Post by Administrator on Jun 11, 2020 22:10:40 GMT
My hometown, Barry, is a remarkable place which has produced some remarkable people.
Former Plaid Cymru leader, Gwynfor Evans, was named the 4th most important Welsh person of the last Millennium.
The story of Gareth Jones, who wrote about Stalin’s man-made famine in the Ukraine, has recently been turned into a Holywood film.
But few in Wales could tell you much about Abdulrahim Abby Farah, the man from Barry who became a senior United Nations diplomat, leading the 1990 UN Mission that oversaw the dismantling of South Africa’s apartheid state.
Farah was born in October 1919, the year of the Race Riots; only weeks after the murder of Chilean sailor, Jose Martinez, on a neighbouring street to Thompson Street where Farah was raised. His mother, Hilda Anderson, ran a boarding house while his Somali father, Abby Farah, was a sailor and entrepreneur.
The young Farah attended Gladstone Primary School and Barry County Grammar School, while his parents were amongst a group which founded the multiracial Domino’s Club on Thompson Street. Most of the street was later erased in clearances of the Barry Docks area running south of Holton Road, a less famous and less romanticised version of Cardiff’s Tiger Bay. His father was a member of Thompson Street’s Colonial Club Committee and awarded an MBE for his wartime support for international sailors.
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Former Plaid Cymru leader, Gwynfor Evans, was named the 4th most important Welsh person of the last Millennium.
The story of Gareth Jones, who wrote about Stalin’s man-made famine in the Ukraine, has recently been turned into a Holywood film.
But few in Wales could tell you much about Abdulrahim Abby Farah, the man from Barry who became a senior United Nations diplomat, leading the 1990 UN Mission that oversaw the dismantling of South Africa’s apartheid state.
Farah was born in October 1919, the year of the Race Riots; only weeks after the murder of Chilean sailor, Jose Martinez, on a neighbouring street to Thompson Street where Farah was raised. His mother, Hilda Anderson, ran a boarding house while his Somali father, Abby Farah, was a sailor and entrepreneur.
The young Farah attended Gladstone Primary School and Barry County Grammar School, while his parents were amongst a group which founded the multiracial Domino’s Club on Thompson Street. Most of the street was later erased in clearances of the Barry Docks area running south of Holton Road, a less famous and less romanticised version of Cardiff’s Tiger Bay. His father was a member of Thompson Street’s Colonial Club Committee and awarded an MBE for his wartime support for international sailors.
LINK