You are in the company of Roger Warren Evans
| To begin at the beginning - born in Swansea, in Mumbles, on 11 December 1935 - my mother was Mary Cann , graduate biology teacher, first woman undergraduate at Swansea University in 1921 (aged 17) daughter of a Swansea builders' merchant George Cann, immigrant from Devon at the age of three, when his father came over from Devon to find work - my grandad's grandfather Abraham Cann was a professional "Prize Wrestler" in the 1830s/1840s, when it was still legal - by all accounts, a man-mountain - South Wales became a multi-cultural multi-ethnic melting-pot which shaped the liberal and egalitarian society of today - South Wales is as much English, Scottish and Irish as it is Welsh - which accounts for the hesitancy, in the 1997 Referendum, about a self-consciously "Welsh" form of provincial self-government.. Early life in Cardiff, 1936-1940 - my father Thomas Ceredig Warren Evans was a Cardiff man - I was born at my mother's parents' home in Mumbles in Swansea, because my father's parents were already long dead - 1916 (his father) and 1928 (his mother) - he had also lost his first wife in 1916, when giving birth to first-born twins - and my mother had also lost her first-born, in 1932 - Swansea seemed a safe haven, and that is where I was born. Hazy memories of Swansea before WW2 , images of the big red Mumbles train, the tramway along Swansea Bay, and of the towering columns of tiles in my grandfather's warehouse in Swansea's South Dock - in my generation, I cannot afford to live in the big detached house where I was born, though that brings no regret - | I live in a comfortable semi-detached, built in 1926 a few hundred yards away. My Cardiff grandfather Thomas Evans was a veritable pillar of Cardiff society in the 1870s and 1880s > founder of the Cardiff Steam
Pilot Boat Company, which emerged as the mainstay
of the budding Cardiff Pilotage Authority, the Trinity House body regulating access to the rapidly
growing port of Cardiff, from 1875 onwards - Thomas Evans was also President of the Cardiff Musical
Society, and a Grand Master of the Cardiff Masonic Lodge - he died of a heart attack at his
home Mayfield , while tackling a boiled egg, over breakfast
in 1916. Thomas Evans had brought his
family to Cardiff from New Quay and Aberaeron in Cardiganshire, in mid-century - my own
father was their fifth child, born in Cardiff in 1887 - like my mother's father George Cann,
Thomas Evans had been attracted to South Wales by dreams of wealth and work.
My wife Elizabeth (nee James) also has English grandparents, the Berretts, who
came in from Gloucestershire. We are both of Welsh parentage, with English antecedents. Late
19th century South Wales was a great melting-pot of immigrants from both Britain and abroad -
it is
still a multi-ethnic community, accommodating ethnic diversity, although with little
recent practice of multi-culturalism. That world was
shattered by WW2 More...
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