ON October 14, Neil Sinclair paid a return visit to the club with further tales of Tiger Bay. Neil was born and raised in TB and remembers John and Haley Mills making the film about the Bay in 1968. Why called “Tiger”? It is thought that Portuguese sailors approaching Cardiff docks feared the rough waters of the Bristol Channel and termed it “tiger water“.

Some of the older people of the Bay were believed to have semi-mystical powers, or so it seemed to Neil.

Recently when he was quite ill in hospital, a lady with whom he had had no contact for some years, stopped his mother in the street and told her that she had dreamt that he would recover. As far as his mother knew, nobody even knew that Neil was ill.

The demographic changes to the population of the Bay continue and Neil is concerned that the newer residents have little knowledge its history. He takes children from local schools on walks around their home areas and is continually amazed and disappointed by their lack of appreciation of what it was like to live there when he was a boy. One little girl asked him “Sir, who were seamen?” After he told them that before the barrage was built, that the sea went out, another question was “Sir, where did it go?” They all had no conception of wives being paid the wages due to their husbands whilst away at sea in cash at a local pub or the like, and not from a cash-point.

Neil has travelled to many foreign countries and makes the point that TB was not the over-crowed slum that many politicians and planners were so keen to get rid of. When Trevor Huddelston, the social reformer, visited TB in 1950, he commented that the slums of South Africa were far worse. With the rise of apartheid in Africa in the 1940’s and 50’s, politicians deliberately destroyed whole supposedly slum villages as an opportunity to disperse undesirable people groups who were socially inconvenient and Neil believes this was the same reason that North Butetown was sacrificed for the rise of South Butetown.

Many of the original houses in TB were large multi-storied town houses that over time became flats occupied by several families. This didn’t mean that they were over-crowded; the people liked and preferred to live in close contact with their friends.

Neil accepts that much of the Bay has gone and cannot be the same again but he believes that some of the £15,000,000 recently granted to South Wales for regeneration of “a deprived area “should be spent not only on roads and the like, but some spent on preserving what is left of the older buildings in the Bay, such as the Coal Exchange, which has always been a centre-piece of Cardiff’s history.

The vote of thanks was given by President Gwyn MacGuire.