Welsh Journals

summarizes the major challenges and crises confronting the University over the years, involving enfants terribles from T. Marchant Williams to Goronwy Rees. It ends on a convincing and robust federalist note. His attractive Illustrated History is admirably designed to celebrate the imposing, sometimes moving, history of a living university in peace and in war. His photographs go beyond the formal ceremonial and committee-dom to show the real university at work and play-the classrooms and laboratories, the football matches and social events (a girls-only dance in Alexandra Hall, Aberystwyth, supervised by an aged warden in a rocking-chair, sets a new standard for bleakness), the rag weeks, the debates and the 'demos'. Historians from J. E. Lloyd onwards are not neglected. The astonishing spectacle of E. A. Lewis, the austere chronicler of the medieval boroughs of Snowdonia, racing home in the staff sprint in Aberystwyth in 1912 like some demented juggernaut, is an inspiration to geriatric scholars of all ages. In passing, the author shows how nationalist passions have at times disturbed the ethos of an increasingly cosmopolitan university-the crisis over Saunders Lewis's expulsion from Swansea in 1937 after the Penyberth arson incident, the Welsh-language campaigns in more recent years. Whatever else can be concluded from the University in this celebratory booklet, it undoubtedly depicts an institution that is alive. The general impression that emerges from these accounts is a positive and hopeful one. It may be concluded that the university, in its foundation years, represented the coalescence of three main forces. There was the political urge of middle-class Liberal nonconformists for civic equality, symbolized by their own unsectarian, open university, free from Anglican patronage. There was the economic demand for training students in industrial, commercial and technical skills to compete with Germans and others, symbolized in the new college at Cardiff. (This was a less fulfilled ambition, since mining and engineering science there met with less than whole-hearted support from south Wales industrialists-only with the founding of Swansea University College in 1921 did applied science find its proper place.) And, as seen above, there was always the University as a unique symbol of Welsh identity, aspiration and nationhood, with the membership of the Court as its embodiment. Equality, enterprise and nationality were thus intertwined. Along the way, the University conveyed other values, too. It promoted the equality of women and, indeed, spelt out this principle in its charter and statutes. It assisted social mobility for poorer students from the industrial classes as the social exclusiveness of the founders came to be challenged. It provided opportunities for students from the Commonwealth and the developing world, not least in its distinguished College of Medicine. And it served the general public in its pioneering extension (later extra-mural) classes, a noble and enlightened tradition still kept alive in the promotion of continuing education today and in Swansea's Community University of the Valleys, launched in 1993. With all its problems, the national University still derives momentum and inspiration from its past. It may be hoped that future historians-and, indeed, future Vice-Chancellors-will respond accordingly. KENNETH O. MORGAN Aberystwyth