Welsh Journals

WALES AND THE QUEST FOR PEACE. By Goronwy J. Jones. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1969. Pp. 187. 35s. (El 75). In the idealised image which we as Welsh people have of ourselves, devotion to international peace and repudiation of militarism have their place as national characteristics. Mr. Goronwy Jones's survey of peace movements in Wales from 1815 to 1939 brings perspective to the matter. The most striking impression conveyed by the earlier chapters is the limited impact made in Wales during the nineteenth century by a move- ment which was at no time indigenous in its origins. It derived from and was part of a United Kingdom activity initiated by Quakers in London in response to the long Napoleonic wars and gradually attracted support from nonconformists. The Peace Society was no more significant in Wales than in England. In fact, what the first section of this study consists of, inevitably, is a brief general history of the British peace movement interspersed with Welsh illustrations for, plainly, the material was too sparse for anything else. Still, there are aspects of interest. Henry Richard is, of course, the commanding figure, though Mr. Jones makes it clear that the cause of peace was more important to him than the cause of Wales. In fact Wales was not, in general, responsive to the movement which was never in the nineteenth century representative of Welsh feeling. It emerges that on the critical issues up to 1914, the Militia Bill of 1852, the Crimean War, the South African War, and the final crisis, Welsh opinion was, in the mass, far from pacific and its responses were no different from those elsewhere in the United Kingdom. The concluding chapters are dominated by the activities of the Welsh League of Nations Union and the personality of Lord Davies, who animated and sustained it by his generosity, devotion and enthusiasm. He was supported in Wales by collaborators of energy and ability who worked with considerable skill to build up membership and create a climate of opinion. They made significant impression on religious bodies and educational institutions. Indeed, perhaps the most important and lasting achievement of the WLNU was the encouragement which its efforts gave to the study of international history and current affairs in the schools. It seems to have been less successful generally in holding its membership, which declined sharply with the economic depression although its influence in the mid-thirties was still considerable-the response in Wales to the Peace Ballot in 1935 was 24 per cent higher than in the country generally. Mr. Jones does not comment upon the political affiliations of the membership or even of the leading figures, but the impression is that in a majority these latter were Liberal nonconformists, latter-day heirs of Gladstonian morality. The League movement certainly attracted religious pacifists; it does not seem to have brought in those political pacificists whose emergence in south Wales before 1914 he notes.