Welsh Journals

He was deeply interested in the vagaries of human behaviour, but he never ignored the historical forces which moulded the character of his chosen subjects. R. T. Jenkins was also a creative literary artist. He inherited from his father an unslakeable thirst for first-rate literature and he won esteem among his contemporaries as a man of catholic tastes and tolerant sympathies. He was, as this study shows, 'a conscious stylist' and it is significant that John Gwilym Jones refers to him as a pattern of per- fection in his recently-published latimer to budding authors, Crefft y Lienor. There can be no doubt that R. T. Jenkins's attraction lies as much in his bewitching prose as in his scholarship, and he would have despaired of the flaccid jargon which nowadays threatens to despoil history as a literary craft. Probably the best example of his work is Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif. This, by any standards, is a minor classic; clearly constructed and rich in style, it teems with vivid and challenging insights. As long as a book like this remains widely-read, history as literature will never lose its charm. R. T. Jenkins's work is little known outside Wales. Hopefully, this brief but penetrating essay will bring his unparalleled contribution to Welsh historical writing to the attention of a wider audience. Alun Llywelyn-Williams unashamedly sings the praises of his former mentor- and rightly so, for he was a spell-binder in every sense. We shall be for- tunate indeed if we ever see his like again. GERAINT H. JENKINS Aberystwyth JAMES GRIFFITHS AND His Times. By J. B. Smith and others. Published by the Labour Party in Wales and the Llanelli Constituency Labour Party, Cardiff, 1977. Pp. 119; illustrated. £ 3.00. The death of James Griffiths in 1975, like the retirement of Lord Heycock in 1977, was a reminder that an era in Welsh political history was ending. This had been an era still largely dominated by pioneers, by those who had been there at the beginning when in each south Wales community small groups had seen that the Liberal Party could no longer speak for labour. It was the pioneers who saw that the need was for independent action in both political and industrial matters and who set out to create new organisations. The impulse to independent thought and action had many sources, but what is interesting is that out of that Edwardian seed-time it was the Labour Party that reaped the harvest and established itself as the champion of independence and then as the central pillar of Welsh political life. The departure of the pioneers came as a reminder to historians that the time had come to account for Labour's victory and to evaluate its achievement during that sixty years or so of hegemony. The historian's task is being made easier by the fact that the Labour movement in Wales had itself become more conscious of its past. It is the Labour Party which has published this volume in which James Griffiths's