This book is the history of St. Peter’s Rugby Football Club for its first hundred years from 1886. The Club began as the Parish Club of St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church, Roath, Cardiff and retains its links to this day.
There was a time when a reference to St. Peter’s was normally accompanied by the suffix ‘Cardiff’ in order to identify the Club accurately. It is fair to say that the suffix has long been redundant since there are few in Welsh rugby who do not know of St. Peter’s R.F.C.
The Club in 1986 is a credit to all those who have gone before. Its facilities are second to none and its achievements particularly in recent years mark it as one of the strongest Clubs outside the first class grouping in the whole of Wales.
A glance at the Appendices showing the results of last season will illustrate the point more powerfully than words.
Those who founded the Club and those who worked so hard through its difficult years would surely be proud of it today. This book is dedicated to them.
The beginnings of St. Peter’s R.F.C. lie inextricably in the origins of the modern Roman Catholic community of Cardiff. The rise of the Catholic population and its influence on sporting life paralleled the rise in prominence of the town itself.
In the early years of the nineteenth century Cardiff was barely stirring from a pattern which had been set for centuries. In spite of its medieval history and ancient castle, time had fashioned little change within the town boundaries. There were few Catholics in Cardiff in the period following the Reformation, whilst in 1800 the total population was not much more than 1,000.
The advent of the Industrial Revolution changed Cardiff, as it did so many places, beyond recognition. As the docks, the Glamorganshire Canal and the railways were built the town grew at an alarming pace. Its new found inhabitants arrived in waves from the farming communities of West Wales and the West Country and from over the Irish Sea. By 1829 the Catholic population of the town had reached 1,000. The total population was about 12,000 in 1837 and in the next fifty years it mush-roomed to over 150,000.
Such expansion was not without problems. In 1847 there was an anti-Catholic riot after a death and 200 Catholic railway workers entered the town armed with pick axes to demand better police protection. There were only about twelve policemen in Cardiff at this time, some of whom were described in a local journal as ‘decrepit old men’.
In 1855, at the request of Bishop Brown, priests from the Rosminian Order, the Institute of Charity, arrived in Cardiff. It was a relatively new order founded by Fr. Antonio Rosmini in 1828. Hence the three priests were Italian and they had only one church, St. David’s, which had been built in 1855. It was obvious that the rapidly growing population needed a second church and the Rosminians immediately decided to build one.
There was some debate about whether to locate the new church west of the river Taff in Cowbridge Road but Fr. Gastaldi, the senior priest, decided to build just within the eastern boundary of the old town. This boundary was what is now known as City Road, but had previously been called Castle Street and, even earlier, Pucca Lane, and ran from the Long Cross, where the Royal Infirmary stands today, to the north. It was judged that the initial expansion of the population would be to the east of the old town rather than over the river to the west.
Although the judgement was to be proved correct, it is strange to think of the new large church being built in advance of much of the attendant parish. The church was dedicated to St. Peter in 1861 and the photograph in this book shows it around 1870 much as it is today except for the bell tower and the high roof windows. Surprisingly, to any inhabitant of modern Roath, it was called St. Peter’s – in – the – Fields which illustrates that it had been built before the houses which would eventually surround it. It was located in what was later to become St. Peter’s Street within the old town boundary of City Road.
The St. Peter’s School was opened in 1868 by another Italian priest, Fr. Signini who recorded in the St. Peter’s Diary ‘Opened a new poor school in the large room till lately used by the Wesleyans for religious and Sunday School purposes, and situated at the back of the present presbytery in Chapel Street (Bedford Place) on 14th January, 1868. The teacher is Timothy O’Brien, formerly a pupil in David Street School, Cardiff. He had previously a small school in his own little cottage, Milton Street, on his own account. The object of the removal of the School is to have more accommodation, better facilities for teaching, and more immediate control over the school by the Clergy. They give the room rent free to the Master, besides incurring some other little expenses, calculated to be, with rent, about £12 a year. The master is not certificated.’ The school was later to move opposite the church where it remained until recent times when it was transferred to the former Cardiff High School site in Newport Road.
Houses were being built rapidly. The community of Adamsdown to the south was being established but in 1861 only a few dwellings had appeared along the old Newport Road from the Long Cross towards the Four Elms (these trees were demolished when the road was widened). Many of the prominent citizens of Cardiff built houses in the ribbon development and although some have disappeared in modern times others still exist. Appropriately, the R.F.C.’s Clubhouse at 118 Newport Road is one of these. The area between Newport Road and Broadway was owned at this time by one Mary Charles. Other less substantial houses were being built along City Road itself, still known as Castle Street after the Roath Castle or Mackintosh Institute as it is now called. These houses were beginning to break the centuries old pattern of life in the parish of Roath.
The medieval parish, centered around the old church of St. Margaret’s, had been little more than a few houses and some outlying farms stretching from the town boundary in the west to the Rumney river in the east and from the moorlands of the Severn Estuary in the south to the adjoining parishes of Llanedeyrn and Llanishen to the north. Two prominent dwellings were Roath Court, the site of today’s Summers Funeral Home in Newport Road, standing in its own grounds, and Ty Mawr, the big house, lying behind St. Margaret’s. Ty Mawr was demolished in 1969 and the site is now occupied by the Ty Mawr old people’s home in Southminster Road.
The Harlequins Ground is located to the north of Newport Road but south of St. Margaret’s and Ty Mawr. There was no sign of the ground in the 1841 survey map of Roath but forty years later a map clearly shows the ground marked as Cardiff Athletic Grounds. The photograph taken around 1890 shows the ground had been in use for some time by then. Apparently it was also known as Cardiff Harlequins Athletic Ground after a club which ceased to exist in 1890. The Cardiff Harlequins R.F.C. were one of the most prominent clubs in Cardiff in the 1880s. They played Cardiff on 10 occasions in these early years, winning one of them. The ground retained the Harlequins name.
The parish of Roath must have viewed the expansion of Cardiff’s population in the latter years of the nineteenth century with awe and apprehension. The new houses came almost like a flood up to the old town boundary and then over it without so much as a pause. Roath was incorporated into Cardiff in 1875. The land of the parish was owned by a series of landowners the largest being Charles Morgan, later Lord Tredegar, while others were the Marquess of Bute, the Croft Williams family and the Mackintosh of Mackintosh who had married into the Richards family. These owners built estates on their land often naming the streets after their relatives and in a few decades Roath was transformed into an urban community.
To return to St. Peter’s Church, it was built in the vanguard of the parish it was meant to serve. At first it may have seemed too large for the potential parishioners but in a few years it was crowded.
This new Welsh Roman Catholic parish was administered by Italian priests and consisted at least initially of a considerable proportion of Irish immigrants or first generation Welshmen of Irish descent. It was not long before it gave birth to a rugby club and helped set a tradition among Cardiff’s Catholics, which has persisted to this day. One hundred years later St. Peter’s celebrates that its name has been carried with honour throughout the rugby fields of Wales.
One cannot help wondering what Fr. Gastaldi, who returned to Italy and eventually became Archbishop of Turin, would have made of it all. Even though the Rosminian may never have seen a rugby ball, he would surely approve of his parish’s offspring.
MORE:
https://stpetersrfc.co.uk/snr/the-rocks/history/history-of-the-rocks/
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