Welsh Journals

this book we have occasional hints of a more prosperous Rhondda awaiting revival in the next millennium. In 1950 two Welsh-medium junior schools were opened as a result of much campaigning; the momentum gained then rolls on apace today suggesting a burgeoning Welsh culture. And there is even the possibility that the Rhondda will not be spiritually bankrupt either, in the hope that is offered by the ecumenical church at the centre of the notorious Penrhys housing estate. Not for the first time in its history, in the blackest of hells, the Rhondda has succeeded in reaching out to a brighter heaven. KATHRYN JENKINS Lampeter DEMOCRATIC RHONDDA: Politics AND SOCIETY 1885-1951. By Chris Williams. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1996. Pp. xvi, 304. £ 25.00. This work of high-quality scholarship is based on a rich range of written and oral sources. It fills major spaces, both in the history of Wales and of the British labour movement, offering a thorough and microscopic examination of Rhondda politics from the first general election fought under the Third Reform Act to the end of the post-war Labour government and the final collapse of the Communist Party's local political challenge. The coverage of such a lengthy period ensures that the analysis avoids many conventional termini and offers answers to significant questions about continuity and change that link to contemporary debates within the historiography of the British Left. An explanation of the general significance of this study should begin with an insistence on the distinctiveness of the Rhondda. The dominance of coal was matched by the early election of a miners' Member of Parliament. The polarization of industrial relations in the years prior to 1914 and the calamitous inter-war decline of the industry are frequently connected to the relative significance of syndicalism and then of Communism in the Rhondda labour movement. Yet as Williams insists (p.7), the political must be seen as relatively autonomous. Attempts to 'read-off' political outcomes from economic and social investigations collapse at the first venture into comparative analysis. The pattern of local politics showed little evidence of conventional party competition. Liberal dominance of a relatively unstructured kind was succeeded by a Labour hegemony to which the most significant challenge was provided from the late twenties to the late forties by the Communist Party. This is not a case