Welsh Journals

Books A SMILE FOR THE PAST. By Berta Ruck (Hutchinson, 21s.) Looking back on it all from the vantage point of her eighty years, Miss Berta Ruck's autobiography is full of fun. Her father was a Regular Army officer who later became Chief Constable of Carnarvonshire, and the family often stayed with his mother near Aberdovey, for Berta Ruck's grandmother lived in Pantlludy. This country house became a Hafod in miniature for the Darwins and George Eliot stayed there. Yet the book certainly hasn't a crachach slant, although the authoress appreciates very well the magic of that vanished world of the late nineteenth century country houses. But she saw, too, the suffering caused by the terrible slate quarry strikes, and isn't taken in by all the foofaraw about the good old days. Of her adventures, which range from lunch with Dr Ernst 'Putzi' Hanfstaengl at Villefranche to rehearsals in the arcana of the Swansea B B C, it would be easiest to give their flavour by some excerpts. Hanfstaengl, always good for a nasty quote about the Fuehrer, 'he had the good manners of a non-commissioned officer', took it too far of course and the Gestapo (so Putzi says) tried to liquidate him by throwing him out of a plane. Sinclair 'Red' Lewis, on the other hand, banged the dinner table and bellowed, 'Why the hell don't you belong to the I W W ?' Lloyd George, a politician always remembering a face, instantly recognised her after a gap of thirty years as the girl he'd once taken tea with during the Carnarvonshire strikes. Her cousin Dick, Lord Atkin, in the Lords in the 18B debate in 1940: 'I, if I stand alone, pronounce it to be contrary to British justice'. Miss Nancy Mitford, writing after a radio talk, 'Oh, how nice, a U-voice at last'. Now Berta Ruck has returned to Aberdovey, where 'my bedroom windows look over the Estuary and Cardigan Bay'. A HISTORICAL ATLAS OF WALES. By William Rees (Faber, 22s. 6d.) Professor William Rees's atlas is quite indispensable for anyone reading Welsh history on any level of scholarship. The general reader will find it immensely interesting, for it brings to life all the detailed information in such histories as Sir J E Lloyd's, and one will never read anything on Medieval Wales again without having this atlas around. The commentary of 70 pages is just right, and the maps are in many cases on large enough a scale to transfer one's reference to the Ordnance Survey i inch and 21 inch maps where necessary. Disentangling the complicated boundaries of the Marcher Lordships in Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire should be quite easy in this manner. There are a dozen or so plates concerned with prehistoric Wales and one regrets that there aren't more. Perhaps these pages could have been augmented by some more illustrations based on Fox's Personality of Britain, Grimes, and