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discussion, one more of those sensitive analyses of local and parliamentary politics with which the author has widened and deepened our knowledge of Welsh society in the central decades of the nineteenth century. R. A. lewis Bangor. LYULPH STANLEY: A STUDY IN EDUCATIONAL Politics. By Alan W. Jones. Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1979. Pp. xiv, 194,$8.50. 'He has nothing to do, and his appointment would be very acceptable to the Non-Cons.' So wrote A. J. Mundella, whose appointment as President of the Board of Trade in Gladstone's third ministry made place for E. L. Stanley on the Cross Commission of 1886. His name had been suggested by Henry Richard, whose assessment of him was that 'though not a Nonconformist [he] shares their views, and is, moreover, more perfectly master of our whole educational system than perhaps any man outside the Education Department'. Edward Lyulph Stanley, subsequently Lord Stanley, finally Lord Sheffield, was born in 1839 in circumstances which allowed him to in- dulge any interest which engaged his attention. That turned out to be a lifelong Liberal, radical concern with education. His inexorable private progress, Eton, Balliol, the Commons, the Lords, contrasts markedly with public disappointment in his hopes for the education system. The principles for which he fought-a unified, national, unsectarian, more egalitarian and democratic system of education-were not achieved in his lifetime, or indeed subsequently. Despite the range and duration of his educational interests-actively pursued until his death in 1925-Stanley has been a casualty of the Whig interpretation of educational history, so prevalent until recently in our textbooks. Only when the 1902 Education Act, in particular, is seen in the Eaglesham/Simon light of Conservative intrigue to consolidate voluntaryist influence, to divert control to more conservative authorities to perpetuate what the government believed to be a dangerous erosion of class differentials in school provision, is there opportunity for a School Board champion like Stanley to emerge from the shadows of history. He deserves to be rescued; and the author has made a thorough job of cataloguing Stanley's achievements and failures. The early biographical details-a father who was a member of Melbourne's government of 1835-41 and President of the Board of Trade in the 1850s, a mother who was influenced by the educational ideas of Locke and Rousseau-are useful, but remoter relations are hardly of central significance. Still, his brother Henry was pleasantly eccentric. Lyulph Stanley was uninterested in education until his thirties but in 1876, an agnostic Liberal, joined the London School Board which he was to serve with enormous energy and distinction. The author's study of Stanley's work here, on the Cross Commission on elementary education (1886-88), and on the National Education Association is fascinating. He spoke out vehemently in favour of a national system of education in the hands of School Boards when successive governments, particularly the Conservative government from