Lord Talbot

Christopher Rice Mansel Talbot FRS (10 May 1803 – 17 January 1890) was a Welsh landowner, industrialist and Liberal politician. He developed his estate at Margam near Swansea as an extensive ironworks, served by railways and a port, which was renamed Port Talbot. He served as a Member of Parliament for Glamorgan constituencies from 1830 until his death in 1890, a sixty-year tenure which made him the longest serving MP in the nineteenth century. He was Lord Lieutenant of Glamorgan, from 1848 to 1890.

Talbot recognised that improved transport could stimulate industrial growth, and as Member of Parliament he introduced a Bill in 1834 to improve the old harbour at Aberavon; two years later, a further Bill provided for the harbour's expansion and a change of name to Port Talbot in his honour. He also encouraged the development of Swansea docks, and pioneered the introduction of railways to south Wales, being chairman and a shareholder in the South Wales Railway Company, which was acquired by the Great Western Railway in 1863, with Talbot joining the board of the GWR.

Talbot also invested in the area's extractive and metal production industries. The Port Talbot ironworks opened in early 1831, part of the industrialisation then taking place across South Wales; copper had been smelted at nearby Neath since 1584, and there were tinworks and ironworks at Pontardawe.

In the development of the town to be named after him, it said that Talbot made a covenant that no public house should be built on the land he owned between the two rivers, the River Afan (with its boundary to Aberavon) and the River Ffrwdwylit at Taibach.  

This appears to be confirmed by the fact that it was only possible to have an alcoholic drink at the Grand Hotel located near the railway station.  It also perhaps explains why a number of clubs sprung up in Station Road, which allowed their members to have a drink on Sundays up to 1961 when the licencing law was repealed.

The face of Port Talbot has changed over the years but there is stlll no pubs in the town centre.