January 23rd

1923: St Illtyd’s College, Courtney Road, opened. It was staffed by the Catholic De La Salle brothers who went on to serve education in Cardiff for seventy-four years. Over seventy former pupils of St Illtyd’s were later ordained to the priesthood. The college buildings were badly damaged by a German bomb on the night of 4th March 1941 but the school continued to function in what was left of the premises. (John O’Sullivan & Bryn Jones, Cardiff: A Centenary Celebration, The History Press, 2005)

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2011: Designer Tim Rice (41) of Grangetown announced his ambitious scheme to redecorate the interior of Brains Brewery’s ‘Yard Bar & Kitchen’ pub diner by plastering the ceilings of the toilets with hundreds of pictures of bottoms. Asked where he would get his ‘models’, he told Wales on Sunday, ‘I’ve been looking everywhere from porn sites on the internet to cosmetic surgery catalogues. I’ve even put out requests to my friends on Facebook to take their own pictures and email them to me. I wanted to go for a look that defied description’. His award-winning redesign of the former dairy at Pontcanna into an art gallery included ‘burlesque dancers can-canning across crocodile-skin floors’.