Charlotte Guest is no eminent Victorian, but she should be. In an age when the business world was completely dominated by men, her achievement was extraordinary. She was 40 years old when she became chairwoman of Dowlais, and the mother of 10 children. She knew the business inside out, having immersed herself in it to support and advise her husband. She now set about assembling a strong management team to support her son and heir, Lord Wimborne. By the time she retired in 1855, Dowlais had grown to become the largest ironworks in the world.

A year later, the company acquired the first British licence to use the new Bessemer process for making steel. With steel-making supplanting iron work, Dowlais continued to grow through the second half of the century. In 1888, it built a second steelworks, this time in Cardiff.

Downstream of the iron and steel-makers, other industries and companies were also rising. In 1834, in the new city of Birmingham, John Nettlefold opened a woodscrew factory. And in 1856, just down the road, Arthur Keen founded the Patent Nut & Bolt company (PNB) with his American partner, Francis Watkins.

The architect of Guest, Keen & Nettlefolds was a classic first-generation Victorian entrepreneur. Arthur Keen was the son of a yeoman-farmer, who rose from being a railway clerk to become a leading figure in the thriving late 19th century world of West Midlands commerce and politics. "Mr Keen generally got his way, both in business and public affairs," observed a contemporary journalist.

By the late 1890s, Keen not only headed PNB but was also chairman of the Birmingham and Midland Bank (which later became the Midland, one of Britain’s big four clearing banks). Wearing his PNB hat, Keen believed that the business had to vertically integrate by going upstream into steel, which was replacing iron as the raw material for fasteners. With his financial connections, he was perfectly positioned for the financial engineering necessary to fulfil his objective.

Through a contact, Keen learned that Lord Wimborne was ready to sell the Dowlais Iron Co. Dowlais was larger than PNB so this was going to be a reverse takeover. Stretching his resources to the limit, Keen agreed in September 1899 to pay Wimborne £1.53m for Dowlais. He told his shareholders that the deal would "give the company a position of complete independence...enabling it to hold its own in competition with the whole world".

In July 1900, the combination of Dowlais and PNB was incorporated into a new group, Guest, Keen & Co. Two years later, Keen drove through the takeover of a reluctant Nettlefolds Ltd. for £630,000, and the enlarged company became Guest, Keen & Nettlefolds.

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