I’ve written fleetingly of my wife’s connection to the Guest family, something I plan to go into a bit more detail at a later date. A random mention of this connection on Bob‘s Facebook group lead to a conversation with Stefano Martini, drone cameraman extraordinaire of that parish (his aerial shots of the Mawddach estuary alone are worth looking him up, just spectacular). This conversation was about Dowlais ironworks where the Broseley abiding Guests decamped to en masse in the later 18th century according to records.
John Guest moved from Broseley which is not too far from Coalbrookdale and all that invokes iron making wise, to South Wales in 1763, originally to start the Plymouth Ironworks. It wasnt a great success and within a couple of years the control was transferred to another man. However his work there caught the eye of the shareholders of the Dowlais works and he was appointed manager of the works in April 1767, he had by this time moved his wife and kids down to live with him as he had become withdrawn and melancholy without them in his early years in South Wales.
Things went well for him because by 1781 he was buying 7 of the 16 shares in the ironworks and employing many of his family in the works, my wife’s 4x Grt Grandfather Cornelius was his nephew and was employed at the works as a manager at a time when Johns son Thomas was running it. The works expanded massively as a result of the Napoleonic wars, which brings us to the title of this post, in 1802 none other than Admiral Horatio Nelson visited the ironworks to express his thanks for the work on producing cannon and shot to arm his ships. As a manager and a member of the owners family it is almost guaranteed that Cornelius Guest would have met Nelson himself….. at least that’s what I thought until I researched a bit more.
Everything I’ve said about the Guests is accurate, they moved down from Shropshire and built Dowlais into one of the most productive and successful Ironworks of the time. Nelson did visit Merthyr to thank the workers for the cannon and shot they produced for his fleet but, and its a disappointing one for familial reasons, he didn’t visit Dowlais. He visited the neighbouring, and competing, works at Cyfarthfa. This must have been a blow to the prestige of the Dowlais works and it was perhaps encouragement for the Guests to strive to make Dowlais the leading ironworks in the area, something they achieved within a few years of the visit.
They were pioneers of the application of science to industry with the Dowlais works being hailed as “one of the World’s great industrial concerns” and receiving visits from leading scientists such as Michael Faraday only supports that view. Not as prestigious maybe as Admiral Nelson unless you view scientists as highly as you do military leaders.
I originally started this post to document a connection to a famous figure, someone everyone can relate to in some way or other, in the end it became about not presuming or getting welded to a certain idea or claim to fame. As someone trained in engineering a link to Faraday is every bit as exciting, let’s be honest when Albert Einstein has your picture on his wall alongside Isaac Newton, us mere mortals should acknowledge his importance too.
The Canalorak 