Standard Brick and Pipe Works and Mount Pleasant Colliery"

Standard Brick and Pipe Works and Mount Pleasant Colliery, Drury

10 May 1969

Whilst singing for the elderly residents of a nursing home in Wood Lane, Hawarden I met an elderly lady in her nineties who said she was the daughter of George Gibson who had lived in Liverpool Road and owned the Buckley Brick and Tile works. She told me the bricks they had made were acid resistant and went all over the world, for example as far as Australia.

Apparently she had left her Buckley home to get married and had moved to Anglesey to open a brickworks there.

I recall the Buckley Brick and Tile Company well, as for years I had a business 'Kendricks Haulage' with my brother Horace and we used to carry bricks. Mostly their products went by rail via the Buckley line but we carried bricks by road as well. We carried clay to the Standard Pipeworks in Drury and then their finished pipes all over the country. We also carried bricks from Davison's bottom works to Tunnel Cement in Kent. I cannot remember the name of the location but it was right on the river Thames.

We carried steel from the Shotton works to Earlam in Manchester and coal slack from Gresford Colliery to Greenfield, Courtaulds in Flint, and Bullwaters, the paper mill at Ellesmere Port. We worked fourteen hours a day and I used to repair the lorries myself if they arrived back at the end of a run with something wrong with them, so that they could be used the next day.

Our business as hauliers started up in 1936 and operated until about 1968 when some of the local factories eg. Standard Pipeworks, were bought out.

The Adamantine brick carried 78 letters on its face, including "made in England" instead of Wales.

Author: Kendrick, Raymond

Standard Brick and Pipe Works and Mount Pleasant Colliery"

Standard Brick and Pipe Works and Mount Pleasant Colliery, Drury

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