Down the Docks, Up the Bay: The Colour Bar
“One enters into a room and history follows; one enters into a room and history precedes. History is already seated in the chair of the empty room when one arrives.”
- Dionne Brand, “A Map to the Door of No Return”
If there were no service workers in Cardiff, the city would stop overnight. Cardiff’s nightlife is the stuff of legend- and so are the legacies of multiculturalism and discrimination.
The landscapes of service work are intimately written onto the landscape and culture of Cardiff: and so are the histories of the communities that work in service. My great grandmother ran pubs in Cardiff, including what was “The Big Windsor” in contemporary Cardiff Bay. As people who have worked in service- to quote Dionne Brand- we enter a room, and history follows, but, it (history) also precedes.
Decades after my Nan’s experiences, my grandfather, a Windrush-era migrant, moved from Panjab in Pakistan. He would open a takeaway in the Vale of Glamorgan, where I was frequently babysat as a child. Our family would later go on to run another takeaway in the Garw valley, a coming-of-age rites of passage to be the third generation of the Pakistani diaspora stood behind the counter.
At 14, I became initiated into (paid) service work working in restaurants as a waitress, and later, as a bar worker. I often thought of the experiences of my Dad as a curry cook, my grandfather running a takeaway, and my great grandmother in dockland pubs as a fourth generation “emergent service worker”.
It’s impossible to discuss the heritage and history of working class Cardiffian life without alcohol, even despite its deeply embedded religious communities. Historically a city of five towns, one named “Temperance Town” sought to mitigate the impact of alcoholism on the city. Likewise, in Grangetown, south of the city, local men would drink in pits following the 1831 Sunday Closing Act which banned the sale of alcohol in Welsh pubs.
The club was ruled a crude workingman’s club, and therefore legal. One of the last remaining pubs of the Irish quarter, Newtown, called “The Vulcan'' has recently been dismantled and rebuilt brick-by-brick in Saint Fagans, the Welsh people’s history museum. But of the docks pubs that were knocked down, none are found at Saint Fagans.
In "Queering Glamorgan", a document on LGBTQ history by Glamorgan Archives, the authors explore LGBTQ pub culture. It reads that "Of course, this was also a period of social change, with new opportunities. Pubs began to turn a blind eye, and some gained an underground reputation as places to meet". I came out of the closet at 24 years old, and I have always been interested in how Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic LGBTQ people negotiated the city my family have lived in for seven generations, and soon found out about the legacies of racism, homophobia, and transphobia: along with how they shape our city today.
My favourite type of Cardiff docks history is “This pub wouldn’t serve my father, and my father and his friends turned the pub upside down”. Racism is a common theme in the oral histories of Cardiff, especially racism in pubs. This, of course, refers to the colour bar. The colour bar was a social system where Black and other Asian and minority ethnic people were barred access to the same facilities as white people. Black communities were in Cardiff as early as the mid-1800s, creating an “insider” area of Cardiff docks. The colour was as consistent to the nightlife of Cardiff as the category of the service worker.
There are no buildings from the dozens of pubs in the docks that didn’t implement the colour bar. Many LGBTQ friendly venues would have implemented the colour bar, but it’s unusual to find an exploration of racism and homophobia.
History is beneath our feet, seated in restaurants, and standing in bars. My late great grandmother ran "The Big Windsor", a pub in the southern part of Tiger Bay in Cardiff. There were dozens of Tiger Bays across the world, a term used to refer to any dock or seaside neighbourhood which shared a similar notoriety for danger.
To this day, the only remaining Cardiff docks pub is The Packet, run by Brains brewery on Bute Street. With the heavy gentrification of Butetown into Cardiff Bay, the loss of Cardiff’s pubs represent a loss of the history that took place there: but a history that still exists between people, and lives on in the legacy of discrimination in servicework and nightlife, one that is only starting to be unpacked.
Words by Yasmin Begum
Art by Helen Anne Smith