Welsh Journals

Delays occurred, too, because of the convoluted nature of the negotiations and, sometimes, changes of mind. In 1954, for example, two years after the approval of its development plan, Carmarthenshire decided to take up an earlier suggestion by the Welsh Department, which moved the district HMI to minute that he found it 'really extraordinary-but less so when we remember it is Carms'. Gareth Jones's acute and intelligent analysis of the negotiations over the development plans leads him to conclude that there was little consensus between local education authorities and central government after the 1944 Act, but rather a continuation of the confrontation which had been manifest on earlier occasions in the twentieth century. Invariably, the winners in these disputes and disagreements were civil servants, who could be as influential as ministers in determining policy. Consequently, the opportunity of producing a post-war pattern of secondary education in Wales, which would have been almost completely multilateral and very distinctive, was lost because of the insistence of the Welsh Department on the retention of some grammar schools in all areas and the dominance exercised by it as far as the approval of development plans was concerned. Therefore, the system which developed paid scant attention to Welsh needs; indeed, it is doubtful whether it was recognised that Wales had different needs. DAVID PRITCHARD Swansea THE PEOPLE'S PEACE: BRITISH HISTORY, 1945-1989. By Kenneth O. Morgan. Oxford University Press, 1990. Pp. 558 and 32 illustrations. £ 19.95 hardback. 'The jury', Professor Morgan writes in his final chapter, 'is still out on Mrs. Thatcher.' Only a few weeks after The People's Peace was published, the lady was dragged from the dock by her own counsel. Not long afterwards, the British, having enjoyed 'one of the longest periods of unbroken peace. since the middle ages', launched themselves for the second time in a decade against an impudent but inept enemy, sustaining light casualties but inflicting as yet incalculable damage on a sensitive and unstable part of the world. Such are the problems of writing contemporary history, and it is unfortunate for Kenneth Morgan that he or his publishers had to stop at a point when historical patterns seemed to resemble football fans meeting on an escalator. Contemporary history, anyway, presents huge problems of comprehension and organisation. The bureaucrats slam the archives shut; the propagandists and ideologues are still in occupation; the professional historians are trudging through their treatments of individual political issues. Things are somewhat better than they were when A. J. P. Taylor produced his English History, 1914-1945 in 1965. We have a thirty-year rule instead of a fifty-year rule, and former Cabinet ministers-particularly Labour ones- are more garrulous than they once were. But in the nature of things any political