Thursday, February 6, 2014

Thomas Richards (1853-?) - the original founder of the Richards' coal merchant business?

This post focuses on a person who is a slight deviation from my direct ancestry, but in terms of his occupation is definitely relevant to the story of my direct line.

To provide some more recent context. My father and his brother (Gwyn), and their father before him, owned a coal merchant's business in the village of Aberdulais, about 2 miles from Neath. The work was hard and I experienced that personally by helping out during holidays. The coal business ceased in the early 1990s due to the building of the new A465 road which came straight through the coal yard.

It seems that my great grandfather (Richard!) and my great-great grandfather (Richard again!) were not in the coal business, but my great-great grandfather's brother Thomas was. And possibly, this is where the coal business started off from. So what do we know of Thomas and how did the coal business develop over time?

My previous post here mentioned a Thomas Richards, who appears to have come over from North Devon to Wales with his brother Richard Richards (my great-great grandfather) in the second half of the 19th century. The census of 1891 shows Thomas living with his wife Mary and family at Tyn Yr Heol Fach*, in the parish of Llantwit Lower, just outside Neath. His occupation is set down as "coal merchant". The next (1901) census shows him still at Tynyrheol Fach as a "coal merchant (retail)" and also his son, another Thomas Richards, as  in a similar occupation. The 1911 census, ten years later, shows that he was  "coal merchant and farmer" at Tynyrheol Farm, Tonna; probably the same property as Tynyrheol Fach (but I'm not completely certain). Thomas was not living at the property in 1911 (though he still may have been in the coal business with his father or on his own) and another son, Frank A Richards was mentioned "assisting in the coal business".

Unfortunately, Ancestry.com records do not show any further information for either Thomas senior, Thomas junior or Frank beyond 1911, so at this point I cannot say which of them, if any, continued the coal business. It is very possible that my grandfather Richard Richards got into the coal business himself via his great-uncle Thomas or uncles Thomas/Frank, or perhaps their offspring, rather than setting up a new business from scratch; though a conversation with my father suggests that my grandfather set up his own coal merchant business, so it was possible that there was some inter-family business rivalry!


* It appears that Tynyrheol Fach or Farm (whether they are the same of different properties) is different from Tynyrheol which is mentioned in the link attached (here) as being on "the Neath road, Tonna". Fach and/or Farm may have been an adjacent property. Certainly the censuses mention above distinguish between the two properties and Tynyrheol was headed up by the Jones family.



  

1 comment:

  1. My surname is Richards. My father's family was from Swansea. He told me the story about the family owning two coal delivery depots. The father started the business but the sons were wasters and drank a lot. The father sent them to buy horses from Cardiff but they spent the money in a pub. Being afraid to return without any horses, they stole some, were caught and hanged by the roadside outside Neath. The Richards family also had a horse and cart haulage business in Swansea. I knew an old man back in the 70s who, as a child, worked for a company that subcontracted to them down at Swansea docks. If I remember right, the coal business was closed due to mismanagement and the haulage had to close because the government took the horses for the first world war. I am 57, and my father told me about this back in the 1970s, so its all a bit of a distant memory, but perhaps it will help someone researching the family in that area.

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