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recently made available which has not been subjected to the kind of integrated and extended narrative presented here. The final four chapters show that by the end of the 1920s even the Mining Association was starting to see that the kind of sweeping re- organisation recommended by the Samuel Report was unavoidable because of the inexorable decline in output, productivity and profitability. But the owners, like the miners, were unwilling to accept all the impli- cations of reorganisation, rationalisation or the restructuring of sales in both domestic and foreign markets. This reluctance from both sides of industry was encouraged by the ability of so many apparently marginal pits and colliery companies to survive. Yet pit closures and thus more unemployment in the short-term were necessary to give the industry any chance of longer-term prosperity. Even after the passage of the Coal Mines Act in 1930, voluntary reorganisation appeared impossible to achieve in a truly integrated, nationwide sense, while after 1931 the National Government lacked the will to make either controlled competition or compulsory reorganisation work. In the end, the owners accepted nationalisation almost as eagerly as the miners-many of them indeed welcomed it-because everything else had failed. As Dr. Kirby shows, reorganisation schemes can scarcely be said to have been tried properly, while nationalisation itself was rushed through for political reasons with far too much haste. This chronic failure to arrest the decline of Britain's most important basic industry was not due to lack of knowledge-the problems were plain and solutions abounded-but lack of will. Economic change, poor investment policy, bad management and even worse labour relations all played their part. But what runs through Dr. Kirby's discussion, and what makes this book so valuable, is the emphasis he places on this political failure. Ideological objections to compulsion by Tory governments and the owners, the intransigence of the miners and the inability of all governments in the interwar years to evolve an effective policy and then impose it on the industry combined to create the lost opportunity of the 1920s and 1930s. Fifty years from now, when historians start to write the political and economic history of the British steel industry during the past decade, they will need to read this book to make comparisons with what happened in coalmining fifty years before. PATRICK RENSHAW Sheffield. CoLEG HARLECH: THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS. By Peter Stead. University of Wales Press, 1977. Pp. 135. £ 4. THOMAS JONES: FOUNDER OF COLEG HARLECH. By Eirene White. Printed for Coleg Harlech at the National Library of Wales, 1978. In 1923 George Davison, an interesting, rich eccentric anarchist, was trying to unload his fine stone house, Wern Fawr, at Harlech on an unresponsive market. In ordinary circumstances it would probably have gone ultimately at a knock-down price, possibly for conversion into an