Welsh Journals

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PAGES FROM MEMORY. By James Griffiths. Dent, 1969. Pp. 213. 50s. Jim Griffiths's memoirs (surely it is typical of the man that one instinctively uses the less formal name) are the pleasant, relaxed record of a busy and eventful life whose even tenor seems never to have been seriously interrupted. From the Amman Valley to miner's agent, president of the South Wales Miners' Federation, member of parliament, chairman of the national executive and deputy leader of the Labour Party, Minister of National Insurance, Colonial Secretary and finally first Secretary of State for Wales-at every stage his career has brought the unsought rewards of unselfish service and has prepared the way for further service. He has had three priceless advantages: a happy home and family, a character of the strictest honour, and a genial, equable temperament which has made him a host of friends and few enemies. His gift for conciliation, for the reconciling of personalities and issues, is all too rare, and is yet indispensable in government at any level. Such a life, like the simple annals of the poor, leaves a record which neither reveals nor titillates. The background is a common one (will it seem so in the next generation?): hand-loom weavers and smiths in the family, a rural coalfield, the chapel. It was a visiting preacher, Evan Roberts, a coalminer turned minister, who first fired the young Griffiths with new thoughts. Religion and socialism were fostered by The Examiner and The Christian Commonwealth, socialism by the sermons printed therein by the Rev. R. J. Campbell of the City Temple. Griffiths's socialist conversion was completed when he and his friends heard Campbell himself at Ystalyfera and Keir Hardie at Gwaun-cae-Gurwen. (Inciden- tally, he suggests that the hostility of ministers to socialism sealed the fate of the Liberal Party in Wales.) His later career was unusual in two ways: he found his wife in a Hampshire village-they began as pen-friends through a socialist comrade of Griffiths who went to work at the Basingstoke Co-operative Society; and he won a scholarship to the Labour College. As president of the S.W.M.F., he led the fight against the Spencer Union, which culminated in one of the first sit-in strikes, at Nine Mile Point. These and later incidents are sketched so briefly, however, that they serve only to remind one how little we know in detail about such things as the influence of the Labour College or the inter-war history of Wales. Griffiths's account of his career in Parliament and ministerial office adds little to our knowledge. He opines that devaluation in 1949 was the beginning of the end of the Attlee government, and speculates whether the devaluation of 1967 will mark the same point for Wilson's. He is (surely unintentionally?). unkind in quoting some of the election fustian of 1964: 'the country needs fresh and virile leadership. Labour is ready and poised to swing its plans into instant operation impatient to apply the new thinking (there are thirteen lines of this). He is unworried by the nationalist movement. He points to the dilemma over