THE QUEEN'S WALES: SOUTH WALES. By H. L. V. Fletcher.
(Hodder and Stoughton, 18s.) In a novelist or a biographer has fallen on hard times he is hereby tipped off to get himself signed up for one of the regional guides or parish-pump travel books which nowadays come deluging from the presses. In my corner of the world it can sometimes seem no more than a few hours between the appearance of one Profusely illustrated work on Radnorshire, Breconshire, Cardigan- shire, Pembrokeshire. Cartnarthenshire and Glamorganshire (including the Gower Peninsula) and the outbreak of the next volume on places of historical and cultural interest in the counties of South Wales (including the Gower Peninsula : with 100 photo- graphs). I often wonder who reads these things, and why. There is a substantial pleasure in finding places we enjoy and admire, and even simply those we know, described or pictured between hard covers. But would this interest, plus that of the straight- forward tourist, account for the readership of such books? Are they ever looked at by men who have never been, or contemplated going, to Glamorganshire, let alone the Gower Peninsula? A little article for somebody there, perhaps even a little thesis.
presumably of a certain interest, at least as much as the fact that, say, in 1777 someone drew Margam Abbey. I know what the tourist is after, but these days it would do him no harm to fit in a glance at a steelworks between taking a brass-rubbing and peering at a Norman rood-screen. And,another thing he should perhaps have been told is that in Llandeilo, provided he knows just where to look for it, he can get the worst lunch in South Wales (including the Gower Peninsula).
Miss Olive Phillips's book, which contains some of the finest photographs I have ever seen, is not selective in this or any way. Her Gower is not merely the rural Peninsula; its boundaries are those of the mediwval lordship of Gower—or roughly of the parliamentary constituency plus Swansea—and it stretches right up into the industrial valleys. She writes as engagingly as Mr.
Fletcher, though much more chattily. There is much to be said for a chronicler who can get a New Stone Age circle, the 'hot blast' method in the iron industry, Mr. Wynford Vaughan Thomas's father, Dafydd ap Gwilym and the Ystalyfera Public Prize Band into a couple of pages. This remarkable volume is larded with verse extracts, running from Ann of Swansea (`Mis- fortune, with imperious sway,/Impels me far from Swansea Bay') to Mr. Cyril Gwynn :
Take for instance Fairwood Common, wild expanse of gorse and bog,
And compare it with the Hafod, with its traffic all agog, Or the view from Penmaen roadways, of a village on the shore, Oxchurch with its wooded background, what a contrast to Landore.
. . . All along the country highways, lofty trees arrest the eye, But in the industrial area, belching stacks obscure the sky.
KINGSLEY AMIS
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