Cylchgronau Cymru

Chwiliwch trwy dros 450 o deitlau a 1.2 miliwn o dudalennau

Century and After, and its republication is much to be welcomed, since it forms by far the best general survey in print of the various movements for governmental devolution in Wales since the late nineteenth century. Sir Frederick deals, with admirable objectivity, with the campaigns for a national educational council, for Welsh home rule, and for a Secretary of State, and with the attitudes of the political parties down to 1963. He notes the divisions in Welsh society that these political movements revealed and which made them largely fruitless. As he points out, the sense of oneness was frequently absent in Wales. And yet, it may be doubted whether the national campaigns of Tom Ellis, Lloyd George, and their successors were as wasted as is implied here. The campaign for national devolution is not yet wholly lost: the Labour Party now advocates a Secretary of State. The campaign for national equality was triumphantly successful, and has regenerated Welsh society and culture in the past seventy or eighty years. No one symbolizes this great transformation more completely than Sir Frederick himself. He was the product of a social revolution which could, through the new intermediate schools and the university colleges, extend a new dignity to the pays réel of Welsh nonconformity, and to the Welsh nation as a whole. It could make the son of an engine driver in the dockyards of Milford Haven one of the foremost figures in Welsh historical and educational life. Sir Frederick's own career is testimony to the glorious fulfilment of social democracy in modern Wales, and those who strive to follow him can receive only inspiration from it. KENNETH O. MORGAN. Swansea. EDWARD WILLIAMS, D.D., 1750-1813: HIS LIFE, THOUGHT, AND INFLUENCE. By W. T. Owen. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1963. Pp. xi-xii, 1-171. 18s. Edward Williams, better known as 'Dr. Edward Williams, Oswestry' or 'Dr. Edward Williams, Rotherham', was a figure of some consequence in his day, more particularly within his own denomination, more generally in the wider field of theological controversy. Soon after his death, however, he passed into oblivion, and according to Dr. W. T. Owen, the author of this biography, he is practically unknown today even to many Welsh Congregationalists. Hence this attempt-a shortened version of a Ph.D. (London) thesis-to rehabilitate him. The facts of Williams' life are fairly clear and simple. Born in 1750 of staunch Anglican parents, in the Vale of Clwyd, converted by a local Methodist worthy, he eventually became an Independent minister, first at Ross (1775-77) and then successively at Oswestry (1777-91), Carr's Lane, Birmingham (1792-95) and Rotherham (1795-1813), where he died. At Oswestry he was also head of the Dissenting Academy at which