Welsh Journals

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Each topic is treated with characteristic thoroughness. For Hugh's family connections the author naturally has to depend much on previous writers, but he is at pains to check them at source wherever possible. Even John Williams, when he printed in Ancient and Modern Denbigh the borough by-laws of 1597 attested by Hugh Myddelton as alderman, omitted the pious aphorisms in Welsh with which the alderman embellished them and his expressions of regret at quitting his native town; in Mr. Gough's book they help to fill in the lines of a necessarily sketchy portrait. On the New River he makes effective use of the account books brought to light by Mr. G. C. Berry of the Metropolitan Water Board, on which Mr. Berry based his Cymmrodorion lecture of 1956; but here again Mr. Gough is not content till he has put the project into its setting in the long story of London's water problem and (enlarging on his predecessors) has carried the story of the New River Company down to our own time. When he comes to the Cardiganshire silver mines, again, he has something to say about both previous and subsequent efforts to work them, and much about the obstacles encountered by Myddelton- obstacles which, as with the New River, were often more human than mechanical, and called for gifts of character rather than engineering skill on the part of the entrepreneur. One is irresistibly reminded of Richard Morris's sympathetic outburst when his brother Lewis was similarly en- tangled in quarrels and lawsuits over the same mines nearly a century and a half later: 'May I be poor for ever if this is to be the reward of mining! Hugh Myddelton was certainly not 'poor for ever', for all the fairy tales that gathered round his name. Others, it is true, reaped the fruits of his New River labours, but he did very well on Cardiganshire silver, which swelled the profits of his own trade of silversmith. Brading was a dead loss which fell mainly on his partner. Here Mr. Gough has little to add to what Samuel Smiles wrote ninety years ago, but he does not fail to point out that, but for this commitment, Myddelton might have antici- pated by nearly two centuries the similar but successful scheme of Madocks at Traeth Mawr, nor to draw a comparison between the two inundations that nearly ruined the one and left the other derelict till late in the last century. In both cases 'the reclaimed land proved disappointing', and transport was the chief beneficiary. It was not, however, Portmadoc (as Mr. Gough says) but Porthdinllaen, linked with it by turnpike, that Madocks, like many others before and since, dreamed of as a packet station for Ireland. Nor has Tremadoc 'declined into a village'; it was never anything else, for Portmadoc was the destined centre of population for the reclaimed land. These are small points of detail outside the author's chosen field; readers of this REVIEW will welcome an attractively written and attractively produced book on this great Welsh entrepreneur, with four excellent plates to enhance the pleasure of reading it. A. H. DODD. Bangor.