NIGHT IN "TIGER BAY."

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 189, 12 August 1933, Page 4 (Supplement)

NIGHT IN "TIGER BAY."

CARDIFF'S "TOUGH" QUARTER. SCUM OF THE SEVEN SEASDENS OF VICE AND SQUALOR. It is a vicious-looking knife. The-edge of its slender, wicked. Jplade would give you a very comfortable shave. I bought it from a negro named Joe, writes a special correspondent of " The People," who produced it from his sock and told me that he had pulled it out of a dead man's throat after a cafc brawl in Marseilles. " Half a dollah, boss," ho drawled. And showed ivory teeth in a wide grin. So I bought it as a souvenir. A souvenir of my night in Tiger Bay, one of the toughest sections of waterfront in the world. A British film company is planning a talkie of Tiger Bay, so 1 came to Cardiff to see whether it is as " tough " as they think. The police here told me that Tiger Bay was dead; cleaned up long ago. Tliey wera wrong. Tiger Bay may not be so gay as it was in its heyday, when the sailors had money to burn, but it is just as "tough"—perhaps even " tougher," for hard times have made it desperate. I have explored Limehouse and Soho. Tiger Bay lacks their ela mour » but it has all their vice. Spend a night as I have done in the] cafes of this squalid waterfront, and you will find mankind in the raw. On one side of the road a long, bare wall, behind which ships' spars and smokestacks reach to the stars, masks the harbour. Gloomy Joe. Oil the other the grimy painted signs— Copenhagen Bar, Oslo Cafe, Charlie's — advertise the cafes. Cheek by jowl they stretch as far as the c.vo can see, scores of j them, with here and there a cheap lodging house or a basement gambling dive. One cafc is much the same as another — bare rooms with a wooden bar and tarnished coffee urn at one end. It was in a cafe, staring despondently at the floor, that I met Joe, who sold me his knife. Joe is a. ship's cook. He lias been around the world three times, and he has been waiting in Cardiff for a ship for IS months. Ho told me that at one time 20 or 30 vessels docked there every week. Now there are never more than two or three. And crews and wages are both cut to a minimum. " Yes, suh," said Joe. " Things sualx is bad for a seafaring man these days." Human Flotsam. In and around Tiger Bay to-day there are between two and three thousand more like Joe—Arabs, Lascars, Negroes, Greeks, -Malays, Chinese, Japs, and Italians — drawn from the seven seas. There they are, lounging in the lamplight at street corneis, sitting in cafes making a twopenny cup of coffee last from nine until midnight. Coal black giants laugh and dice the hours away. Slim Lascars smoke their cigarettes through cupped hands so that the tobacco shall not touch their lips. And there are fierce romantic-looking Arabs, with gay ear-rings swinging against swarthy checks. Three thousand of them —waiting for the ships that never come. And there are almost as many girls. Tiger -Bay girls! They're known from Shanghai to Valparaiso.

Meet, for instance, Betty, in Marlene Dietrich trousers and a white middy blouse. She sat at my table and said wasn't it a rotten night, and had I got a cigarette. That's all the introduction one needs in Tiger Bay.

In one corner an ancient pianola wheezed the tunes of two years ago, and on a tiny strip of oilcloth' a Lascar seaman and a coloured girl danced and blew tobacco smoke into each other's eyes. Betty, who is not yet twenty, has been in Tiger Bay for three years. She told me that she had seen one man murdered and two others stubbed: "Just fighting over a girl," she said, shrugging sl : m shoulders. And they say Tiger Bay is not " tough."