Welsh Journals

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The book is pleasantly free from the slanted attitudes and politicization which dog so much nineteenth-century social history, mainly from the Left. The exception is Norman McCord's chapter on the Poor Law and Philanthropy which, while usefully restoring the relation between poor relief and the abundant private charity of the Victorians, is too full of special pleading and too complacent to be wholly credible. He omits, for instance, to mention the ghastly abuses which arose from the consignment of the pauper lunatics to private asylums, chained in filthy cellars and outhouses from which Lord Shaftesbury struggled so hard to rescue them. Gross abuse, which brought about increasing public participation, necessitated the provision of a public system. But on the whole the book maintains objectivity. It brings Poor Law studies up to date; and no student of nineteenth-century social history will be able to ignore it. URSULA HENRIQUES Cardiff DICTIONARY OF LABOUR BIOGRAPHY. VOLUME III. Edited by Joyce M. Bellamy and John Saville. Macmillan, 1976. Pp. xix, 236. £ 20.00. The unique qualities of this invaluable enterprise have already been acclaimed in these pages (ante, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 111-13). Volume Three is, to some extent, the hapless socialist victim of the crisis of capitalism, since it appears in a slimmed down, computerized form. Nevertheless, the essential virtues of the Dictionary all survive intact. Once again, the entries and the editing, the cross-referencing and indexing, and above all the guides to manuscript and printed sources can only arouse admiration and gratitude both from the specialist scholar and the lay enthusiast. The fact that this third volume covers, in the main, relatively less well-known figures from the worlds of Labour, the trade unions and the Co-operative movement, many of them rooted in their own local communities, makes it in some ways even more valuable than its predecessors. Once again, Wales gains its fair share of attention. The point was made previously (ante, loc. cit., p. 112) that it is a little surprising that no Welsh contributors have been approached. However, it must be emphasized that the authors of the entries here have made valiant and impressive efforts to unearth the abundant source material to be found in Welsh archives, including the riches of the Swansea Miners' Library of which great use has rightly been made. Once again, therefore, Hull has done us proud. Students of Welsh history should not overlook the entries here of non- Welsh labour leaders whose activities brought them temporarily, but crucially, into contact with the Welsh industrial scene. In this category comes Thomas Halliday, president of the Amalgamated Association of Miners, which achieved an astonishing growth in the Welsh coalfield in the 1869-74 period; Halliday himself polled remarkably strongly at Merthyr in the 1874 general election. (Incidentally, the assertion on p. 94 that 'almost all' the South Wales miners in the 1870s were 'monoglot Welshmen' seems surprising.) John Hodge, later Minister, first of Labour and then of