Volume One - Into the Victorian Age - The official opening of the docks . . .

The Chairman gave "the Hon. Lady Mary Windsor Clive." He could not give this toast without emotion, having associated with the late Mr. Robert Clive in the directorship of this company. No man ever sat at their board who had enlisted the sympathy and esteem of his co-directors as Mr. Clive had as their chairman. They felt that he was a gentlemen in every respect, a man of great business attitude, and they deeply deplored his loss and had often expressed their sense of it to each other. The young boy who now sat with them they trusted would grow up to be such a man as his father was, and that he would never forget what he has seen this day, but feel that in being selected to open the dock it had been a measure placed upon his auspices as his father's successor ; that he should tread in his parent's steps and feel a deep interest in the progress of this enterprise. He hoped that Lady Clive in cultivating her youthful son, would never allow him to forget the interest he had in this locality, so that in future years they might see him here, taking his father's place. (Cheers.)

The Hon. Robert Windsor Clive was then placed on his feet on his chair by his mother, Lady Mary, and said - I thank you very much for the honour you have done in drinking mamma's and my health. (Cheers.)

The Hon. Capt. Clive gave the next toast, "The Chairman and Directors of the Penath Company." The Chairman briefly acknowledged the complement.

Mr. Poole rose next, and said his apology for again bespeaking the attention for the audience was the importance of the toast which he had to propose. Some might think that this toast was one which could not appropriately proceed out of the mouth of the chairman of the Taff Vale Company. With that opinion he did not sympathise, and he thought they would not when he told them that toast was the health of the most noble the Marquis of Bute - (Cheers.) - but that the chairman of the Taff Vale Company was not only justified in proposing the toast, but was the person from whom the toast should originate. (Cheers.)

They were not insensible of the vast advantages the Bute Docks had conferred upon the Taff Vale Company. Some persons said, what would be the docks without the railway? True, but what would be the railway without the docks? - The docks were a noble instance of the foresight of the late Marquis, the father of the present noble lord. He remembered when the West Dock was finished, a gentlemen going to see it, and he said it was a fine dock, but why did his lordship make it so large? No doubt the noble lord thought the development was in the womb of time, and soon the time arrived when the West Dock was insufficient and another noble dock was made after it.