Welsh Journals

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Angela John, in her exciting and wide-ranging study, has restored the centrality of what was always a small percentage of the total mining force to our understanding of Victorian society. The women, whose exclusion from underground work was legislated in 1842, both offended significant sections of Victorian society and attracted disparate supporters (from coalowners intent on profits to middle-class women suffragists intent on symbols), so that their history as women workers allows Dr. John to write of them in an integrated social history. The way she builds up from a meticulous, scholarly reconstruction of their daily lives, at work and in the home, on through public attitudes to their dress and behaviour and subsequent legislation, down to the enormously important debates of the late-nineteenth century, is quite breathtaking in its mastery and marshalling of sources. Photographs, the private diaries of A. J. Munby (afficionado of daughters of toil), magazine illustrations, novels and paintings are treated with the same deft touch as she brings to more conventional material. Historians of Wales can feel especially pleased that this first major work for over fifty years on women in a nineteenth- century industry has been written by a woman who is an accomplished Welsh historian. That combination is rare. Women have always shaped the actual history of Wales; this dazzling debut is firm evidence of the way women, as authors and as subjects, can help transform our written history too. DAVID SMITH Cardiff DAVID LLOYD GEORGE. By Kenneth O. Morgan. University of Wales Press, 1981. Pp. 91. £ 1.95. Now that Lloyd George has been adopted by the animated Madame Tussaud's of television there is every chance that the majority of the population will remember him as the sum of his human frailties rather than as a political giant. This is likely to be true for the younger generation too. School pupils who come across Lloyd George in their studies-and fewer than half our pupils will hear his name in a history lesson-are rarely presented, at least in written word, with the richness of his personality. In one 'A' level text on the history of the twentieth century published last year-balanced, full of factual information but not devoid of analysis-Lloyd George emerges as a cardboard cut-out, indistinguishable in physique or temperament or personality or charisma from Baldwin or MacDonald et al. He comes across as a parliamentary cog, whirring at high speed during wartime, certainly, but with the whole being the sum of legislative and administrative achievements. We have to avoid the extremes. We do not want a 1066 and All That caricature, particularly dangerous in Lloyd "George's case because of personal and political scandal. Nor do we want, indeed cannot tolerate, Lloyd George as a puppet on history's string. What do we want? Precisely what Dr. Morgan has provided in this short bilingual St. David's Day booklet. The author has managed to distil the essence of Lloyd George's amazing career into fewer than 20,000 words and he has done it with all