Welsh Journals

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Was there ever a career like T.J.'s? Son of a company storekeeper in Rhymney, student and ultimately president of the University College of Aberystwyth, student and lecturer at Glasgow, professor of economics at Queen's University, Belfast when still under forty; then, one year later, a jump to the Welsh National Memorial to King Edward VII campaign against tuberculosis, the secretaryship of the Welsh National Health Insurance Commission, and so to London and the Cabinet secretariat in 1916, followed by the secretaryship of the Pilgrim Trust on his retirement from government service in 1930. The transit from Rhymney to Cliveden was less remarkable than the moves from Belfast to Cardiff and London. The key to the last two was turned by David Davies; and T.J.'s devotion to the Davies family, and especially to Gregynog and its press which he did so much to establish, was one of the sheet-anchors of his busy and zealous life. Wales made him, but Wales distrusted him as it has so many other Welshmen who reach high position in London. To be in office in London or was it to be T.J. ? was enough to rob him of the principalships of Cardiff and Aberystwyth, to both of which he aspired. He has had his sardonic revenge. He has got, as his successful rivals never will, his footnote in history, which is more than most civil servants either deserve or achieve. And he himself made sure of it, first by publishing the later parts of his diaries in his lifetime: Diary with Letters, 1931-1950 (1954), and secondly by leaving his complete diaries from 1916 onwards, and his vast collection of letters and papers, official and unofficial, 240 volumes in all, to the National Library of Wales. It is important to notice the nature of the published diaries. T.J. himself published only about one-sixth of his original diaries for those years in Diary with Letters, and his present editor, Mr. Middlemas, has apparently cut the diaries by a similar proportion and has added 'only a handful of papers not in the printed diary' (p. xviii). There has in fact been a double editing, first by T.J. himself, when he put the diaries in shape and sent them to be printed in Switzerland in twelve copies (of twenty-two volumes) by his friend Dr. Ernst Zellweger: the original and several of the copies were destroyed when the Pilgrim Trust offices were bombed. The second editing is by Mr. Middlemas, who has excluded most of the government documents which make up about half these diaries, and other matter which is either still 'sensitive' (for instance, the Violet Douglas-Pennant case) or of no general interest. This, at least, is my 1 Thomas Jones: Whitehall Diary, I, 1916-25. Edited by R. K. Middlemas. Oxford University Press. 1969. Pp. xxiv, 358. 63s. 'A FLUID PERSON': T.J. AND His EDITOR! REVIEWS