Welsh Journals

carriers, flywheels, beam engines, pigs of iron, staircase locks, timber baulks, bevel gears and horizontal shafting belts, not to mention blast furnaces, mills, pits and docks, could better serve to emphasise the sheer, physical presence and gobbling energy of the Machine in the Welsh Garden. Views of the copper smelting works (13 between 1717 and 1850) by the Tawe provide a sulphurous commentary on the environmental brutality. Historians of Wales have, perhaps, been slow to appreciate the visual evidence that industrial archaeologists are busy uncovering and presenting. This volume, rather more than other recent 'picture books', is a salutary reminder to them. At the same time it indicates a few problems itself. There are only eight illustrations that specifically deal with people whilst it is the pencil drawings by Miss M. E. Thompson of Bethesda quarrymen that actually say more to us about the relationship of humans to work environ- ment than the stiff, posed photographs of workers. To demand more people may, in itself, be mere sentiment if the evidence that survives is of the kind it is, but it is precisely the historian's task to connect the evidence to the particular people who created it and whose lives, in rather complex fashion, it altered. The same blankness of presentation has affected, hitherto, the Industrial and Maritime Museum at the Pierhead in Cardiff where the exhibits look, wrenched from their context, as lordly domineer- ing as when, in context, they helped set patterns and rhythms of work. It is to be hoped that the Blaenavon Ironworks, in preparation as a museum site since 1977, will speak more forcefully to visitors about past realities. Similarly, alongside a photograph of road construction above the Rhondda after 1926, it is simply not true to say that the 'contractors were faced with the daunting task of man-handling compressors, crushers and portable engines up the steep sides of the "Bwlch" The only things the contractors man-handled were unemployed colliers. Doubtless the detail of industrial process and mechanical invention is important but it should not override the explanation of the purpose that led to stone-quarrying for railway bridge coping-stones in Radyr near the Taff Vale railway line nor the successive uses of limestone quarries all over Wales nor, indeed, the quarrying, shaping and, sometimes, splitting of industry's most valuable raw material, the people themselves. The new slate galleries, miners' museums and other old industrial 'beauty-spots' that the Wales Tourist Board is now busily, and ham-fistedly, promoting could do worse than hang over their entrances Bertolt Brecht's questions: Who built Thebes of the seven gates? In the books you will find the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock? Cardiff DAVID smith THE Grenvillites, 1801-1829. By James J. Sack. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1979. Pp. 224.$10.00. Writing the history of the Grenville family, as the present author concedes in his opening chapter, is an unenviable task. Individually, they were cold and aloof. Collectively, they carried around with them what came to be known as the 'odium Grenvillium'. The best that could be said