Welsh Journals

THE UNIVERSITIES AND BRITISH INDUSTRY, 1850-1970. By Michael Sanderson. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. Pp. 436. £ 6.50. One is by now well used to reading disclaimers in the prefaces to books on British historical subjects expressing their author's regret at having to concentrate on the English aspects of their study. The reasons usually given are the paucity of sources relating to Scotland, Ireland and Wales, coupled with the author's feeling of incompetence to deal with the material that is available. There is no need for Dr. Sanderson to make any such apology, for his fascinating book on the relationship between universities and British industry is in effect a study in comparative education whose nearest parallel is perhaps M. G. Jones's classic The Charity School Movement published in 1938. Dr. Sanderson begins his study with separate chapters on the effect of industrial development on Oxford and Cambridge, the English civic universities, the Welsh university colleges and the Scottish universities, respectively, during the critical period 1850-1914, and he then goes on to show how the different interactions at this time affected the direction that universities in Britain took from the First World War to 1970. The author shows that the striking success of civic universities in England in the late-nineteenth century depended almost entirely upon the support of local industrialists and the extent to which the universities were in turn able to help industry. This was in stark contrast to the Welsh university movement 'a pathological example of the dangers of disengagement between the universities and industry'. Dr. Sanderson rightly sees the basic cause of this disengagement in the lack of sympathy between the lower middle class nonconformist and 'nationalist' leaders of the university movement (led by the emigre London Welsh whose hearts nevertheless lay in Welsh-speaking rural Wales) and the industrial 'colonists' who rarely identified themselves with the localities in which their industries were situated. This thesis is not new to Welsh historians, but Dr. Sanderson's study shows the pervasiveness of the influence of this basic dichotomy in Welsh society on the growth of higher education in Wales, so that south Wales industrialists, for example, even refused to aid the University College, Cardiff, because it was a part of the University of Wales which, they considered, was dominated by the nonconformist preacher and teacher-producing colleges of Aberystwyth and Bangor. Dr. Sanderson's book is a model for educational historians to follow; his analysis is backed up with hard facts about the extent and sources of financial support, the numbers of students, their social origins and the occupations they took up. The sixtieth birthday of the University of Wales was marked by the publication of 'an historical sketch' by the late Sir Emrys Evans, who had spent almost the whole of his professional life working for the University. The centenary of the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 1972 was celebrated by Dr. Ellis's excellent history of the College. Professor Dodd is already preparing a history of the University College of North Wales to mark its centenary in 1984.