Welsh Journals

responded, particularly in the early 1970s. We are told of the strains, too. Particularly compelling is the University's relationship with the Ministry of Education since Dr. Lewis reinforces suspicion that men from the Ministry could exercise consummate skill in persuading or coercing others into doing precisely what they wanted. The author was inevitably denied access to the Ministry's files for the late 1950s, when discord was most intense. Will the records eventually reveal some of the anti- academic sentiments occasionally to be found in Board of Education papers? In one sense the author cannot finish his story. The A.T.O.s have gone; the Regional Councils, beloved of Lord James, are not yet with us. We are left with that elegantly-labelled vacuum, the rump-A.T.O., which, translated, means that for the moment the University of Wales is as closely involved in the pre-service and in-service training of teachers as ever. In another, sadder, sense this book forms part of the college of education epitaph. With few exceptions they are no more. When they had gone far in earning the confidence of the University they were overtaken by events which planted them firmly on the other side of the binary line. As Dr. Lewis has shown, this was not what college staff wanted, to put it mildly. This is surely the first history of an Area Training Organisation to be published. May it serve as a model for others. No-one knows more about the subject than the author since he is the University officer most closely involved with teacher training. He has used documents, interviews and personal experience to unravel the mysteries of relevant committees skilfully and clearly. He does not absolve any of the interested parties from criticism or blame, and he does not shrink from pointing up the occasionally unsavoury politics of educational decision-making. And he has certainly captured accurately the mood of college staff as they have been caught up in the maelstrom of the last two decades. GARETH E. JONES Swansea THE ROOTS OF NATIONALISM. Edited by Rosalind Mitchison. Edinburgh. John Donald, 1980. Pp. 175. £ 12. From my study window in Aberystwyth my view stretched from a Welsh monument, the National Library on Penglais, to a British monument to Wellington on Pendinas. Historically, they embody very different aspects of Welsh national identity. On the evening of the Jubilee in 1977 our television told us enthusiastically that the celebration bonfires ran from Pendinas in the west not so, the bonfire on Pendinas had been evicted, so to speak, by a farmer (whether Republican, Nationalist, Ecologist or non-pyrotechnic we do not know). A substitute bonfire built on the beach below was prematurely lit and disposed of by a Saturday night gang of roistering lads. The forces (if not the fires) of nationalism are to be found in this story of Pendinas and the Library, the monumental symbols of history, and of