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in policing industrial disputes. But the author's somewhat restrained conclusion comes as no surprise, for throughout her account she makes it abundantly clear that the drift from local to national control was effectively limiting, if not terminating, the accountability of the police, and that in particular there was a worrying accession of power to individual chief constables. Dr. Morgan believes quite passionately that the new dispensation, which saw the powers of magistrates and watch committees decline and the powers of democratically-elected members of standing-joint committees never really develop, was a disturbing one. Fired by this belief and at every point sustained by her sources, she has proceeded to write a very radical book. At several points in her argument, Dr. Morgan asks us to consider the similarity of the events she describes with those of 1984-85 and it may well be that she was somewhat influenced by those later confrontations. Nineteenth-century Britain had been governed essentially by an amateur gentry living in a network of country houses and surely it was unreasonable to expect the police forces that they created to pass entirely into the hands of democratically-elected local authorities. As she accumulates her detailed evidence, much of which not surprisingly comes from the turbulent counties of Wales, Dr. Morgan provides many instances of police excess. In this respect the remarkable figure of Captain Lionel Lindsay soon becomes her favourite villain. Professor Dai Smith has already drawn our attention to the way in which Lindsay had even less regard for the miners of south Wales than he had for the peasants of Egypt whom he had previously administered. Jane Morgan now takes up the argument that throughout his long period of office (he was chief constable of Glamorgan from 1891 to 1936) he displayed no sympathy for working-class aspiration and he often displayed a brutality towards strikers that occasionally frightened even the Home Office. The case against Lindsay in Glamorgan (and against Picton-Phillips in Carmarthenshire and Bosanquet in Monmouthshire) is well argued. One begins to appreciate the way in which 'the Glamorgans' were spoken of as if they were the Cossacks, but one is never sure that the author has fully considered the irrationality of much industrial action or the potential and actual violence of an incensed mob. She has nicely, tellingly and most professionally juxtaposed labour and the police; but we have to provide the rest of the community ourselves. PETER STEAD Swansea Eamon de VALERA. By Owen Dudley Edwards. Political Portraits, general editor Kenneth O. Morgan. GPC Books, University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1987. Pp. xxi, 161. £ 4.95 (paperback); £ 12.95 (hardback). A new series of political biography aimed at the general reader, as well as the specialist, needs careful launching. If it is unfortunate, but inevitable, that a book is judged by its cover, how much more is a series judged by its early volumes. This might seem to disqualify a life of Eamon de Valera as one of the first pair of books chosen to launch this series, de Valera is of course very well known in Ireland; but