Welsh Journals

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generation of women, the generation of Menna Gallie and Elaine Morgan, who in many ways have prepared the way and whose (albeit older) voices should be heard. HYWEL FRANCIS Swansea ANEURIN BEVAN AND THE WORLD OF SOUTH WALES. By Dai Smith. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1993. Pp. x, 359. £ 12.95. Late in 1910, Bill Haywood, leader of the Industrial Workers of the World, spoke to the Cambrian Combine strikers in the aftermath of the Tonypandy riots. This episode could serve as an image for this kaleidoscopic presentation of the making and unmaking of industrial south Wales-or, as the author insists, of 'American Wales'. The judgement is amplified by Gwyn Thomas's characterization of the Rhondda as 'parts of America that never managed to get to the boat'. Yet on that night in 1910, it was Butte that came to Tonypandy. The collection can be read as meditations on south Walian identity, an insistence on complexity, on the power of myth and the need to go beyond this, on distinctiveness and on legitimacy. And this last insistence is applied not just to the formal institutions such as 'the Fed' nor simply to the familiar political debates between syndicalists and State Socialists or Communists and Labour. The insistence extends rather to the whole culture, so that the prominent figures-Ablett and Barker, Horner and James Griffiths-must be viewed not simply as bearers of ideological claims, but as individuals rooted in communities that were both real and imagined. Here is W. J. Edwards, as an adolescent watching Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull parade through Aberdare, then playing rugby for under-the-counter cash and studying at Ruskin on a miners' scholarship. Then, in 1917, he successfully moved at a 'Fed' Conference that the organization's second objective be the 'abolition of capitalism'. It was not just a question of a political success in that year of radical hopes; Edwards was as much a man of his world as Haywood was of the hard-rock mining camps. The analysis does not just locate actors within their total society; it also offers images which suggest the connectedness of what is typically wrapped in discrete historiographical packages. Thus on that December night in 1910, when two Welsh boxing heroes, Jim Driscoll and Freddie Welsh, met in the American Roller rink in Cardiff, troops were billeted in Pontypridd to protect the magistrates' court during the hearing of the Tonypandy riot cases. The range of meditations is wide-rugby and novels, boxing and cultural criticism, Raymond Williams and Raymond Chandler. Yet the scope is partial. The writers discussed are men: the sports are celebrations of male virtues; the dominant industry and its union were male preserves. Perhaps the collection should be entitled Aneurin Bevan and the Macho World of South Wales? This world was constructed often in this fashion-and yet that begs the critical questions: why and by whom? Any construction has its absences and its marginalizations; and in this case, these effectively included half the population-invisible at work, their writings not discussed, their leisure