Interview with Alex Bird regarding his work with the Cardiff Peoples' Paper, 6 December 2016, Cardiff

Description

Interview with Alex Bird regarding his work with the Cardiff Peoples' Paper, 6 December 2016, Cardiff

You can view the Cardiff People's Paper website here: http://www.alex-bird.com/download-publications/cardiff-peoples-paper/

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The Chronicle Project is a community heritage project supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund and run by VCS Cymru with the aims to document the history of volunteering in Cardiff, from 1914 to 2014.

Visit our website at: http://chronicle.recueil.net/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chronicleVCS/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/vcs_chronicle

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[Audio Header]
• We now will begin recording the interview with Alex Bird.
• The recording … takes place on the 6th December 2016 at Glamorgan Archives.
• The volunteers present are Mike Hawkins and Conan Friel.
And this recording is being collected as an oral history and will be part of the Chronicle Project, a project led by VCS Cymru and funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

[Cardiff People’s Paper]
Alex Bird: OK. So you wanted me to talk about my involvement in volunteering et cetera in Cardiff. Well, you can probably tell from the accent that I am not South Walian born although I am very much a Welshman now. I came here right at the end of 1971, I moved into, into Cardiff and immediately started to make links. I was always a person very much on the radical left so I had a couple of contacts people gave me. I went to see them. I met them in the basement bar, I don't think it's there any more, of the Angel Hotel and we started talking about the things that they were doing here and that's when I discovered and then got involved with the Cardiff People's Paper. Now the Cardiff People's Paper was what at the time we would have called, well we did call it, a collective. It was just a loose group of people who came together to put the paper together, we would probably call it more of a co-operative now, we would probably call it a publishing co-op now. It was totally loose, there wasn't any sort of legal form to it, people just came together on a regular basis and produced a newspaper. And we printed up about fifteen hundred copies roughly monthly, um, no external funding whatsoever, nobody got paid for anything, it was entirely a volunteer effort of producing the paper and selling the paper and it just relied on, I think it was six old pence or whatever it was at the time, no we were decimalised so it can't have been that. Decimalisation was in 1971. The paper had been going when I joined it for about three years something like that and it was very much campaigning about tenants’ issues so whatever great issues were coming up that's what it focused in on so, and the sales tended to reflect then wherever the issues were really so there were a huge issues in the Llanedeyrn Pentwyn estate because it had what was very radical at the time, it had a centralised boiler system and heated all of the houses based on the Scandinavian model of centralised heating. Unfortunately in Scandinavia they tend to live in large blocks of flats so rendering the pipe work is quite easy. With individual houses up on a hillside the pipework was all under gardens and it leaked. And there was some wonderful tales about people's great success growing tomatoes and cucumbers where the soil was so warm [laughs] but it was a hopeless system. So we campaigned there quite a bit, you know, we wrote quite a bit about those problems and therefore we sold, we sold door-to-door and we sold through a network of sympathetic newsagents who took it on sale or return obviously we gave them a margin but the amount of money they made was minimal compared to the space that they committed to displaying it. So they were great supporters as well.

[The Hook Road Campaign]
We campaigned through Butetown about, and Grangetown, about some of the issues on regeneration and we did quite a lot in Riverside but the really big thing that really took up most of the effort and with which I think we had the greatest success was the Hook Road. Now the Hook Road was this magnificent scheme to produce a dual carriageway that would start up more or less where the motorway is now and streak down through northern Cardiff right the way down through Cyncoed, right the way down through Roath and Plasnewydd and then it had a little bit of a bend at the end where it joined Newport Road, hence it got its name the Hook Road. Well, it was a completely bonkers scheme because there was no thought about where these cars would go. They would all stream into the city centre and then what was going to happen to them, you know. It was going to destroy fifteen hundred houses and we campaigned very strongly against that. And we had support from all sides including Labour and Tory party both campaigning against it, both realising fifteen hundred houses, five thousand people, that's an awful lot of disruption. And we won, we got the road abandoned in the end, so that was a great success. But we campaigned on lots of other issues. And it was a very interesting production process that we had. As I said, we were all volunteers and so, and we did everything, so we sold a bit of advertising but not a huge amount, we sold door-to-door and we found local printers, and eventually couldn't find a local printer and went elsewhere. And we did all the layout ourselves, it was back in the days of typewriters and cow gum and bits of paper and Letraset and you know, we would spend a whole weekend in one person's house or another, crawling all over the living room floor pasting all this stuff together and furiously writing it. And nobody had typewriters particularly so we had one typewriter between us and one guy who could type pretty well and a couple of others who could type badly and we just bashed it out, you know. It was 48 hours of continuous hard work then rushing off to the printers, then get it back and try and sell it. And we had great difficulty with printers to start with, as I said, you know, we started with local printers and they would take one look at it, or there would be a little bit of legal tussle over something or other and they would say no, we don't want to touch it any more, so eventually we ended up at the Russell Press in Nottingham. So my job, I was the one who had the van, my job was to drive up to Nottingham every month or so and we used to send the stuff up on a courier and then the artwork and then I would go and collect the actual printed press, paper from the press which was fascinating. They were lovely people, part of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, very sympathetic, very helpful to us, but it was a long way and it cost a lot of money and eventually we got a local printer, Cleglen Press based down in Riverside and they did it for us on a regular basis. But they could only print a small edition so we became a sort of mini-tabloid whereas before we had been a full size paper.

[The Free the Buses Campaign]
So that sort off, you know, led on to other campaigns. One campaign that we had that came out of the paper and again had some successes was what we called the Free the Buses Campaign which really attracted quite a lot of attention, we got interviewed on BBC Radio for that, put on a big event in the Cory Hall, the Cory Hall not there of course any more, been demolished I don't know how many decades now, but we didn't quite fill the Cory Hall but we got a few hundred people along and got a live broadcast from that, and interviews afterwards, and that was when one of us was doing a bit of research and looking at the accounts for Cardiff Bus, it was still being run in house, in the Council, it is still of course one of the few bus companies that isn't totally privatised because although it is run by a private company, the company is owned by the council. So it’s one of the few left in Britain really that still has some local authority control. But we looked at it and we realised that, back in those days you had drivers and conductors, and we realised that they were paying more in wages to the conductors than they were actually taking in fares. So it made logical sense from an economist's point of view to just get rid of the conductors and just let people get on and off the bus for nothing. Now that's pretty controversial for trade unions, because that meant a loss of jobs. So we went to see the T and G shop stewards that organised Cardiff Bus and said, “Look we've got this idea what do you think about it”, and they said “It's great” and they backed it. Which was quite surprising really but they backed it on the basis that they would be so many more people getting on the bus that there would have to be more buses and they would work on the basis that there would be an agreement to retrain the conductors to become drivers. So they backed that. Obviously, as you know from getting on and off a Cardiff bus and paying money that we never quite succeeded in getting it free. It did start the process of moving to one person operation. But the crucial success I think that we got was a radical change to some of the bus routes because every single bus route at the time was radial and we put forward as part of that campaign what we saw as a logical thing was that we should have a bus that joined the hospitals together. So a bus that started at the CRI, ran up to the Heath, went to Velindra and then out west and picked up the little tiny cottage hospital that was still there in Fairwater. So it was a circular route around the city, and of course the circular route that joins the hospitals is still there, so that was a, that was a major success.

[The Printing Co-op & Real Live Music]
Part of the process, um, that also got me interested in the whole print business, because I wasn’t a printer, I was an engineer, and I worked in power stations for quite a few years when I came to South Wales. Um, but I‘d always, I’d enjoyed dabbling in printing, I had done a bit of silk screen printing on a totally amateur basis, doing a few posters, um I don’t think I ever did any posters for the People’s Paper, we always had quite large print runs and silk-screening was fine for doing fifty posters or a hundred posters but not any good for many, many more. But I got an interest in it and one day I decided, because of the difficulties we had with printing the paper, that I would have a go at starting a printing co-op. So, um, did what you do, bought a printing press, bought a book telling me how to work it [laughing] and then tried to work out how to work it. But unfortunately, although we got the printing press up and running, and the printing co-op became quite a leading and a quite well known radical printers’ fingerprints that people right the way across South Wales still remember, some people anyway, we didn’t do it in time because the People’s Paper had finally given up the ghost and stopped before we bought the printing press. So although there was a sort of aim that we would eventually print up Cardiff People’s Paper we never got to do that. But through that at the start we had this tiny little lithopress but we also had a very nice silk-screen press so we were able to produce some posters and we really got into doing all sorts of posters for all sorts of people, trade unions, charities, campaigning issues, and one of the things we realised that we could do and that was as I say before we got the printing press but we were doing some screen printing, is we could do some stuff that would raise some money for local groups and that‘s when we came up with this idea of Real Live Music. And, um, Terry Dimmock who was a very keen photographer and film-maker had become involved with the paper and he went out and took some lovely pictures of street musicians and we used those as the basis of a poster and we started this enormous poster campaign that really made the thing kick off, you know, it’s the sort of, it’s the twitter feed of previous generations really. Fly posting was really quite common in Cardiff, there was still in the City centre an awful lot of boarded up shops that had been, some of them were bomb-sites still from the war, others were just shops that were changing hands or whatever, and fly-posting, although completely illegal, was just ignored really. The Top Rank, you know the big, the big sort of disco club that was on Queens Street, paid a professional fly-poster and, Mike I think his name was, and he did stuff for some of the other venues as well, and there was a couple of big screen printers that were producing all these printed posters, so there was a lot of fly-posted music posters everywhere and nobody took any notice and I’ve seen him out fly-posting a couple of times, you know he would just double-park the car with the hazard flashers on, get the bucket and paste out the back of the car and just fly-post, in the middle of the day, nobody took any notice at all. So we started this fly-posting campaign for Real Live Music and we put together three, three radical organisations and those three were the People’s Paper, RIB (the Rights and Information Bureau in Charles Street) and Cardiff Women’s Action Group which was sort of the pre-runner really to Cardiff Woman’s Aid and the whole of the Welsh Women’s Aid, it was the first, Cardiff Women’s Aid was the first Women’s Aid in Wales, and the people involved led all the way through that. So the three of us got together and basically we just took over the Montmorence Club in Charles Street once a week, we did a deal, as you did deals in those days, you met some one, you talked through the idea, you shook hands on it and off you went. So there was no contracts, no formal arrangements, we just did a deal with the club that we’d take the gate money, because mid-week was very, very quiet and he’d have the bar takings and provide all the staff. We did the staff on the door, and then we booked bands. And booking bands, I’d never booked bands before in my life, I just put our phone number on the posters. We managed to find a couple of local bands from Cardiff for the first couple of weeks, I just put a little bit on the bottom of the poster that said if you want to play ring this number. And within about a week I had a queue of about six or eight bands, all scheduled all the way through, they just wanted to play. And we didn’t mess with paying expenses or anything, they just wanted to play. And for bands that come from, you know up the valleys or a bit further afield or even just on the outskirts of Cardiff, the ability to get to play in a city centre club is, is a great sort of shop-window for them really, and clearly you know record touts and managers and so on would come and come to the club and listen because it was so eclectic, we had no real idea of who we were booking at all, you know. I never, I never asked anybody anything about what they played. If they wanted to play, and they were coming to do it for nothing, then that was fine you know. And we made what today would be quite considerable amounts of money. I think we were taking something like fifty or sixty quid on the door every week so it was a couple of hundred quid a month and quickly totted up and in 1970s money, you know, that’s up to like a thousand or fifteen hundred a month we were making purely in cash, simply distributed between those three groups.

[Pause in recording]

[Cardiff Peace Shop]
Well, Cardiff Peace Shop was actually in the premises that we started the printing co-op in. And I started the printing co-op, I talked earlier on about the Hook Road and the struggle against the Hook Road. Well the Council as part of the sort of pre-process leading up to the Hook Road had bought quite a lot of houses, they had started on compulsory purchase even though they didn’t have full consent and hadn’t done the public consultation to build the road, they started buying up the houses. And as part of that they bought a couple of shops, um, one of things that happened after they lost, they started to sell the housing off and there was a big campaign, which the People’s Paper wasn’t particularly involved in, it was starting to fall apart by then, but also I think we were slightly ambivalent about it, there was a big campaign to try and stop the sell off of the houses and for the council to let them instead to people on the waiting list. Um, we had a bit of a struggle, um, as to what to do because at the same time they put up, I think, about seven or eight commercial premises for sale. One of them was in Violet Road that we looked at that, that was enormous and still, half of it still stands empty all these decades later, and were very extensive, very odd premises because Violet Road sits down below Crwys Road, you know it’s a story and a half down, um, so part of the premises were down there and part of them came out onto the, onto the main road so they were quite big premises. And it was just by a blind auction, you just put in a bid to the council and we put in a bid for that, that failed but we also put in a bid for a shop in 56 Mackintosh Place and um, and got it. But as I say it was a dilemma because there was this whole campaign against not buying up the houses and, although we weren’t buying up a house we were buying up a shop premises, it was still one of those things that you had to think about very carefully you know, should this be part of the campaign or not. We took the pragmatic view, the four of us that were starting up the printing co-op, that we would just go for it anyway, you know. And because part of the shop was residential we also qualified for potential for getting a domestic mortgage. So we applied to Cardiff Council, back in those days councils still gave out house mortgages, particularly to people who were on fairly low incomes, which we were. So we successfully got a council mortgage that went about half way, I think towards buying the premises and had to borrow the rest and bought a shop and that’s where we started the printing coop. We did the screen-printing for the Real Live Music out of that shop and that is where eventually we bought a little litho-press and started up general printing and grew and grew and grew and in the end took over the whole shop premises with massive machinery you could hardly get in the door. Well that shop originally had been a…which is also very interesting, I think, it had been a French polishers, funny little old man who was a very keen purchaser of the Cardiff People’s Paper. And I can remember him so well, seeing him there, you know and he would open the door and all you could smell was the alcohol from the, from the French polish that was stooped on the man, he would buy it and it was a really shabby little shop I mean it was, it was filthy. One of the things he used to do was light fires to melt the shellac before he would mix it with the alcohol to make the French polish and it would burn holes in the floor. He used to, you know, imagine this little terrace of houses, alcohol and a fire, you know [laughs]. But he was reckoned to be the finest French polisher and he did all of the big pianos that had a little scratch or whatever; they would send them up to him on a van and he would fix it. So he eventually became too ill and moved away, that’s how the house became, the shop became vacant, the council bought it, we then bought it and started it up . And, um, I knew quite a lot of people in the peace movement and we had done quite a lot of printing for people in the peace movement, we, I mean I am very much a pacifist myself. And they started the idea of Peace Shops, you know that, the Cold War was really at its peak, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was really, really taking off across the UK. CND groups were forming everywhere, there was a CND Cymru and a CND Cardiff. And I think it was Brighton that started the first Peace Shop, the idea that you would actually take over a shop and start selling all of the paraphernalia that people like, you know car stickers and bumper stickers, T-shirts, you know, um, flags, and banners and, and cards, greeting cards, all of the, pamphlets, copies of Peace News, all of this stuff. And one day a lady named Alison MacPherson who was very involved in the peace movement, ah, she walked in the door, she was after getting some stuff printed. And she said, you know, I’m really, really interested in getting a shop, you know, and at that time we had completely outgrown the shop and we were looking for more premises and coincidentally although it had changed hands we were looking at buying another one of the Hook Road properties [laughs] that someone had bought and had been a crisp warehouse of all things, um, tucked up a lane at the top. So we were already negotiating with the, the sellers of this property. And she walked in, she said you now we’re really after a shop, I said how do you fancy this one, you know. And she said, “Well…”. I said, “Look, we’ll do a deal, you know, we’ll appoint a neutral valuer, I have no idea what it would cost, we won’t mess with estate agents, we’ll appoint a neutral valuer, put a middle market price on it, shake hands on it, we’ll do the deal and that’s it, you know, and save all the costs, etc etc”. So she went back to a couple of other people and said, “Yes, we’ll do it”. And so we arranged the sale to turn it into the Peace Shop. Well sadly I’m not very good at saying no, so when they asked me to help I said yes and they decided that they really wanted to make it into a co-op, there was about a dozen of us. Because the shop had been bought originally with, um, three donors who’d put up quite large amounts of money to buy it, thousands of pounds each to buy it and they couldn’t quite get enough money and we did another slightly dodgy deal I suppose really, which the bank manager didn’t like because we were borrowing money in order to, to buy this other premises, so I was constantly dealing with the bank manager. So I just, I upped the amount that I was borrowing and then lent it back to the Peace Shop as it was emerging, um, but what he realised eventually was that whilst I had done that, and hadn’t quite told him the truth about where I was, what I was using the money for, he had already turned the Peace Shop down for a loan. So he ended up effectively, or the Co-op bank ended up effectively lending money to someone that he had already turned down for a loan [laughs], which they weren’t that pleased about but there was nothing they could do about it. So between that loan that we put in, and three other people’s large amounts of money again put in on loan, they managed to buy the shop and then I spoke to someone else who spoke to someone else and we managed to form a co-operative society and I became the secretary. So I became really then quite heavily involved in the Peace Shop having sold them the premises and also lent them, or organised to lend them some money. It didn’t come from me, technically it came from, from the printing co-op. So it became immediately quite a big success, um, although it’s not the best location, they had at the time looked around for locations, but I think it was £45,000 a year rent on Queens Street at the time and we sold them the shop for eighteen and a half grand. So you know they paid a third of a year’s rent and got the shop. But it’s a bit out of town but it’s just around the corner from Albany Road, a busy shopping street, so it managed to build up quite a trade and being the only one in South Wales people came from all over. And a lot of people would call in, you know, when they’re coming into Cardiff on a Saturday, coming in to do a bit of shopping in town, they would park round the corner, they’d come in the Peace Shop, have a cup of tea with us, you know, pick up a few things and move on into town.

[The Peace Shop caravan]
And we started to realise then the possibilities of, if we could just get in the centre of town without paying a huge amount of money, what we could do. So, I wasn’t me, it was Alison Jackson I think, who was one of the other leading lights in it. She knew people in the council and started talking about getting permission to go down onto the Hayes and set up a stall. You know we have the Christmas markets and things on the Hayes now. Well, none of that existed then, there were no stalls down there, there was a vegetable stall outside David Morgans but there was nobody actually on the, on the Hayes and it had just become a pedestrianised precinct. So there was some negotiations that were done, which I wasn’t part of, and somehow or other we got permission to set a stall up there on a, on a Saturday, on a regular weekly basis, fifty-two weeks of the year if we wanted to. So we started off by buying a market stall. So I just looked in Exchange and Mart, that’s where you, I mean you buy stuff on the internet now if you want to find stuff that’s a bit off the wall, but Exchange and Mart is where you went in those days. So bought a copy of Exchange and Mart, found somebody who sold market stalls, you know this sort of bit of canvas and all the steel framework that locks together and simply took it down in the back of the estate car. So we set that up for a few weeks and we realised then that other people had to come in with cars with all the goods, we would set it all up, we had to get it down at the end of the day, and two or three cars to take the stuff away. So we thought why don’t we get something that’s a little bit more permanent. So I said, “Well why don’t we get a caravan”. So we looked in the South Wales Echo, found a caravan for sale, a hundred and fifty quid, second hand caravan, quite nice, tucked away on a farm up past Rogerstone somewhere. Wandered up, saw it, cash changed hands, got the caravan, parked it on the street outside my house which fortunately was a street that backed onto a school so that there was nobody living on the other side, so there was lots and lots of parking space, you weren’t putting it in front of someone’s house, so no-one was going to object. So we just parked it on the street and every week I would hitch it up behind the car, tow it into town, set it up. We still had the market stall, so we used the market stall like a sort of awning set up on the front and we kept all the goods in the caravan. And we shared the keys around so people could just come down to the caravan, open it up while it was parked opposite my house, go in there and check the stock, you know, put more stock in so that everything was just right for the time. And we did that on a regular basis for I don’t like to think how many years. And we had this old caravan, it was a Bailey caravan, two-berth Bailey caravan made in, made in Bristol, Baileys still going, but a really nice quality, very old-fashioned but a really nice quality built caravan so it, it lasted quite well, got a bit bashed around but it lasted quite well and we did so well selling stuff in town like that we decided in the end we’d get a proper stall, you know like a hot dog stall with a great big square boxy thing with a big side that opens up and side curtains to protect it from the wind and so on. So I found a manufacturer, again good old Exchange and Mart again, I found a manufacturer who made these things and we were making decent profit, you know we were a not-for-profit co-op but that doesn’t mean you don’t make a profit, just that the profit was accumulated and used for various things, partly paying off the, you know paying off the loans for buying the shop but also we were accumulating money in the bank. So I think it was about fifteen hundred quid or something like that for a market stall. So we commissioned it, you know they were all built to order, you chose the size and style that you want, size of opening etc, got all that made up, went and collected that, towed it back. It was a bit of a beast compared to the caravan, very, very substantial but very heavy as a consequence. So we took that into town all the time but the only problem with both of them was we could never get any insurance, just could not find any insurance company that would licence what they regarded as a hot dog, would insure what they regarded as a hot dog stall. We kept it but it wasn’t the sort of thing you could keep on the street anymore. You know, it was so obviously a commercial thing, the sort of thing that attracted objections. So we found a farm up in Lisvane and paid them I think it was a pound a week or something to store it there. But unfortunately there was no security and one day, although it had locks on it and wheel clamps and everything else, one day it got stolen and that’s the point at which we gave up running the stall in town. We thought, well, trade was starting to drop a bit anyway but we thought no, we’ll give up. But we did have some very, very busy periods.

[Peace Christmas cards]
And also other things that we did with the shop were, there were very few, um, cards around, you know with peace themes. So we struck on the idea of producing Christmas cards which we printed in the, in the printing co-op. We got a local artist to design them again, you know, all free of charge, and we printed them and I think from the figures that we could manage to glean, we were far and away the largest producer of Christmas cards for the peace movement anywhere in the UK. I think it’s fair to say that really we started the peace Christmas card movement for, you know of coloured ribbons, doves of peace and so on which every commercial producer picked up in the end. But we just advertised them in the small ads in the back of the Observer; again, you know, one of the ways lots of stuff got sold was in the small ads in the Sunday papers, you took a little tiny advertising box and we were selling something like a hundred thousand cards every Christmas. So it was big business, all off by mail order, so massive, massive business which again made quite a lot of money that sustained the Peace Shop.

[End of the Peace Shop]
And the Peace Shop eventually gave up the shop and we sold it on to a solicitor who specialised in working with mental health clients, you know very much campaigning for better conditions for them. We would also, his wife had been involved in the Peace Shop on the periphery, she had been one of the many, many volunteers, because the Peace Shop had been run again entirely by volunteers of which I was one but there were dozens and dozens of others, and people who contributed. We had a system where people could make a standing order contributing. And eventually we decided, you know, we decided that the shop was, all the loans were paid off, there was a bit of money in the bank so we sold it on again and, um, I think I gave you the wrong figures before because I think I am right in saying that the eighteen and a half thousand is what we sold it for, I think we bought it for six and a half actually, so that makes a bit more sense. So we sold if off for eighteen and a half thousand plus some money we had in the bank and set the Peace Shop up then as a sort of peace fund, really, funding various other peace campaigns. Put some money into an organisation called Shared Interest which you may have heard of, it’s a micro-loan business, it makes loans right the way across the third world and its called Shared Interest because they collect the interest on the micro-loans and they ask people who invest in it not to take the interest so the interest is left and is shared for future use. So we put some money in there and we gave money off to various, um, peace associated campaigns and eventually spent the fund out and wound it up. But, you know, wound up in a good way I think. So that was really good.

[South Glamorgan Peace Festival]
Another spin off that came from that was the, um, South Glamorgan Peace Festival, which again was Alison Jackson’s baby, she had good contacts in the council and persuaded them through the Education Department to support the Peace Festival. And they did, um, a competition and one of the parts of the competition was designing cards, so some of the later peace cards came through the, the school kids competitions for designing cards and produced a great big wall chart all about the peace movement that came out each year, you know, talking about examples, talking about examples of how people got involved in the peace movement. But this went out through all of the schools, so all of the schools got engaged in the design process and the winning cards were all reproduced on this great big broadsheet that the schools could pin up as well, so. And that continued for a number of years after the Peace Shop had finished, I believe it has now stopped but that again was, although it had some official sanction, it had a grant from the council, it was very much run through volunteering effort of Alison and a couple of others and the volunteer time that the teachers put in, because it wasn’t part of the curriculum so it was their extra curriculum activities. So I think that, that sums up the Peace Shop and the engagement with the stall and I guess, you know, to a very small extent we started that change, we proved to the public and to the council that they could quite easily run stalls on the town there. So, you know, there had been other, other temporary stalls there, there was once a food market was there for a very short period of time, and also the regular Christmas stalls, so the centre of town there in the way we’ve got temporary stalls set up I think is to a very small extent from the pioneering work of the peace stall.

[Break in recording]

[The impact of volunteering on wider society]
I think quite profound I think, some of the changes, um, you know the People’s Paper, um, ran some, ran some big campaigns, you know, so there was the Hook Road, um, there was the stuff that span out of it on the buses that made changes to the way bus routes were operated but, you know, stopping an enormous redevelopment scheme. We ran campaigns against the original Ravenseft redevelopment of Cardiff City Centre which was going to be fairly bonkers, it was going to end up a bit like the Bull Ring in Birmingham but actually probably slightly worse. The idea of the Ravenseft development was to jack the entire city centre up by a storey, so that all of the shopping would be on the first floor and all of the ground floor, all of the city centre space, would be a car park. So, pretty radical transformation. So we campaigned strongly against that, and defeated that. But I think in a slightly wider way, um, we made those sorts of radical campaigns possible and, and respectable, you know, there was solid citizens in there, you know. Jane Hutt was one of people involved in the People’s Paper, gone on to be a very well-respected AM and Minister, and we had a couple of university lecturers in there so you know we were… we were a mixture of working class and middle class people, so we had those sort of middle-class connections to help do things, but the fact it came out as a properly printed paper gave people the idea that this was the sort of thing that they should take a bit of notice of rather than just a bunch of people with placards. It gave it a certain amount of respectability. I think the, um, as I touched on earlier on, you know, the stuff about, you know, the idea of market stalls, you know, we’ve got things like the Riverside farmers’ market now which is all run on the street and I don’t think that would have happened unless we had got this idea that markets on the street, which happens perfectly well and has always happened perfectly well over most of Europe and half of America and used to be really quite common in the UK, but had been damaged and destroyed. Part of the city centre redevelopment took away the old Hayes fruit market down at the bottom end of the Hayes where you didn’t have the sort of temporary market stalls, you had little wooden boxes, lock-ups that stayed there time. It was very much, you know, a street market and that was all removed in the redevelopment. So I think we started to bring a little bit of that back again. I think that the, you know, the work that we did in Real Live Music certainly seems to have helped a number of bands and if you start googling around, um, you now, you’ll find a number of people still chatting about the good old days when they played in the Montmorence. I can’t say for certain that was on our Wednesday nights but I think it probably was, so you know it set a number of people going in the music scene. It helped to develop a music scene in, in Charles Street, where now we’ve got of course, you know, the community run recording studios and so on, so there’s those sorts of impacts. It got groups working together, you know, we were a partnership of three different, quite different radical groups with quite different sort of agendas, working together to raise money. We got the idea that you don’t have to just have to entirely rely on grants, you can be self-sustaining through your own activities, which is something that we see more and more now with the whole sort of community shares issue idea that you raise money from the public and invest in good things that are essentially voluntary run. You know I think that’s a long way, you can’t trace a direct link, but I think we were part of a process that started to change that. We certainly weren’t alone, you know similar activities were taking place right the way across the UK, we weren’t unique here in Cardiff but we were part of that greater movement. Um, in terms of other changes, certainly you know the shape of Cardiff has changed, you have got things like the campaign against the barrage, the campaigns that came in Riverside after the flooding which really heightened I think the memory of that, heightened the campaign against the barrage which was completely unsuccessful, we ended up with the barrage which, which fortunately, because of the changes that they have made in water quality and so on hasn’t been as damaging as it could have been but I still think personally it is a bit of a waste of time, you know. Changing and redeveloping south Cardiff, that’s been largely positive although not entirely so, because it has been a bit of a mish-mash with the Cardiff Bay Development Corporation who never really had a proper plan, didn’t really quite know where they were going, they were just steering along from day to day, wherever the primary developers would lead them by the nose is where they ended up going. But I never felt personally, because I campaigned very strongly against the barrage, I never felt personally that the barrage did any good, I could never see what was wrong with the tide going in and out personally. You know, it looked pretty hideous when the rusty Ford Cortinas appeared but if you had taken away the rusty Ford Cortinas there was nothing wrong with a bit of mud and some bits of the old dockside that poked out when the tide went out and, you know, the wading birds that lived on the mud et cetera. I could never see anything wrong with that. The docks were tatty, and the docks needed upgrading and improving and we got some magnificent stuff down there like, you know, the Millennium Centre and so on, and the old D shed with the artists gallery in it and so on, you know there’s a number of great things, the conversion of the dry dock to make the Roald Dahl Plaza now in the old Roath basin, You know there’s been some fantastic improvements down there but there’re nothing to do with the concrete wall that makes it awkward for the boats to get in and out. So I think, you know, that those sorts of changes have come about because of that sort of, that respectability for being radical and campaigning that I think to a certain extent we kicked off in the People’s Paper and that’s continued with lots and lots of other people’s effort ever since.

MH: What does volunteering mean to you?

AB: I think volunteering is, is about giving back really, you know, and I think it’s really important because it’s a different relationship with a project or with a plan or a campaign than if you were paid to do it. Obviously we all have to earn a living somewhere, so volunteering can only come from people who have got a bit of time and space in their lives to do the volunteering. It can’t, you know, fix everything, but it’s a totally different relationship, it’s a much more powerful relationship that you have as a volunteer because of the time and energy that you’re giving. And I think it’s something that’s been there, you know, in the British way of life for, for hundreds if not thousands of years that people see something that needs doing, join together in a group and just get on and fix it, you know. I think that’s really powerful and long may it continue.

MH: What do you think that volunteering has given you personally.

AB: Um, it’s given me a huge amount of experience, I have met some fantastic people, got a real sense of achievement for the things that we’ve managed to do, um, filled the gap in my life, but there probably wasn’t a gap there. So you know it takes pressure on you, there are downsides to becoming a very keen volunteer, you know you do end up neglecting certain other aspects of your life, trying to squeeze too many things in, particularly if like me you find it difficult to say no to things. But I, you know, I do get immense pleasure from it, I have to say, a deep sense of satisfaction. You know, I’m not a Christian, I’m quite a militant atheist in many ways, but you know, but it’s this bit in the bible about it’s better to give than to receive, and I think, um, giving is a very pleasurable activity, and volunteering is about giving to society.

• http://chronicle.recueil.net/collection/item/vcs_chronicle_oh_21 (link opens in new window)