Tackling a 'social evil' in 1908

Victorian newspapers carried reports of disorderly houses in Cardiff

Angry letters were written to the local newspaper and a group was formed to tackle the problem of prostitution in Cardiff. But this was 100 years ago.

You can read the columns of old newspapers going back the previous 40 years, as the town and docklands expanded and the sea traffic grew, to find more concerns about the "social evil" of the so-called "oldest profession".

Disorderly boarding houses and certain pubs were the scourge of Victorian churchmen, the town's watch committee and newspaper columnists.

In December 1869, one resident complained that "the so-called restaurants in Bute Road are nearly all brothels", with tenants "well-known bad characters".

'Flagrantly indecent'

In 1883, as a women's protection society was formed, it was reported that there were "no less than 70 houses of ill-fame" in the town, but that despite laws against it, the powers had "signally failed" to keep prostitution in check.

A police superintendent reported the nuisance "worse than ever" two years later, with teenage girls at houses being "farmed" by "nefarious traffickers in vice," who visited to collect their "ill-gotten gains".

Back in late 1908, the Methodist-led Citizen's Movement was formed, with the Reverend John Thomas railing against vice and drunkenness.

One of its supporters, a George Bibbings, who lived in the Grangetown area, wrote to the chief constable and the South Wales Echo, saying it was clearly evident that there was a "brothel colony" on the route out of town.

Prostitutes "and their partners in vice" were using the trams, with the full knowledge of the conductors, claimed Mr Bibbings.

"The behaviour of these gangs of women is flagrantly indecent and an extreme object lesson in degradation," he wrote.