The Short Life of Dolly Kelly

This is Dorothy Kelly, known to her friends as Dolly. She is 23 in this photograph. It is in the same style as small passport sized photographs that were popular in the Edwardian era. Note the lovely heart dangling from a choker. 

We start Dolly's story at the very start of the 20th century when she's 18. She was working as a waitress in The Philharmonic Restaurant on St Mary Street, Cardiff. 

Dorothy worked there alongside 9 other young waitresses and barmaids and a male cook and porter. 

The Philharmonic was, and still is, a large public house on one of Cardiff's main streets. It served food, held boxing matches, ping pong competitions, luncheons and also had a shooting range. The staff would have lived either in the top rooms seen in this 1890 photo, or probably rooms on the opposite side at the back. 

Copyright Cardiff Public Libraries.

We don't know if Dolly enjoyed or hated her job. It must have been something of an adventure living in the centre of a bustling Cardiff with a host of young women of the same age. 

Dorothy's life took her away from waiting on customers. Four years later, for reasons we will never know, she had 6 convictions to her name, was a 'well-known character' and was trashing her mother's house. 

After breaking one of her mother's chairs on a policeman Dotty picked up her seventh conviction.

Two months after this Dolly was working in a brothel on Cowbridge Road in Cardiff and using an alias of 'Mrs Munro' as she 'rented a room' from a Mr and Mrs Cheen.

Brothels in Edwardian Cardiff that were away from the dock area were often 'pop ups'. Someone would rent a house, take in some women, and when the neighbours complained or the police got suspicious it would shut down and move somewhere else. Dolly seemed to work here with another girl called Dotty Evans. 

When Dolly became ill she went to Cardiff infirmary for a few weeks to recover. On her return to the brothel Dolly found that not only had the owners been jailed for brothel keeping but the woman they had left in charge- Dotty- had also got herself jailed. 

Dolly blagged a neighbour who let her into the empty house. She found the keys on the kitchen table and another young prostitute called Rose Saunders joined her. They lived there for a fortnight until bailiffs came knocking about rent arrears and took some of the furniture to pay for it.
Dolly and Rose soon left in a cab and took a train to London Paddington. With her was a large trunk that she had stolen from the brothel. It contained the Gibby's possessions and when Dolly got to London she seemed to forget about it and it stayed gathering dust in a cloak room at the station. 

In January the next year the trunk and then Dorothy were tracked down and she was taken back to Cardiff by the police. The photograph at the start of this article was taken and the newspapers reported the strange headline 'Story of a Trunk'

Story of a Trunk, Remarkable charge at Cardiff, Case against Paddington Girl Breaks Down.

The Gibby's didn't get much sympathy in the court. Their brothel had been robbed while they were in prison for keeping it in the first place and Dorothy was set free. 

Not all of Dolly's court appearances appear in the newspapers. By the early 1900's they had stopped reporting every court case, choosing only to cherry pick the most interesting, so we don't know the full history of what Dolly was being arrested for. What is clear is that to her contemporaries she was notorious.

Proof of this comes in a paternity court case held a month after the trunk incident. A young woman called Isabelle was suing a young man called Sam claiming he was the father of their child (they had had sex in a cave in Penarth and on Llandaff Fields). As the young man's solicitor tried to fling as much mud as possible at Isabelle, one of his questions to her was 

'Were some of your friends woman of ill-fame? Dorothy Kelly?' 

In court Dolly's very reputation was used as a slander.  

Dolly Kelly returned to London in the months after her court case. She didn't live to see out the end of the year.

Written in the margin of the police photographic register of 1906 is the horrible note:

'Found drowned at foreshore of River Thames at Lambeth on 22nd November 1906.'

I ordered her death certificate, which is listed under 'Dolly Kelly' but it did not give much more information. 

There was an inquest on the 26th November but I have found no reports of this in the newspapers. Her address is given as unknown and she is of 'no occupation'. The only other piece of information on the certificate is the exact location that Dolly's body was found- Nelson's Wharf, Lambeth. 

I think her body was either identified by someone with only a fleeting acquaintance with her, someone who only knew her as 'Dolly Kelly', or she had something on her body that identified her name, like a letter from her mother. 

The Lambeth police must have spread the name around other police departments to find out who she was and of course the Cardiff police were well aware of Dolly's existence. 

Her drowning could be an accident, a suicide or a murder. The only thing we are certain of is the sad ending of a young woman.

As a postscript Dotty Evans, the young woman who had shared the brothel with Dolly, attempted suicide in the Canton Police Station in July of the same year. She had been arrested for being very drunk and disorderly and assaulting a policeman. In the cells she tied a garter around her neck and fell unconscious. She was only revived 20 minutes after she was discovered and in court the next day said 'Yes, I'll do it again if I get the chance, I am tired of my life.'

Dolly's Prisoner Details can be found at Glamorgan Record Office DCONC/3/2/1
Newpaper images are from Welsh Newspapers Online from National Library of Wales.
Image of Philharmonic Restaurant is copyright Cardiff Libraries. 

The Origin of 'Tiger Bay' in Cardiff.

Following on from my blog post that uncovered the reason why the red light district of Merthyr Tydfil was nicknamed 'China' (found here) in the 1840's I thought I'd do a post on 'Tiger Bay' in Cardiff. 

Although I'm not claiming to have uncovered anything particularly original I think the 'Tiger' part of the Tiger Bay name has been obscured over the years and I'll like to speak up on behalf of the Tigers.  

My main area of expertise is the first 'red-light' area of Cardiff on Charlotte Street and Whitmore Lane, which was active from the 1830's until the 1870's. Bute Street took over this mantle from the 1870's onwards and this street was at the centre of Tiger Bay. See this description from 1870: 

The 'debased women' referred to were sex workers and Bute Street, where the sailors would invariably walk along when they got to Cardiff, was where the women would look for trade. 

London's Tiger Bay

There's a few dodgy explanations of the origin of Cardiff's 'Tiger Bay' floating round on the internet including references to dangerous tides and waves that looked like tigers. None of these have any evidence behind them and thankfully the Wikipedia article on Cardiff's Tiger Bay explains the origin of the name:

'The name "Tiger Bay" was applied in popular literature and slang (especially that of sailors) to any dock or seaside neighbourhood which shared a similar notoriety for danger.'

This is the origin of the term and if we go to London in the 1860's we find that 'Tiger Bay' was used as another name for Bluegate Fields, a slum area that existed just north of the old east London docks. It's the place where Dorian Gray goes to smoke opium in the famous novel and was part of St George's-in-the-East parish. 

This description from 1865 deserves to be read in full: 

TIGER BAY

This portion of thief-London, which has lately been made somewhat prominent by newspaper allusions and descriptive articles respecting a few of its inhabitants, is generally associated in the public mind with dangerous ruffianism and unscrupulous crime. This is, in a sense, true enough; but he who goes to Tiger Bay in the expectation of meeting with roaring, riotous vice, or in fear of sudden and desperate robbery, would altogether mistake the place. It is true that the unsuspecting wayfarer going through some of these dark alleys might be suddenly pounced upon by a couple of ruffians and be robbed and half stifled, but it is not this sort of crime which gives its name to Tiger Bay. 
The tigers are, for the most part, quiet in their lairs; slinking, watchful, crouching, cruel beasts, who wait there, sharpening their claws, and looking with hungry eyes for the prey that their treacherous she-cats bring down. Jack (the sailor) is their prey chiefly; they half live on him, and he knows it, and so upon these shallows, where he is lured to his destruction, he has bestowed the name of Tiger Bay; for to him the tiger, - as a land animal, to cope with which he is unequal, is more expressive than the shark who meets him on a more congenial element, and therefore, - "Tiger Bay."

The dwelling-place of the ruffian and the thief- Tiger Bay is not named after these, but takes its name from the brothels and those who keep them - the harpies and harlots who deal with drugged liquor, and the slinking bullies who come, like foul beasts, about the prey.

The man who wrote this spent time in the area (he even tried to get out of his head in one of the opium dens there) so he knew the community first hand.

So the 'treacherous she-cats' or the Tigers of London's Tiger Bay were the sex workers who, occasionally, robbed unwary sailors. 

Cardiff's Tiger Bay

Back to Cardiff. As the dock traffic increased and more and more sailors came to the town throughout the 1860's and 1870's, the area around Bute Street served their thirst for drink and women. It became even more prominent when the brothels of Charlotte Street and Whitmore Lane were bought up or shut down by 1869. There were many drinking houses, brothels and prostitutes active on and around Bute Street. Here's a letter to the Western Mail in 1878:

The sailors, many of whom would have been familiar with London docks, brought the 'Tiger Bay' slang name with them to this part of Wales to describe exactly the same thing as in London. 

As far as I can make out 'Tiger Bay' was first used to describe Cardiff's docks in the 1880's. The first reference I can find in Welsh Newspapers online from the National Library of Wales is a tongue in cheek letter from 1882 in which the writer, who is clearly living in Cardiff, signs himself off as:

"John Snob, Captain, Salvation Army.

The Barracks, Tiger Bay."

But it takes another three years to 1885 to find a proper use of the phrase in an article entitled "The New Criminal Law at Cardiff" which describes how the Head Constable of Cardiff had evicted all the sex workers from the brothels. Here the newspaper has to explain the phrase "Tiger Bay" to its readers:

'The houses formerly occupied by the girls are spread over a number of streets running off Bute Road (Bute Street), the district being locally known as "Tiger Bay." The "bay" is not a nice place to look at, and its inhabitants are not the most refined people on the face of the earth. They consist principally of dock labourers, members of the seafaring community, boarding-house keepers, and females of uncertain virtue. Squalor reigns everywhere, rows are frequent, and on the whole it may be said that the "bay" is a very desirable place- to live out of it.'

So begins the use of 'Tiger Bay'. After 1885 "Tiger Bay" is used to describe the area around Bute Street, usually when the article is about crime. 

An article on a murder in 1887 re-enforces the idea that Tiger Bay was a name given by the sailors. The 'rough locality, known amongst seafaring men as "Tiger Bay"':

Because the press love a good nickname 'Tiger Bay' was used with increasing frequency: 

This from 1886:

And this from 1888 at the height of the Ripper craze in London: 

The 1890's saw a marked increase in references to Tiger Bay, especially when the articles were about drunkenness, prostitution and crime, and also especially crime committed by black and ethnic minorities, such as this 'zulu' case: 

The 'Tiger Bay' name stuck, although I doubt in the beginning whether the locals used it to describe where they lived- they would more likely use Butetown or Cardiff Docks. It was more of an derogatory 'outsider' term to be savoured by newspaper readers sat in their suburbs.

Now, and rightly so, Tiger Bay is synonymous with it's multi-cultural history but the original Tigers of Cardiff's Tiger Bay were the Victorian sex-workers who earned their living in the streets around Bute Street and the name is derived from a previous use in London's East End.   

This post is dedicated to Neil Sinclair who recently passed away. His contribution to the history of Tiger Bay is immense. See his 2013 book The Tiger Bay Story for more information about this unique place and community. 

References:

'Women Tearing each others hair' and 'A By Street by Night' are from an article on the Salvation Army in Tiger Bay from Evening Express October 13th 1893 p.3.
Wikipedia entry for Tiger Bay. Here.
Bluegate Fields wikipedia page is here.
Tiger Bay 1865 description from The Pauper, The Thief and the Convict by Thomas Archer from the wonderful Victorian London website link here. A description of a visit to the London Tiger Bay can be found here.
1882 description of area off Radcliffe Highway link here.
Bute Street Nuisance Western Mail 1878 August 13th p.4.
1882 John Snob letter is in Western Mail 8th December 1882. p.4.
1885 first description Cardiff Times November 7th 1885. Interestingly a counter was included in an editorial of the same week, it reads thus:

'In connection with the subject, I may mention that I have had some more letters as to the character of Tiger Bay. I presume they are from sensitive residents, and for their satisfaction I have great pleasure in saying to them that there is really no need for them to be under a misapprehension as to the general belief of the respectability of many of the inhabitants of the district. It is hardly the Belgravia (a posh area of London) of Cardiff perhaps, but neither is it all bad. Everybody is quite aware of this, and there is no need for the respectable part of the inhabitants to think that they have been classed with the disreputable.' South Wales Daily News 6th November 1885 p.2.

Rough Locality South Wales Echo 18th August 1887 p.2.
Peeps Behind the Scenes: Western Mail 15th May 1886 p.4.
Jack: South Wales Daily News 8th October 1888.
Zulu: Weekly Mail 3rd April 1897 p.2.

The Twelve Day Death of Eliza Lewis

This one is perhaps one of the darkest stories I have come across in my research and it involved two Charlotte Street women.

First we have to go back to 1863 when a house was found ablaze in the morning:

The arsonist was found to be a girl called Elizabeth Tregall and she was brought before the court on the Saturday:

Elizabeth would spend the next two nights in a cell at the police station on St Mary Street. She was back in court on the Monday:

So they let her off an arson charge but she got three months hard labour for vagrancy, probably in  Cardiff Gaol. 

However the original Police Court records of this case paint a different picture. Elizabeth Tregall only looked 15 years old because she was emaciated and malnourished. She was actually in her early twenties. PC Surcombe states:

"She has no employment, she said her husband was at sea" 

Also Sergeant Glass states:

"I have known prisoner 5 or 6 months. She is married but her husband has left her and she has been on the town . She has no home and nowhere to sleep. I see her wonder round the streets every night."(This description means she was homeless rather than working as a prostitute)

While in Cardiff Gaol Eliza would have met Adeliade Paine, Annie Yarwood and Mary Murphy, all experienced brothel keepers from Charlotte Street and Whitmore Lane who were also there at this time. Also there was Sue Walker, in for smashing the windows of her old brothel on Charlotte Street and Catherine Mitchell, a prostitute in for stopping men and using foul language.  

So if Elizabeth wasn't familiar with prostitution in Cardiff before gaol she certainly would have known all about it by the time she left. 

Cut to a year later and an Elizabeth Lewis (bear with me on the name) is up for soliciting on Bute Street:

"Three sailors were coming up. Prisoner caught hold of one between the legs and behaved in a very disorderly way."

Then next year our Elizabeth resurfaces as Eliza on Charlotte Street in April 1865:

It reads:

"At 12:30 on Sat night saw prisoner drunk in Charlotte St. She was hollering and shouting- she is a prostitute. 7 days Hard Labour"

So Eliza was back in gaol. She was picked up again the next month:

"Last night at one o'clock saw defendant in Nelson Street drunk and behaving in a very riotous manner using obscene language. She is a prostitute. Cautioned."

Things then came to a dramatic conclusion in February 1866 and is evidence of the name change:

The other newspaper report gives more information but not the alias:

See my other blog post on the Glamorganshire Canal for more background on how common this was. This lock on the junction canal still exists today.

The body they had pulled from the canal was badly decomposed and so Elizabeth Lewis/Tregall was pronounced dead at the inquest and a death certificate was issued for her. She was hurriedly buried at Cathays Cemetary. 

The thing is the body wasn't Eliza. For twelve days Eliza Lewis was walking dead and buried on the streets of Cardiff.

Ten days later the lock gates on the junction canal were not shutting properly. The workman overseeing the lock used his grappling hooks to remove the blockage. He pulled up the mutilated corpse of a baby girl. The sixth month old was wearing clothes from Cardiff Workhouse:

This led to enquiries being made at the workhouse and soon enough the mistake was realised.

The woman's body wasn't Eliza but Mary Wheelan who had taken her daughter Catherine out of the workhouse on Sunday to go to chapel. Mary had possibly slit her baby's throat before she hugged her daughter and jumped into the canal. I think the doctor is sparing the dead mother here in his sudden change of mind about the cut- is it not doubtful that two huge lock gates could make a clean cut from ear to ear of a six month old baby?

Mary Wheelan herself had probably worked as a prostitute on Charlotte Street as she was assaulted there by a bully in June 1865, two months before she gave birth to Catherine in the workhouse. 

Of course it is possible she fell in by accident, the Junction Canal ran under Bute Street, but it seems probable this was a suicide.

Why she committed suicide and murdered her child we will never know but post-natal depression, desperation and despair must have lain at the root of the cause.

Interestingly it seems that the deaths of Mary and Catherine were not registered officially, even though Eliza's incorrect death was. The Burial Register at Cathays was also not altered so the grave is still named as Elizabeth Lewis, there is no indication her daughters body was buried with her. Surely this is the result of some highly insensitive bureaucratic oversight after the inquest. 

As for Eliza Lewis being dead did not stop her:

That is from the July after she was recorded as dead in February.

In November of the same year Eliza was stripping clothes lines along Bute Street:

Eliza was sentenced to a year in gaol for this offence. 

There the trail goes cold for Eliza. I can't be sure when she died or if she remarried as the name Elizabeth Lewis is so common, she certainly did not carry on as Elizabeth Tregall. 

References
Fire: Cardiff and Merthyr Guardian 29th May 1863 p.8.
Saturday Court and Monday court are the same reference.
Police Court is Glamorgan Record Office PSCBO/1/39 Elizabeth Tregall 23rd May 1863. The other women in Cardiff gaol are also from this record in May and June 1863. I can find no record of any Tregall living in Cardiff in this time, or any marriage between a Tregall and an Elizabeth either, though it is highly likely they are from Cornwall.
Catching hold of sailors is PSCBO/1/42 Elizabeth Lewis 4th June 1864
Prostitution charges PSCBO/1/44 Eliza Lewis 24th April and 17th May 1865.
Inquest on Eliza Lewis MM 10 February 1866 p.8. and Cardiff Times 9 February 1866 p.5. Death Certificate is March quarter 1866 Cardiff 11a 164. Cathays Cemetary plot K929.
Mary Wheelan inquest Cardiff Times 23 February 1866 p.5. Her daughter is Catherine Wheelan see birth Cardiff Sept Quart 11a 259.
Mary Wheelan on Charlotte Street is Cardiff Times 9 June 1865 p.7. and PSCBO/1/45 Thomas Davies 7th June 1865. Strangely Thomas Davies alias Clark was sentenced to a year imprisonment at the New Year Assizes in 1866 for theft of meat from Bute Street- he could be the bully that Eliza Tregall was supposedly bereaving when it was thought she had committed suicide.
Eliza tea can theft: CT 20 July 1866 p.8.
Eliza clothes theft: CT 2 November 1866 p.6. and trial CT 12 January 1867 p.8

The Whore and the Mayoress: The Death of Bristol Eliza.

The Golden Cross: Whitmore Lane on the left c.1890. Image National Library of Wales.

The Whore and the Mayoress: The Death of Bristol Eliza

I am currently writing a book on Charlotte Street and Whitmore Lane in Cardiff, two streets notorious for prostitution, drink, violence and theft. From 1840-1870 it was a community unique in Cardiff's history and one that is currently quite unknown. See my earlier post on the general background of the book for more information on the growing art and narrative history project.

One of the most interesting events in my research so far has been the case of Eliza Wells. This is the text from my book.

Monday April 15th 1850

Merry Meyrick is woken up at Ann Llewellyn’s brothel. She gets the message that Bristol Eliza wants her because she is dying. Eliza used to be a servant from Bristol and worked on the Lane with Merry when she came to Cardiff. For the last three years she’s been going in and out of the workhouse with her injuries, big open sores on her legs that she got from a bully kicking three years ago. Wounds that just won’t heal. Syphilis has ravaged her body, there are weeping sores on her hands and feet, massive lesions and growths all over. To dull the pain Eliza’s been taking an ounce of laudanum a day for years, Merry often gets the laudanum for her and she takes half an ounce at a time from a small phial and then a drop of water. Recently it's got so bad that if she tries to speak or move too much she’s soon asleep.  

Merry walks down Whitmore Lane to Mrs Prothero’s brothel where Eliza has been lodging for years. Eliza is in a very bad state, weak, haggard and withered. She looks about 50 years old but has only lived 23 short years. She quietly tells Merry that she is dying and that she has seen it coming in her dreams. Merry doesn’t really know what to say so she talks to her of praying to God for solace. They say a prayer together and sit for a while. In the afternoon Eliza says she wants someone to read the bible to her. Merry can read and write a little but she knows her words will be slow and stumbling so Mrs Prothero sends for one of the few well educated people that they have had contact with. 

Mrs Vachell, the mayoress, who knows the girls from the courts and the streets comes within the half hour. She reads to Eliza and prays with her. Eliza asks to be turned from one side to another to ease the pain on her sore body and then she dies. When they try to move her body for the coroner blood gushes out of her mouth and nostrils. The inquest says that she died by the visitation of God.

So why does this sad event interest me so much? It gives an extremely rare behind the scenes insight into the human relationships of the many brothels on Charlotte Street and Whitmore Lane. It is also  evidence of the camaraderie and community that I hoped existed in this much maligned community. Here's some background information on the main people:

Mrs Prothero ran a brothel on Whitmore Lane from at least 1839 until her death aged 84 in 1857. It was in a commanding position at number 44 Whitmore Lane, right next door to the Custom House where the sailors were paid their wages. It also operated in conjunction with a pub on Charlotte Street that was called 'The Navigators Arms' 1841-1849, 'The Lame Chicken' up until 1851 and then 'Noah's Ark' until 1855. This notorious beer house was run by Mrs Prothero's daughter and son-in-law and it supplied drunken customers for the brothel and also out of hours beer.

Mrs Prothero's brothel or 'lodging house' at 44 Whitmore Lane, 1851. All five women listed were active prostitutes, 'girls of ill fame' has been written down by the census taker then later crossed out.

Merry Meyrick is Maria Meyrick, a Cardiff born girl who turned to prostitution in the Friar's Fields area of Newport around 1841 at the age of 19.  She returned to Cardiff in 1845 after she was severely beaten by her bully and almost killed. At first Maria worked mainly out of the Gloucester Arms beerhouse at 28 Charlotte Street but like most other girls she moved from pub to pub and brothel to brothel. She could be vicious and was an accessory in the murder of a man in 1847 when she assaulted his landlady Peggy the Sweep for bringing a light out to her own door. She was transported to Van Dieman's Land in 1851 for a brothel theft at the Noah's Ark. (Her nickname Merry comes from a report in a Hobart newspaper- Maria liked to wear pink dresses.)

1841 census record for Eliza Wells, aged 15.

Maria Meyrick showed another side of her character though with Bristol Eliza (place name nicknames were common in these streets, Liverpool Dick, Swansea Dan, Swansea Sue and Gloucester Bill were all living on Charlotte Street and Whitmore Lane). Eliza Wells was indeed from Bristol and was a house servant for a skilled working class family on Lawrence Hill in 1841. When she moved to Cardiff is unknown as she seemed to stay out of trouble with the authorities but by February 1847 she was very unwell. She entered the Cardiff Union Workhouse as a destitute prostitute and with 'wounds on legs'. She seems to have admitted herself voluntarily for medical help for short periods and discharged herself on the 16th February, 15th April and 24th July 1847. 

Cardiff Union Workhouse admissions register 1847 listing Eliza Wells

The inquest says that the wounds on her legs were originally caused by kicks from a bully (pimp). There was endemic violence towards prostitutes from their bullies right through the Victorian era and kicking was as popular as punching. Why the wounds did not heal though is due to the syphilis she had contracted. The inquest does not say this explicitly, preferring to call it 'the disease to which unfortunate women are peculiarly liable' and 'a certain disease'. Eliza was obviously in the latter stages of syphilis and her body would have been a mass of painful sores. She would have also probably suffered from growths around her vagina and anus, hair loss, swollen glands, tiredness, headaches and joint pains. As she worsened further she would have had vision and heart problems, numbness, loss of co-ordination and she died from either a laudanum overdose, meningitis, strokes or dementia like symptoms as her brain rotted.

The inquest also says that laudanum, a flavoured medicine of 10% opium and 90% alcohol, was easily accessible from the chemist and that it was low cost and commonly used by the prostitutes. It was a cheaper way of getting wasted than alcohol and was also an effective pain reliever. Laudanum misuse was a massively under reported problem in Cardiff and I have only come across one other reference to it in this time period when Ann Llewellyn, who Maria Meyrick was lodging with, took an overdose in January 1857. This was probably a suicide attempt as she was about to be given a four year sentence for a robbery.

What interests me with all this information is that Mrs Prothero, Maria Meyrick and others obviously took care of Eliza Wells over a three year period. I think a common assumption with a case like this is that Eliza would have been forced out of the brothel as she was no longer economically viable and would have died in the workhouse. The opposite seems true here however as she died in bed surrounded by friends. There was no way she could have paid any rent or bought laudanum by her own means especially in the latter years or months of her life yet this is what happened. The relevant records for the workhouse do not survive for this period but I doubt if she was a candidate for outdoor relief from the Poor Law authorities so what we have is a brothel owner and a working prostitute looking after one of their own and caring for them.

The mayoresses' involvement is also interesting. Mrs Vachell probably came into contact with Mrs Prothero and her girls either through the police courts and magistrates or through some civic charitable cause, although I have found no charity involvement recorded this early- all of the 'homes for fallen women' and church work seemed to have started in the 1860's. I find it very consoling that a 'lady of the pave' could go out on a Monday morning to the mayors house and ask her to come and read to a dying syphilitic. 

Eliza Wells was buried April 17th 1850 at St Mary the Virgin Cardiff aged 23 and I like to think that her funeral was well attended by her friends. I am glad that she was looked after. 

St Mary the Virgin Church Burial Record for Eliza Wells, 1850.

References available. 

Article in it's current form is copyright Anthony Rhys 2017.

Notorious: Charlotte Street and 'The Lane'.

 

Whitmore Lane on the left. The Golden Cross circa 1890. National Museums of Wales.

Sex, violence, theft and death in Cardiff.

Anne Awberry, prostitute and drunk, from the Carmarthen 'Notorious' show.

My next project is a book with paintings based on thirty people living in two streets in Cardiff- Charlotte Street and Whitmore Lane over a thirty year period. It sounds a but dry but bear with me on this one. The two streets were back to back and connected with a maze of lanes and outbuildings.

Charlotte Street and Whitmore Lane 1851, Cardiff Central Station is bottom left. Glamorgan Record Office.

Even if you live in Cardiff chances are you won't have heard of them. They were purposefully destroyed by the Cardiff Corporation- Whitmore Lane was renamed Custom House Street in 1872 and Charlotte Street was demolished soon after and now lies under the Marriott Hotel. Only one building, The Golden Cross, remains in a rebuilt form on the original streets. In their time from the 1830's to the 1870's these two streets were truly notorious and full of brothels, beerhouses and lodging houses. A unique community of prostitutes, gangsters, thieves, pimps, boatmen, sailors and the poor emerged there - streets of vice and pleasure.

Two of my previous shows have used historical sources from Carmarthen and Merthyr Tydfil as a basis for my paintings so this project is a natural progression.

Bute Street, which was round the corner, is still well known in Cardiff as having been an area for pubs and prostitutes. Cardiff Bay/Tiger Bay further towards the coast has a semi-mythical status now as a unique and multicultural community but it came later in the 1870's and 1880's. The story of Charlotte Street and Whitmore Lane is unknown. Google searches reveal very little, academic books and articles make brief mention of it. It was a liminal area inhabited by unique subcultures. It was half town half docks, half working class half criminal, half land half water, half Welsh half Irish, half pleasure and half pain. It was a place of sex, violence, money, disease, prison and transportation, drink and drugs, laughter and death.
This is how it was described looking back in 1901:

Cardiff Times 1901 May 4th p.4.

Don't think I am exaggerating just because you may not heard of Charlotte Street and Whitmore Lane. The newspapers of the time are riddled with condemnation of these two streets. In 1860:
'The name I see written on a wall in black letters, which seem to be in mourning for lost characters- lost virtue- lost purses- lost everything relating to genuine happiness and respectability, and which letters form 'Whitmore Lane'... dens of infamy, shoeless feet, broken heads, flat noses, beds full of innumerable, diminutive, bona fide lodgers of biting and teasing propensities.' Cardiff Times February 25th, p.7.
The place of women in this community was central, pivotal and strong. They owned and ran brothels and beerhouses, they were prostitutes and thieves, they were drunk and violent and they also made money on their own terms. Disability was not always a hindrance there either and one of Whitmore Lane's most important figures, Mary The Cripple, a woman severely disabled from birth, managed to thrive and support an extended family there through difficult times. She is a character unique in Welsh history. I have unearthed the lives and stories of many other individuals who were not content to live their lives according to the socially acceptable roles of the time.

Mrs Prothero's brothel on the 1851 census, age 73 her house includes her house manager Mary Davies and four prostitutes including 'The Grenadier' from Chester and 'Little Punch' from Swansea. It operated for at least twenty years.

The thirty people I write about in the book are all social outcasts to some extent, more than half of them are female and three of them disabled. All of them are intriguing. For their story I have trawled whatever sources are available- newspaper reports, censuses, gaol and workhouse records, birth, death and marriage certificates, court records and maps. Their stories interweave with each other throughout the thirty years and it is almost possible to recreate the community through their lives. I am turning these historical sources into a ‘creative history’ or ‘narrative history’ format, that I have admired in the work of historians such as Helen Rogers and Lesley Hulonce.

I am primarily a painter though and so this book will cross creative and historical boundaries by containing thirty portraits of the main people within it. I want to illustrate these people, because as far as I am aware there is only one photograph extant of them, a prisoner mugshot from the mid 1870's of one of the bullies of Whitmore Lane. There are also no photographs of the streets either from the time, the one heading this post being the closest I can find. 


Daniel Davies, aka 'Swansea Dan', a boatman and bully from Whitmore Lane. The photograph was taken in Pentonville Prison in June 1876 after a charge of shooting. He has an abscess on his hand. Source: National Archives.

I am intensely passionate about this book as on a personal note my family lived there from the 1830’s until 1865. My grandmother knew her grandfather who was born there so the link is historical and biological. My family were (unfortunately) not notorious enough to be in this book but they do appear in the sidelines. They would have known everyone in it, they would have heard about every event on the street, they lived it and they are a part of me. 

So, utilising (so far) over 4,000 individual sources of information about these people, I’m drafting through the finished work. It’s currently around 90,000 words long with 30 paintings to do alongside it.

I can’t wait to introduce you to Kitty Pig Eyes, Lewis Leyshon, Mary the Cripple, The Notorious Jack Matthews, Swansea Sue, Mrs Prothero, Billy Shortlegs, Harry Kickup and the rest of the formidable cast of Notorious who hung around the Lame Chicken, The Kings Head, The Flying Eagle and the many brothels of Charlotte Street and Whitmore Lane.

The text is in a very rough draft form still as I've only recently added all of the core information in order but here's a flavour from 1841.

'Mrs Prothero, at 63 years of age, is the oldest owner of the oldest brothel in Cardiff. It gets the lion share of the business on Whitmore Lane, partly because it's right next to the Custom house where the sailors get paid off, partly because Mrs Prothero knows the game inside out. She’s also a light sleeper, alert to the comings and goings and a door banging nearby in the early hours rouses her. Hearing shouts of ‘Driver!’ from across the road she knows full well that the boatman William Bennett is in trouble again. The copper on duty has heard a grunting in a lane. He’s looked over a fence and seen Driver in the moonlight in a garden, digging up a stashed stolen goose. Mrs Prothero glides downstairs to her door in time to see Driver smashing in the head of the policeman with an iron bar. The copper has hold of Driver’s collar and manages a smash back on the head with his staff but then he faints. Driver runs off but is soon caught. Having no love for the thug, Mrs Prothero testifies in court that she saw him and he gets four months in Swansea Gaol.'

'Hard labour at the house of correction means grabbing a bar and walking up the steps of a giant wheel with a group of other inmates, turning it for no reason. Ten minutes on the wheel, five minutes off and you do that for eight hours straight.  Driver lasts six days then he dares to talk at the wheel. He’s sent to the dark cell for three nights of solitude on bread and water with nothing but a bowl to piss in.'

Driver goes on to beat children and punch sick women, but he gets his dues one dark night near the docks.....

For further reading on academic views on my paintings and their links to history please see:

Neo-Victorian review from BAVS2016 conference. by Emily Turner from Sussex University.  

Resoundingly Neo-Victorian Biofiction in Paint: Review of Anthony Rhys’s Notorious
Marie-Luise Kohlke

In Neo-Victorian Studies 8:2 2016. (Should be online but the link is down!)

Anthony Rhys 28th January 2017