Many years after leaving Gabalfa I found myself in a community where the majority of the educated and privileged, the sophisticated and traveled, the lawyers and accountants, and politicians and social figures were black. And we whites were in the minority, locals and expatriates. And, with the exception of a small number of seriously professional players, we British Expatriates did not compare well with the population at large. In fact, to some extent, we were embarrassing. But that is to prejudicially label a group of people largely composed of upright citizens with the more unfavorable characteristics of the few. So, the shoe was definitely on the other foot.
Looking back at my early years in Gabalfa and attending Cathays High School for Boys, Cardiff, I have some defining racial moments.
On the estate was a “coloured” family as the term was used then. One coloured family. Even though below Bute Street Bridge lived a large coloured community. The boys in that family were tough no-nonsense kids who earned our respect and admiration, and became leaders. In Cathays High there was a black boy called Baker ( I can’t recall his first name ) who at lunch one day in the refectory picked up his gravy and potato laden plate and shoved it right in the face of the nasty bully who had been taunting him. We cheered and stamped our feet and threw things in the air and all hell let loose with appropriate canings subsequently. Except in the case of Baker, who was merely standing up for himself, something which we all wished we had the courage to do. There were other boys of light-skinned ethnicity ,mainly from The Docks, who excelled at science, maths, and sports and whom we all revered as our peer group heroes. Not because of their colour but because of their prowess.
A group of Cathays boys were asked to collect examples of rock from Penarth beach. On our return we took the subway tunnel from Penarth to Grangetown, and with our hands full of ominous looking rocks, we walked up what was then the old Bute Street. Black women sachey-d along with bundles of washing on their heads. Arabs sat at the kerbside throwing small stones and catching them on the backs of their hands. An elderly asian man pulled two giggling girls in a rickety rickshaw, and the trams and trolleys went to and fro. Old shopfronts displayed faded dresses and bolts of fabrics in their dusty windows. The Cardiff in which we lived might have been a whole world away from this cosmopolitan world of the dispossessed from all the nations of the earth, and particularly from those countries which were part of The British Commonwealth, and The British Empire, and yet it was just under the Bute Street Bridge between The City and The Docks.
It would be many years before homes and the streets of Cardiff would be filled representatively with the ethnic peoples for whom Wales and Cardiff had been home for more generations than many white people who had migrated to the city.