Wyndham Colliery Deaths

John Brogden, Senior, was the main proponent of the Ogmore Railway Act of 1863, which authorised the construction of the railway into the Ogmore Valley.
The railway connecting Nantymoel with the main line junction at Tondu was opened for mineral, goods and passenger traffic on 1st August 1865.

John Brogden and Sons commenced the sinking of the Nos.1 and 2 Pits of the Wyndham Colliery late in 1865. The Two Feet Nine seam was proved at a depth of 161 yards and the Six Feet seam at 227 yards. Both of these seams were of high quality smokeless dry steam coals and coal production started in 1868.

Brogden and Sons formed the Llynvi, Tondu and Ogmore Coal and Iron Company Ltd., which controlled their iron and coal, interests at ironworks in Tondu and the Llynfi Valley and their coal mining developments in the Llynfi and Ogmore Valleys.

In 1888, a syndicate headed by Colonel John T. North purchased all the colliery interests of the reconstructed but then insolvent Llynvi and Tondu Coal and Iron Company Ltd. and, in the following year, formed North’s Navigation Collieries (1889) Ltd. which deepened the Wyndham Colliery shafts to 353 yards to prove and develop the Nine Feet seam and other seams of the Lower Coal Measures.

In 1906, Messrs. Cory Brothers & Co. Ltd. bought all North’s Navigation colliery interests in the Ogmore Valley.

In 1942, Powell Duffryn Associated Collieries Ltd. bought the Cory Brothers’ colliery properties in the Ogmore Valley and worked them until the nationalisation of the coal industry in 1947. In 1965, the National Coal Board combined the Wyndham Colliery with the Ocean Western Colliery to form the combined Wyndham/Western Mine which was closed in April 1984.