COLOUR PERIL

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 620, 23 March 1929, Page 26

COLOUR PERIL

FOREIGN SAILORS AND WHITE GIRLS CARDIFF FACES PROBLEM The great peril of the growing number of liaisons and marriages between coloured men and white women, which was revealed recently in a series of special articles in "The Sunday News," has received striking confirmation. Warnings contained in these articles —warnings uttered only after the fullest investigation by a special correspondent who toured the great dock arvis - arc reiterated in a report on the subject, submitted to the Cardiff Watch Committee by Chief-Constable J. A. Wilson in reply to statements made by Mr. de Courcy Hamilton that there is an absence of decent seamen’s lodging-houses for coloured men and a great excess of drinking facilities in the Butte Road area. Cardiff, he states, has become the largest centre in this country for the engagement of coloured seamen, who, in actual practice, are firemen. They come into contact with white women, principally those of loose moral character, and children bom are halfcaste, with the vicious hereditary taint of their parents. The legislature has not taken steps to prevent or penalise relations between the white and coloured races, and this, he continues, is the crux of the whole question. There is grave doubt whether any local effort in the absence of special legislation will solve the problem or mitigate some of its worst effects. Large houses are “farmed” on the furnished room or apartment system to coloured men and white women, and some of the women are so credulous as to go through a form of marriage at the hands of a coloured man, who, so far as can be ascertained, is a self-ordained priest. Describing how these coloured men and white women meet, the chief constable refers to premises deliberately described wrongly as cafes kept by Indians and Maltese of immoral and dishonest habits, debased and degenerate types. A gap exists in the general law with regard to hours of closing of

these cafes, which arc a menace to the peace of the district and a source of much ultimate misery to those who frequent them, and in due course their half-caste offspring, about 200 hair, caste boys and 200 half-caste girls, will have to be absorbed into the com! merc.ial and domestic life of Cardi-r. The problem of the girls, he adds, jj most difficult.