Welsh Journals

Great Britain. Although the impact of such events as the American War of Independence and the French Revolution on the day-to-day life of Glamorgan was small, the county certainly felt the effect of the Industrial Revolution. However, the Cardiff of Bird's day responded only slowly to the challenge of the new industrial order. At the beginning of the nineteenth century its population of no more than 2,000 put it well behind Merthyr and Swansea. Its politics and government were controlled by the owners of the castle and its trade was still closely linked with, and heavily dependent on, Bristol and the West Country. In the course of his long life, which stretched from 1761 to 1840, Bird played an important part in the town. Among his occupations at one time or another were those of printer and bookseller, agent to the Phoenix Fire Office, coach proprietor, tax collector, postmaster, and clerk to the marquess of Bute. A bailiff and alderman of Cardiff, Bird was referred to in one obituary notice as a 'gentleman of much local influence, a kind-hearted, intelligent and useful member of the community'. However, interesting though his career is in itself, John Bird is of particular value to historians of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Cardiff on account of the diaries which he kept. Three of these diaries still survive, and two of them, the first covering the years 1790 and 1791 and the second the period from 1792 to 1803, are transcribed by Hilary Thomas in the present volume. With the exception of the brief entry, 'LB at Spain', they contain no information for the period from late March 1795 to early March 1797, a gap explained by the fact that during that time the marquess was out of the country, pursuing an undistinguished career as British ambassador at Madrid. The diaries were not intended as a private record but were, in effect, aide-memoires or letter books containing items of information which could be forwarded to the absentee marquess either directly by letter or through the agency of Henry Hollier, steward of the Bute Cardiff estate. The entries cover a wide range of themes, most of a local nature and, not surprisingly, many of them relating to the Bute estate in Glamorgan. What Bird's employer made of his clerk's observations can only be judged from the fact that the correspondence between the two men was both irregular and one-sided. Although the marquess wrote on one occasion to his son that 'experience has taught me that without being excessively attentive, accurate and watchful, an estate must suffer essentially', there is no evidence to suggest that the first marquess was anything other than, in John Davies's words, 'feckless, profligate and irresponsible', completely incapable of applying himself to the affairs of his estate. In any case, as Davies has noted, 'his life in the 1760s and 1770s as a man- about-town flirting with politics, his diplomatic career in the 1780s and 1790s, and the ceaseless wanderings of his last years can have left little time for earnest application to estate management'. Bird's diaries contain no indication that the marquess ever answered his letters or conveyed any instructions to his estate officials. However, this in no way diminishes the value of Bird's diaries to the historian. They are, in fact, our main source of information not only for estate matters for the period which they cover but also for the history of Cardiff itself at the end of the eighteenth