Welsh Journals

quarrying villages and townships has been recorded in the creative works of Kate Roberts, Dic Tryfan, Caradog Pritchard, W. J. Gruffydd and T. Rowland Hughes, and in the historical and descriptive accounts by Dylan Pritchard, Ernest Roberts, J. Rhoose Williams, Cyril Parry, Emyr Jones and other writers. The slate industry of north Wales experienced a nineteen-fold growth between 1793 and the peak output of 1898, and in that period and later it accounted for over three-quarters of the British output of slate. Its growth was due to the enormous expansion in house and other building and to the substantial price advantage which slates gained over locally-produced clay tiles in the main population centres-a relative cheapness that was largely the result of a reduction in transport costs, absolutely and especially as a proportion of the price. The very rapid decline of slate production from the end of the nineteenth century onwards was the consequence of such factors as the slumps in the British building industry; the renewed competition from tiles which gained in terms of price and of attractiveness; competition from galvanized metal sheets and from imported slates; the fall in overseas demand, particularly that of Germany, due to tariff protection and war; and the interruptions in the supply of slates, as a result of the Penrhyn strikes of 1896 and 1900-3 and of the World Wars, all of which hastened the use of other materials. Employment in the industry fell in the first phase of the contraction from some 16,000 in 1898 to 8,860 in 1913. It is gratifying that Dr. Lindsay has assembled so much of the industry's history and has been able to use the large additional collections of manuscript records recently made available. Her task of organizing the voluminous material was a daunting one, but it cannot be said that she has been very successful in this. Dr. Lindsay adds considerably to our knowledge-enabling us, for example, to derive a capital intensity of £ 200 per worker in one quarrying enterprise in the 1870s; and an employment ratio of quarrying to mining for slate of about 7 3 in Gwynedd at the beginning of the present century (pp. 141, 167). The information about the comparative cost of transport by early roads and by tramroad in the region (pp. 49-50, 108) can be fitted into a wider context as can the various references to banks and to methods of payment. Various omissions, however, have been noted. For example, in the dispersed references to wages (for some quarries and some periods only) no corrections, or inadequate ones, are made for price changes and thus little indication is given of changes in real wages (cf. pp. 203-4, 209, 219-20). It would have been of interest-though possibly this was to expect too much-to have information about the relative importance of natural growth and of net inward migration in the population increase of the slate districts. And the second element in the expansion of their population should surely be described as 'net gain by migration' or 'net in-migration' rather than 'immigration' (pp. 121, 224-25). One wonders whether the origins of the 'bargain' system of letting sections of rock face (pp. 40, 67, 93, 203) could have been explored: its introduction in the copper workings of Parys Mountain around 1770 (cf. J. Rowlands, The Copper Mountain, pp. 25-26, 94) may have encouraged its adoption soon afterwards in the slate quarries. There