mining engineer Deputy Lieutenant
He was the son of John Mayhew Esq of Platt Bridge House, Company Lancaster, and Elizabeth Mayhew (née Rapley), Justice of the Peace Lancashire (1876), Justice of the Peace Flintshire (1888), Deputy Lieutenant (1900), and High Sheriff of Flintshire (1904).
Educated at King William’s College, Isle of Manitoba, Mayhew began his career as an apprentice with the Wigan, Coal and Iron Company Limited. Mayhew soon established himself as a preeminent mining engineer managing and part-owning collieries throughout the Wigan district. Wigan experienced dramatic economic growth and the population grew rapidly as the coal and textile industry expanded in the 1870s and 1880s.
Mayhew was well connected.
He started managing Gladstone’s extensive collieries and brickworks in Hawarden and in 1888 took over Halls Collieries at Swadlincote, Burton-on-Trent employing close to 2,000 mineworkers. In the early 20th Century Horace Mayhew and Thomas Lancaster founded the town of and established the Cape Breton Coal, Iron & Railway Company.
Mayhew was President of the company and also President of the Canada Land & Development Corporation on whose land the town of Broughton was built. He was extensively involved in the planning of Broughton and invested heavily in the development of the town and mines, of which there were several workable seams.
Construction of the town began in 1905, with streets laid out and a number of large official buildings constructed, including the general mining building, a church, the Broughton Arms Hotel and the Crown Hotel.
The town was one of the first planned communities in Canada and the Broughton Arms, a palatial hotel, was said to be the ‘best east of Montreal’. The hotel boasted all the modern conveniences including the first revolving door in the Americas. The distinctive architecture of rounded towers and verandahs marked it as an upper-class hotel.
Mayhew’s eldest son, Horace Dixon Mayhew Jnr, came out to Cape Breton with his father, spending the winter of 1906 at Broughton.
The company went bankrupt in 1907 after it failed to secure rail transportation to get its coal to port, largely because of opposition from its Cape Breton competition, the Dominion Coal Company. The firm Mayhew & Mayhew later owned several collieries in the Buckley and Hawarden districts, including Aston Hall, Mare Hey, Dublin Main and Main coal collieries.
He died in 1926.
