Welsh Journals

SHORT NOTICES The Vivian family came from Cornwall to South Wales early in the nineteenth century, and within less than a generation had become the leading copper manufacturers in the region in which nine-tenths of Britain's copper smelting was carried on. While their works were destroying almost every blade of grass in what had been a notable eighteenth-century beauty spot on the east side of the town, on the west side the family had built itself a delightful house in Strawberry-Hill Gothic and around it had created a still more delightful park and gardens. Life in this nineteenth-century copper-master's household has been re-created by one of the family's descendants, Mrs. Averil Stewart, in Family Tapestry (John Murray, London, 1961, pp. 223, 21s.). Written in an intimately reminiscent and chatty style, the book, nevertheless, provides an interesting account of the personal and domestic life of the second generation of this notable family of industrialists whose home, in 1920, became the nucleus of the University College of Swansea and whose good taste in landscape, trees, and flowers has delighted generations of its teachers and students. A revised and enlarged edition of Dr. Iorwerth Peate's useful Clock and Watch Makers in Wales, first published in 1945, has now appeared (National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, 1960, pp. 107 and seven plates, 6s.). Prefaced by two short chapters giving a summary of the development of clocks and watches and of clock and watch making in Wales, the core of the book is a very full list of the clock and watch makers in Wales during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, of which well over a thousand are listed, together with a catalogue of the specimens of their work which can be seen at the Welsh Folk Museum. Wales's connection with the craft is long and venerable: one of the very earliest references to a clock in European literature is to be found in Dafydd ap Gwilym's poetry in the middle of the fourteenth century. Later Welsh craftsmen were more than mere assemblers of parts made elsewhere; at its best, their work was not unworthy of comparison with clocks made at leading English centres. At least one of them, John Tibbot of Newtown, was capable of making notable original contributions to the clockmaker's art. In The Story of Kenfig (published by the author, Port Talbot, 1961, pp. 80, 8s.), that talented and versatile local historian, Mr. A. Leslie Evans, has published another booklet as well informed, enthusiastically written and charmingly illustrated as his earlier works on Sker and Margam Abbey. A. H. Dodd contributes a study of the early career of 'Mr. Myddleton the Merchant of Tower Street' to Elizabethan Government and Society,