John Batchelor
John Batchelor was born in Newport in 1820. In his twenties he began trading in timber and slate and established yards in Aberdare and Merthyr. In 1843 he moved to Cardiff and set up business with his brother Sidney as Batchelor Brothers. They took over the William Jones yard on the bank of River Taff at the lower end of St Mary Street. The River Taff was diverted to prevent flooding. This process meant that the Batchelor Brothers no longer had access to the river from their yard and were forced to move their business to Bute Dock. The 2nd Marquess of Bute used this to his advantage, only giving the Batchelors an annual lease. Batchelor became a Liberal Councillor for Cardiff South in 1850, partly due to his campaigning for better sanitary conditions. In 1852 Batchelor helped to get Walter Coffin of the Taff Vale Railway Company elected to parliament as a Liberal against Bute's Tory candidate, J.D.C.L. Nicholl. At the end of the year Bute refused to renew the Batchelors' shipyard tenure. His ships were barred from entry to the docks. In 1853 Batchelor was elected Mayor of Cardiff. The reason for getting Coffin elected was to get an act of Parliament passed to allow the building of Penarth Dock, in direct competition to Bute's current monopoly. It also meant securing the necessary connection to the Taff Vale Railway, the main connection to coalfields and for Batchelor to his timber yards in the valleys. In 1856 Batchelor was appointed director of Penarth Dock. Work started in 1859 and was completed by 1865, three years before the 3rd Marquess of Bute reached his majority. In 1869 Batchelor was elected president of the Cardiff Liberal Association, he was on the Cardiff School Board and active in the anti-slavery movement. The first act to abolish slavery in British territories had been passed in 1833, however, there were some exceptions in this act and slavery continued to be practiced in other countries. Batchelor had improved the sewerage system in Cardiff, cholera nurtured in Bute Dock had previously killed many of the citizens of Cardiff. he had also broken the Bute families monopoly on Cardiff's access to the sea. On his death Batchelor's fellow Liberals and Non-conformist co-religionists raised the money to build a statue in his honour to stand in the Hayes outside the Free Library that he had helped found. The final insult was yet to come. The statue was defaced , covered in tar and yellow paint and a scurrilous epitaph placed in the Western Mail by Thomas Henry Ensor, a successful lawyer and supporter of the Butes and the Tories:
"In honour of John Batchelor, a native of Newport, who left his country for his country's god; who, on his return, devoted his life and energies to setting class against class, a traitor to the crown, a reviler of the aristocracy, a hater of the clergy, a panderer to the multitude, who, as first Chairman of the Cardiff School Board, squandered the funds to which he did not contribute: who is sincerely mourned by his unpaid creditors to the amount of fifty thousand pounds; who at the close of a wasted and mis-spent life died a demagogue and a pauper, this monument, to the eternal disgrace of Cardiff is erected by sympathetic Radicals: "Owe No Man Anything' ".
This lead to a court case for libel, however, the court found that a dead man had no need of a reputation and so could not be libelled or slandered, setting a precedent in British Law.
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