TIGER BAY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 14 December 1942, Page 5

TIGER BAY

ONE WARDEN’S POST. AND FOURTEEN NATIONALITIES. (By Eldon Moore). (Special to the “Times-Age.’’) CARDIFF. October 30. Of all the places that have felt the hate of the Hun perhaps the strangest is Tiger Ray and its warden’s post. I discovered it partly because some of its citizens have already been heard on the British Broadcasting Corporation’s overseas programmes, and partly because I was looking for fresh radio talent among them. Tiger Bay. I should explain, contains no tigers, and.it is not a bay. Otherwise the name is correct. Tiger Bay is the residential area of the dockland of Cardiff, South Wales, and it houses, probably, a greater mixture of races and colours than could be found anywhere else in the world in so small an area. In the Warden’s Post, which has figured in the B.B.C’s. Empire Service, there are fourteen nationalities, nearly as many colours of skin, and at least half a dozen religions. Yet they arc the most amicable team you could wish to meet, all united by the one thought of doing their war job. They are not left alone in that job, either, when the raids descend on Cardiff. After each warden pour, whooping, as many children as ever the Pied Piper collected and of more nationalities than the Warden’s Post. After the warden they. pour, clanking along with pails and stirrup-pumps, competing to dump their sandbags on the incendiaries and, generally, making a beanfeast out of a blitz —that in a place where there isn’t much glass, in the houses that is left, and where' the treasured mosque of the Muslim community has been shattered —and so on. That mosque, by the way. is now being rebuilt by the Colonial Office. UNITED COMMUNITY. The grown-ups vie with the children in doing their stuff. Neither wardens nor police, for instance, ever have to bother about enforcing the blackout. The neighbours see to that. In fact, it would be hard to find a community more conscious of its duties, or one more royalist and proud of being British. You should see the warden’s post, with its flags and portraits of the King and Queen, the other portraits, the Vs scrawled on the walls all over the Bay. Many elderly seamen who used to know Tiger Bay will probably say “Rubbish!” —or something rather stronger—at my description. Years ago, when they knew it, the Bay was regarded as the third worst dockland area in the world; and the police never entered it except in couples or more. Yet now, I ask my seamen readers to believe, you can stroll about it in broad daylight or the wartime blackout in complete safety —I have done it myself, unescorted and wearing clothes that were an invitation to the predatory. 1 call Tiger Bay one of the many little miracles achieved by British rule—ope of the many that have never y'6t got publicity (doing good by stealth is rather a habit of the English). But that does not explain how it was achieved. The credit is mainly due to two men—the constitutional monarch of the Bay, Divisional Inspector Pickett of the Cardiff Police, and his Prime Minister (by acclamation) Joe Mercia, of Malta. NOTABLE LEADERS. There are about six and a half feet of Inspector Pickett —all lean and sinewy—and he has been on the job in the Bay over twenty years, after serving with the R.A.F. in the last war. Of Joe Mercia there is little over five feet upwards, and about the same sideways. During the last war he was the

heavyweight champion of the Mediterranean Fleet; and he is now unofficial Mayor of Tiger Bay. Post Warden of that international Warden’s Post and quite the most colourful figure in the Bay. It’s a sight for sore eyes to see him driving his high-stepping pony through the blitzed squalor of the Bay—like most Maltese, he cannot keep away from horseflesh. Joe has been on the 8.8. C. radio several times —to Malta and elsewhere. Empire listeners, though, have not been lucky enough to hear the inspector yet. That is owing to the formalities of police regulations. But to no man is greater credit due for the attitude of his “subjects.” While nobody could be firmer on the essentials of law and order, he has also established a reputation as a friend to whom anyone can turn in moments of difficulty, so that today he and his men move about the Bay, not like sharks among the little fishes, but like Father Christmas in his home town. It is hard to see a policeman's knees owing to the children swarming round them! —fact!

Pickett trained the Warden’s Post; Joe has led them in blitzes and the community spirit 5n war time. The two of them together arc not a bad epitome of how British Imperialism works.