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Herefordshire, Esq., Samuel Munckley, Richard Bright, Levi Ames, William Delpratt and Thomas Sims of the City of Bristol, merchants". Little information is available about membership of the firm in the nineteenth century except that Jeremiah Ames, Benjamin Heywood Bright, John Freeman and a certain Beckett were lessees of land at White Rock soon after 1800[9]. In the 1790s three groups of copper-users from the Birmingham district operated smelting works in Glamorgan. The first, the Birmingham Mining and Copper Co., had been established in 1790 as a co-operative venture for buying mines and setting up smelting works to meet the needs of the shareholders. Its formation was part of the reaction in the Midlands against the monopolistic practices of the Anglesey and Cornish mining interests led by Thomas Williams. The company initially had a capital of £ 50,000 in £ 100 shares, each subscriber being limited to five shares and obliged to buy a certain amount of metal per share held. It set up its new Ynys (alias Birmingham) Works in the Tawe Valley in 1793 and held it for a period of forty years. Four years later a similar co-operative partnership of Birmingham people, the Crown Copper & Spelter Co., opened works on the Neath river which it operated until 1839. In 1797 also, another Birmingham based firm, the Rose Copper Smelting Co., took over and "considerably enlarged" a smelter on the river Tawe which had been operated since 1780 by Fenton & Co., of Leeds. This partnership produced mainly for the market rather than for meeting the requirements of the members who included Matthew Boulton, Joseph Gibbins, W. and A. Baldwin, Walter Gibbon and T. Holbrook (the latter having been the Swansea agent of Fenton & Co.) [10]. The Cheadle Brass Wire Co., from Staffordshire, took over the copper works at Penclawdd, probably in 1792, and operated it until 1812 when they moved to an establishment near Neath Abbey which they held for about ten years. This important partnership had been set up in 1719 by people with a wide range of interests, and it operated brass works at Cheadle. By 1788 the share capital was £ 30,000, of which Thomas Patten, son of the firm's founder, owned fl8,000 the remainder being held by six partners. Borrowed capital then amounted to L10,000 and to £ 29,500 in 1793, by which time also a call for a further £ 10,000 had been made on the