Welsh Journals

amount to a vast sum and would not have been enough to set the college on its course. But their generosity must be contrasted with the unreadiness of local land- owners to do their bit. Such munificent benefactors as Sir John Prichard-Jones, Sir Robert Thomas and Evan Thomas were not local landowners. The college opened with six professors and fifty-eight students. The teachers, of necessity, had to teach more than one subject. The first Registrar was W. Cadwaladr Davies, a man whose contribution towards the success of the enterprise was equalled only by that of William Rathbone. The first Principal was Harry Rudolf Reichel. He had enjoyed a brilliant career at Oxford and spent his whole working life at Bangor. Opinions still differ about him. Lloyd George was always of the opinion that his appointment was a mistake. It is rather suggestive that those who were students under him at Bangor had few memorable recollections of him. Whereas a body of apocryphal legends grew about Professors Arnold and Bryan, the oral tradition owed very little to Reichel. Most students hardly came into contact with him. He certainly maintained the Oxford tradition of having students in to breakfast but they were occasions that students dreaded. The Principal guided what was supposed to be informal conversation with frequent glances at the notes lying beside his plate. In a word, they found him a cold fish, remote, even inhuman. Not so those who knew him more intimately. They testified to his uprightness, his sense of fair play, his dedication to the college and its best interests. He made a determined attempt to learn Welsh but never mastered it as Professor Fynes- Clinton did. It has been said cynically that Reichel succeeded only in creating a third-rate Balliol at Bangor. This was unfair and it is instructive that Professor Williams is generous in his appraisal of his achievements, and in that he agrees with Reichel's memorial volume. There were tensions and storms and Reichel was not at his best in dealing with them. Professor Williams's account of the extraordinary controversy about Frances Emily Hughes is a fascinating piece of narrative. She was the head of the women's hall of residence and rather pompously styled the 'Lady Principal'. The storm broke when Violet Osborn (later to marry Professor Arnold) decided to defy Miss Hughes's rigid code of discipline. It became a noisy conflict which eventually reached the correspondence columns of The Times. But in essence it was a demonstration of Victorian prudery at its silliest. And so was the row that developed over the relationship between Professor Keri Evans and his women students. A vast number of characters pass through the pages of the book. It is one of Professor Williams's most attractive gifts as a historian that he has been able to combine the prosaic details of institutional history with those warm, personal details of human ambition, envy, disappointment and brilliant achievement into an integrated whole. One theme that runs through the volume is the inter-relationship between the alien elements in the college's character and the expectations of the locality in