Welsh Journals

MERTHYR POLITICS: THE MAKING OF A WORKING-CLASS TRADITION. Edited, with a foreword, by Glanmor Williams. University of Wales Press, 1966. Pp. 109. 10s. 6d. This book consists of four studies based on lectures delivered to the Merthyr Tydfil branch of the W.E.A. during the winter of 1964-65 by Gwyn Williams, Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, Kenneth Morgan, and J. W. England. 'Large and eager audiences', according to the editor, 'listened to the series with absorption and enthusiasm'; and the Merthyr corporation decided to make a handsome grant in aid of publication. Pride in one's locality and a lively interest in its past may not be uncommon, especially in Wales. What is most unusual is that the reward of civic virtue should be a highly readable work of original scholarship, which certainly deserves 'a wider audience' than the men of Merthyr who made it possible. The title is something of a misnomer. The main achievement of Glan- mor Williams's team is that they have combined to present a vivid and coherent picture of a remarkable community, the classic product in Wales of 'the first industrial revolution'. 'More than any other Welsh town', therefore, Merthyr was 'the crucible and matrix of working-class political tradition' of the type which was to become characteristic of the urban areas in the principality. The contributors describe the development of that tradition with a new subtlety and in some depth; but they would be the first to agree that they also raise questions which remain unanswered. Created by iron, sustained on coal, Merthyr waxed and waned with the old heavy industries. 'For all practical purposes', in Gwyn Williams's words, 'the first Welsh town', it was also the largest until the 1860s, a booming settlement on the frontiers of a new society. That jaundiced Scot, Carlyle, saw it as 'a vision of Hell all cinders, and dustmounds and soot'; and one of Trollope's more squeamish curates fainted at the thought of being sent to such a place. But to the discontented of rural Wales-the precursors of a later, more cosmopolitan immigration-it was a Mecca, 'attractive, not merely in terms of higher wages, but in terms of the fuller life, of a line of escape from a thin and crabbed isolation'. For a time at least many were to feel they had found that fuller life, notably in the Merthyr of Henry Richard. Thereafter, the town's pros- perity grew increasingly precarious and the resulting stresses undermined the long supremacy of Liberalism. D. A. Thomas and Keir Hardie could sit together for a decade as the Members for Merthyr; but what had begun as an association based on 'benevolent neutrality' ended in a bitter con- frontation between the interests they represented, both in parliament and in the valleys. Socialism, drawing upon Dissent as well as dogma, emerged to prepare the way for Labour's inheritance, in Kenneth Morgan's ex- pressive phrase, as 'the depression party, the residuary legatee of un- employment, industrial recession and human misery in the grim decades after the end of the First World War'.