(Image: Geraint Rowland, Cardiff Bay (The Other Side) Sunrise Glow, CC BY-NC 2.0.)
I was born in Cardiff 81 years ago and, though most of my life has been spent in England, my Welsh roots matter more and more to me the older I get. I begin with a brief look at them. Like me, my father Hilary Marquand was born in Cardiff, as was his father Alfred Marquand. His grand-father, my paternal great-grand-father, another Hilary Marquand, was born in 1825 in Guernsey. He worked briefly in a lawyer’s office after leaving school, but the call of the sea was irresistible. As a cabin boy of 14 he sailed to Havana and thence to Trieste; on the return voyage the ship was chased by pirates off the coast of North Africa, and the captain succumbed to a severe bout of insanity. Undeterred, Hilary stuck to his chosen career, rising to become a Master Mariner. In 1867 he retired from sea-faring and settled in Cardiff. He and a friend John Martin set up a shipping firm, Martin and Marquand, to take part in the burgeoning coal trade which was making Cardiff an El Dorado.
My great-grand-father Hilary died of smallpox, aged only 46, in 1872, but the firm continued to prosper. Though my grand-father Alfred was the least successful of great-grand-father Hilary’s sons, he shared the instinctive, anti-intellectual Toryism of his more successful brothers. My father Hilary broke dramatically with the family tradition. He used to sell the Daily Herald, then a rumbustious, far-left socialist paper, outside the dock gates, and joined the Labour Party in 1920, aged eighteen. He won a scholarship to Cardiff High School, and another to the University College of Cardiff in what was then the federal University of Wales. After graduating, he spent a year in America as a research fellow and then taught at Birmingham University. He was professor of industrial relations at Cardiff throughout the 1930s. He published a path-breaking study, South Wales Needs A Plan, which still resonates today. He was drafted into the civil service at the start of the Second World War. In 1945 he was elected Labour MP for Cardiff East, and held a variety of ministerial posts in the post-war Attlee government.
