Welsh Journals

the persistence of the legend is confirmed. Welsh hymn tunes are still sung (Thomas Jones compiled the first small collection of hymns in 1845), Sunday suits are worn and there are five or six times as many Presbyterians as in the 'mother church' in Wales. Jenkins, however, goes beyond the surface resemblances to examine what was good and bad in the relationship and does this in a fair-minded way: "No one can deny that as the Welsh, in their kindness, built they also destroyed", notably every manifestation of tribal culture (shades of the accusation against the Methodist Revival in Wales). So far, so conventional, but he then draws interesting parallels between Khasi and Welsh society in process of change, re-making themselves. The volume is unusually well-produced, with some splendid photographs and is better edited than is often the case with books in Wales. The author should have been dissuaded from his continual use of what was once the solecism, "Revd Pryce', simply on the grounds that there is no point in irritating older readers. Discreet' is surely the intention on page 46, and not 'discrete'; Tie joins Desmond and I', on page 140, calls for 'me'; and 'leach' on page 149 should be 'leech'. R J Williams's extensive biography of Dr John Roberts (1923) is missing from the bibliography. Details, of course, but this is such a good book that one wants everything in it to be right. Glyn Tegai Hughes Tregynon Raymond Renowden, A Genial, Kind Divine. Watkin Herbert Williams, 1845-1944 [Gee & Son, Denbigh, nd]. Paperback, illustrated, 200 pp. ISBN: 0 7074 0309 X. Price £ 15.00. In this volume Dean Renowden pays tribute in what he describes as a "series of snapshots" to one of the longest-lived, if least known, of Welsh bishops, Watkin Williams, who occupied the see of Bangor from 1899-1925. Williams was the odd man out. Of his three contemporaries in the dioceses of Wales, one was the son of a bishop, another the son of a priest, and the third the son of a nonconformist artisan. Williams was the second son of a baronet, and, on his mother's side, descended from the Williams-Wynns of Wynnstay. His formative years were spent in the luxury of Bodelwyddan Castle, at Westminster School, at Christ Church, Oxford, on leisurely holidays abroad (one, extended, to recover his health from some unnamed illness which did not prevent him, whatever it was, living into his 100th year). He always remained the well educated, cultured and rather leisurely country gentleman at heart. For twenty years, after one brief curacy, he was the 'squarson' of the family living of Bodelwyddan, where the church had been built, at the then astronomic cost of £ 70,000 and generously endowed by one of his aunts. For most of his episcopate