Welsh Journals

Yet though this book says nothing about the war, it does show how moderate trade union leaders, immensely impressed by the power of war-time government to help organized Labour, emerged as the true victors in 1918. They, rather than the socialists or the I.L.P., put their stamp on the party then. Clause Four of the constitution, which was to become the Ark of the Socialist Covenant in the fight against Gaitskellite revisionism in the 1960s, really represented the crucial post-war defeat for socialism. But what mattered most in the replacement of the Liberals by Labour was the doubling of the electorate in the franchise bill of 1918. The Liberals really had nothing to offer these new voters; Labour might have, if it shaped its policies carefully. Even so, the Conservatives were paradoxically the real beneficiaries, ruling alone or in partnership for all but thirteen of the next fifty years. Labour had to wait until 1945 before it could fully savour the power it had so tantalisingly tasted as Dr. McKibbin's important book ends. PATRICK RENSHAW Sheffield. FROM CASTLE TO CIVIC CENTRE. A HISTORY OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN NEATH, C. 1100-1972. By G. H. Eaton. Neath, published by the author, 1975. £ 1.75. Mr. Eaton, the last mayor of the old Borough of Neath, celebrates the advent of the new District Council under the Local Government Act of 1972. The story, which is derived primarily from the broader secondary sources, is plainly told: it moves from the first establishment of the medieval settlement around the castle through the later middle ages and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the eighteenth-century heyday of the Mackworths. Two-thirds of the book naturally deal with the modern period. Anecdotal material is allowed to appear, and colourful characters: Agnes 'Swallow Tail' Davies and the company of apparently permanently drunk prostitutes in Neath in the 1850s and '60s; C. R. Trueman, the eccentric early-twentieth-century photographer and scourge of the local aediles, frequently in jail for libel and slander. But the serious purpose of local government is not forgotten, and the sincerity with which Mr. Eaton writes allows one to forget a number of misprints and the obiter dicta, vaguely nationalist and vaguely left-wing, which are perhaps part of the heritage of the town. P. S. LEWIS All Souls College, Oxford.