Cylchgronau Cymru

Chwiliwch trwy dros 450 o deitlau a 1.2 miliwn o dudalennau

while the variety and quality of leadership (here limited to Mabon and Arthur Horner) could be illustrated by portraits of Walter Coffin, D. A. Thomas, M. O. Jones, Canon William Lewis, J. Rufus Williams, Percy Smith, R. B. Jones, Noah Ablett, A. J. Cook, Mark Harcombe and Will John. There is room for them all in Rhondda's Pantheon. The volume is a credit to both printers and binders. Misprints are few: on p. 17, for Rhys read Rees; p. 71, for 'Bridages' read 'Brigades'; p. 163, for 'veiw' read 'view'. The place of this interesting volume on one's shelf is alongside E. D. Lewis's The Rhondda Valleys, which it does not supersede. BEN BOWEN THOMAS Bangor EDUCATION IN A WELSH RURAL COUNTY, 1870-1973. By J. A. Davies. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1974. Pp. 278. £ 3.00. Despite the general title of Dr. Davies's book, the work is actually confined to the administrative side of education. It is essentially the study of how educational policy determined in London was administered in a Welsh rural county such as Montgomeryshire. Dr. Davies is peculiarly well qualified to undertake such a survey, having been Director of Education for the county for eleven years. The book is something of a memorial to the work of the county council as a L.E.A. now that it has been merged with a larger authority. The early years of state-supplied education coincided with the era of tension and conflict in Welsh rural society between landlord and tenant, Anglican and non-conformist, Conservative and Liberal. The establish- ment of popularly-elected school boards provided a new field in which the battles in this conflict could be fought. Indeed, as Dr. Davies shows, the very establishment of school boards could provide the means whereby the latent tensions rose to the surface-especially in areas where a non- conformist majority, in favour of the creation of a school board, was opposed by a strong established Church in alliance with local landlords who were anxious not to have their influence diminished. The strength, in social and political terms, of the Anglican minority in Montgomery- shire made the conflicts in this county that much fiercer than in neigh- bouring counties, where the numerical strength of the non-conformists was much greater. The passing of the Welsh Intermediate Act, very much the product of the tireless efforts of the county's M.P., Stuart Rendel, for the first time involved the new county council in the administration of education. Religious and political differences over educational policy were now complicated by competing demands from districts over the siting of secondary schools and from economic interests over the distribution of grants for technical education. It was, however, with the passing of the 1902 Act, which for the first time centralized the administration of education in the county councils, that the political and religious divisions in the county were shown most clearly. The conflict over support for