Welsh Journals

which are the very stuff of local patriotism and local history. But all the contributors have brought an enthusiasm which must have affected many readers; and the photographs, if nothing else, must have sent a good many of them out looking and learning for themselves. In parenthesis, it must be said that all the illustrations have been good, but the aerial pictures in volume IV are quite superb. One has, in all fairness, also to recognize what it is the market will take in relation to a series sponsored by a private individual. The book-buying public's assessment of what constitutes local history does not necessarily square with the historian's. In general, Mr. Williams and his contributors are to be commended for raising not lowering their readers' sights. GLANMOR WILLIAMS. Swansea. THE BARRY RAILWAY. By D. S. Barrie. The Oakwood Press, Lingfield, 1962. Pp. 62. 13s. 6d. Mr. Barrie is one of a select class: a working railwayman-he is assistant general manager of the North-Eastern Region of British Railways-who is also a productive and scholarly historian of railways. Of his three previous histories of South Wales railways, all published by the Oakwood Press, the Taff Vale appeared in 1939, the Rhymney in 1952, and the Brecon and Merthyr in 1957. By contrast with those three the Barry was very much a late-comer, the product of the long-standing resentment of the Rhondda coal-owners at the high charges and the delays imposed on them by the monopolistic Taff Vale and the Bute Trustees. David Davies was the leader: it was his last great enterprise. Not surprisingly, the company was defeated by the vested interests in its first appearance in Parliament, but it got its Bill in 1884; it opened its main line, from Trehafod to Barry, in 1889. The company's importance, however, was not just that of a railway operator: it built simultaneously the great docks at Barry, of which the first part, 73 acres in extent, was the largest enclosed dock in the country. The railway and docks were, from the first, an integrated undertaking. From the start, the Barry's was a success story. It fought, and eventually won, lengthy legal battles with the Taff Vale over rates. It promoted expensive extensions: one to the Rhymney valley was opened in 1905 but abandoned, at its northern end, in 1926; another, from near Caerphilly to either Ynysddu or Nine Mile Point in the Sirhowy valley, was authorized at the third attempt, in 1907, after a great parliamentary battle which cost the Barry alone £ 100,000. It is probably as well that Mr. Barrie gives us only a few phrases from the thousands of pages of evidence which must survive from these hearings-surely the most tedious and expensive way imaginable for eliciting the arguments for and against a new enterprise. The struggle was carried on beyond the walls of Parliament when a public meeting at Caerphilly was broken up by stink bombs.