Suddenly, the rips and tears left behind by Britain’s declining, parasitic Empire become clear.
Yet following the violent murder of Violet Volacki, a well-known Jewish shopkeeper in the area, the texture of Tiger Bay’s worn tapestry slowly begins to grate. It is a Bay where Somalian Milk Bar owners mix with Cypriot hairdressers whose children play alongside the Welsh, white working classes. His Tiger Bay is a rich tapestry animated by characters whose existence defies those common perceptions of a British past that was homogenous and white, particularly outside the Empire’s centrifugal force, London. Opening with the death of George VI and the birth of a new decolonial era, we are introduced to the backdrop of Tiger Bay riding on the coattails of Mattan’s stylish fawn mackintosh.
The Fortune Men follows Mahmood Mattan, a British Somali sailor, father and chancer who, until we meet him in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay in 1952, has spent the past 24 years of his life chasing the world, from Hargeisa in Somaliland, through Australia to Brazil.
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