History of the Labour Exchange

The building that is now split into the Old Labour Exchange (Hen Ganolfan Waith) and the Hideaway (Cuddfan) is stooped in history. It started life as a Conservative Workingmen's Club providing the young miners of Nantlle Vale with somewhere to socialise during the slate mining boom which had started in the 1800's. By the twentieth century the mining industry in the local area was heading into decline and the building was repurposed as a Labour Exchange to help local people find employment again.

In this first photo you can see the building when it was a Conservative Club, protruding from the left side of the original Town Hall / Market Hall. The second photo is a close up of the "Conservative Club" sign over the window. Here is a brief timeline of the history of this fascinating building:

From 28th to 31st October 1891 there was a large auction of land and buildings at the Royal Sportsman Hotel in Caernarfon. In total 2,439 acres of land from the Brynkir estate were offered for sale by the local, well known Huddart family. The Huddarts ended up bankrupt by 1910. Lot number 484 was described as "Market Hall and Market Square, Penygroes, 1040 square yards." and was purchased for £300 by Mr George Owen on behalf of the Penygroes Workingmen's Conservative Club.

On 2nd December 1893 Mr George Owen told a meeting of the Conservative Association that he had received an "intimation from Major Evans of Broom Hall" that he was prepared to convert the Market Hall into premises suitable for a Conservative Club. "Major Evans" was the wealthy land owner Owen Lloyd Jones Evans who later attained the rank of Lt Colonel before retiring from the army.

In 1920 a committee was formed to oversee the creation of a memorial to honour the local men that were lost in WW1. A survey was sent to every house in Penygroes to see if the villagers prefered a monument or a Memorial Hall and they chose to have both. A monument in the form of a column and wheeled cross was erected in 1920 and the Memorial Hall or Neuadd Goffa (the big green building next door to our cottages) was built as an extension to the original Market Hall with the foundation stone being laid on 27th July 1922. The Memorial Hall was officially opened eleven years later in October 1933.

On 27th May 1926 two thousand women from a number of villages in the hills around the local area gathered in the Market Square outside the Memorial Hall. They were led by peace activists Gwladys Thoday and Silyn Roberts and they set off on a 150 mile peace pilgrimage to Chester before 28 of them continued on to a national demonstration in Hyde Park, London where Mrs Thoday and Mrs Roberts addressed the crowd. This was a turbulent period in history, two years before the suffragette movement had won the right for women to vote and the peace protesters were angry that they had no say in the running of the country or whether the nation went to war or not.

1936 - local man Humphrey Jones purchased the former Conservative Club in a sale at Pwllheli Old Town Hall from William Prys Owen Evans who was the son of Lt-Col Evans and heir to the Broom Hall estate. Less than a year later, on 6th April 1937 the vendor William Evans was tragically killed when his Hornet Moth aircraft crashed into a wall on take off from the private Broom Hall airfield. The Broom Hall estate was later sold off (in 1946) to Billy Butlin who provided commercial flights for holiday makers from the airfield to Cardiff and Dublin until a fatal accident in the mid 1960's involving an Auster aircraft brought about the end of activity at the airfield.

By the 1940's the building was being used by the Employment Service as a Labour Exchange. Ownership was handed down through the Jones family until 1999 when it was no longer rented to the government and was sold to some local builders. Planning permission was obtained to turn the former commercial building into 2 x 2 bedroom cottages and work started but was never completed and it stood empty for over 20 years until December 2021 when we purchased it and work finally resumed.