Welsh Journals

The energetic Chris Cook's edited series on 'Sources in British History', published by Macmillan, is one of the useful enterprises in recent years to assist the researches of modern political historians. Perhaps the best of them was the first volume (1975), on the archival resources of selected organizations and societies, a remarkable compendium of information on records familiar and obscure. Volume 2 (1975), on the papers of selected public servants, was also of much value. Now there have appeared two further volumes which offer a guide to the private papers of members of parliament, 1900-51 (Macmillan, 1977: Volume 3, A-K, pp. 281, jE 15.00; Volume 4, L-Z, pp. 272, £ 15.00). These cover all English, Welsh and Scottish MPs in the period, with appendices on archives in Ireland. Despite the dedicated work of the editor, such a volume must inevitably have its limitations. A large proportion of those included left no papers that can be traced, and many entries are, therefore, void. The usefulness of filling up so much of the volumes in this fashion must be in some doubt. Those MPs who were also Cabinet ministers are dismissed by reference to the Hazlehurst and Woodland Guide to twentieth-century Cabinet mini- sters' papers (reviewed, ante, VIII, No. 1, 124-25). Despite the immense qualities of this last work, it is not flawless and it is unfortunate that Mr. Cook did not attempt to do more than merely reproduce the work of his predecessors. The papers of Ramsay MacDonald, to take only one example are done somewhat less than justice on this basis. The entry on Lloyd George takes no account of material that has appeared since the Hazlehurst- Woodland guide was published. Other entries are manifestly less thorough than they could have been. To take two Welsh examples, Keir Hardie (member for Merthyr, 1900-15) has a most inadequate entry which mentions some unimportant holdings in the United States but ignores several significant ones in England and Wales. Llewelyn Williams (member for Carmarthen Boroughs, 1906-18) is dispatched into oblivion, a cruel fate for so original and creative a political figure. Here and else- where, more use might have been made of published works (for instance, the writings of Emrys Hughes on Keir Hardie) or accessible unpublished studies (such as Seymour Rees's eisteddfod prize essay on Llewelyn Williams) which provide primary source material for their subject. Welsh printed sources, such as the Dictionary of Welsh Biography or the various editions of Who's Who in Wales are largely disregarded. His daughter's valuable biography of Sir Herbert Lewis (MP for Flintshire, Flint Boroughs and the University of Wales successively, 1892-1922) is ignored, no doubt because it is written in Welsh. The same applies to E. Morgan Humphreys's perceptive essays on George Maitland Lloyd Davies (MP for the Univer- sity of Wales, 1923-24) and others. The conclusion must be, therefore, that, for all the immensely useful and lucidly presented material contained in these volumes, slightly less haste to publish would have made it a more complete and reliable guide for historians of modern British and Welsh politics. SHORT NOTICES K.O.M.