Welsh Journals

CONFLICT ON BUCKLEY COMMON By J. E. MESSHAM 'A dispute arose as to whether the Common belonged to the people or whether certain parties had the right to fence it in'. 1. The Major and the Minister One of the interesting characters living in Buckley a century ago was Edwin Rogers. He died in 1915 at the age of ninety-four. Two years before his death he made the last entries in the 'diary' which he had begun to keep over sixty-five years earlier.1 The short notes in the small metal-clasped booklets include jottings from newspapers, but for the most part they have to do with his work as a carpenter and with what went on in the locality. Among them is the following entry: May 14th 1894. Whit Monday. Joseph Davies broke in Gibson's corrugated sheet fence for the footpaths over the Common. Thus he summed up the opening move in a legendary conflict. It all began with Major John Merriman Gibson. The major was that figure so admired in his own generation, the self-made man. A native of Hexham in Northumberland, he had learned the trade of a blacksmith at Newcastle, and when he first made his appearance in these parts it was as a workman on the making of a Dee embankment. In 1863, at the age of twenty-two, he became a clerk in the employ of the Wrexham and Mold Railway Company, as an assistant to the manager of the Buckley branch of the railway, and during the manager's illness he had had sole charge of the line.3 This was probably the job at which he earned £1 a week, as he recalled in later years, adding with pride 'I am not ashamed of it. I learnt my work like a man'. Three years later he applied for the post of NOTE: All documentary references are to deposits in the Clwyd Record Office, Hawarden. 1 D/ DM/ 809/ 97. Diary of Edwin Rogers. 2 Obituaries in local newspapers, especially Chester Chronicle and the Mold, Deeside & Buckley Leader, 25 February 1927. sD/DM/809/37. Enquiry before Railway Commissioners into freight charges on the Buckley-Connah's Quay mineral line.