Cylchgronau Cymru

Chwiliwch trwy dros 450 o deitlau a 1.2 miliwn o dudalennau

SINGLETON ABBEY AND THE Vivians OF SWANSEA. By Ralph A. Griffiths. Gomer Press, Llandysul, 1988. Pp. 67; illustrated. £ 3.95, soft covers. The siting of University College, Swansea, at Singleton Abbey in 1920 proved a symbolic act. An institution purposely established to further scientific and technological scholarship in Wales, notably in metallurgy, was placed in the former home of the Vivian family, past promoters and advancers of copper and other non- ferrous metal-working activities in the Swansea area. The resplendence of the house and its contents testified to the great success of that industrial enterprise, the general wealth it had brought to the area and the distinctive paternal instinct which was displayed by the Vivians. In a particularly attractive booklet, Professor Griffiths relates not so much the economic history of Swansea as the role of the Vivians in it and their personal or domestic histories. The Vivians were part of that remarkable migration from Cornwall of skilled workers and managers into the copper and other metallurgical trades throughout Britain, including Wales. It is important to remember, for example, that John Vivian who managed the Penclawdd works and established the Hafod concern was also the John Vivian who was principal copper agent to that great Welsh capitalist of the late-eighteenth century, Thomas Williams of Llanidan, Anglesey, and that his sons, Richard Hussey Vivian and John Henry Vivian, were both significant partners in a revived Mona Mine Company at Amlwch after Williams's death. It was with John Henry Vivian that the family loosened its Cornish ties and settled at Swansea, and it was he who was responsible for the creation of Singleton Abbey. As Professor Griffiths shows, the name Abbey was merely a convenient romantic appellation adopted for the grand structure created in the 1820s. Singleton as a name had medieval local associations, notably with Robert de Sengleton in the early- fourteenth century, and it was this name, taken from a nearby farm, which was applied to the mansion. The mansion itself, in fact, encloses an earlier most interesting building, an octagonal neo-classical house called Marino, built by Edward King in 1784. J. H. Vivian was unusual in deciding not to raze the original but to mould it into the larger whole which was in essence of a neo-Gothic design. In a lengthy section we are offered many splendid illustrations and plans of the new building designed by P. F. Robinson, an architect who became popular in south Wales at this time. The pinnacled mansion at Maesgwyn, Glyn Neath, for example, seems to have been a modest imitation of Singleton Abbey. The Gothicism of the Abbey was by no means as grey and severe as some of the contemporary mansion rebuilding and perhaps was testimony to the subtler artistic taste of both J. H. Vivian and his wife Sarah, revealed too in their collection of objets d'art and in the fine landscaping of Singleton Park. It was this devotion to culture as well as the amassing of wealth through industry which characterized the Vivian family for most of the nineteenth century. It is probably true, as the author hints in several places, that the continental education provided for the sons of the family made them more adept in scientific and business