Driving away from Cardiff Prison on the romantically-named Central Link road towards Cardiff Bay, beloved of tourists and politicians, you’d be forgiven for failing to notice a short-lived part of Cardiff’s history, as it is no longer there. As one accelerates away from the jail, as men of goodwill are wont to do – despite the saints rushing in the opposite direction to visit the prisoners – it will take you mere seconds to pass above what used to be a Catholic enclave of 200 houses right in the heart of the Welsh capital.
My grandfather, Daniel Hurley, was born in Kinsale, County Cork; perhaps, like so many others, he sailed from Cork or Waterford as ballast in poor conditions. My fath-er’s family lived in the unimaginatively named Newtown, which was known as “Little Ireland”. Sandwiched between the main railway line to London and the busy docks, it was hardly a place of wonderful vistas or verdant pastures. One resident said there was barely a blade of grass to be seen.
The six streets that made up Newtown – Ellen Street, North Williams Street, Pendoylan Street, Pendoylan Place, Roland Street and Rosemary Street – bustled with life. As my father tells me, everyone knew everyone. It was the very essence of a community: a village within a city. And its Irish, Catholic nature made it special. It’s no exaggeration to say that the Irish of Newtown shaped the city that grew around them.
John Crichton-Stuart, 2nd Marquess of Bute, built the new docks between 1822 and 1848; Newtown was established by the 1830s. It was separated from similar housing in Adamsdown by the Swansea to Chepstow railway, which opened in 1850. After the Irish Famine in 1846-49 there were outbreaks of typhus and cholera in Cardiff, such were the awful conditions for many Irish migrants.
The 3rd Marquess of Bute, John Patrick Crichton-Stuart – said to be the richest man in the world – created a public scandal in Victorian Britain when he became a Catholic and was confirmed by Pope Pius IX. His local architectural impact was huge, and Cardiff Castle and Castell Coch were designed for him by William Burges. After his death in 1900, his heart was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.
By 1930, the decade of my father’s birth, Newtown was labelled a slum. In 1966, as part of a clearance programme, the houses were subject to compulsory purchase orders, and demolished in 1967. Residents hoped that they would be rebuilt, or that another community would be established, but they were moved into housing on the far edges of the city. The community was destroyed and many hearts broken.
The most famous resident of Newtown was “Peerless” Jim Driscoll from Ellen Street. Winner of the Lonsdale Belt in 1910, he was the British and Commonwealth Featherweight Champion and went on to fight in America. He never forgot his roots and was a tireless campaigner and fundraiser for Nazareth House, the local orphanage and retirement home. In 1875 Lord Bute gave the nuns a large house on the other side of the city.
Driscoll even passed on the chance to win the world featherweight title, having promised to take part in an exhibition match to raise funds for the orphanage. The Nazareth House fete was an important annual event into the 1970s and I remember returning home with the obligatory goldfish. My grandmother, who lived in Pendoylan Street, died in Nazareth House in the 1980s.
No doubt Driscoll’s own childhood poverty, his father having died in an accident at the docks, played a huge part in his loyalty to the orphanage children. In the days before income support my grandfather lost a leg while unloading a train at the docks. When the family were desperate it was the local Conservative Party that helped, and my father never forgot it. He rose to be president of the local Conservative Club, and we joked that he needed some gold braid befitting his station.
When Driscoll died of consumption in 1925 at the age of 44, over 100,000 people lined the streets of Cardiff for his funeral. This amazing sportsman never forgot the poor or the Faith, despite the fame he achieved. The poor and faithful didn’t forget him, either.
For anyone who lived in Newtown, St Paul’s Church was the centre of community life. In 2023, on ITV’s Vanished Wales programme, Adeola Dewis said: “Newtown was a largely Catholic community and faith was woven into daily life.”
Meanwhile on social media Maria Griffin wrote: “I remember old Mrs Anzani … all the little girls in their white dresses had to go in to see her before they went to Corpus Christi; she loved it.”
“We went to church every Sunday,” Maria Johnston said on Vanished Wales. “We never missed Mass. We went during the week. We used to say prayers before we ate food. We’d say prayers together in the morning, and my mother would always say, and I say it to my children: ‘The family that prays together stays together.’ Faith was a big part of our lives.”
The first church, a chapel with a wooden bell tower, was funded by the 3rd Marquess. It doubled as the local school, with the altar protected by a screen. The chapel was replaced in 1893, and a school built as well; there was also a hall and basement. The Hibernian Society used the basement as a headquarters, while the hall was used for wedding parties, classes, dancing, Irish lessons and other cultural events. On feasts like St Patrick’s Day and Corpus Christi, the church band would march into the town centre.
I said that nothing remains of Newtown, which isn’t quite true. Aside from a stone wall that runs along the train track, Newtown Memorial Garden was established in 2005 on Tyndall Street, once the boundary of Little Ireland. It contains a stone “knotwork” sculpture by local artist David Mackie. There is also the Vulcan pub, a neighbour, which has been relocated to St Fagans National Museum of History.
Cardiff has a vibrant Catholic history. The Corpus Christi procession, which ended in a huge open-air Mass in Cardiff Castle, was allegedly the oldest in post-Reformation Britain, with the local Catholic schoolchildren filling the streets of Cardiff in their various uniforms.
In 2017 my mother had a stroke that left her permanently disabled. She went into a nursing home, run by Angela Kelly, an old Newtown family neighbour. When Mrs Kelly died last year, her photo was placed in the lounge of the home with statues of Our Lady and the Sacred Heart for people to pay their respects. The echoes of Newtown’s Catholic identity were palpable.
Newtown was a huge part of Cardiff’s history for the best part of 150 years. I hope we will never forget the part that “Little Ireland” played in Welsh history. It certainly lives on in the hearts of those who lived there, and in their – and their descendants’ – Catholic faith.
GP Hurley is the author of The Lord Rhys Adventures: @GPHurley1, facebook.com/NewtownCardiff
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