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You are in the company of Roger Warren Evans | ||||||
My father Warren - (he loved his other name Ceredig, but never quite had the courage adopt it, in Cardiff professional circles. which were very English - found his niche in service as an elected Councillor - a Parish Councillor as well as a District Councillor, a Justice of the Peace, Member of the local Watch Committee (overseeing the Police) and Chairman of the Grammar School Governors - founding Chairman, when the School was formed in 1935.
The "District" was Cardiff Rural District , a large suburban and rural area Cardiff to the North and West - when standing for the District Council, he followed local convention and stood as an
"Independent" - in national terms, he had always supported the Liberal Party, albeit its managerialist wing. He was a Keynesian to the core, with a total belief that The economy could be managed out of "Depression" - he was a child of the Liberals' Yellow Book of 1929, which figured prominently even on our post-War bookshelves "UNEMPLOYMENT What Can Be Done?" . My earliest political memory is of delivering his Election leaflets, when I was 10 and he was 59, in 1946 - in Whitchurch, I absorbed all my ideas about civic responsibility, and the duty of citizen to take action to improve his society - a strong admixture of the doctrines of Calvinism, which doctrinally aligned the position of
Whitchurch Parish Council was abolished in 1962, and absorbed into the City of Cardiff - in later years, as
a young
barrister in 1962, I was briefed to represent Whitchurch Parish Council in its forlorn attempt to resist the tidal advance of Cardiff - I went down fighting, at the 1962 public inquiry in Cardiff City Hall - but my concern with the progressive elimination of small, accessible units of government has lived with me ever since.
Our family was "Chapel", not Church - that distinction carries little resonance now, but it was still important then, in the 1940s and 1950s - Chapel was unambiguously Welsh, while Church was not - Chapel was a place, not an abstract movement - in our case, it meant Tabernacle, the Whitchurch Calvinistic Methodist chapel - it meant Sunday School and the Band of Hope - it meant the Sedd Fawr at the front of the Chapel where the Elders sat, whence they descended to make the Collection, just before the Sermon - although the language of our Chapel was English, the discourse was shot through with Welsh expressions - I became keenly aware of not speaking
Welsh, although I could already speak working French, and I was ashamed of my deficiency - I am still trying to make good that omission of my childhood, taking Welsh lessons now every Sunday afternoon...
My ambitious father had planned a private education for me and my sister - our nursery school was in Church Road, Whitchurch - "Lamorna", a large converted private-house run by a Miss Bradley and a Miss Scarfe, who would now have been identified as a Lesbian couple, but that was all sotto voce then - for my primary education I attended Llandaff Cathedral School 1946/48 - where I played rugby with David Rowe-Beddoe (later to become Chairman of the Welsh Development Agency, a Tory fundraiser confirmed-in-office by Labour - much to my disgust - in 1997) - at Llandaff, I experienced my first rejection at the hands of "The Establishment" - my boy-soprano voice was not considered sufficiently
substantial for the prestigious Llandaff Cathedral Choir - inside, I have raged against that injustice ever since.