Welsh Journals

partners. It seems that the purpose of this additional call was to finance the firm's new enterprise in Glamorgan: an entry in the partnership's Minute Book in August 1792 records the decision "That Robert Dagley be admitted a Partner in the Smelting Concern at Penclawdd and that he pay £ 1,250 as his share of the capital". Dagley had been closely associated with Thomas Williams of Anglesey and had worked at the Middle Bank Works when the Stanley Co. was in possession. It is likely that the remainder of the capital for the Penclawdd smelter was provided by the seven members of the Cheadle Co. A highly significant change in partnership occurred in 1800 when John Vivian, who was the Cheadle Co.'s agent in Cornwall, was admitted temporarily as a partner in Penclawdd: it is to this transient arrangement that the smelting activities of the Vivian dynasty may be traced. William Ingleby of Flintshire and a certain Isaac Milner were among the Cheadle partners involved at Penclawdd. John Vivian had five- tenths of the capital by 1805, and it appears that there was a considerable degree of separation between the Vivian and the Cheadle activities at the Penclawdd works, albeit with uneasy co- operation between the two sides. By 1812 the Cheadle Co.'s partnership with John Vivian had ended, and it had moved to Roe's establishment near Neath Abbey, which it operated until 1821[11]. Roe & Co. were a Liverpool and Macclesfield firm, established in 1758 by a successful silk manufacturer, Charles Roe, and by other persons of diverse interests. It manufactured copper and brass products, obtaining ores from various sources, including the eastern part of Mynydd Parys in Anglesey, of which it held a very profitable lease until 1785. In 1792-3 the firm moved its smelter from Liverpool to Neath where it operated for almost twenty years. By the 1790s the firm was known as William Roe & Co. William Roe being the eldest son of the founder and around 1800 the managing partner was Edward Hawkins of Congleton, a banker who patented a method of making "bright latten" from sheet brass[12]. The third class of entrepreneurs and investors cannot be identified with any single type of economic background for they had stakes in various industrial and commercial concerns. Such were the