Welsh Journals

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University Press, 1985), Dr. William Donaldson has described an organisation and (between readers and writers) a 'non-created' culture which amounts to a self-standing politics-something vividly present in a 'classic' of village politics like William Alexander's Johnie Gibb o' Gwshetneuk (1871)— but one which lived by and in the vernacular. Nor does Biagini make a more than token reference to Wales, despite the detailed work on Welsh-language political culture and its interface with the electoral politics of Ieuan Gwynedd Jones and Prys Morgan. 'Community' was distorted by cultural nationalism as well as by class, while the metropolitan 'pull' steadily grew with demographic change. Biagini is right to stress Gladstone's mastery of his party-but this surely was less the result of the party's cohesion than a response to its centrifugal tendencies. CHRISTOPHER HARVIE Tübingen LIME, LEMON AND SARSAPARILLA: THE ITALIAN COMMUNITY IN SOUTH WALES, 1881-1945. By Colin Hughes. Seren Books, Bridgend, 1991. Pp. 142. £ 9.95. In recent years historians of modern Wales have begun to explore more systematically the rich plurality of cultures which, from at least the mid-nineteenth century onwards, interacted to create a new and distinctive urban culture. Studies of Spanish, Irish, Jewish, West Indian, and Chinese immigrants have recaptured the different experiences of each group, and have shed new light on Welsh society as seen from the perspective of minorities. This research has gone some way towards revising the perception of the Welsh as exemplars in their treatment of outsiders. However, the overall picture is not one of unrelieved gloom, as this important study of Italian immigrants in south Wales demonstrates. As the book's eye-catching title suggests, the immigrants in question are the men and women who established the bright, cosy 'temperance bars' and cafes in the coastal towns and valleys of south Wales during the years of pell-mell expansion at the turn of the century. Emigration was far from being a novel experience for the people of the Ceno Valley in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy. The valley, with its market town of Bardi, was dependent upon a poor peasant agriculture, and there were well-worn migration routes northwards through Milan and on into France. Colin Hughes reveals that it was the Bardigiani who followed this route to Paris and London to bring back the news of the economic boom in south Wales, not the sailors engaged in the coal trade between Cardiff and Genoa. Somewhat surprisingly, the legendary facility for making ice cream was probably acquired en route in Paris, rather than being a direct import from Italy. Colin Hughes identifies three distinct phases of Italian immigration. Firstly, the arrival of the pioneers of the catering trade in the 1890s-small numbers of single men who established an early foothold. These were small enterprises initially, and the funds necessary for starting up the business were probably accumulated while