by Victoria Owens
185 years ago today, a terrible explosion occurred at the Dowlais Ironworks. To mark the anniversary, eminent historian, and biographer of Lady Charlotte Guest, Victoria Owens, has written the following article.
Although nineteenth century industry relied heavily upon steam power, people were slow to recognise the dangers that it presented. In 1836, an accident occurred at Dowlais which showed just what elemental peril high pressure steam could present. Dowlais House, home of ironmaster Josiah John Guest and his family, stood on the very margin of the Dowlais Ironworks and in her journal Guest’s wife Lady Charlotte wrote a graphic account of the boiler explosion that took place one November morning.
Guest had risen early. His nephew Edward Hutchins hoped shortly to purchase a share in Thomas and Richard Brown’s Blaina Iron Company and the two men planned to visit the Browns’ Works on the Ebwy fach riverin the course of the day. Charlotte got up while her husband was breakfasting, and as she dressed, she distinctly felt the house tremble. At first, it reminded her of what she had read about earthquakes – not a phenomenon of which she had any direct experience – and she reasoned that ‘something – not perhaps very awful – must have happened at the works.’ Hearing a window rattle she assumed, undaunted, that her fourteen-month old son Ivor was amusing himself by shaking it.
A vast explosion, the crash of a falling stack and the sound of bricks cascading onto the roof of the house disabused her of her error, and hearing the sound of escaping steam, she guessed that a boiler had burst. It was, she realised, ‘the centre one of the New Forge Engine, and consequently very near the House, towards which all the fury of the explosion was directed.’ While it was not unusual for eighteenth and early nineteenth century industrialists to live close to their works, 1836 plans of the Dowlais Works show the New Forge with its engine actually bordering the gardens of Dowlais House which was left ‘strewn with bricks, cinders and broken glass.’ Amazed and appalled, Charlotte later found a brick in her bed and discovered a heavy piece of iron ‘weighing several pounds’ embedded in an internal wall. Apparently it had passed straight between two servants as they chatted in the first-floor corridor. Meanwhile, a couple of workmen on the charging platform by the furnaces had an equally lucky escape. According to Charlotte, a ‘steam pipe fell between them and the furnace they were charging upon the bar they were using, which it knocked out of their hand.’ If the sentence-structure is somewhat awkward, it may reflect her shock at recalling how she saw the projectile strike the bar used to thrust coke, ore and flux into the furnace mouth clean out of the men’s hands. George Childs’ 1840 depiction of Dowlais labourers gives an idea of the impact that the sight must have made on her. ‘Most thankful I was,’ she wrote later, ‘that we were all in the house together. Had Merthyr [her private name for her husband] been in the works (which he would have been a quarter of an hour later) my alarm would have been infinitely greater.’ Caught in the blast, the boiler stack seemed to rise from its base to pause, ‘as if poised,’ in the air before crashing down from its 120 foot height across the Guests’ lawn, breaking all their windows’ and killing a man and a boy as it fell..
Outside her bedroom, Charlotte found Susan the nursemaid with young Ivor in the passage. As they ran downstairs in search of John, they felt the whole building shake. John was, in fact, already hastening upstairs to look for them and husband and wife simultaneously realised, appalled, that neither of them knew what had happened to their two-year old daughter Maria. Charlotte thought she had been eating an early breakfast with her father while John, in the stress of the moment, could not remember what he had done with her or whether she had even been with him. After a few moments of numb alarm, they found the little girl safe with the housekeeper, neither hurt nor unduly frightened. Seeing a crowd surge across his garden John went out to comfort them as best he could, before seeking to assess the extent of the damage to the works’ buildings.
The following week’s edition of the Cardiff and Merthyr Guardian carried not only a report of the explosion but also a comprehensive description of the boiler. A new installation, it was apparently 42 feet long and 6 feet in diameter. Despite weighing 18 tons and being embedded in solid masonry, it had burst with enough force to thrust it clean off its foundation and carry it over some ten yards’ distance before coming to rest at right-angles to its original position. A large piece of flying masonry had hit a house nearby, home to seven people. The man who had been sleeping in the room into which it actually landed somehow avoided injury, but not all the inhabitants were so lucky. John Howe, a fireman, and the boys David Thomas and John Jones both lost their lives, while ‘the wife of Daniel James, founder’ was badly injured. Meanwhile the New Forge where the boiler had been located, was blown to smithereens – ‘damage’ which the newspaper estimated at not less than £1000, ‘without taking into account the loss occasioned by the suspension of the works.’
At the inquest following the explosion, the jury returned a verdict of accidental death upon the deceased. Significantly, the coroner explicitly ruled out any question of culpability on the part of the Dowlais Company’s chief engineer John Watt. Local opinion – and presumably Watt himself – linked the cause of the explosion to the rupture of a boiler-plate immediately over the fire. The Dowlais Company’s decision in 1838 to name a new plateway locomotive ‘John Watt’ may well reflect the esteem in which John Guest held his colleague.
For general information about boiler explosions, see http://www.historywebsite.co.uk/articles/boiler/explosions.htm