Leyshon
Thomas was born in Neath, an industrial town in South Wales, and was
christened
on 19th June 1814 at St Thomas’s church, Neath.
His father, Simon Thomas, was a miner.
Leyshon married a local girl, Elizabeth
Hill, in 1835, and by 1841 was working as a moulder, making the moulds
into
which molten metal was poured to form castings.
The growth
of the metalworking
industry in the early nineteenth century was driven by a number of
factors. The arrival of the steam
engine had made industrial operations more efficient, as well as
providing more
effective transport of both raw materials and finished products. The invention of the blast furnace and of
“puddling”, the raking of iron in the furnace while molten, allowed
iron to be
cast using coal in furnaces rather than the more difficult to obtain
charcoal. The South Wales coal was
ideally suited to this new process, and it provided the basis for a
flourishing
industry. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century, Britain had relied on imports of iron from Sweden
and
Russia, where wood for charcoal was abundant.
But by 1850, the South Wales industry was producing over half of
the
world’s iron. Almost every rail of the
United States railway system built in the next half century was
produced in the
South Wales valleys.
In 1792
three Quaker families had
bought an industrial site on the banks of the river Clydach at Neath
Abbey with
the intention of producing pig iron for their foundries in Cornwall. They built large blast furnaces with air
blown by a Bolton & Watt steam engine, the most powerful in Britain
at the
time. By 1818 the company was using
moulds to produce machine parts and eventually complete steam engines. It became world famous, producing not only a
wide variety of beam, pumping and marine engines, but also railway
locomotives
and, later, iron ships. Its products
were exported all over the world. In
1829, under the watchful eye of George Stevenson, it produced the track
which
the next year carried his locomotive “The Rocket” from Liverpool to
Manchester
at a world record speed of 36 miles per hour.
By 1861, Leyshon &
Elizabeth Thomas were living at the Ferry Road Public House in Briton
Ferry, a
small town adjacent to Neath, selling beer, although Leyshon continued
to
describe himself as a moulder. They had
a total of 11 children.
The
beer selling business did not go well.
There were frequent fights at the tavern, and in 1862 Leyshon
was sent
to prison charged with bankruptcy. No
creditors appeared at his hearing, however, and he was soon released.
By
1867 he had decided to start a new life in the United States. He sailed into New York as a steerage
passenger from Liverpool aboard the SS City of London on October
21, 1867
with his wife and 6 youngest children, and was processed at Castle
Garden. The family soon moved to Syracuse,
NY, where
they established a saloon.
Welsh
emigration to the United States began in
small sailing boats from the many little harbours around the Welsh
coast, but
by the middle of the nineteenth century, larger boats were sailing from
Liverpool to the east coast, stopping at Queenstown, now Cobh, the port
of Cork
in Ireland to pick up Irish emigrants.
Most Welsh towns had emigration agents who sold passages on
these larger
vessels, which reduced the crossing time from many weeks to less than a
fortnight and made the passage considerably safer.
As a result, more and more Welsh men and women sought their
fortune in the New World, and in 1870 there were more than 75,000
Welsh-born
people in the United States.
It
seems likely that Elizabeth died in around 1873, and by 1875 the family
was
scattered around the North Eastern states.
Most
of them worked in the metal industry, but Leyshon junior stayed in the
saloon
business. In 1874 he bought a saloon on
Broadway Street, Cleveland. A year later Leyshon senior moved to
Cleveland and bought his son’s saloon for $2750. He
was then aged 60, although throughout his time so far in the
United States, he had seriously understated his age.
Leyshon
junior went on to establish the West End Hotel and Restaurant in
Norristown PA,
and seems to have been very successful.
In 1902 he was President of the Firemen’s Association of the
State of
Pennsylvania.
At
some stage in the next four years, Leyshon senior returned to Great
Britain,
and in 1879, re-immigrated via Castle Garden, the New York immigration
centre,
to Cleveland. He appears there in the 1880 census, wrongly enumerated
as Daniel
Thomas. Later that year, on July 12th,
Leyshon senior remarried at the age of 66.
His bride, Mary Jane “Jennie”
Simmons, was born in Canada to an Irish father and a Canadian
mother. She was just 24 years old on her
marriage,
42 years her husband’s junior!
Four
years later, on October 20th 1884, they became the proud
parents of
Jennie’s only child, and Leyshon’s twelfth, Gwendolyn Thomas.
Despite
the huge age difference, Jennie and Leyshon’s marriage lasted almost 24
years
until Leyshon’s death in 1904 at the age of 89. He
was still mis-stating his age, but now in the other direction,
and his death certificate shows him as 96.
He is buried in Harvard Grove cemetery.
Jennie Thomas lived to the age of 85.
She died in Cleveland in 1940 and is buried in Lake View
Cemetery.
Gwendolyn
married a German immigrant, Albert
Burschkat, in Cleveland in about 1907.
They quickly changed their name to Bushcott, and had two
daughters, both
of whom sadly died in infancy. Many
years later they moved to Los Angeles, where Albert died in 1954 at the
age of
70.
Gwendolyn
Bushcott was still living 150 years after her father’s birth. She was
half
Welsh, a quarter Irish and a quarter Canadian, and was married to a
German. Her father was born before the
Battle of Trafalgar, when James Monroe, the fourth President, sat in
the White
House. Her grandfather, Simon Thomas,
was born before the Constitution of the United States was adopted. She died in Los Angeles in 1965, aged 80.
Leyshon
Thomas' eldest daughter Catherine, by his first wife Elizabeth, was
Gwendolyn'
half sister, although fifty years her senior. She did not
emigrate with
the family but remained in Neath and was my mother's grandmother.
She too
lived into her nineties. My mother, who died two years ago age
90,
remembered Catherine well and had some interesting memories of her.
Each
evening my mother was sent to the public house across the road to buy a
pint of
beer for her grandmother. Catherine
would hide it under her Welsh shawl if visitors arrived.
Roger Davies
October 2008
roger.davies55@virgin.net