Cylchgronau Cymru

Chwiliwch trwy dros 450 o deitlau a 1.2 miliwn o dudalennau

ment to its historical identity in a scheme for a major, four-volume, history, on which work began some twenty years ago. A notable product of this enterprise is this compre- hensive treatment, in nineteen chapters, of the county between 1815 and its administrative extinction, much resented by several of the authors, in 1974. It is a record of successful co-operation between many local historians and a handful of profes- sionals, gently steered to completion by the skill and experience of the editor. The primary purpose of the volume is to establish a clear and authoritative record of what has happened in the county, in pretty well every imaginable department of life (and some of death). The economy is generously treated, with separate chapters on popula- tion, farming, towns, the coal industry, the slate industry, the dockyards, the fishing industry, the tourist trade, the islands, and Milford Haven as an oil port. Society is perhaps given shorter measure, with chapters on religion, education, and leisure; but then national politics, local government, and crime get a chapter each, as do the army, the navy, and military aviation. Perhaps the only obvious absentees from this list are health, housing, and transport; but, although they are not accorded separate treatment, they are covered at least in essentials, mainly in the chapters on towns and local govern- ment. The lack of a consolidated discussion of transport, for example, does, however, make it rather difficult to follow the railway construction and railway politics of the area; we are rightly informed that the G.W.R. switched its Irish traffic from Neyland (New Milford) to Fishguard (the Rosslare service was opened in 1906), but we do not learn why it did so, although the decision had very marked local consequences in terms of jobs and urban expansion. Each chapter is packed with information, some of it curious, most of it useful, much of it presented in a plain descriptive and encyclopaedic manner, some of it structured and processed to serve a full historical interpretation and a placement in a wider Welsh and British context. At one point, indeed, a decline in female crime after 1870 seems to be placed in an Australian context, although to be fair the citation of a recent mono- graph on crimes involving Australian women since 1880 in elucidation of figures from Pembrokeshire quarter sessions, which showed a steep decline in the 1920s of the number of cases concerning women, is perhaps no more than a sign of amateur exuber- ance. Agricultural history, the editor's speciality, is handled with great assurance, and the specific ways in which different sub-regions within the county adapted to increasing international competition and changes in the domestic market are well brought out, and illustrated with particular examples. The mysteries of farming are such, however, that not every reader may grasp without further explanation why and how growing early potatoes and raising turkeys were complementary activities because they used the same buildings. That was in the 1930s and later; in the nineteenth century the county was one of the regular sources for supplying the metropolis with the huge quantities of rabbits that formed an important, but largely unnoticed, part of the popular diet, and to learn of the role of the offshore islands in this traffic is a useful step towards illuminating a dark corner of the food trades. To those on the outside, Pembrokeshire is known, perhaps, for three towns: Tenby. the elegant seaside resort of the nineteenth century; Fishguard, the rival to Holyhead for