by Mike Hall
October 28th
1849: The Castle Arcade was officially opened by the Mayor of Cardiff, Alderman David Jones. The arcade, running from High Street to Castle Street, was decorated from end to end with bunting and shrubs. It rapidly became a popular place to shop and in 1988 underwent a £500,000 refurbishment. The High Street Arcade was opened between 1880 and 1887 and links with Duke Street Arcade (1902) opposite the Castle. Morgan Arcade, now the best-preserved of Cardiff’s arcades, is named after David Morgan who started in business with a gents’ outfitters in The Hayes. Its construction radically changed the character of the area, sweeping away what was described as ‘a nest of slums, some picturesque courts and gardens’. Union Buildings, consisting of over thirty dwellings and an inn, was also swept away for this development. The Royal Arcade (1858) still retains some of its original shop-fronts. Cardiff has the highest concentration of Victorian and Edwardian shopping arcades in Britain, much admired in 1952 by John Betjeman (see May 19th). (Stewart Williams, Cardiff Yesterday / Wikipedia)
October 29th
1906: Cardiff City Hall and the Law Courts were officially opened by the Marquis of Bute. ‘The star of the show is undoubtedly the City Hall,’ wrote Simon Jenkins in 2008. ‘This was begun in 1901 with baroque swagger. The exterior drips with sculpture, including Welsh music complimenting poetry, commerce paying court to industry and unity to patriotism. Everywhere are the Latin initials V.C., trumpeting a pride in Villa Cardiff. The interior is more than a match for the exterior.’ The City Hall cost £129,000 and the Law Courts, £96,000. (Simon Jenkins, Wales: Churches, Houses, Castles, Allen Lane, 2008)
1955: Cardiff’s oldest cinema, the Queen’s, closed. It was the first cinema in Cardiff to show the ‘talkies’. (Stewart Williams, Cardiff Yesterday)
1981: The Prince and Princess of Wales visited Cardiff for Princess Diana to receive the Freedom of the City. They were welcomed by the Lord Mayor, Alderman Ron Watkiss, also the long-serving Chief Executive of the Council, Mr Harry Crippin. (Stewart Williams, Cardiff Yesterday)
October 30th
1926: Goscombe John’s statue of Archdeacon James Rice Buckley was unveiled on the Green at Llandaff. James Buckley had given forty-six years of devoted ministry to the cathedral and diocese. He was Vicar of Llandaff from 1878 to 1924 and Archdeacon from 1913. The inscription read ‘A Man He Was To All The Country Dear’. He was a descendent of the Revd James Buckley who came to Llanelli in 1760 and, perhaps unexpectedly for a clergyman, took over a brewery in 1799. This came about because he had married Maria, the daughter of its owner, Henry Buckley who, even more improbably, was a prominent Methodist! Buckley’s Brewery was eventually taken over by the Cardiff-based S.A. Brain’s but Mr Buckley is commemorated in the name of one of its most popular products, ‘Reverend James’. His portrait now appears on beer-pumps in pubs right across South Wales and beyond. (Stewart Williams, Cardiff Yesterday / www.sabrain.com/beers)
October 31st
1147: Thirty-year-old William FitzRobert, the son of an illegitimate son of King Henry I, succeeded to the title of Earl of Gloucester – which also brought with it the Lordship of Glamorgan and a principal residence at Cardiff Castle. However, in 1158 FitzRobert and his wife Hawise (a daughter of the Earl of Leicester) were captured by Welsh rebel Ifor Bach (Ivor the Short), the Lord of Senghenydd. Ifor was one of his tenants but he believed that the earl was trying to take land which under Welsh law was rightfully his. It is said that Ifor scaled the castle walls and seized William, Hawise and son Robert and held them in the depths of the forest. He refused to release them until William promised to return his lands ‘and a lot more’. FitzRobert died on his 67th birthday (November 23rd 1183) and his name is unknown to most Cardiff people. Ifor Bach has (albeit unwittingly) given his name to a music nightspot in Womanby Street! (William Rees, Cardiff: A History of the City, Cardiff Corporation, 1969 / Wikipedia)
November 1st
1775: 100,000 people were believed to have been killed in the Lisbon Earthquake. The tsunami caused by the quake later caused flooding in low-lying parts of Cardiff. (Wikipedia)
1886: The old frigate Hamadryad was berthed in East Dock to serve as a seamen’s hospital. She was later moved to her permanent site near the Glamorgan Canal’s sea lock. The running of the hospital was partly financed by a voluntary levy of 2 shillings per ton of cargo paid by ships docking at Cardiff. In 1905 the hospital ship was replaced by the Royal Hamadryad Hospital in Ferry Road. She was later towed to Appledore in Devon where she was broken up. (John Richards, Cardiff: A Maritime History, The History Press, 2005)
1982: The Welsh-language television channel S4C was launched. This had been put at risk by the election of the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Believing that Welsh Nationalism was a dead cause, the Government announced that they would not honour the pledge to establish it. Two thousand members of Plaid Cymru promised to go to prison rather than pay for a TV licence and Carmarthen MP Gwynfor Evans vowed to ‘fast to the death’. The Government announced its change of mind in October 1980. (John Davies, A History of Wales, 1990 (in Welsh), 1993 (English))
November 2nd
1954: ‘I return my contract for Cardiff Castle unsigned. I shall be grateful if you could make out a cheque for the amount you were going to pay me to the fund for St Mary Aldermanbury. I am asking you as a protest against against the disproportion of your television fees. If I take part in that delightful programme Where On Earth? there is virtually no rehearsing and I am given a good meal free. Even if I am asked to appear on Christian Forum on the Isle of Wight, there is still virtually no rehearsing and I am offered eighteen guineas. Yet I had to make two visits to Cardiff in connection with the televising of the Castle, spend three nights in the city and rehearse almost the whole of Sunday. Between the final rehearsal at 6.15 and the programme at ten o’clock, I was offered not even a cup of tea. Only through the kindness of one of the local officials not appearing in the programme did I get a glass of beer at a club. I feel that the fee for the extra work and specialist knowledge required over Cardiff should be higher. Yours sincerely JB’. (Letter to BBC Television quoted in Candida Lycett-Green (ed.) John Betjeman Letters 1951-1984, 1995)
November 3rd
1927: Floods engulfed Cowbridge Road and the adjacent main line but the trains kept running. Residents of this areas of Ely and Victoria Park had to put up with periodic inundations until the River Ely Flood Prevention Scheme remedied matters. This was not pleasant – the river was polluted with sewage from the industrial valley upstream and was not improved until the opening of treatment works in the 1980s at Miskin and Rhiwsaeson. In 2011 Cardiff Council was developing a cycleway, The Ely Trail, alongside the river. (Stewart Williams, Cardiff Yesterday / Wikipedia)
1945: Cardiff, captained by Jack Matthews, took on New Zealand Services at the Arms Park. Among those watching was Wilf Wooller, only lately returned from a Japanese Prisoner of War camp. Another former Cardiff captain present was CSM Les Spence, both were veterans of the 77th Heavy Artilliery Regiment (see September 11th). On the same day the Gunner Club at Artilliery House, 10 Pembroke Terrace (now Churchill Way), was officially opened by Major General D. Paige. (Stewart Williams, Cardiff Yesterday)
November 4th
1910: Aviation pioneer Ernest Thompson Willows made the first night crossing of the English Channel in his airship, City of Cardiff. He experienced serious difficulties, not least because his maps were accidentally dropped over the side. The landing at Corbehem near Douai at five o’clock on the morning of the 5th was very tricky. Repairs to the envelope were needed and he was not able to arrive in Paris until December 28th. He celebrated with a New Year’s Eve flight around the Eiffel Tower. (T.D. Breverton, The Welsh Almanac, Glyndwr Publications, 2002 / Wikipedia)
1986: The new Lisvane & Thornhill station on the Cardiff to Caerphilly line was opened, replacing the little-used Cefn-Onn Halt, originally provided for local golfers. (Don Gatehouse & Geoff Dowling, British Railways Past & Prese
nt, Vol.27, 1995)
1999: Cardiff Bay Barrage was completed, creating a new lake. (Western Mail)
November 5th
1854: The 1st Battalion of the Welch Regiment were in the thick of the Battle of Inkerman in the Crimean War. A memorial in the north aisle of Llandaff Cathedral commemorates those killed: Lieutenant Colonel George Carpenter, Captain E. Rowlands, Lt J.W. Swaby, Lt A. Taylor, Lt John Stirling (killed carrying the Colours), Assistant Surgeon J. Lamont, Sergeant Major James White, Cpl W. Shaughnessy and Cpl Thomas Jones. Although heavily outnumbered the Allied troops of Britain and France held their ground against the Imperial Russian Army. The memorial, ‘Erected by Past and Present Officers, NCOs and Men as a tribute to the devotion and courage displayed by the Regiment during the War with Russia, 1854-6’ also refers to the 731 un-named private soldiers who died in the Crimea Campaign. (Llandaff Cathedral guidebook)
1963: The meaning of the name of the Cardiff district of Gabalfa (‘place of the boat’ in Welsh) became very apt when the area was flooded by the River Taff. (South Wales Echo)
November 6th
1890: Cab-driver Thomas Davies went before Cardiff Magistrates and successfully claimed £13 11s 6d damages from a fellow cabman whose horse-drawn vehicle had injured Mr Davies’s horse in a collision in Bute Street. Seamen on board a ship berthed at Penarth went on strike because the only food they were being offered was putrid salt beef. Coal miners accepted a 2 per cent pay rise offered by the mine-owners but a strike was threatening to close Cardiff Docks. (John O’Sullivan, ‘How Green Was Their Island’ in Stewart Williams (ed.), The Cardiff Book, Vol.2, 1974)
1953: The Royal Train was on show for a week at Queen Street station. Among the attractions at the Exhibition was the ‘bedroom’ used at various times by Kings Edward VII, George V and George VI. The oldest carriage on show was one built for Queen Adelaide, widow of King William IV, in 1842. Her main claim to fame is that the city of Adelaide in Australia was named after her. (Stewart Williams, Cardiff Yesterday)
November 7th
1896: Final day of a six month-long Fine Art, Industrial and Maritime Exhibition which attracted visitors from all over the country. The Taff Vale Railway built a temporary station for the exhibition site in Cathays Park where the City Hall, Law Courts and Welsh National Museum now stand. As well as the more worthy exhibits there were plenty of side-shows to amuse and entertain. Particularly popular was the ‘African Jungle’ which included lions, tigers, crocodiles and alligators. In the evening the exhibition was lit by 10,000 fairy lights. There were concerts by a 500-strong choir and the Santiago Opera. (Brian Lee, Memory Lane, Cardiff)
1964: The Beatles played a concert at the Capitol Cinema, Cardiff, as part of the group’s only UK tour that year. The tour included twenty-seven concerts in twenty-five venues over thirty-three days, visiting most major towns and cities, playing the Gaumont, ABC and Granada cinema circuit. As the venues rarely held more than 3,000 people, often less, at the height of ‘Beatlemania’, thousands of fans could not get tickets. (See also December 12th.) (Mark Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Chronicle, Chancellor Press, 1992)
November 8th
1903: Birth in Cardiff of pioneer naturalist, conservationist and writer, Ronald Lockley. He wrote over fifty books, including The Private Life of the Rabbit (1965), which inspired Richard Adams’ classic book Watership Down. Lockley grew up in Whitchurch where his mother ran a boarding school. He played a leading role in setting up the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park and campaigned unsuccessfully against the oil refinery developments around Milford Haven. His belief that successive British governments were not sufficiently concerned about the threat to environments from industrial development led to his emigration to New Zealand, where he died in 1970. (T.D. Breverton, The Welsh Almanac, Glyndwr Publications, 2002 / Wikipedia)
1951: Pretty 19-year-old Joan Canham was murdered, stabbed by a jealous ex-boyfriend, John Bowling, on the steps of her family home in Gelligaer Road, Cathays. Bowling was charged with murder and the evidence seemed clear enough. However, despite the judge’s warning to the contrary, the jury chose to find him guilty only of the lesser charge of manslaughter. He was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. (Mark Isaacs, Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths in Cardiff, Wharncliffe, 2009)
November 9th
1711: Craddock Wells bequeathed the sum of £30 a year to provide for the education of poor children in Cardiff. He had been a leading member of the Borough Council and a Senior Alderman. The bequest was to be held in trust by the Aldermen to apply the income towards the education of as many poor boys and girls as would be named yearly by them They were to be taught ‘to read, write and cipher. Each of the boys to wear a blue bonnet and each of the girls a badge to distinguish them’. (Presumably to distinguish the recipients of the charity, not girls from boys). The school was opened in 1719. The trust continued to make educational grants for many years (see October 24th). (William Rees, Cardiff: A History of the City, Cardiff Corporation, 1969)
1783: Edward Davies was up before Cardiff’s Gild of Cordwainers and Glovers. It was stated that he had opened a shop and ‘sold a great quantity of boots and shoes’ without having served the usual seven years apprenticeship in the town, thereby incurring a fine of 20 shillings for each month that the shop remained open. (William Rees, Cardiff: A History of the City, Cardiff Corporation, 1969)
November 10th
2010: Thanks to a touch of time-travelling, Christmas came early to Cardiff. Doctor Who and his feisty young assistant, Amy Pond (played by actors Matt Smith and Karen Gillan) arrived in the evening to switch on the Christmas Lights. They were welcomed by large and enthusiastic crowds. The cult science fiction programme had been filmed in and around Cardiff since its revival in 2005 and led to a spin-off series, Torchwood. ‘Cardiff is a great city,’ Matt Smith said to the reporter from the South Wales Echo. ‘I’d like to thank all of its residents for being so welcoming.’ Matt was the third incarnation of the famous Time Lord since 2005, his predecessors being Christopher Eccleston and David Tennent. Among the special festive attractions in Cardiff was the ‘Winter Wonderland’ set up outside the City Hall. There was a giant Ferris wheel (Cardiff’s answer to the London Eye), an open-air ice-rink and a Christmas Market.
November 11th
1848: Thirty-year-old Thomas Lewis, the son of the landlord of the Red Lion Hotel in Queen Street, was stabbed to death late at night in Stanley Street by John Connors, an Irishman. The facts of the case were disputed but it brought to the surface the antipathy felt by the Protestant Welsh working class against Irish Catholics, prepared to work for low wages, who were taking their jobs. It led to an outbreak of sectarian violence with vigilantes attacking Irish homes. The windows of a Catholic church were smashed. The priest fled after his house was attacked and did not return. Lewis’s funeral became a trial of strength between the two factions – large groups of Irish navvies armed with pickaxes arrived to be met by a Protestant mob from Merthyr. Connors was convicted of manslaughter – not murder – and transported. He lived out his final years at Botany Bay. (Mark Isaacs, Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths in Cardiff, Wharncliffe, 2009)
1918: Scenes of wild jubilation in St Mary Street and Queen Street marked the end of the First World War. (John O’Sullivan & Bryn Jones, Cardiff: A Centenary Celebration, The History Press, 2005)
November 12th
1935: The Olympia cinema, which had been thoroughly modernised, was reopened. It stood on the site in Queen Street that had been occupied by the Empire Theatre before it was destroyed by fire in November 1899. The Andrews Hall, named after entrepreneur Soloman Andrews, had replaced the Empire and had in turn been replaced by the cinema. (Stewart Williams, Cardiff Yesterday)
1990: A burst water-main at Tongwynlais caused severe flooding and the closure of the A470 for about eight weeks. Known for its famous landmark, Castell Coch, the village can also claim to be mentioned in two pop hits of the 1990s. Cardiff-based Tigertailz, described as ‘a glam-metal ban
d’ had a song called ‘Tongwnynlais Fly’ on their ‘Thrill Pistol’ album and Rocket Gold Star wrote a song about the place and recorded it for the BBC Radio One ‘Maida Vale Session’ show. In 1995 this band ‘moved into a remote farmhouse on top of a Welsh mountain to write and rehearse music’. In May 2000 they released what was claimed to be the first twelve-hour single (listened to on-line, a procedure made almost impossible by the primitive dial-up modems at that time). (Wikipedia)
November 13th
1961: Pubs in Cardiff opened on Sundays for the first time since 1881. Under new legislation, if 500 registered voters in each Welsh city, borough or county district requested it, the local authority had to conduct a poll in which electors could decide whether pubs in that area could open on Sundays or not. Opinion was divided – some areas opting to remain ‘dry’ while others, including Cardiff, went ‘wet’. It was the predominantly rural and Welsh-speaking parts of the country that remained opposed to Sunday-drinking. Polls were held every seven years until all of Wales became ‘wet’. The last area to go ‘wet’ was the Dwyfor district of Gwynedd in 1996. The 2003 Licensing Act finally did away with the right of opponents of Sunday-drinking to call for a ballot. (www.news/bbc.co.uk/wales)
