orks, which it was found necessary to erect, since the Company was
working its own line. In July 1864, the inhabitants of Welshpool,
conscious of the prominent part which the town had played in the
inauguration of the Oswestry and Newtown Railway, presented a memorial to
the board in which they urged its central position on the system and the
recent completion of the waterworks as strong arguments for favourable
consideration of the borough's claims to such an advantage. Nor was it
without an eye to future development that Welshpool station was built in
a manner capable of allowing its upper stories to be used as the
Company's offices. Here, for the brief space, the offices were, but in
both these cases ambitious Poolonians were doomed to disappointment.

[Picture: The late MR. A. C. HUMPHREYS-OWEN, M.P. Chairman, 1900-1905]

The official headquarters of the Newtown and Machynlleth Railway Company
were destined for some time to remain at Machynlleth, where Mr. David
Howell, its secretary, practised as a solicitor; but in January 1862 the
staff of the Oswestry and Newtown had removed from Welshpool, and,
together with those of the Llanidloes and Newtown, the Oswestry,
Ellesmere and Whitchurch, the Buckley and the Wrexham Mold and Connah's
Quay, jointly occupied two rooms on the second floor of No. 9a, Cannon
Row, Westminster, Mr. George Lewis being secretary of all five companies.
On the floor below the Aberystwyth and Welsh Coast Company cohabited with
some dozen slate and stone companies, while Mr. Benjamin Piercy sat in
state hard by in Great George Street, and Mr. Thomas Savin weaved his
ambitious schemes around the corner, at No. 7, Delahay Street, with Mr.
James Fraser (father of the auditor of the Cambrian in recent years)
acting, under power of attorney, as his manager. This proved quite a
convenient arrangement so long as Parliamentary Committee work absorbed
much of the time of these officials, and here all the companies held
their board meetings, generally on the same day.

There were stirring times without, and it is scarcely strange if Cannon
Row did not live up to the reputation of its suggestive name. Rows,
indeed, were frequent and occasionally threatened to reverberate beyond
the walls of the official sanctum. There is an old and honoured Cambrian
official, then a young clerk sitting at his desk in the office above the
board room, who remembers the occasion when an extraordinary scene was
enacte