Taking Stock

After a late and shaky start because of the jealousies of local agricultural societies, the Welsh National Agricultural Society founded in 1904 (to be renamed the Royal Welsh Agricultural Society in 1922) was to surmount many problems and difficulties in its first seventy years or so to become by the 1980s one of the three major agricultural societies in the United Kingdom. This remarkable success story is traced by David Howell in fourteen chapters which cover the holding of the show at Aberystwyth from 1904 to 1909, the migratory years between 1910 and 1962 when some 37 'canvass towns' were erected at different centres in north and south Wales in alternative years, and the society's fortunes on the permanent site at Llanelwedd from 1963.