Rhiwbina Living 61

history
The French Connection
Cardiff celebrates 60 years of its twinning with the French city of Nantes this
year. Maggie Smales charts the intertwining tale of the two cities
by Maggie Smales
Driving or walking down the
Boulevard de Nantes, few of
us probably question why one
of Cardiff’s main thoroughfares has
a French name. The formal twinning
of the two cities, Cardiff and Nantes,
dates back 60 years to 24 February
1964, but the links between South
Wales and France are very much
older.
We know that Teilo, one of the
three patron Saints of Llandaff
Cathedral, took refuge from the
plague in Dol in Brittany in the
middle of the 6th century. He
stayed there several years and
even, legend tells us, tamed a sea
dragon and harnessed it to a nearby
rock. Very appropriate for a Welsh
saint.
Fast forward a few centuries
and the Norman French settled
extensively in Pembrokeshire and
the Vale of Glamorgan, leaving
place names like Bonvilston, home
of the 12th century nobleman
Simon de Bonville (called Tresimwn,
18
or Simon’s town, by the Welsh who
had yet to catch on to the use of
surnames). Invaders came again to
Pembrokeshire from France in 1797,
the last landing of a hostile army in
mainland Britain, and were defeated
at Fishguard, with Jemima Nicholas
allegedly capturing 12 drunken
French soldiers single-handed.
Sometimes the Welsh went in the
opposite direction. Owain Lawgoch
(Yvain de Galles), a descendent
of Llywelyn the Great, fought on
the side of French king Charles
V in the 100 Years’ War and was
assassinated at Mortagne in the
Gironde in 1378 on the orders of the
English court.
Specific links between Cardiff
and Nantes owe their origins more
prosaically to the coal trade. This
may have begun as early as the
16th century, although the Nantes
Chamber of Commerce first
documented dealings in coal and
timber with Cardiff in 1729. At the
time, Nantes was already a thriving
metropolis, whilst Cardiff was hardly
more than an overgrown village.
Things were to change with the
completion of the Glamorganshire
Canal and the development of
Cardiff Docks; also, through the
vision of a Durham-born mining
engineer, John Nixon, one of
the first to realise the natural
advantages of Welsh ‘steam’ coal
for use in furnaces. Having surveyed
the coalfields in Dowlais for the
Marquess of Bute, he made his first
trip to France and realised that the
industrial potential of the Nantes
region was being held back by a
lack of reserves of good quality
coal.
He worked first with sugar
refineries in Nantes and, once they
were persuaded of the virtues
of Welsh coal, its use spread
quickly in other manufacturing
industries. Cardiff became the
boom town of Victorian Britain, its
population growing from less than
2,000 in 1800 to c.165,000 in 1901.
Meanwhile, Nantes developed as a
major industrial centre, focussing, in
particular, on shipbuilding and food
processing.
The concept of ‘town twinning’
developed in the aftermath of
World War Two, in an attempt to
put an end to two generations of
conflict in Europe by building links
at a personal and community level.
The first formal school exchanges
with Nantes started in 1954.