Welsh Journals

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a large profit in 1872. There are hints of progressive management, but also of sinister disease and primitive conditions. This does not quite tally with Robbins's account of Bright's quest for Welsh gold (not lead) and in any case suggests a rather bigger involvement on Bright's part, enough to make him, like Gladstone and Disraeli, a Welsh mineowner during his period of greatest popular prominence. When the story is cleared up, it may give us a somewhat different view of how far Bright had really wanted to be a politician in the 1860s. JOHN VINCENT Bristol Greenhill SCHOOL, TENBY, 1896-1964. By Wilfred Harrison. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1979. Pp. xiv, 390; 42 black and white illustra- tions. £ 7.95. The history of the Welsh county/grammar school spans a period in which the politics and economy of the society it served changed fundamentally. The large majority of the schools came into existence as a result of the 1889 Welsh Intermediate Education Act, a proud achievement of radical Liberalism. Anthony Crosland's Circular 10/65 hastened, though it did not cause, their demise in a largely Labour-dominated Wales. This was a society increasingly conscious of the inadequacies of the 'Eleven Plus', sufficiently affluent to foot the bill for the transformation to a compre- hensive system, and swayed by educational theories-Newsom, Plowden -which made the world of the Welsh county school of the 1890s seem very remote. The 1897 Greenhill school photograph, one of an interesting selection of black and white plates in this book, reveals not only a staff of four in full academic dress but also most of the boys in mortar boards. The mortar boards were replaced by caps within a few years, and now, even in the few grammar schools in Wales, staff gowns sweep the corridors infrequently. So nostalgia can flourish, and more certainly in the late 1970s when the educational, social and architectural theories on which massive plate-glass comprehensives were founded are under fire. Examina- tions, standards, the rewards of academic success are again fashionable. and this, fundamentally, was what the county/grammar schools were about, The judgement of historians of education on these schools has some- times been tinged with this nostalgia; yet the history of the Welsh county/ grammar school is riddled with paradoxes. Lauded as providing Wales with a system of state secondary education in advance of anything equivalent in England, and therefore, in some strange way, testifying to the superiority of the Welsh in all things educational, the schools were being violently criticised within a dozen years of their foundation for betraying the needs of Wales as a nation and Welsh pupils as individuals -and O. M. Edwards was only the best known of the critics. More democratic agents of social mobility than their English counterparts- from early days they drew the vast majority of their pupils from the public elementary schools-they were geared to the needs of the successful, the potential university student. Drawing on an enormous fund of loyalty