Preece Family Tree

In 1877 the Cymmer colliery had a new manager, who satisfied the spirit and the letter of the Mines Regulation Act 1872 by having secured a manager's certificate by examination. Thomas Griffiths was a professional mining engineer, who succeeded Jabez Thomas when he retired. Jabez Thomas had served the Insoles for nearly fifty years from George Insole's first ventures on the canal wharf at Cardiff. It was probably his knowledge of coal mining, albeit without any formal qualifications, which made him useful to his employers; he seems, however, to have been both insensitive in his handling of subordinate managers and workers and slipshod in his supervision and administration. On two events, he bears responsibility for a serious industrial dispute and a mining disaster. He was a founder and leading member of Bethlehem, the Calvinistic Methodist chapel in Cymmer, whose first congregation came with him from Maesmawr to Cymmer in 1844. After his retirement he continued to live next to the colliery office in a house in Three-quarters Row, with his wife Ann, who was some nine years his junior and, like him, came from the Vale of Glamorgan. He died in 1885 at the age of 87.

Thomas Griffiths was a different type of man; he was born in 1849 at Bettws near Bridgend but, by the time he left school in 1860, his family had moved to Hafod. He started work at Cymmer as a door-boy and worked for ten years at the coal-face. He became a fireman in 1869 and so started a professional career, which saw him rise to the positions of overman and agent and to the acquisition of a manager's certificate, through part-time education and private study. He had left Cymmer in the course of his progress but in 1872 he married the daughter of John Williams of Pen Rhos and he returned to work at Cymmer in 1875, possibly as engineer for the sinking of Cymmer Old to the steam coals. He was a member of the South Wales Institute of Engineers and of the Cardiff Naturalists' Society, whom he entertained at Cymmer in 1885. By that time he had been elected to the Ystradyfodwg Urban Sanitary Authority, so starting a long career of public service in local government. He was to be involved not only in colliery management but also in the direction of the Insole mining businesses over the next forty years. The Insole's management of their collieries was always more distant than the control of their sales office and both Jabez Thomas and Thomas Griffiths enjoyed a considerable measure of freedom and delegated authority in running them. Griffiths was an early beneficiary of improvements in the professional education of engineers in South Wales, which had been fostered by the South Wales Institute of Engineers.[1]

[1] Walters, South Wales Steam Coal Industry, pp. 181-4.