the export of his slate products. A major road-building operation culminated in the creation of Port Penrhyn on the North-Wales coast as the fulcrum of his operations that saw the Bethesda quarries become the world's largest producer of slate by the early 19th century. The profits from sugar and slate enabled Pennant to commission Samuel Wyatt to rebuild the medieval house as a "castellated Gothic" castle. Richard Pennant was elected Member of Parliament for Liverpool and sat for the city until elevated to the Irish peerage as 1st Baron Penrhyn in 1783. Between 1780 and 1790 he made over thirty speeches defending the slave trade against abolitionist attacks, and became so influential that he was made chairman of the West India Committee, an informal alliance of some 50 MPs dedicated to opposing abolition. 19th and 20th centuries George Hay Dawkins-Pennant (1764–1840) inherited the Penrhyn Estate on Richard Pennant's death in 1808. He continued the approach adopted by his second cousin: developing the Penrhyn Quarry; opposing the abolition of slavery; serving in Parliament; and building at Penrhyn. Dawkins-Pennant's ambitions for his castle, however, far exceeded those of Richard Pennant for his - the building that Thomas Hopper created for him between 1820 and 1837 is one of the largest castles in Britain. The cost of the construction of this vast house is uncertain, and difficult to quantify as many of the materials came from the family's own forests and quarries and much of the labour from their industrial workforce. Cadw's estimation suggests the castle cost the Pennant family around £150,000, equivalent to some £50m in current values. The German aristocrat and traveller Hermann, Fürst von Pückler-Muskau recorded his visit to Penrhyn in his memoirs, Tour of a German Prince, published in 1831. He noted the ingenious design of the bell pulls; "a pendulum is attached to each which continues to vibrate for ten minutes after the sound has ceased, to remind the sluggish of their duty." He was even more impressed by the scale of Dawkins-Pennant's ambition; reflecting that castle building, which in the time of William the Conqueror could only be carried out by "mighty" kings, was by the early 19th century, "executed, as a plaything, - only with increased size, magnificence and expense, - by a simple country-gentleman, whose father very likely sold cheeses." The eldest of Dawkins-Pennant's two daughters, Juliana, married an aristocratic Grenadier guardsman, Edward Gordon Douglas