Tredegar (; ) is a town and community situated on the banks of the Sirhowy River in the county borough of Blaenau Gwent, in South East Wales. Within the historic boundaries of Monmouthshire, it became an early centre of the Industrial Revolution in Wales. The relevant wards (Tredegar Central and West, Sirhowy and Georgetown) collectively listed the town's population as 15,103 in the UK 2011 census.
Toponymy Tredegar was originally part of the Tredegar Estate, the seat of which was in Coedcernyw, outside Newport, and which extended northwards to include almost the entire length of the Sirhowy Valley. Local historian Oliver Jones (1969) writes that, by c.1803, the new town that had been created after the completion of the Furnace No 3 of the local iron works:
...was becoming known far and wide as Tredegar Iron Works and not as Tredegar as would be expected, the town not having or being allowed to have an identity apart from the industry that sustained it. And as Tredegar Iron Works it continued to be known for many years. Tombstones in the old Cholera Cemetery on Cefn Golau describe the victims of the 1832 and 1848 epidemics as "natives of the Tredegar Iron Works" and as late as the 1860's letters were still being addressed, for example, to "Mr. John Lewis, East Lane, Tredegar Iron Works.' (op. cit.: 41)
The previous analysis is supplemented by the fact that company's buildings appeared on the 1832 Ordnance Survey map as 'Tredegar Iron Works'. Jones didn't state when the name of the new town was shortened to 'Tredegar'. But when its name was shortened, it resulted in the existence of two Tredegars, one at each end of the estate: one at the top of the Sirhowy Valley and the other outside Newport.
In 1881, Octavius Morgan, the fourth son of Sir Charles Morgan of Tredegar, had published his etymology of the name of his ancestral home, which he had republished in 1886. He divided his etymology into two parts, about the Welsh adjective 'tref' and the noun 'degar'. He began by dismissing four derivations of 'tref': 'the foot of the camp', 'ten plough-lands', 'ten acres' and 'two forts', which he described as 'conjectural'. He then proposed his derivation, which he described as 'most obvious' and 'the true one' – that 'tref' means 'the dwelling place, chief mansion, or homestead of some important person'. Morgan then cited a poem, a manuscript and a pedigree in support of his proposal that 'degar' was derived from an historical personage called 'Teigr', whose name was changed to 'Deigr' to enable euphony (see the entry for the term in Phonaesthetics), which in turn was styled as 'degyr, which then in another context presumably became 'Degar'.
Bartrum (2009, originally 1993) explicitly concurred with Octavius Morgan in the entry for "Deigr ap Dyfnwal Hen (Legendary)" in his A Welsh Classical Dictionary, while Osborne and Hobbs (1992) and Owen and Morgan (2007) implicitly did so.
In the local Welsh dialect known as Gwenhwyseg, the name was often pronounced as Tredecar (with provection of /g/ to /k/). There was also a shortened form Decar.
History
Industrialisation Tredegar became industrialised because the local availability of easily accessible iron ore and the three natural resources which enabled iron production: wood, which was used to produce charcoal as a fuel coal, which was used to produce coke as a fuel water, from the fast-flowing Sirhowy River, which could be used for scouring (separating the topsoil from the underlying iron ore).
There is disagreement about the date when the first furnace was built locally. In his 1903 History of the iron, steel, tinplate and ... other trades of Wales, Charles Wilkins described a charcoal-fired furnace, Pont Gwaith yr Haiarn [alternatively 'Hearn'] ('the bridge iron works'), four miles south of Tredegar, as 'one of the oldest places on the hills for ironmaking.' He cited in support of his description the Rev. R. Ellis ('Cynddelw'), who had claimed, 'many years ago', that old inhabitants 'fixed the earliest date of working there as at the close of seventeenth century, probably about 1690.' (ibid.)
In contrast, local author David Morris ('Eiddil Gwent') related in his Hanes Tredegar his conversation with an old lady, 'Mrs Thomas', who told him that her father and husband's relations had worked in the furnace at Pont Gwaith yr Hearn, next to the Sirhowy River, four miles south of Tredegar. The furnace was developed by two Bretons and worked by men from Penydarren, Merthyr Tydfil. Morris concluded that they had built the furnace 'about the year 1738 or 1739.'
Local historian Oliver Jones cast doubt on the claim of David Morris in his 1969 book The early days of Sirhowy and Tredegar. He commented that "when the Bretons arrived in 1738 they simply took over a works which had been in existence for many years."
There is also disagreement about the next furnace that was built locally, the coal-fired Sirhowy Furnace. Evan Powell claimed in his 1884 History of Tredegar that it was erected 'a few years' after the closure of the Pont Gwaith yr Hearn furnace, by a Mr Kettle of Shropshire. Oliver Jones also cast doubt on this claim. He commented: 'neither maps nor documents support [Powell] .... Nor does Kettle, the name of the man who is supposed to have built it at that time, appear anywhere in the records.'
However, there is agreement that a furnace was built 'near the confluence of Nant Melin brook and the river Sirhowy at the place then called Aber-Sirhowy' in 1778, by manual workers who were hired by a consortium of four men: Thomas Atkinson, a merchant from York, and three businessmen from London, William Barrow, Bolton Hudson and John Sealy, who were 'involved in the tea and grocery trade'. The consortium secured a forty-year lease on local lands from Charles Henry Burgh, who had inherited the estate of his father, the Rev. Henry Burgh. It employed miners who drove coal levels into the hillsides at Bryn Bach and Nantybwch, the first small-scale coal mining operation in the area, for the coal-fired furnace. (Oliver Jones documented that, from the mid-1780s, 'coal mining became more systematic and much better organised'.) Other trades that the consortium employed included furnacemen, furnace helpers, smiths, cokers, masons and mule drivers.
Tredegar Ironworks
In 1800, Samuel Homfray, with partners Richard Fothergill and Matthew Monkhouse, signed a lease from the Tredegar Estate in Newport which enabled the creation of the Tredegar Iron Company, which was named in deference to Sir Charles Morgan of Tredegar House in Newport. Previously, Tredegar 'contained only three houses'. In 1891, the company ceased production of iron, but continued to develop coal mines and produce coal. The former Tredegar Ironworks were effectively abandoned, with Whiteheads taking over the southern section of the site from 1907. In 1931, they also closed down their operations, moving everything to their Newport works. TICC continued to develop coal mines and work pits, until it was nationalised in 1946, becoming part of the National Coal Board.
The Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia, United States was named in honour of the town.
Tredegar Circle
Samuel Homfray, an iron master who managed to obtain a large parcel of land in and around Tredegar, is to be thanked for Tredegar Circle and the wide streets running out from it. He showed a great concern about the state of the current streets and how narrow they were, deciding that his new town would have wide streets running out from a central place. Tredegar Circle was first known as 'The Square', but as buildings and shops developed around it people within Tredegar began to refer to it as 'The Circle'.
The town clock which stands in the middle of Tredegar Circle was once where the town stocks resided, with there being records of people being put into the stocks to be punished for petty misdemeanours. People being punished within the stocks would have their legs trapped in the stocks, being kept outside for hours in all weather conditions.
Prostitution was rife within Tredegar Circle, almost having a reputation of being a 'red light district' in the earlier days.
Tredegar Circle was also seen as being an important 'shopping centre', many local tradespeople would go there to set up stalls and sell their wares to the people within Tredegar, before the town clock was erected. Horses and carts loaded with goods would clatter around Tredegar Circle, with almost every type of produce being available to buy within Tredegar Circle. Tredegar Town Hall, a prominent building in The Circle, was rebuilt in 1892.
Tredegar Circle is also known for the pubs that occupy it, although there have been many that have closed down over the years such as the Greyhound Inn and the Freemasons, both once very popular with local workers. There have been many reported arrests within Tredegar Circle, in both present and earlier days, due to drunken and disorderly behaviour.
Welsh language According to the 2011 Census, 5.4% of Tredegar Central and West's 6,063 (328 residents) resident-population can speak, read, and write Welsh.Welsh language skills by electoral division, 2011 Census Retrieved 13/12/21 This is below the county's figure of 5.5% of 67,348 (3,705 residents) who can speak, read, and write Welsh.
Riots The town is known for its three major riots. In 1868, there were the election riots, which took place after the locals' favourite candidate, Colonel Clifford, was not elected.
Secondly in 1882, there was a major anti-Irish riot in Tredegar. There had been a large Irish community in Tredegar since the 1850s, and for a while there had been tensions. Reports from the time vary, however where they all concur includes the fact the riot began with stone throwing and quickly escalated with Irishmen's homes being destroyed and furniture burned in the streets. The Irish were run out of Tredegar and some were beaten. Troops from Newport and Cardiff had to be called in to quell the violence
Thirdly, there were the anti-Jewish riots of 1911, which some called a pogrom, when Jewish shops were ransacked and the army had to be brought in.BBC News, 19 August 2011: History debate over anti-Semitism in 1911 Tredegar riot Though Jewish businesses and property were attacked, nobody was killed in this riot.
Foundation Samuel Homfray and his partners needed accommodation for their workers, and so needed to develop a suitable town. The land on the eastside of the Sirhowy river was owned by Lt.Col. Sir Charles Gould Morgan who granted a lease in 1799 to build Tredegar Ironworks Company. In 1800, Homfray married Sir Charles daughter Jane, and hence improved his lease terms. The west bank of the river was owned by Lord Tredegar, and hence in the short term remained undeveloped.
Homfray was a hard task master. He sold franchises to business people who wanted to operate within his town, from which he would take a percentage. He paid his workers in his own private coinage, so that they could not easily spend their wages outside the town. However, the opportunity to work created a boom town, which with a parish population of 1,132 in 1801 had boomed to 34,685 by 1881, in part boosted by the laying of the stretch of horse drawn track to Newport in 1805.
But all of this development came at a price. Adrian Vaughn, in his 1985 book Grub, Water & Relief, mentions that in 1832 John Gooch took a managerial post in the Tredegar iron works:
There were several cholera epidemics in the town in the 19th century, and a dedicated cholera burial ground was established at Cefn Golau.
Governance Links with the Labour Party