CARDIFFREMEMBERED Brochure provides a glimpse of life in our city 87 years ago

ON ST George’s Day, April 23, 1931, the Royal Society of St George (Cardiff and District Branch) held a banquet and ball at the Whitehall Rooms, Park Hotel, in Cardiff.

I know this because a kindly reader sent me the list of guests and a table plan along with a copy of Burrow’s Pointer Guide Map of Cardiff.

Tickets for the ball cost 10 shillings and sixpence, and seated on table C was the unnamed Western Mail Lady Correspondent and also Dan Lewis of the Western Mail.

The Master of Ceremonies was a Captain AH Gadd and the toastmaster CPO Wm Lashley AM RN (Ret) of Scott’s Terra Nova and Discovery expeditions.

However, the Burrow’s Pointer Guide Map brochure is to my mind more interesting as it informs us that: “A distance of eight centuries in time but of little more than a stone’s throw in space separates the earliest and latest administrative centres of Cardiff – the Castle and the City Hall within sight of each other”.

It goes on to say: “To the stranger, knowing Cardiff only by repute as a great port and industrial centre, not the Civic Centre only but the city as a whole, with its picturesque Castle, the contrasting modernity of its streets, its wealth of public parks and its cleaniness, supply a surprising contradiction of possibly preconceived ideas.”

It goes on to say that: “Though the primitive beginnings of Cardiff as a seaport probably preceded even the Roman occupation, the first documented evidence of its importance as a shipping centre occurs in a charter of Edward II of 1324.

“In succeeding centuries, and up to the time of James I, the nefarious if profitable application of such port