This is the first in a series of posts on the history of the Rowland family of the Rhondda Valley, the maternal ancestors of my grandfather Rowland Bevan Jones (see Keeping up with the Joneses (part 3)). In this part I will be looking at the earliest known generation of Rowlands from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Much of this story has been pieced together through the combined efforts of multiple researchers over the years, whose work I have attempted to credit wherever possible. In particular I would like to thank Philip Richards and Peter J. Williams for their invaluable help in researching these early generations. For consistency Welsh place names have been standardised to conform to their familiar modern spellings.
In the late nineteenth century the Rowland family could be counted among the most influential industrial dynasties in South Wales. While they later became closely associated with the coal mining communities of the Rhondda Valley in Glamorgan, their origins lay further west. According to a contemporary newspaper account (Western Mail, 21 March 1894, p. 6, col. 4) they were related to the renowned evangelical preacher Daniel Rowland (c. 1711-1790), a leading figure of the Welsh Methodist Revival from Cardiganshire. This claim has never been proved however, and as it did not appear in print until over a century after Daniel’s death it may have been a later family legend.
Their earliest verifiable ancestors can be traced back to the tiny villages of Caio and Llanycrwys in Carmarthenshire, where five children with the surname ‘Rowland’ were born between 1786 and 1801 (Swann, 2015):
- Ann (b. c. 1786, Caio, Carmarthenshire – d. c. July 1859, Llandovery, Carmarthenshire)
- Moses (b. c. 1790, Caio, Carmarthenshire – d. 1837, Dinas, Glamorgan)
- Thomas (b. c. 1791, Caio, Carmarthenshire – d. 1 January 1844, Dinas Middle Colliery, Dinas, Glamorgan)
- Catherine (b. c. 1794, Llanycrwys, Carmarthenshire)
- Rees (b. c. 1801, Llanycrwys, Carmarthenshire – d. c. 1856, Glamorgan)
While circumstantial evidence strongly suggests these five children were siblings (and in this post I will be referring to them as such), there remains some uncertainty as to their parentage. The only matching baptism record to have surfaced so far is for a Catherine Rowland from 6 May 1794 in Llanycrwys, which gives her father’s name as Roland Thomas (no mother is mentioned, unfortunately). Rees’s marriage certificate from 1840 however asserts that his father was a farmer named Rowland Rees. This claim is backed up somewhat by a Land Tax Assessment from 1798 which confirms that a man with that name lived in the parish of Llanycrwys around the time when Rees was born, specifically in the hamlet of Mynachty. Whatever their father’s name was, it seems likely their use of ‘Rowland’ as a last name arose through the Welsh patronymic system, in which children received their father’s forename as a surname.
Little is known of the family’s early years in Carmarthenshire, however Fred S. Price (1904, p. [5]) writing a century later paints an idyllic picture of the remote, rural community the children would have known growing up:
Though far removed from railways and other conveniences of modern civilisation, [Caio] deserves to be better known to the world at large on account of its historical interest, its natural beauty, its mountains and fine rocks on the north, frequented by buzzards, ravens, badgers and foxes, and which afford pastures only for sheep and ponies; its beautiful valleys of the Twrch and the Cothi on the south, where the goldfinch, the bullfinch, the swallows, the greenfinch, and the rare kingfisher haunt every year, and there rear their young. On the north the country is bare and bleak, on the south beautifully wooded, and altogether affords as great a variety of scenery as is possible on so small a scale.
We can tell from the children’s birthplaces that the Rowlands moved north from Caio to Llanycrwys at some point between 1791 and 1794, where they remained until at least 1801. Ann, the eldest, was the first to marry and start a family. Her husband William Llewellyn (b. c. 1786, Caio, Carmarthenshire – d. c. February 1864, Llandovery, Carmarthenshire) was a fellow Caio native, and although it is unclear exactly when they were married he and Ann are known to have had the following four children between 1812 and 1831:
- Mary (b. c. 1812, Pencarreg, Carmarthenshire)
- Elizabeth (b. 1821)
- Rowland (b. c. 1821, Caio, Carmarthenshire – d. c. February 1903. Rhondda, Glamorgan)
- John (b. 18 February 1831, Llanycrwys, Carmarthenshire)
Their birthplaces suggest Ann and William did not initially travel far from the village of their birth, settling first in nearby Pencarreg before returning to Caio and Llanycrwys by the early 1820s. Two decades later however they were recorded in the 1841 census living with William’s father, Llewellyn William, in a house called ‘Wenallt’ in the Glamorgan hamlet of Llantwit Major. William was employed as a tinplate manufacturer that year, and living alongside him, Ann, and William’s father was their daughter Elizabeth and her two sons William and Rowland Thomas. William’s elderly father Llewellyn died the following year, and by the 1851 census he and Ann had moved back to Caio. William, then aged sixty-five, was working as a shoemaker and he and Ann were caring for a grandson, their daughter Mary’s nine-year-old boy John Lewis. Ann died at the age of seventy-three in the third quarter of 1859. Her husband survived a further five years, long enough for him to be recorded in the 1861 census living at the family home ‘Ddisgwilfa’ with his daughter Mary, still working as a shoemaker in his mid-seventies.
Although she and William eventually returned to Caio, Ann’s move from the Carmarthen countryside to industrial Glamorgan was a journey shared by all four of her younger siblings. The catalyst for this family migration was their brother Moses, “a short amiable man, with a high and broad forehead” (Morgan, 1903), the eldest of the three Rowland boys, and my fourth great-grandfather. In his early twenties he had moved to Penderyn in Breconshire, where he worked as a school teacher. Prior to this he may have attended one of the dissenting academies which had been set up in West Wales, which would explain how he came to learn English. On 30 December 1815 he married a young woman named Mary Morgan (b. c. 1795, Llantrisant, Glamorgan) in Ystradfellte, Breconshire, with the consent of her father Morgan Owen. The fact that her father’s permission was required suggests Mary was under twenty-one at the time. Her father Morgan also served as one of their witnesses alongside a man named John Thomas. Unsurprisingly, as a school teacher Moses was able to sign his name but the ‘x’ by Mary’s confirms she was illiterate.
After marrying, Moses and Mary appear to have stayed in Penderyn for at least a year, where they had one son:
- Morgan (b. c. 1816, Penderyn, Breconshire – d. 21 September 1884, Hendregwilym, Penygraig, Glamorgan)
Morgan Rowland, my third great-grandfather, was baptised in Penderyn Church on 12 May 1816. Not long after, his father Moses was offered a job as a school teacher in the coal mining village of Dinas, Glamorgan, which he accepted. This fateful offer came courtesy of Walter Coffin, “the first real industrial pioneer of the Rhondda Valleys” (Lewis, 1959, p. 40) who had sunk Dinas Colliery in 1812 and was now in need of someone to teach English and arithmetic to his workers’ children. Moses had been recommended to him by Thomas Morgan, a cousin of Moses’s wife Mary who vouched for his good reputation:
There is an Abereyron man, named Moses Rowland, keeping an English School at Penderyn. He is a clever man. He is newly married at Ystradvellte to my cousin, Mary Thomas [sic] … I dare say he would accept your invitation.
Moses is said to have delivered his first lessons in a makeshift day school in a colliery storehouse. By the mid-1820s however he had earned a reputation as “an enthusiast in the cause of elementary education in the district” (LSJ Services [Wales] Ltd., 2009) thanks both to his tireless work at the day school, and for establishing a thriving Sunday School for children and adults in a room on White Rock Row, the precursor to Soar Baptist Chapel. In Soariana, the Centenary Book of Zoar Chapel, Penygraig he was described as a good man who was particularly active in chapel life and gave sermons as a lay preacher there despite being a Methodist himself (Hicks, 2002). Around this same time Moses apparently “became such a firm favourite with [Walter] Coffin that he later became secretary and his Clerk of Works” at Dinas Colliery (Carpenter, 2000, p. 28).
Throughout the 1820s, as Moses’s reputation and influence grew so too did his family, with Mary giving birth to at least eight children between 1819 and 1830:
- Ester (b. c. 1819, Glamorgan – d. 11 February 1820, Dinas, Glamorgan)
- Rowland (b. c. January 1821, Dinas, Glamorgan – d. 19 March 1894 , Pontypridd, Glamorgan)
- Thomas (b. c. 1823, Dinas, Glamorgan – d. 7 April 1888, Pontypridd, Glamorgan)
- Esther (b. c. January 1824, Dinas, Glamorgan – d. 3 August 1895, Newton Nottage, Glamorgan)
- Mary (b. 30 October 1825, Dinas, Glamorgan – d. 14 April 1881, Penygraig, Glamorgan)
- John (b. c. 6 December 1827, Ystradyfodwg, Glamorgan – d. c. 19 December 1827, Ystradyfodwg, Glamorgan)
- Moses (b. c. September 1828, Dinas, Glamorgan – d. 21 September 1884, Penpisgah House, Penygraig, Glamorgan)
- Anne (b. c. 1830, Llantrisant, Glamorgan)
Two sadly died in infancy (Ester, their second-born, and John, their sixth) but of those who survived, several would go on to have a significant impact on Rhondda Valley and its community in the decades to come.
Following Walter Coffin’s sinking of a second mine shaft the population of Dinas continued to increase throughout the 1830s, and by 1941 Coffin employed 301 men and 113 boys, more than any other colliery in the Glamorgan highlands not connected to an ironworks (Lewis, 1959, p. 44). Conditions for mineworkers were notoriously harsh and dangerous at the time, however some mine owners did at least provide educational facilities for their workers’ children (and indeed the children they employed) at a time before government grants for schools were available. Initially this was on a largely informal basis, like the early arrangement between Moses Rowland and Walter Coffin, however later a number of official colliery schools were opened in the Rhondda.
Among the very first of these was Graig-Ddu School in Dinas, which was opened by Walter Coffin in 1830. Moses’s success as an educator in the local area and his good working relationship with Coffin made him the obvious candidate for the role of Dinas’s first schoolmaster. On 29 September 1829 an agreement was signed between Coffin, Moses and the owner of the Graig-Ddu and Gwaun-Adda farmland to lease that land for nine hundred and ninety-nine years, with the first rent payment due on that date the following year (Lewis, 1959, p. 191).
Graig-Ddu School, Dinas, photographed by Edna Thomas (via Rhondda Cynon Taf Library Service Digital Archive).
Moses’s tenure as schoolmaster of Dinas was to be a brief one however. In 1837 he died after suffering a case of bronchitis at the age of forty-seven. He was buried at Ebenezer Chapel, where his epitaph reads “I shall be satisfied, when I awake with Thy Likeness” (psalm 17:15). Despite the short time he spent in the Rhondda there is no doubt he left an enduring legacy, and according to Tudor Reynolds Morgan (1903), “his qualities of heart and mind influenced Dinas people long after his departure.” His wife Mary lived long enough to be recorded in the 1841 census, at which time she was working as a housekeeper and living at Dinas storehouse where her husband had taught with her unmarried children Rowland, Thomas, Moses, and Anne. She died just four years later in 1845 at the age of fifty, when her youngest children were still in their teens. Following her death her son Moses (the Younger) seems to have become the head of the house, but his story will be told in the next installment.
* * *
Among those most directly influenced by Moses (the Elder) were his three younger siblings, Thomas, Catherine, and Rees. The eldest of these, Thomas, had married a woman named Margaret “Pegi” Rowland (b. c. 1893, Llanddewi, Cardiganshire – d. c. 1874, Pontypridd, Glamorgan) on 16 August 1816 in Caio when he was around twenty-five. The signature on his marriage certificate shows that like his brother Moses he was literate, and that Pegi was not. Moses and his wife Mary also served as Thomas and Pegi’s witnesses, having themselves been married the previous year. They initially settled in the village of Myddfai where they had two children, before moving to Llandingad in the early 1820s, where they had a third:
- Ann (b. November 1818, Myddfai, Carmarthenshire)
- Rowland Thomas (b. 25 May 1821, Mydffai, Carmarthenshire)
- Esther (b. 16 September 1824, Llandingad, Carmarthenshire)
Around the middle of the decade however they followed Thomas’s brother Moses to Glamorgan, where their final three children were born:
- John (b. c. 1827, Glamorgan – d. 1 January 1844, Dinas Middle Colliery, Dinas, Glamorgan)
- Moses Thomas (b. c. 1832, Llantrisant, Glamorgan – 16 October 1895, Penygraig, Glamorgan)
- David (b. 1834, Glamorgan – d. 1 January 1844, Dinas Middle Colliery, Dinas, Glamorgan)
The 1841 census records the family living at Dinas storehouse, the same building where Moses’s widow Mary was housed at the time. Thomas was by then working as a collier, unsurprisingly given his family’s connection to the pits, and he is also said to have also served as a deacon at Ebenezer Chapel at around this time. Perhaps more surprisingly, all four of his sons were recorded as colliers as well, the youngest of whom was only seven. Beyond shocking by today’s standards, the use of child labour in coal mines was already coming under increased scrutiny by 1841. The previous year a commission headed by Baron Ashley had been established to investigate the working conditions of miners, particularly children, and Dinas was one of the collieries they visited. It was found that even by the standards of the time, Walter Coffin’s use of young children for work underground was excessive, with more boys under the age of 13 employed at Dinas than at any other colliery in Glamorgan and Monmouthshire (Lewis, 1959, p. 151). Remarkably, the report included the first-hand accounts of several boys at Dinas Colliery, which describe their long hours, low wages and the dark, dangerous conditions in which they worked. One boy even touched on the issue of elementary education in Dinas, which despite the efforts of educators like Moses Rowland was always doomed to suffer as long as economic necessity and the absence of legal protections kept so many children in work:
I have been driving horses below ground three years, and was 12 months before at a trap door [working as a ‘door boy’]; when at the traps used frequently to fall asleep; works 12 hours; would go the School if the work were not so long; cannot go now as I now have to work on the night as well as the day shifts.
Philip Davies, aged 10 (Haulier)
The commissioners added that Philip was illiterate, as well as neglected and sickly in appearance. In general they noted that the children working in the mines of South Wales “become pallid, stunted in growth, short of breath, sometimes thin and often burnt, crooked, crippled, and that, in addition, they are peculiarly subject to certain mortal diseases, the direct result of their employment and the state of the place in which they work” (Lewis, 1959, p. 153).
The report sparked a public outcry, and many including Charles Dickens (whose A Christmas Carol was partly inspired by the report) called for a change in the law. After being watered down considerably in the House of Lords this was granted with the Mines and Collieries Act 1842, which banned women, girls, and boys under the age of ten from working underground. The immediate effect on Thomas Rowland’s family would have been limited however, as all but one of his sons would have been over ten by 1842, and in practice the law was widely flouted due to poor enforcement and a lack of compensation for families whose incomes were hit by the new restrictions. Moreover the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842 did nothing to improve the dangerous and often deadly working conditions for those who were still obliged to work below ground.
On the morning of New Year’s Day 1844, a firedamp explosion at Dinas Middle Colliery caused by poor ventilation took the lives of twelve workers, four of whom were children. Among those killed were Thomas Rowland, and his sons, John and David. Reports from those who were there that day paint a harrowing picture of a powerless and grief-stricken community:
The agony and consternation of the wives and daughters of the employed, among whom the report spread, may be easily conceived. Each, for the moment, lamented the death of a son, a brother, or a husband; and, until the exact number of the deceased was ascertained, the neighbourhood presented a scene of wailing and alarm, which a bereavement under such circumstances is well calculated to create.
Three days after the explosion the bodies had still not been recovered, and Thomas and his sons were among the last to be found. None but one of the bodies displayed signs of burning, suggesting the rest died of suffocation. In addition to those killed, a further three suffered broken limbs and other injuries. The coroner’s inquest that followed was severely critical of the overman Griffith Williams, who it transpired had neglected to personally check if conditions were safe in each heading that morning, and had instead entrusted a fourteen-year-old boy under his charge to inspect several by himself (The Monmouthshire Merlin, 13 January 1844, p. 2, cols. 4-5). The coroner recommended the overman be charged with manslaughter, but a jury ultimately returned a verdict of accidental death. There was to be no significant legislation to improve working conditions for miners until the Mines Regulation Act 1860, which raised the minimum age boys could work underground from ten to twelve, where it would remain for several decades.
After her husband’s death, Thomas’s widow Pegi worked as a glover and was recorded living at ‘Dinas Cottages’ in the 1851 census along with her last surviving son Moses, who himself died as the result of a mining accident years later in 1895. It is unknown what became of their daughters Ann and Esther, but as Pegi would have struggled to support three children by herself with little income and no compensation, it is possible they were sent to live with relatives after their father’s death.
* * *
Thomas’s younger sister Catherine is perhaps the Rowland sibling about whom we know the least. She married relatively late at the age of thirty-six to a widower named Thomas Thomas (b. c. April 1792, Caio, Carmarthenshire), whose first wife apparently died giving birth to their seventh child. The wedding took place on 6 April 1830 in Thomas’s home parish of Caio, and they would go on to have at least the following five children over the next decade:
- Esther (b. c. 1832)
- John (b. c. 1833, Caio, Carmarthenshire)
- Moses (b. c. 1834, Caio, Carmarthenshire)
- David (b. c. 1835)
- Ann (b. c. 1840, Llantrisant, Glamorgan)
The children’s birthplaces show they remained in Caio for about five years before joining Catherine’s siblings in Glamorgan. In the 1841 census the family, including two children from Thomas’s previous marriage, William and Rees, were living at Graig-Ddu south of Dinas, close to the village school. Thomas was recorded as a labourer while his teenage boys Rees and William were both working at the colliery, as was his and Catherine’s eight-year-old son John. In 1851 they were living at ‘Gwaun Adda Cottages’, and by then Thomas was working as a coal miner alongside his sons William, John, and Moses. In a sign of the changing times, their youngest child Ann was recorded as a full-time ‘scholar’.
Unfortunately after this date nothing more is known for certain about Catherine, her husband Thomas, or any of their children. Slightly more can be said of her brother Rees, the fifth and last of this first generation of Rowlands. At age twenty he married Gwenillian Jones in Llanddeusant, Carmarthenshire, on 30 January 1821, with whom he had at least five children:
- John (b. c. Llanddeusant, Carmarthenshire, 1822)
- Esther (b. c. 1826)
- Margaret (b. 23 December 1826, Llywel, Breconshire
- Gwenillian (b. c. 1832)
- Ann (b. c. 1837)
From their children’s baptism records and later census returns we know Catherine and Thomas initially settled in Llanddeusant, Carmarthenshire before moving to Llywel in Breconshire by 1826, where Rees worked as a weaver. Rees’s wife Gwenillian died at some point between 1837 and 1840, and in around August that year he married his second wife Kesiah Jones (b. c. 1811, Glamorgan – d. c. August 1849 Merthyr Tydfil, Glamorgan) at Carmel Chapel, Merthyr Tydfil. Their marriage certificate records Rees’s address as Ystradyfodwg, confirming that he and the children had moved to Glamorgan around the same time as his sister Catherine. He gave his occupation as ‘farmer’, and in common with his brothers Moses and Thomas he signed his name on the register (unlike Kesiah whose mark indicates she was illiterate). As mentioned near the beginning of this post however, the real significance of Rees’s second marriage certificate is our only credible source confirming his father’s name, and therefore that of his siblings’, Rowland Rees. Moreover the absence of the word ‘deceased’ or ‘retired’ under his father’s name suggests that as late as 1840 he was possibly still alive and working as a farmer.
The 1841 census shows that Rees and his family farmed a piece of land known as ‘Rhondda Ffychan’, most likley on the site now occupied by Rhondda Fechan Farm in Ystradyfodwg parish. It also shows that by then he and Kesiah had had their first child together, who would soon be joined by a second. Their names were:
- Mary (b. c. 1840, Glamorgan)
- Jenkin (b. c. September 1845, Ystradyfodwg, Glamorgan)
Jenkin’s baptism record from 7 September 1845 gives the family’s address as Aberdare, where Rees was apparently still working as a farmer. Kesiah died in 1849 aged around thirty-eight, and two years later her widower Rees was recorded living at Graig-Ddu Cottages south of Dinas, the same place his sister Catherine’s family had been a decade earlier. By then Rees was no longer involved in farming and was instead employed as a ‘coal tipper’, no doubt working for Walter Coffin’s now-ubiquitous colliery like both his brothers before him. And like his brothers, he too would soon be gone, but with the passing of this first generation of Rowlands the next were ready to make their mark.
* * *
In the next instalment we will look at this second generation of Rowlands, specifically the children of Moses Rowland (the Elder) and Mary Morgan, including my third great-grandfather Morgan, whose influence in the Rhondda Valley would soon come to rival Walter Coffin’s. For better or worse.
Sources
Carpenter, David. Rhondda collieries. Stroud: Tempus, 2000.
Commissioners for Inquiring into the Employment and Condition of Children in Mines and Manufactories. The Condition and Treatment of the Children Employed in the Mines and Colliers of the United Kingdom. Carefully Compiled from the Appendix to the First Report of the Commissioners … With Copious Extracts from the Evidence, and Illustrative Engravings. London: William Strange, 1842
Hicks, Gareth. “Glamorgan County, Towns and Parishes 2”. Genuki. 2002. Accessed 27 February 2023. https://www.genuki.org.uk/big/wal/GHP/HelpPagepearlsGLA2#Merthyr.
Lewis, E.D. The Rhondda Valleys: A Study in Industrial Development, 1800 to the Present Day. London: Phoenix House, 1959.
Morgan, O. History of Pontypridd and the Rhondda Valleys. Pontypridd: Whittaker & Co., 1903.
Morgan, Tudor Reynolds. The Rowlands Family, Penygraig, Rhondda Valley. c. 1975.
Northern Mine Research Society. “Dinas Middle Pit Explosion, Glamorganshire, 1884”. Accessed 17 March 2023. https://www.nmrs.org.uk/mines-map/accidents-disasters/glamorganshire/dinas-middle-pit-explosion-glamorganshire-1844/.
Price, Fred S. History of Caio, Carmarthenshire. Swansea: Published by the author, 1904.
Rees, Thomas. The Beauties of England and Wales: or Original Delineations , Topographical, Historical, and Descriptive (Vol. XVIII — South Wales). London, 1815.
Swann, Brian. Martin and Rowlands Families of Glamorganshire. Version 1.02. 2015.
LSJ Services [Wales] Ltd. “Colliery schools in the Rhondda in the c19th.” Tribute to the Rhondda. 2009. Accessed 7 November 2011. http://www.therhondda.co.uk/general/rhondda_education.htm.
Williams, Peter J. Rowlands Family Tree. 2011.
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