of Moel Siabod and even mighty Snowdon, Yr Wyddfa itself, provided the clouds are high. It is all the greater shock then, unless the visitor has been over that way before, when he crests the top of the pass and is greeted by a view of a mountain clearly ravaged by man. Giant steps carved from the living rock make an ogres pathway up the flanks of the mountain while vast tips of loose rock spill away from the hillsides stretching like rivers of lava towards the road seeming to seek to bury it. The road descends, abandoning the green and brown of moor and mountain for the grim shattered mounds of sharp edged waste, which tower over it. Instead of the whitewashed walls of cottages and farms rows of grey walled houses appear, all the trappings of a small industrial town, but without the factory chimneys. This is Blaenau Ffestiniog, centre of the Ffestiniog slate industry, much contracted now from its former pre-eminent position in the roofing trade, but still a potent source of slate. Really Blaenau consists of a row of several villages all strung out together so that one runs into the next and is indistinguishable from it. Once called the “slate horseshoe”, these villages of Tanygrisiau, Rhiwbryfdir, Four Crosses, Conglywal, Bethania and Manod echoed twice a day to the tramp of booted feet as the men made their way to and from the great mines that had caused the town to be. Now only a few work in the quarries, but the memories linger on in the minds of the people, the names of men long gone to rest, of injuries sustained and grievances real and imagined, the names of quarries great and small, their masters, and above all of the rock that was both life and death to them. Life in that it gave them the money to live, death both from the instant crushing weight of a fall, slower from shattered limbs and complications and the real killer, the dust, which turned young men old and crippled them, dooming them to a wheezing, gasping breath-denied end before their time. Blaenau is easy to locate on any map of North and Mid Wales – simply look for the coloured boundary representing the Snowdonia National Park. The planners who drew up the boundary after the Second World War were careful to exclude the significant slate industry sites of Dinorwic (Llanberis), Penrhyn (Bethesda), Nantlle, Corris and Blaenau from the park, thus ensuring that their work would not be affected by the planning controls within the park. In the case of the first four, exclusion was simple, they were on the edge of the area anyway, but Blaenau was in the middle. The Solution ? Create a “hole” in the park with Blaenau in it. The Oakeley Quarries lie to the west of the A470 as it descends from the Crimea Pass, forming the “giant’s steps” mentioned earlier. For most of their lives it was the largest quarry complex in Blaenau and acquired the cognomen of The Largest Slate Mine in the World. The word “mine” is important, for, despite the easily visible open workings which scar the mountain, like an iceberg, two-thirds of the quarry workings are invisible, hidden from view below ground, the steep dip of the bands of slate rock, (known as veins), in the Blaenau district having made the mining of the rock a necessity to avoid excessive removal of overburden. The Oakeley Quarries has a plural title for the site is in fact an amalgam of three original quarrying ventures, begun in the 1820s and 30s and as later chapters will relate, have been known under various titles in their time, some official, others less so; Hollands’ Quarry, Mathew’s Quarry, the Rhiwbryfdir Slate Co.’s Quarry, the Palmerston Quarry, the Company’s Quarry, the Welsh Slate Company’s Quarry, Cloddfa Gesail and Chwarel Isaf being but a few of them. The essential point being that the site was worked for some seventy years or so by three independent companies and even after amalgamation into the Oakeley Quarries , the divisions remained so marked that until the 1960s it was still possible to speak of the Upper Quarry , the Middle Quarry and the Lower Quarry as distinct identities. Despite this clear verbal division of the site, physically the divisions are less clear, the workings on both surface and underground have merged inextricably into one another and the prodigious production of slate from the workings and more particularly the accompanying vast quantities of waste rock have all but buried much of the earlier remains of the quarries, a process which accelerated over the last decade or so. After amalgamation in the 1880s working continued, following the rises and declines of the slate industry in general until in 1970 the Oakeley Quarries as such were closed and their deep underground workings scrapped and allowed to flood up to the drainage levels. The site was sold to Glyn Williams, a local coal merchant, haulage and plant hire firm owner. He continued the open workings of the old quarry as the Ffestiniog Slate Company, retaining sections of the underground workings above the flood waters for special quality slate and as reserves of rock. This activity took place principally in the Lower Quarry , although roads were constructed throughout the site to enable modern tracked vehicles and lorries to reach all parts of the site where there might be workable slate and for maintenance purposes. For a while the Upper and Middle Quarries languished, but later the old Middle Quarry slab producing mill was put into service for architectural and slab work by Wil Roberts, Glyn Williams’ son in law, and by 1974 this formed the nucleus of the new Gloddfa Ganol company, named after the welsh for Middle Quarry. As trade developed other slate quarries were taken over and a trading organization was set up as The Ffestiniog Slate Group. Gloddfa Ganol, as well as being a productive member of the group, was intended from the start to tap the tourist trade and the increasing interest in our industrial past. Its formal title was Gloddfa Ganol – Ffestiniog Mountain Tourist Centre. - 4 - Oakeley Slate Part One – 1. Location and Overview From 1974 until the 1990s working there continued in parallel with tourism, but for a number of reasons, recession being a major contributing factor, the whole of the Ffestiniog Slate Group of companies was bought up by McAlpines who had been working the Penrhyn Quarry at Bethesda since the late 1960s. They closed down the tourist side of the business and proceeded to radically re-organise the open workings and production methods in line with their long experience at Penrhyn, introducing modern geological surveys, Health & Safety analyses and large-scale methods of working. Following some financial irregularities the quarry closed and then reopened under new ownership. Now, once againat has been closed due to geo technical problems. They found, as both Oakeley and the Ffestiniog Slate Group had found before them that the progress of the Great Fall westward had so deatroyed the cohesion of the ground to the north and west of the open quarry that as they were extended into the broken ground, so that ground gave way and collapsed into the open workings again. The scale of the later operations radically altered the appearance of the old quarry.