Swansea at the mouth of the Tawe was recognised as a natural harbour by Norse pirates and came into its own with the discovery of bituminous coal which, from the sixteenth century, it was exporting by sea to other parts of Britain and further afield. In 1913 at its peak South Wales produced 56 million tons of coal.
Local deposits made Swansea and its surrounding area the principal place for smelting copper, which from the eighteenth century was much in demand from Birmingham's brass industry. Matthew Boulton and others formed the Rose Copper Company with a smelter on the banks of the Tawe. In time copper ore was brought by sea from Cornwall and Anglesea as well as from overseas to be smelted using the Welsh process and Welsh coal. In 1845, Swansea was producing 55% of the world's copper. Copper was joined by lead and zinc.
Tinplate was, though, what made Swansea's name. Locally produced iron would be dipped in locally mined tin. Tin was also brought in from Cornwall. In 1831, William Llewellyn had founded the Aberdulais Tinplate Company where iron ingots were rolled into flat plates and a thin protective layer of tin attached. It was one of hundreds of tin mills which grew up around the country. Tin was readily available, easy to work and very effective in coating iron and steel to prevent rust.
With the advent of steel, the iron ore local to Swansea had too high a phosphorous content (a problem also found elsewhere) and so ore was sourced from further east. William Siemens was determined to see his method of steel making, as opposed to that of Bessemer, embraced. The tin platers were reluctant and so Siemens set up his own state of the art plant at Landore. It proved successful for tin plate and gradually more plants took on the Siemens system. Swansea went from strength to strength in tin plate production.
Continuous strip mills were introduced alongside electroplating allowing a very thin coating of expensive tin. Demand grew as more and more food stuffs were packaged in tin cans.The producers of South Wales at one time provided three quarters of Britain's production with much going to the USA.
The coming of central heating created a demand for anthracite coal which was in plentiful supply around Swansea and which had proved less suitable for smelting. This provided a much needed boost to the economy.
Swansea had become a town long before Cardiff and residential development ran west along the shore with industry along the banks of Tawe running north. There were hundreds of small copper smelters most of which closed when the industry was consolidated. Balchin's introduction to his book has a vivid description of what remained: 'one of the most concentrated areas of industrial dereliction, desolation and decay in Britain.' Alongside this, the city has long been a cultural and intellectual centre.
I write about the consolidation of the steel industry in Vehicles to Vaccines and this brought about the Steel Company of Wales. This new company embraced amongst others the major tin plate producer Richard Thomas with plants at Velindre and Trostre and built a massive continuous process steel plant at nearby Port Talbot. This complex produced most of Britain's sheet steel and all its tin plate.
Copper production had suffered as other countries came on stream. The same became true of tin plating. Nonetheless Swansea attracted a wide spread of metal and other industries.
Alcoa Manufacturing and British Aluminium produced cast and sheet aluminium as well as wire. Borg-Warner from the USA produced car transmissions. Also from the USA, Jefferson Chemicals produced morpholine for making rubber and Piperazine for pig and poultry feed additives. B.P. refined oil and manufactured chemicals and 3M made tape products. Imperial Metal Industries produced Titanium and Zirconium alloy. International Nickel produced nickel and Imperial Smelting (about which I write more in the context of Bristol) produced zinc and lead. Smiths Industries made watches and Ford UK, rear axles. Mettoy built a factory at Fforestfach to manufacture Corgi toys. In the seventies Morgan Crucible relocated its electric motor brush manufacturing from Battersea.
A programme of development attracted other SMEs, but more and more the economy of Swansea became dominated by service industries. It boast a university with its own wafer fab for semiconductors.
Further reading:
- Swansea and its Region, W.G.V. Balchin ed. (Swansea: University College of Swansea, 1971)
- J.C. Carr and W. Taplin, History of the British Steel Industry (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962)
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