Volume Twelve - Pre-Victorian to the Present Day - further aspects - A History of Penarth Dock by Roy Thorne . . .

A deputation of the Town Council led by the Chairman, Coun. Nigel Gibbs and Commodore R. A. Denman of the Penarth Motor Boat and Sailing Club met Mr. T. S. Roberts, Chief Dock Manager to discuss the closing of the subway which was being damaged by vandals, the partial industrial development, the future of the Penarth Motor Boat and Sailing Club, and the intention of the British Transport Dock Board to dam the inner basin and to make a yachting harbour.

The dam was made but by October 1963 the Penarth Motor Boat and Sailing Club who previously had their headquarters at Penarth Dock were established at the end of Ferry Road at the mouth of the River Ely.

Both entrances of the subway were bricked up in September 1963.

The town of Penarth which had been formed from the three parishes of Penarth, Cogan and Llandough in 1875 had lost its dock but no doubt it would have grown as a "suburb" of Cardiff, even if the dock had not been built.

It was a pleasant place to live on a south facing slope away from the flat land of Cardiff and attracted wealthy ship owning families to build their large houses here. It also attracted the managerial and professional people connected with the coal trade.

The population rose from 1,678 in 1861 to 17,710 in 1931, fell in the depression years to 16,080 in 1938, but significantly since 1945, when there has been no dock, its population has risen. In 1971 it was 24,000 and in 1981 24,119.

The dock certainly gave the town its initial impetus, but Mr. Forrest’s, the Plymouth family’s agent, intention to make it a place of "Commercial activity" and "to transform it into a beautiful and commodious watering place, a successfu1 competitor with other places of summer resort" did not happen.

A dock built at Barry in the middle of the last century would have provided more and better facilities for "commercial activity" than the dock which grew out of the clash of interests of the T.V.R. and the Bute Family.