Welsh Journals

communities in the 19th and 20th centuries. The essays concentrate upon Cardiff, Swansea and the Valleys, and range from the general to the particular. The editor, for example, has contributed an overview of Cardiff s Jewish community in the 100 years 1813-1914, and more particular studies of the Swansea Hebrew congregation during 1895-1914, and the one-time cause celebre in Roath, Cardiff, the so-called Jewish abduction case of 1867-68. This involved the Baptist minister Nathaniel Thomas, his redoubtable wife, and an orthodox Jewish teenager, Esther Lyons. Taken together the essays in this volume throw considerable light upon the patterns of development, religious, social and economic, of the various communities, as scattered as their surviving records. In some cases, such as the troubled short ministry in Swansea of the Revd. Simon Fyne, chronicled by Leonard Mars, or the editor's examination of the life of the Swansea Hebrew congregation, there appear to be close parallels with the problems and power-struggles which occurred in many Christian nonconformist chapels in Welsh provincial towns (often the same provincial towns) at the same period. Some comparative studies might be undertaken here with profit. To date only a few, though important, papers have been written about south Wales Jewry, notably by Geoffrey Alderman and Maurice Dennis, but the list of as-yet unpublished university dissertations and theses in this book's bibliography is indicative of growing interest and serious research. It is to be hoped that this volume of essays will stimulate local historians and scholars to further work. J.R.G. J.B. Sinclair and R.W.D. Fenn, just the Right Man. John Richard Worthington Poole-Hughes, 1916-1988. (Cadoc Books, Kington, Hereford, 1992) iv + 177 pp. illus. ISBN 0 9516865 1 8, pbk. £ 12. This is not, strictly speaking, a biography of Llandaffs bishop from 1975-85. It is more a variation upon the 19th century's 'Life and