Welsh Journals

THE DIARY OF William THOMAS OF Michaelston-super-Ely, NEAR ST FAGANS, GLAMORGAN, 1762-1795. Abridged and edited by R. T. W Denning from a transcript by J. B. Davies and G. H. Rhys. South Wales Record Society, Cardiff, 1995. Pp. 488. £ 19.95 (members of the Society £ 14). William Thomas (1725-95), who was schoolmaster and clerk in Michaelston-super-Ely a few miles west of Cardiff, left behind him a voluminous manuscript full of observations on his neighbours and acquaintances. This manuscript, now in Cardiff Central Library, is a rich source for rural life in the Vale of Glamorgan in George Ill's reign. R.T. W. Denning's abridgement represents about half of the manuscript and has been arranged in a chronological sequence, yet this is not a conventional 'diary', but rather a series of comments on people and events, and, above all, on births, deaths and marriages. Although the repetitive formula, 'was buried in Cardiff 'was buried in St Fagans can become a little wearing on the reader, this work frequently transcends its parochial and morbid character. As Sir Keith Thomas observes in his foreword to this edition, the individuality of these long-dead men and women cannot help but shine through William Thomas's terse notes: these are people remarkable for all sorts of characteristics, physical, moral or acquired; many of them were identified by their often extraordinary skills, as was the case, for instance, with David Jones, a 92-year-old papist miller, who could cure 'desperate wounds' and set broken bones which had defeated the medical profession. William Thomas himself stood out in his own com- munity thanks to his literacy. He was educated at the local village school in St Fagans, but seems to have had pretensions to a wider learning; he bought books in Latin and French, as well as a range of English works on topics as diverse as theology, history, geography, surveying, mathematics and astronomy. Thomas was a predestinarian Calvinist of the old school, and it frequently showed in both his own spiritual anxieties and in his censorious, even bitter, judgements on his neighbours. Thomas's personality is at the centre of this work. All of the vivid details, the malicious gossip, the deadpan notes of lives blighted by drink or child- bearing or cut short by disease and accident, are filtered through the sensibilities of this frankly curious, often introspective, and rather touchy, little schoolmaster. Yet there is nothing here as revealing of the author as one finds in Thomas Turner's diary of the 1750s and 1760s. Nor is William Thomas as garrulous as, say, Richard Gough, the historian of Myddle. But he remains an intriguing, if uncomfortable, figure. Moreover, the sheer scale of his commentary on over thirty years of local life and death provides