SOUTH WALES IRON AND STEEL 273 
North, when he stood for Parliament as the “ Bonnie Pit 
Laddie.” He formed the existing Powell Duffryn Co. 
The Ferndale Colliery was sunk in the early thirties by 
David Davies, a draper, who worked a small anthracite level 
under the Marquess of Bute. With his two sons, Lewis 
and David, he sank another pit, and in 1839 they, for the 
first time, shipped coal at Cardiff. A pit was then sunk at 
Ferndale, and the concern was carried on by the sons until 
1890, when they formed the existing Company of David 
Davies & Sons, of which Viscountess Rhondda is Deputy- 
Chairman. This afterwards acquired the Tylorstown 
Collieries, which had been sunk by Alfred Tylor in 1872. 
From this brief survey of its history it is clear that the 
old pre-eminence of South Wales and Monmouthshire in 
the heavy iron and steel trades has passed away. The 
natural conditions which originally favoured these indus- 
tries have disappeared. Shipbuilding, which is the largest 
consumer of steel, has never found a place in the Bristol 
Channel. The high wages paid to shipyard hands in the 
repairing docks of its Coal ports, where there is a constant 
demand for this class of labour, would, of themselves, drive 
marine construction to the Clyde and the Tyne. Theheavy 
engineering trades, too, centre round Glasgow, Leeds, 
Manchester, Sheffield and Newcastle. Even the hydraulic 
machinery and colliery engines used in South Wales are 
made chiefly in the North of England. 
But small engineering establishments abound. The 
calorific value of South Wales coal is_greater than that of 
the coal of any other part of the United Kingdom, and it 
pays better to put Welsh coal under a boiler than in 
a blast furnace. Still, some of the lost ground has been 
recovered. The output of pig iron in Wales and Mon- 
mouthshire in 1893, with twenty-five furnaces in blast, was 
710,972 tons; in 1903, with twenty-two furnaces in blast, 
it is 875,584 tons, showing that better plants gave an