Abertillery Online site established 1997 by David Llewellyn; designed and maintained by Cybertyleri © All rights reserved 2010
IMPORTANT NOTICE:
Permission for use of images on this site has been sought in all cases where possible and no copyright infringement is intended whatsoever. If you feel that an image does infringe an existing copyright, please contact abertilleryonline@yahoo.co.uk and we will be happy to withdraw the image(s) concerned. Copies of images shown on this site are available, where permission has been granted, by request to abertilleryonline@yahoo.co.uk

Please note that contents of the chat forum are not official views of members of Cybertyleri but those of the individual contributors who post them.

PAST IMAGES OF ABERTILLERY: TYLERI VALLEY TRIP

Looking at the Tyleri Valley today, it is very difficult to envisage the way it looked just 50 years ago or certainly over a hundred years ago at the turn of the twentieth century. The present scene is much more tranquil with no heavy industry and long gone are the rail tracks serving the various works packed into the valley that employed thousands, sustaining the town and its economy. This page sets out to describe the sights and scenes of a journey that a traveller on a train up the Tyleri Valley in 1896 would have encountered as Abertillery entered the 20th century.

This old coloured postcard shows the view in about 1896. The town is just starting to embark on huge expansion with workers and their families flooding in.

The journey begins naturally enough, at the start of the Cwmtillery branch rail line. Heading up the valley from Aberbeeg, instead of travelling onwards to Abertillery's snake-like GWR station, just out of view on the left, we branch off right, crossing under the bridge.

New building and rebuilding is going on everywhere. Immediately, we can see one of the town's earliest hostelries, the Bush, which is being rebuilt as a hotel rather than an inn, a sign of the town's new-found prosperity.

Close by St Michael's Church is also being rebuilt, this time perpendicular to the structure originally erected in 1854. Slightly further up the valley is the Iron Foundry established by Henry Ward Williams in 1874.

On the other side of the valley to our left, the British School, which has expanded since it was originally built in the early 1850s and the houses of James Terrace are perched above us. There are no houses at the bottom end of Gladstone Street or the one side of Alma Street, where one of the fields belonging to Clynmawr Isaf farm (just to the left of the top centre of the picture) remains.

Before 1896, we would have traversed a level crossing at the valley bottom, probably with people waiting at the gates on either side to cross. But the town is developing fast and a new bridge is built to join the east and west sides of Cwm Tyleri (right).

The tall stack of the Gray Pit, which has been producing coal for just about three years, is just coming into view on the right whilst before it, just up on Tillery Street, formerly called Wesleyan Road, the town's police station houses its few constables and possibly some overnight detainees.

The gardens of the smaller houses on Alma Street back onto the line. At about this time, more salubrious houses were just starting to be built opposite them to house the more affluent professional classes in the town.

Within a couple of hundred yards, Pen-y-bont Colliery, with another large stack, comes into view (right).

Its spoil is being dumped on the mountainside just below Green Meadow Farm, or Gwerlod Gleision as it was known in the local Welsh dialect, either side of a tramway that originally brought coal down from the now defunct superficial workings of Pullinger's Level.

The colliery itself has surrounded the few buildings that still remain from Pen-y-bont farm, which provided the stables for the pit.

Just out of view on the top right above a small row of workers houses called Dyffryn Row, a historic house called Ty Llawn Bwn March (House of the fully-laden stallion) is being encroached upon by this waste, which will sadly eventually lead to the house's disappearance.

Slightly further up on the hill is Blaenau Gwent Baptist Church, built in 1715 but the surrounding area at this time was known to locals as Brynteg rather than Blaenau Gwent as it is called today.

Just after we pass the Foundry Bridge, lines branch off to the right to serve Gray Pit and its older, sister colliery, Pen-y-bont, earlier called the Tillery Colliery.

The Gray Pit was sunk in the late 1880s by Powell's Tillery Steam Coal Company.

In 1896, over 400 men are now working the Blackvein seam. 

By 1908, the Gray, together with the Vivian and Pen-y-bont collieries, all owned by Powell's Tillery Steam Coal Company Ltd, employed 2,766 men.

As we cast our gaze across onto the western side of the valley, we see two local hostelries close to the line, which slake the thirsts of the men after they finish their shifts underground. The first of these is the Britannia Inn, situated just at the bottom of Hill Street (or as it is also known, Griffiths Street), where some train drivers it appears also halt for some liquid refreshment on occasion.

The main Pen-y-bont road, previously called Accommodation Road some twenty years earlier, skirts by the railway line, and just a short way up, situated next to where it crosses the line is another pub, the Old Bridgend Inn (in the centre of the picture opposite), run at this time by Benjamin Fieldhouse.

Behind the pub, and the adjacent houses to its right, is Bryn Morgan Terrace, two long rows of cottages that house workers from the Gray and Pen-y-bont collieries. These would stand until the late 1960s.

For a brief moment or two, the industrial scene is broken and we can catch a glimpse of how the valley looked just over 40 years ago with nothing to impede the view across from Gwern Berthi farm on our left and the Tillery Fountain pub on the eastern side of the valley, run by Joseph Chivers and his family, whose small brewery is a little way above it on Crook Hill.

Just above that again is another single row of workers' houses, Club Row, also called by the locals, 'Little Ireland' because of the numbers of Irish immigrants living there, and just beyond that, the ancient farm of Ty Pwdr, undergoing renovation by the Ralph family who run the South Wales Inn.

This will all change by the 1920s with the establishment of the coal washeries and the By Product works (opposite) whose coke ovens will generate acrid products including tar, ammonium sulphate, and crude benzol. Like Bryn Morgan Terrace, some of the washeries' buildings will remain until the late 1960s, when they are demolished as part of a huge reclamation scheme.

Within a short time we reach our final destination of Cwmtillery Colliery, a hive of activity with over 1600 men working in it and its sister colliery, Rose Heyworth in the adjacent Ebbw Fach valley.

The colliery was established just over 50 years previously when Thomas Brown found coal in the Elled seam in 1843 on ground occupied by an ancient Welsh farm, Tir Nicolas, leading to the sinking of the first deep shaft in 1850.

When John Russell took over ownership of the new colliery, he described the scene at Tir Nicolas before the colliery buildings were erected: "A typical Welsh valley farm with massive gables and a stone-tiled roof, situated low in the valley for shelter. The front garden was surrounded by hedges of Holly and Beech and its stone-flagged pathways were lined with dwarf bunders of clipped box bushes. Near the house was a watermill.

Inside the house sat two women working at spinning wheel, making wool for knitting or weaving. Large sides of bacon hung from the rafters and simple food, including milk, butter and cheese made from ewe's milk, and instead of wheaten bread, crisp fresh oatcakes was the diet."

As we arrive at Cwmtillery Colliery, all has changed from the idyllic scene thus described with large colliery buildings, including two winding wheels, surrounded on either side of the valley by rows of workers' houses. On the west bank, the South Wales Inn, named after the pit's original title, the South Wales Colliery, is serving Webb's Ales brewed at nearby Aberbeeg.