Cambria Cat Club History

The Cambria Cat Club was formed in May 1974 to encourage and promote a greater understanding in the welfare, breeding and exhibiting of cats.

We started with just twelve members and held jumble sales and sold tea with home made cakes to make money for stationery and printing of membership forms and rule books. We now have about 200 plus members from all over Great Britain, some of whom have been with us since the year we began.

Our first exemption and sanction shows were held in the delightful Barry Memorial Hall but we needed a much larger hall for championship shows, so we moved to the Sophia Gardens Hall for our last sanction show and booked the hall for our first championship show. Unfortunately during a very heavy snowfall, the roof of the hall collapsed and we had to move the show to the Splott Leisure Centre, where we stayed for three years.

During this time we had seen that a large hall was being built in Newport and while work was still going on, we were taken on a tour of the site (wearing hard hats) we then made the first ever booking for the Newport Centre and hoped it would be ready by October.

Cambria- the name

Cambria is the classical name for Wales, being the Latinised form of the Welsh name Cymru (Wales). The etymology of Cymry "the Welsh", Cimbri, and Cwmry" Cumbria", improbably connected to the Biblical Gomer and the "Cimmerians" by 17th-century Celtic scholars, is now known to come from Old Welsh combrog "compatriot; Welshman"[1], deriving from an old Brythonic word "combroges" or Proto-Brythonic  kom-brogos[2][3], meaning "compatriots", (as a result of the struggle with the Anglo-Saxons) possibly therefore related to its sister language Breton's keñvroad, keñvroiz "compatriot" [4].

References

  1. Gove, Philip Babcock, ed. Webster's Third New International Dictionary. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 2002: 321
  2. Jones, J. Morris. Welsh Grammar: Historical and Comparative. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913; new edition, 1995.
  3. Russell, Paul. Introduction to the Celtic Languages. London: Longman, 1995.
  4. Delamarre, Xavier. Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise. Paris: Errance, 2001.