Today’s Daily Telegraph includes a letter from a Cardiff reader Barrie Cooper complaining that BT insists on sending him a Newport phone directory because he lives in east Cardiff. This prompted schoolboy memories of a time when Cardiff’s eastern suburbs were technically part of England. Not that any of us accepted that for a moment…
Blame King Henry VIII. Shortly before the Act of Union between England and Wales in 1536, he took Monmouthshire, Wales’s south eastern county, as an English shire. The boundary between Monmouthshire and Glamorgan was the river Rhymney. The small town of Cardiff was in Glamorgan, but as it grew in the 19th century, it spread across the river into Monmouthshire.
The ‘Wales and Monmouthshire’ confusion continued for over 400 years. Even in the 20th century, when Welsh national consciousness was truly revived, Monmouthshire was in a no man’s land between England and Wales. The Local Government Act 1933 stated that it was an English county. The Welsh Language Act 1967 referred to “Wales and Monmouthshire”.
Monmouthshire was finally reunited with Wales once and for all in 1974. Local government reorganisation abolished the old county but placed its successor, Gwent, firmly in Cymru. The timing, while centuries late, was appropriate: the county’s Pontypool rugby club was in its pomp and helping Wales achieve European domination. Cardiff’s eastern suburbs were now in (South) Glamorgan, not the old border county.
Over forty years on, Wales has its own senedd, the National Assembly, and its first national government. Another local government reorganisation has abolished Gwent and revived Monmouthshire, although the new version is smaller than the old county. Cardiff is thriving, even if its eastern residents are still given a border county’s phone book…
PS: the Bella Caledonia blog asked whether Berwick will be reunited with Scotland as Monmouthshire has been with Wales, 40 years after the abolition of the Wales and Berwick Act…
PPS: here’s my post about other geographical anomalies, the exclaves of Wales and England.
Leave a Reply