Welsh Journals

THE WELSH EDUCATIONAL ALLIANCE AND THE 1870 ELEMENTARY EDUCATION ACT I do not know that there is any part of the kingdom where there is more feeling on this subject than in Wales. I am not surprised at that. What has passed there within the last year or two may well make Welshmen sensitive. WHEN W. E. Forster, the vice-president of the Committee of Council on Education, made these remarks on 14 March 1870 during a Commons debate on an amendment to his Elementary Education Bill, he could hardly be accused of exaggeration. Less than a week earlier, he had been present when Gladstone had received a depu- tation from Wales which by Forster's own admission was 'most earnest, intelligent and influential'.1 While the parties which had waited upon the prime minister on 9 March had tended to be overshadowed by Joseph Chamberlain and the leaders of the National Education League who had met Gladstone earlier in the day, Forster was referring to the representatives of the recently- formed body called the Welsh Educational Alliance, which in some respects was more advanced than its Birmingham counterpart. Both organizations were products of the urban radicalism which in 1868 formed a demonstrative minority in the Liberal ranks, but whereas the National Education League was optimistically intended by its followers to become 'the most powerful engine of agitation since the Anti-Corn Law League',2 the Welsh Educational Alliance lacked effective means of applying pressure on the government. It was largely for political advantage that the Welsh delegates acted in conjunction with the League, while striving at the same time to establish their own organization with a separate identity. The Alliance originated in January 1870 as a result of the growing disquiet amongst Liberals in Wales who felt that the government's intentions in the field of elementary education would not provide the type of system of which they approved. As public interest in education had gathered momentum in the 1860s,3 certain noncon- formist elements of Liberal persuasion were obliged to reconsider their traditional distrust of government authority over schools. 1 Pari. Deb. (3rd Series), Vol. 199, 1936-37. J. L. Garvin, Life of Joseph Chamberlain (1935), I, 94. o H. Roper, 'Towards an Education Act for England and Wales, 1865-68', British Journal of Educational Studies, XXIII (1975), 181-208.