The Man in the Cap. The Life of Herbert Smith.
By Jack Lawson. (Methuen. I25. 6d.) HERBERT SMITH was known to his friends and to his opponents as a man who could say " No " with such force that the word became more than a mere answer in the negative. This biography of the Yorkshire miners' leader expresses very well his sturdy good sense and kindly feeling without denying that his manners were abrupt and sometimes rude. The book also gives a good account of the atmosphere of mining villages, in which continuous hard work is interrupted chiefly by crises due to accidents in the e. Herbert Smith was a workhouse boy adopted by a child- less miner and his wife named Smith. At ten years of age he began work in the pits. At twenty he had an important influence his district ; at sixty he was president of the Miners' Federation Great Britain, from which post he resigned in 1929. He came Mayor of Barnsley, and at seventy-four years of age he turned by 'plane from an international congress at Prague to assist with rescue work after an explosion in a coal-mine in York- hire. He had had no education, and was not concerned with tiks. It is doubtful whether he had even a policy for the ning industry. But he was a champion of specific and detailed dorms, whose attitude and methods were typical of the trade- nionism of the middle of the nineteenth century. The biography rider review is interesting ; but it suffers him what may be - led the methods of the cinema, in taking " shots " of dis- connected scenes.
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