A friend of mine will be ever so jealous of me catching the No.13 to Drope. Heโs been on to me for years saying he is fascinated by the name Drope and one day wants to catch the No.13 there. Wiki tells me โDrope is a hamlet in the valley of the River Ely in Vale of Glamorgan, southeast Wales, just beyond the territorial border of western Cardiffโ. I took a picture of the bus and sent it to him. Thereโs one big problem though. The bus doesnโt actually go to Drope. Many years ago I think the bus probably did go there but not anymore. In fact if you look at Google Street View you can see a bus stop in Drope and even an actual bus but the photos are dated 2012. Nowadays the closest you get is Mansell Avenue which leaves you a 15 walk to Drope. So why is the No.13 Cardiff Bus still advertising Drope on itโs headboard? Probably because it would be fairly expensive to change I guess. Being a bit nerdy I asked both an attendant in the bus station and the bus driver whether the bus went to Drope. They looked rather confused/embarrassed, Iโm not sure which, but didnโt have an answer.
Before catching the bus I needed a book. Iโd had a look around to see what was near the No.13 terminus and spotted the Western Cemetery. I visit Cathays Cemetery on a weekly basis but I think I have only ever been to Western Cemetery once or twice and that was quite a few years ago. I searched to see if there was anyone of note buried there and came across a reference to Mahmood Mattan, the last person to be hung in Cardiff in 1952. In 1998, 45 years after his death, his conviction was quashed. I spotted the was a book, The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed, a non-fiction novel that semi-fictionalises the true story of Mahmood Mattan.
I looked in the very useful Cardiff Libraries on-line catalogue. It told me they had some eight copies and only two were currently out on loan and that the most convenient one for me to pick up a copy would be Capel i Bawb library at the Infirmary. What a lovely wee library this is, built in a renovated hospital chapel. I was there some ten minutes after it opened, armed with the Dewey classification. Could I find it? No. Luckily there was a librarian on duty who said it was best to ignore the Dewey classification and have look in the fiction section. I suppose that made sense in hindsight considering the book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021.
The No.13 took me out along Cowbridge Road, over the River Ely and then into Ely itself. The Halloween decorations had come down and the Christmas decorations starting to appear.
Western Cemetery is large and opened in 1936. There is a war graves section, a fenced off Jewish section, a Greek orthodox section and a couple of Muslim sections. I didnโt have a location for the Mattan grave but I did have a picture and guessed it was in the Muslim section. It took about 30 minutes to locate. On his headstone is inscribed Killed by Injustice. I took a few minutes to reflect on that.
I walked out the other end of the cemetery and onto Cowbridge Road West, past the milestone and found the Cafรฉ Eighty Nine in The Range. The Christmas shoppers were out in droves but I found a table, ordered a brie and cranberry panini and pot of tea and settled down to read. The Fortune Men is very well written, lovely prose, good social history of Cardiff but a harrowing story at the same time.
Cardiff Capers 