ABSTRACT
In 1913 a Catholic priest wrote to Bishop Hedley of Newport, a diocese that included all the important urban and industrial centres in south Wales, extolling the virtues of the Ancient Order ofHibernians. He claimed that the organisation was numerically robust in the British Isles, with 130,000 members in Ireland, 50,000 in Scotland, 20,000 in England and 5,000 in Hedley's own diocese of Newport. l If these rounded statistics are broadly accurate, they indicate that a remarkably high proportion of Catholic males in south Wales were members of the Order at this time, a proportion perhaps comparable to that of Irish societies in some parts of North America.2 But numbers were not the only indicator of the Order's
value to the Church; the quality ofleadership it offered also mattered. The priest wrote that the Order was 'powerful also considering the members who are at its head'. 'In this diocese we have men such as Harold Turnbull & Thomas J. Callaghan, and elsewhere men of the same standing are connected with it.'3 The identification of key middle-class individuals, like the coal exporter Thomas J. Callaghan of Cardiff, illustrates the extent to which the Church had come to rely on the influence of well-to-do laymen to promote religion in parochial associationallife by this date.
