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‘THE OLD CHESTNUT’ The Introduction of Electricity in Abergavenny

In 1894 the Gas Committee of the Improvement Commissioners (forerunners of the Town Council) of the small, but busy, Welsh border town of Abergavenny considered the installation of electricity to supply the town and its immediate area. This, in itself, was not unusual because by this date many other towns and cities had either installed or were considering the installation of electricity for lighting and, to a lesser extent, power applications. What was unusual, however, was that almost another forty years were to elapse before electricity in Abergavenny finally became a reality. This paper begins by outlining the general development of the British electricity supply industry up to the introduction of the Electric (Supply) Act, 1926. Having ‘set the scene’ on a nation-wide basis, the paper then attempts to trace the events and examines the attitudes, obstacles and problems that a small town had to overcome before electricity was finally installed. The conclusions are that whilst a number of factors, at various times, contributed towards the unduly protracted delay before public electricity in Abergavenny became a reality, the two main ones were vested interests and some individuals losing sight of the wider issues of electricity supply. In the case of vested interests, the members of Abergavenny’s small but powerful Gas Committee, aided by early legislation which regarded electricity as something best controlled by the appropriate local authority, successfully resisted any threat of intrusion upon their monopolistic and lucrative business for many decades. Even when the implementation of electricity was finally inevitable, a number of town councillors ensured that the process was further delayed by not looking beyond their parish boundaries at the wider issues of electricity supply in Britain by attempting to pursue self-generation policies.