CARDIFFREMEMBERED Port used by landlord to quell arguments between customers

EMRYS Jones, back in 1927, wrote a series of “Old Inns of South Wales” articles for the Evening Express which later became the South Wales Echo and Evening Express.

In one of them, he wrote: “Another glimpse of old Cardiff rewards you if you turn off St Mary Street up through narrow Church Street, and take your stand before ‘Ye Olde Dolphin.’

“This inn has not merely an old name to please the antiquary; its associations are over a hundred years old.”

He goes on to tell us that the streets back then were little more than carttracks, hedged between wooden fences, set all awry.

And the roofs of the houses that existed sagged dangerously in the middle.

We learn that all the stones of these low-built dwellings were moss patched and weather worn.

In fact, the only two buildings that stood above the rest were the Castle and St John’s Church.

Apparently, this inn was in place two years before “the Iron Duke broke Napoleon at Waterloo” and its hardworking host was Tailor Winstone.

We are told that Tailor, upon seeing an exchange of sharp words between two of his patrons that might lead to a duel in Llandaff Fields, would pour oil on the troubled waters by fetching from the deep recesses of his cellar a bottle of his oldest port.

The port was of such a quality that “Whig and Tory would forget their differences and act like gentlemen”, while also incidentally swelling the coffers of Ye Olde Dolphin.

Then, in the bright moonlight, they would walk arm in arm down Church Street off to the Angel Hotel to snatch an hour of sleep before the mail coach set out, with each vowing – by virtue of