Welsh Journals

All this is described by Allan James in the latest volume in the valuable 'Writers of Wales' series. James opens his essay, rightly, in Oxford in 1883 before proceeding to outline Morris-Jones's career and survey his work as grammarian, scholar and poet. Throughout the essay he is well-informed, he is fair, he is sympathetic. He is particularly good on the poetry, stressing quite properly that it was the appeal of form rather than romantic ideals which drew Morris-Jones to translate from German an extensive selection of Heine's love lyrics. Occasionally, however, a phrase used by James causes one to pause uneasily. Referring to the feebleness of love poetry in Welsh in the last century, he talks of 'an exiled Eros, banished by chapel deacons and pagan druids alike'. One has to ask who these Victorian bachelor pagan druids were. Again when James tells us that 'the nineteenth century saw in Wales a rural, peasant culture and a population denied the advantages of a formal education' one has to query his description. 'A rural, peasant culture' would equally well fit eighteenth-century Wales or nineteenth-century Ireland. It misses the point that what one had in Wales in the nineteenth century was a high level of literacy and book-reading amongst the 'peasantry'. The difference is important. John Morris-Jones was himself a product of this chapel-nurtured, book- reading gwerin who were so alive culturally but lacked intellectual leadership in most areas other than theology. For him it became a crusade, in matters of language and literature, to provide that leadership. BEDWYR LEWIS JONES THE GREAT STRIKE: A HISTORY OF THE PENRHYN QUARRY DISPUTE OF 1900-1903. By Jean Lindsay. David and Charles, Newton Abbot, 1987. Pp. 256. £ 9.95. Some people might question whether a further study of industrial relations in the Welsh slate industry is required so soon after Dr. Merfyn Jones's magisterial account of the north Wales quarrymen. One justification for such a study is the progressive (and welcome) relaxation by the present day Pennant family of the closure rule on many of the relevant papers. Though Dr. Jones himself was a beneficiary, Dr. Lindsay has gained access to even more new material and her work, for example, makes careful use of letter books and of information contained in papers prepared during the second Lord Penrhyn's successful libel action against W. J. Parry of Coetmor in 1903. A second justification probably lies in their contrasting approaches. Dr. Jones's work was a comprehensively researched analytical account of the quarrying communities throughout Gwynedd with a stress on the circumstances and outlook of the quarrymen and their Union over a broad period but including, too, the Penrhyn dispute of 1900-3. Dr. Lindsay, on the other hand, produces a less weighty, though not insubstantial, account which is narrative in form and which centres on Bethesda and more particularly on the dispute. Also, as a result of the greater access gained to the Pennant family papers, the author makes a point of trying to reveal the