Cylchgronau Cymru

National Strike and, in a supreme act of rebellion, the mine-owner's chauffeur takes the day off at the National Eisteddfod. The Rev. Bowen offers to break the strike in return for Miriam's hand in marriage, but justice wins through. The mines are nationalised, Owen marries Miriam and, broken by his defeat, the mine-owner dies, leaving all his ill-gotten gains to the chapels and churches. 'The Heritage' was a distillation of the Pioneer's own political philosophy by the early 1920s, albeit expressed in simplistic terms. Its bete noires were encompassed in it; unscrupulous mine-owners, hypocritical Christians, bucolic workers of a dying generation, confronted by a new wave of young, hopeful, vigorous and articulate Left-wingers to whom the future clearly belonged. The denouement came through struggle, though there was no clearly defined revolutionary solution. At the end, the mine-owner was still able to leave his money to whom he pleased. If the story of Owen and Miriam ended happily, the Pioneer's own story ended somewhat less happily. There is some evidence that the paper's increasing reputation as a bastion of the new Left, even of syndicalism, was having adverse effects on its advertising income, and on its circulation. The paper was obliged to increase its price substantially because of inflation but there was a strong criticism of its deteriorating news coverage. An editorial openly acknowledged both the criticism and its cause but added that the Pioneer could not afford to offer the kind of news service its capitalist competitors offered. The answer, it was argued, lay with the readers: By every Labourite frankly accepting that paper of his Party as the best under the conditions which it struggles for life, and by the test of his or her loyalty to those papers.When every Labour sympathiser has learnt how to buy and push the Party's papers, despite their weakness, then will the circulations attained by an invisible pull on the advertisers, and that better service that alone offers a solution will be built up, and the capitalist press overpowered." In July 1921, the Pioneer was brought under new management and its proprietors, in all probability the local Labour party, promised that the diffuseness of the paper's editorial content, which had been marked since 1917, would disappear and that the Pioneer would become, once again, a local paper. A children's comer was introduced, much more sports news, including bowls, was included and a births, marriages and deaths column, the staple of conventional local papers, was introduced. Yet in April 1922, the paper suddenly ceased publication. There was no warning and no explanation. One can only conclude that the money problems, which had afflicted the paper for years, had become too much to bear and that the schisms of the Left, produced by the refusal of the ILP to back the Moscow-sponsored Third International, sapped the Pioneer of much of its editorial energy. Judged by any standards, however, the Pioneer had been a successful newspaper. It was one of a very small handful of British Labour newspapers which lasted more than ten years. The majority of them lasted less than a year, so that the Pioneer's survival for eleven years, appearing weekly at that, was a major feat in itself. It was also an extremely good Labour paper, achieving what few others did-to combine its purpose as the organ