Welsh Journals

to read and interpret newspapers, chapel registers, diaries, poll books or social surveys; and how to look at landscapes, maps, family photo albums or picture postcards for which the beautiful colour illustrations are mostly Welsh. You are taught how to use statistics in history (even some elementary computing), and how to record oral history. You are given long lists of useful archives and helpful societies. You are even instructed on how to publish your own work. Concise, dense, and full of good sense, this volume seems to be an exceptionally valuable distillation of many years of research experience by its collective authors. This series of four volumes is thus certainly of great interest to anyone studying family history or community history. I would expect, however, that they will prove of relatively restricted use for those not following the Open University course for which they are designed. They are much too didactic and directive, telling you this and asking you that and setting you exercises, to be read through as books. So they will be essentially how-to- do-it reference volumes. And ironically, just because of their imaginative breadth of perspective, time and again they will merely provide signposts to other works. For example, how could you learn to do oral history from a mere ten pages, let alone landscape history from just three? In short, while I doubt whether many amateur historians will want to do more than dip into these volumes, they provide an invaluable resource which should be stacked in every local history library section. PAUL THOMPSON Essex Loyalty PAYS: A History OF THE UNITED CLUBS BREWERY. By Brian Glover. Allan Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 1995, in conjunction with Crown Buckley. Pp. 143. £ 7.99. For many of the beer drinkers of south Wales the most significant outcome of the Great War was not the defeat of Kaiser Bill's Germany but the establishment of their own brewery. The difficulty of obtaining adequate supplies of the working man's nectar at a quality and a price to suit both the tastes and pockets of the coal miners, metal workers and dockers resulted, in 1919, in the south Wales branch of the Club and Institute Union (established in 1909) purchasing its own brewery at Brynsadler, Pontyclun. Brian Glover's well-researched Loyalty Pays, which follows hard on the heels of his Prince of Ales, is, however, much more than a straightforward