Thomas Roberts was said to have been a proud man, a product of his tough upbringing who never lost his Staffordshire accent. He first came to Llanelly as a young boy when his father was one of the first potters to sign contracts with the Llanelly Pottery but his father died while Thomas was in his teens and the family were said to have spent three days in the workhouse before returning to Staffordshire. Thomas returned to the town some years later as a young man where he shared lodgings with his friend David Guest - another glost fireman - at the home of the then widowed Margaret Wells in Stepney Street. Thomas and David married two of her daughters Ann and Jane. Thomas and Jane Roberts had eleven children, six of whom survived. The couple moved back to Burslem in or around 1872 but were there for only a couple of years before Jane died, young at the age of forty, six months after the birth of their youngest daughter Emma. Thomas Roberts brought his children back to Llanelli on the train and resumed work at the Pottery, which by this time was in financial trouble. It was then that he started selling produce from his garden. His daughters followed him into the pottery business when it re-opened, but his son kept the gardening business running. A heavy drinker when he was younger, he signed the pledge and became a teetotaller until his death. A generous man to his family, he could be a difficult character as well. He would give friends basket of produce from his garden but what not allow his grandchildren to collect windfalls. He remarried after the death of his first wife and died at home in 1904.