Ystradgynlais

On 5 February 1837, at an ironworks on the bank of the Tawe, David Thomas ran a blast furnace on anthracite and it worked.

That sentence needs unpacking, because it does not look like much and it changed a great deal. Anthracite is hard coal. It burns clean and hot, the western coalfield sits on enormous quantities of it, and until 1837 nobody could make it work in a blast furnace, because blowing cold air onto burning anthracite tends to put it out rather than drive it. Iron therefore had to be smelted with coke from bituminous coal, which meant it had to be smelted somewhere else.

Thomas was works superintendent at Ynyscedwyn under George Crane, an ironmaster from Bromsgrove who had bought the works in 1823 and spent a decade funding experiments that did not work. Then they heard about James Neilson's hot blast, patented in Scotland. Thomas went to see it, Crane bought a licence, and a Scottish mechanic helped build the plant to preheat the air. In the spring of 1837 the works was smelting iron with local anthracite, and Crane patented the application.

What followed

Within a few years thirty-six new furnaces went up across the anthracite coalfield. Ynyscedwyn itself had seven by the time Crane died in 1846.

And David Thomas left. Pennsylvania and Ohio sat on the largest anthracite reserves in the world and could not use them either, so he was recruited to go and fix that. He founded what became the Lehigh Crane Iron Company at Catasauqua, trained a generation of American ironmasters, and by the time he died in 1882 he was one of the more significant figures in United States heavy industry. He came back to Wales once, briefly, in 1866.

So a technical problem solved in a Brecknockshire valley is a direct part of why the American iron industry took the shape it did. It is not a claim the town makes loudly and it is not in most county histories.

Before the ironworks

Iron was being made here a long way back. A piece of iron stamped 1612 was reportedly found in an old cinder bed on the site, and the works is generally dated from then. A single charcoal furnace on the valley floor, working ore and wood from the hills around it, supplied among other things cannonballs during the Napoleonic wars.

Before that, Ystradgynlais was a scattering of farms on the Tawe. The name is the valley floor of the Gynlais, the brook that joins the river here, and until the nineteenth century that is more or less all it was.

Coal

The ironworks came first but coal outlasted it. Anthracite drift mines had worked the local seams for lime burning and domestic use for a long time; the iron trade turned that into an industry. The Diamond Colliery opened in 1874, Ynyscedwyn Colliery ran into the twentieth century at something around 100,000 tons a year, and the pits employed most of the town for the best part of a century.

They are all gone. The town has done more than most to green over the ground they left, and Ynyscedwyn is now a heritage park with a chimney and a run of arches standing in grass.

Josef Herman

In 1944 a Polish-Jewish painter arrived intending to stay a fortnight and stayed eleven years. Josef Herman had lost his family in the Warsaw ghetto. He rented rooms above a shop, painted the miners walking home in the last light, and produced the body of work now generally called his Ystradgynlais period.

He was not painting an idea of Wales from outside it. He lived in the town, knew the men he painted, and left in 1955. There is a Josef Herman gallery in the town, and his work did more to fix an image of the south Wales collier in British art than anything else of the period.

The language

Ystradgynlais is the most strongly Welsh-speaking town in Powys and by a wide margin. That is a legacy of industry, not of isolation: the coalfield drew workers from Welsh-speaking country rather than from England, and the chapels held the language in place for three generations.

Which makes its absence from most county-level heritage accounts particularly odd. Powys is usually described as a rural county with a language line running down the middle of it. The second largest town is industrial, Welsh-speaking, and sits in the far south-western corner where hardly anyone looks.