NIGHTS OF RIOTING
on August 31, 1991
After the initial disturbances, people from other areas of Cardiff and Barry began travelling to the site in order to join in with the disruption. To combat the arrival of further rioters to the area, the police began turning non-locals away in what was described as a “sterile-zone”.
Over the weekend of September 1-2, estimates put the number of rioters at around 500, who threw stones, petrol bombs and fired air rifles at riot police. Twenty-two arrests were made over the initial two days.
Police arrested 11 people on September 3, including three over an incident in which a car was driven at a line of police officers. During the operation, numerous officers from the Vale of Glamorgan area were called in to assist, as well as officers from the wider South Wales region.
In total, an estimated 175 officers were mobilised at the height of the disturbances. Cardiff police were equipped with full riot gear during the unrest, the first time in the force’s history that the equipment had been used, and the force’s helicopter was deployed.
It’s a week that former First Minister Rhodri Morgan said he classed as one of the more extraordinary he had experienced when he spoke to WalesOnline on the 20th anniversary of the riots.
The Cardiff West MP at the time, who died in 2017, said his first memory of the riots was receiving a call from the Reverend Bob Morgan, alerting him to the situation.
The first evidence Mr Morgan saw of the trouble was a woman attacking the closed-up shop of Mr Waheed.
“When I arrived at the scene she was stood outside the shop, which was by now shuttered up, and was trying to hit the roller-shuttered door with her high heels and sort of kicking backwards like a mule. It was very bizarre,” Mr Morgan said.
“Then there was an egg-throwing incident – luckily it didn’t hit me or my political career might have been quite different. It struck a policeman and he was quite philosophical about it.
“The egg hit Inspector Tony Lewis while they were trying to brief me when I arrived. I’d walked up about half a mile from the Church of the Resurrection, up Grand Avenue to the ‘top shops’, as they called them.
“There was a world of difference in prosperity: the main Wilson Road shops were quite prosperous but the other ones were quite down-at-heel. But they did serve the oldest part of the community and the council houses built in the 1920s under the Homes Fit for Heroes campaign.
“Ely, in a way, is one estate but in another way it is also four estates. Part of it was built in the 1920s, between the railway line and Grand Avenue. In the 1930s they built between Grand Avenue and Cowbridge Road West, in the 1940s between Cowbridge Road West and Heol Trelai, and in the 1950s between Heol Trelai and the Ely bypass.”
Mr Morgan said there was a “very sharp gradient of prosperity” in the area, with unemployment at the time ranging from 10% in the newer parts of the estate to as much as 40% in the oldest parts.
“There was this strange stand-off going on, it was like a Greek tragedy,” he said.
“The men were in one section, the women were in another, the police were in another, the BBC and media were like a Greek chorus and then there were the MPs and councillors. You couldn’t talk to the men really as they were armed with eggs and you wanted to talk to the women and see if they could calm the men down.”
He said the trouble eventually “wore itself out” after four nights, and he blamed youths coming from other parts of the city for the rioting going on as long as it did.
Mr Morgan said he did not believe anyone had ever truly got to the bottom of why the riots started.
“It was a very depressed part of Cardiff and with the poorest housing in Ely – but what was the reason this tinderbox condition suddenly came alight?” he said.