DescriptionA small engineering business was established in the early 1840s by Owen Thomas, on the bank of the Afon Saint in Caernarfon in the area known as the Slate Quay, just south of the Castle. In about 1861 Thomas was joined by Jeffreys Parry de Winton. During the period 1883-1888 the business employed between 200 and 250 men with 30 apprentices. The buildings were known as the Union Works and extended from north to south along the river bank comprising offices, stores, erecting shop, fitting and turning shops, foundry and boiler shops, pattern shop and a large yard with smithy and timber stocks. The firm had a wide range of products, amongst which were locomotives, marine engines, Scotch and Lancashire boilers, cooling tanks, compressors, a bucket dredge, stone-crushing machines, equipment for water balances, slate saw-tables, quarry wagons and turntables, weighing machines, waterwheels, mechanical saw sharpeners, winding drums for quarry inclines, gold mining machinery and sugar boilers. The earliest locomotives for which records exist date from 1869 or 1870; they were designed for running on wooden rails and were exported to India. The firm's standard locomotive was the small distinctive 'coffee-pot' vertical-boilered type intended for the narrow-gauge lines in the local slate and granite quarries of Caernarfon and Merioneth but later supplied for use further afield.
Following de Winton's death in 1892 a new company was formed called de Winton Limited. This company failed and closed in 1901-2 following an expensive but unsuccessful attempt at manufacturing special condensers. The works were taken over as an early automobile repair shop trading as Kiwi Engineering Co.; the premises subsequently passed to Lake & Co., Wholesale Grocers and then to Morris & Jones, Wholesale Grocers of Liverpool.
Source: R.A.S Abbot, 'Chronicles of a Caernarvon Ironworks' in Transactions of the Caernarvonshire Historical Society, vol. 17 (1956), pp.86-94.
In July 2013 the foundry building was noted as surviving on St Helen's Road.
B.A.Malaws, RCAHMW, 15 January 2016.
