Welsh Journals

eminent force in the South African Communist Party and he attended the Communist International in Moscow in 1921. He died there in 1924 and received the accolade of the revolutionary government. David Ivon Jones had a remarkable career, with the later period proving particularly colourful and controversial. This article, however, considers the earlier career of David Jones and examines the community in Aberystwyth and Cardiganshire at the turn of the nineteenth century in the light of the evidence presented by his life. The career of John Ivon Jones, grandfather of David and a strong, formative influence during his early years itself reflects fundamental changes which occurred in Welsh society during the mid-nineteenth century. A native of south Cardiganshire, he witnessed 'Rhyfel y Sais Bach' in the Mynydd Bach area in the late- 1820s. Those events resembled and were the forerunners not only of the Rebecca movement in south-west Wales but also the Scotch Cattle activity in the industrial valleys, and they illustrate the close connection between rural and industrial communities in Wales in this period, connections which were to be strengthened by continued migration from rural to urban areas. Yet it is the experiences of John Ivon Jones in the years after the Mynydd Bach disturbances which are in many ways the most significant. A man of considerable literary talents, he was a close associate of J. Kilsby Jones and other radical figures within Welsh Nonconformity as well as being a leading figure in the commercial life of Aberystwyth. He was well-connected to the banking and municipal leaders and was a prominent and highly-respected member of the Nonconformist community. As such, he formed part of the petty bourgeoisie which was to dominate the outlook of Welsh Nonconformity and Welsh Liberalism throughout the Victorian and Edwardian period. John Ivon Jones lived through a period which witnessed the decline of unconstitutional forms of protest in Wales and the development of a more politicized version of opposition to the established social and political order in rural Wales. As Ieuan Gwynedd Jones has demonstrated,3 by the late-1860s an increasingly self-confident, middle-class, Nonconformist