Patterns of migration

Patterns of migration Cardiff Bay

Rob Quinn

Rob is Head of History and Politics at a school in Wrexham. He has worked as an examiner and is the author of several GCSE History textbooks, revision guides and magazine articles.

Article links to: GCSE Unit 3D. Changes in Patterns of Migration, c.1500 to the present day

The development of Butetown Until the mid-twentieth century, immigrants in Cardiff were concentrated in the Butetown district which was to the south of the city centre in the area now referred to as Cardiff Bay. This area was dominated by docks that were developed by the second Marquess of Bute to export South Wales coal to the rest of the world. The Glamorganshire Canal joined Cardiff with Merthyr Tydfil in 1794 and a canal basin was in place at Cardiff Bay by 1798. In 1839 the docks were then built at the end of this canal by Irish immigrant labourers, with the area connected back to the South Wales valleys by the Taff Vale Railway, which opened in 1841. The impact of sea trade Merchant sailors came to the docks on ships from all over the world. Many sailors did not stay in Butetown long as they were only there during the gap between their ships unloading and then taking on new cargo. However, working on ships was not a reliable form of employment and many merchant sailors would get left behind at ports all over the world if their services were suddenly no longer needed. As a result a lot of immigrants ending up settling in Butetown. They built a community together, opened local businesses and intermarried. Butetown was highly unusual in the extent to which men and women from different immigrant groups had families together. Butetown had originally housed many wealthy homeowners who owned businesses related to the trading and transporting of coal. As the nineteenth century progressed, they had moved to greener Cardiff suburbs. The large houses they left behind, especially around Loudoun Square, became more and more crowded as their owners sub-divided them into apartments or families took in lodgers to help pay their rent. Local legend has it that the nickname Tiger Bay comes from a woman who used to walk around with two tigers. Other people say that it was because Portuguese sailors described the conditions in Cardiff Bay as like sailing through a bay of tigers. Some have argued that it was the name given by sailors to any port town where they could find gambling, prostitution and fighting. Names of the 97 pubs that were in the area suggest that Butetown did see its fair share of violence and crime: House of Blazes, Bucket of Blood, Snakepit to name but a few. Even the 1959 film “Tiger Bay”, filmed mostly on location in Butetown, built its story around this reputation for crime. This reputation was part of the negative

stereotyping of immigrants that had started in the nineteenth century. Increasing multiculturalism By the twentieth century the Somali, Yemeni, Spanish, Norwegian, Italian, Caribbean and Irish immigrants were joined by other people from around the world. The 1911 census showed that there were people from fifty different nationalities living in the area. By this point, Cardiff was second only to London in terms of the concentration of black and Asian people in the UK. However, this did not stop the Chinese community from being attacked in the 1911 “Laundry Riots” when they had worked during a dockers’ strike.

The docks themselves were at their peak capacity in the years leading up to the First World War. In 1910, Captain Scott’s fateful Terra Nova Expedition sailed from there, heading to Antarctica and what they hoped would be the glory of being the first men to reach the South Pole. The previous year the Coal Exchange in Butetown had seen the world’s first million-pound cheque being written, illustrating the vast wealth that flowed through the district – even if little of it was spent there.

There was a rush to hire immigrant sailors for the merchant fleet when the First World War broke out in 1914. Hundreds of immigrant sailors from Butetown lost their lives in the war but once it was over found themselves facing violence when they returned home. As white soldiers left the army in 1919 to find that there were no jobs available, many of them attacked the black sailors in Butetown. The riots that followed left three people dead. The police blamed the white mob but the authorities responded by Credit: Neil Evans

transporting 600 black sailors to the West Indies. The Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order of 1925 made it more difficult for immigrants in Butetown to get work as they were classified as ‘aliens’ (i.e. foreigners).

The area went into sharp decline during the Depression of the 1930s as coal exports fell from their peak of 9 million tons a year to less than 5 million, with oil became the dominant source of fuel around the world. As a result there were fewer and fewer ships passing through the docks. This decline was briefly reversed by the Second World War when, once again, Butetown residents went to sea as part of the Atlantic convoys, while the docks and the surrounding area were heavily bombed. Multicultural life in Butetown in the mid-twentieth century

After the Second World War, 2 000 Somalis and their families were settled in Tiger Bay... Like other

Cardiff residents, in their spare time they liked to drink hot milk and play cards at Ben Ali’s dockside boarding-house. Some also attended a mosque on

Sophia Street...

Caribbean people would socialise at the Caribbean

Café at 185a Bute Road and had built up a local team for their much-loved sport, cricket. They used to worship at the Loudon Square Mission Church...

Walking along Bute Road in the 1940s, you would pass the Oriental Café and the Chop Suey Café on Bute Road were where Chinese people would socialise, and by the 1950s there was a Chinese laundry on almost every major street in Cardiff. (from "Cardiff Migration Stories")

Coal exports from the Butetown docks ended in 1964, and unemployment in the area during that decade was high. Further, the condition of its predominantly nineteenth-century housing, built without proper sanitation, was increasingly run down. Tuberculosis and other diseases associated with poverty were rife. Developers moved in and the old buildings were torn down. 45 streets were demolished.

The council estate and tower blocks that replaced the Victorian housing were very poor quality by comparison, and residents were scattered to other parts of Cardiff and never returned. Both the buildings and the community were gone, something some believe was a deliberate act of destruction, arguing that buildings could have been gradually replaced, and more investment could have been made to support communities. Instead it was broken up and most traces of it removed.

Notable figures born in Tiger Bay Billy Boston’s parents were from the Caribbean and Ireland; he went on to be a star Rugby League player for Wigan scoring 571 tries in 564 games Boxer Joe Erskine’s parents were from the West Indies and Cardiff; he went on to become boxing Champion of the British Empire in 1956 Singer Shirley Bassey’s parents were from Nigeria and England; she went on to become a worldfamous singer best known for her title songs for the James Bond films.

The 1990s saw new waves of migrant settlers – refugees escaping conflicts in the Balkans and the Middle East bringing new elements of diversity to the area. At the end of that decade, when the barrage across the bay was completed the area was re-branded as Cardiff Bay. It is now home to the Mermaid Quay leisure development, the Millennium Centre and Senedd Cymru. BBC drama studios were built at Roath Lock in an area now called Porth Teigr. But this nod to the name Tiger Bay is one of few links to the area’s rich multicultural heritage. In the latter half of the twentieth century, new developments erased much of Butetown’s history, and it is to the Marquess of Bute and to Roald Dahl, who was born to Norwegian parents and spent his early years in Llandaff, that areas of the modern Cardiff Bay development are dedicated, and not to the immigrants who had made the area their home. Credit: Neil Evans

Acknowledgements "Cardiff Migration Stories" Runnymede Perspectives Series, 2012 Evans, R. 2007. Immigrants in Wales during the 20th Century. Aberystwyth. CAA Cymru