Welsh Journals

SHORT NOTICES The rare virtues of the Dictionary of Labour Biography, edited by Joyce M. Bellamy and John Saville, have already been applauded in these pages on more than one occasion (ante, VIII, 111 and 491, for Volumes II and III). All these qualities appeared yet again in Volume V (Macmillan, 1978, pp. 279, £ 20.00). The net is cast somewhat wider this time, to include intellectuals and novelists as well as trade union leaders and Labour M.Ps.: Graham Wallas and Leonard Woolf are amongst those given full coverage. Just three of the entries here are of direct Welsh interest. A recent figure warmly recalled in the south Wales socialist world is W. Campbell Balfour, a Scotsman who served in the Industrial Relations department at the University College, Cardiff, and was an active member of the city Labour Party until his death in 1973. H. T. Hamson (1868-1951) was a Northamptonshire man who came to Merthyr Tydfil in the 1890s, became assistant editor of the Merthyr Express, was active in the local ILP and close to Keir Hardie. Important letters survive written by Hardie to Hamson between 1900 and 1906, in the Labour Party archives in Walworth Road, testimony to Labour's struggles to maintain a political foothold in the valleys at this early period. The most important Welsh figure represented, though, is Arthur Homer on whom John Saville himself writes an extensive contribution with a full list of Horner's writings and of source materials relevant to studying his career. Homer's life is central to the history of the Welsh miners since the first world war. Beginning life as a Baptist theological student, he fell under the sway of Noah Ablett and joined James Connolly's Citizen Army during the first world war. After 1918 Homer rose rapidly within the South Wales Miners' Federation, as the guiding spirit of Mardy, the lieutenant of A. J. Cook and an active figure in the Minority Movement who kept the spirit of syndicalism alive. In 1936 he was elected president of the South Wales Miners and later served from 1946 to 1959 as general sec- retary of the NUM, where he presided with remarkable equanimity over massive pit closures by the Coal Board. Homer's political activities were as unrewarding as his industrial work was fulfilling. He was a rebellious member of the Communist Party, almost expelled for the deviation of 'Homerism' in 1931; but he stayed faithful to Communism to the end, despite such unpalatable events as the Nazi-Soviet pact and the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956. It is for his industrial not his political career that Homer will be remembered and his achievements are finely recaptured here. Volume 2 of the 'Historic Waterways Scenes', Britain's Lost Water- ways (Moorland Publishing Co. Ltd., Ashboume, Derbyshire) is a magnificent compilation by Michael E. Ware of 'navigations to the sea' with 137 excellent photographs. Thirty-two of them cover canals and inland waterways in the south Wales valleys, which carried up to 200,000