Welsh Journals

Wilson, ten years his senior, a former health insurance commissioner who, like himself, had taken to literature. This retreat appears to have restored Young's confidence and enabled him to affirm more strongly his centrist position. So much was this the case that it has been said of his writings that they may well cause a reader to appreciate the continuing need for extremist views in British politics. Certainly, there must be many Con- servatives today who are rather repelled by Young's enthusiasm for welfare and contempt for wealth, whilst many members of the Labour party may find that this life-long Tory is more sympathetic to their ideas than the Webbs and the Coles who, they may now feel, were earnestly barking up the wrong trees. Those who dislike the fractiousness of the present day, however, may value Young's essay all the more because of its central view-point and because, too, it helps to relate our own time to a previous one, even if a little correction may now be deemed necessary. N. C. MASTERMAN Swansea. THE BRITISH COALMINING INDUSTRY, 1870-1946: A POUTICAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY. By M. W. Kirby. Macmillan 1977. Pp. 278. £ 10. The political history of the British coalmining industry has been written largely from the point of view of the miners. Economic and social historians have presented a more balanced picture, but there has long been need for a book which combined political and economic history with an objective account of the role both of the employers, the Miners' Federation and successive Governments. Dr. Kirby's new study fills this gap admirably, and fills it, moreover, in just 200 pages of text. Such economy of effort, has rarely been achieved by earlier scholars, and there are signs of too much compression. For example, the book would have benefited from the addition of a con- cluding chapter, for it ends abruptly with nationalisation when there is need to draw together the strands of a complex argument covering 77 years of history. But for the most part anyone who has read at all deeply about the subject, or tried to write about the changing politics of the industry while sorting out the complexities of pay and profitability, must admire Dr. Kirby's skill in exposition, to say nothing of his handling of sources which are often intractable and unsatisfactory. The first half of the book covers familiar ground and offers no new interpretations, although it often achieves a more satisfactory synthesis than others. Thus the discussion of the Sankey Commission in 1919 reveals a much clearer insight into the problems facing the industry and, more important, the different ways in which these problems were per- ceived by the Coalition Government, the owners and the MFGB, than can be found in previous accounts. Between the publication of the Sankey Report and the end of the General Strike Dr. Kirby makes good use of the most recent work published in the past three years. After 1926, the book begins to break fresh ground, analysing material from the Public Record Office only