Cylchgronau Cymru

of a local Labour movement with its function as a genuine local newspaper. And this is all the more remarkable when one considers that the running of the paper was managed by a group of unpaid volunteers, most of them total amateurs who cut their journalistic teeth on the Pioneer. This meant that, occasionally, the paper relied on reprinting articles and features from other newspapers, but the Pioneer was far less guilty of this practice than most local, or even national, Labour newspapers. It was in its coverage of local issues, however, that the Pioneer excelled. Long ago it had been recognised that the way to the citadel of power lay through its outposts, the town and city councils, and since 1895 the ILP, for example, had devoted considerable energy to winning seats on every possible board or council. The men who created the Merthyr Pioneer were local councillors and local opinion leaders, not aspiring Parliament- arians, and their interests and activities were reflected in their paper. Housing, welfare, local government, education were the subjects most often discussed in the Pioneer, for these were the subjects closest to the hearts of the supporters of the Merthyr Labour movement. This is why the Pioneer has remained so important for historians; not only because of the unexpected information about the sociology of the Merthyr Labour movement revealed in the company file, or in the unique information about the setting up and running of a Labour newspaper reflected in the annual financial returns, but because, in every page of the Pioneer, we can observe the day-to-day life and preoccupations of a most significant centre of the ILP and the Labour movement. FOOTNOTES 1. For a discussion of the development of Labour in Merthyr see Kenneth 0 Morgan, "The Merthyr of Keir Hardie" in Glanmor Williams (Ed), Merthyr Politics; The Making of a Working Class tradition (1966). See also K. O. Fox, "Labour and Merthyr's Khaki Election", Welsh History Review, Vol. II, No. 4. (1965). 2. Alan J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press, 1855-1914 (1976), pp. 131 ff. The P.E.P. Report on the British Press (1936) regarded 1900 as the peak year in the entire history of the press, though this is an assessment of the number of individual newspapers rather than the total circulation of all newspapers, which continued to rise for the next thirty years. See also the Report of the Royal Commission on the Press, Cmd. 7700 (1947-9), pp. 14 ff. 3. See R. Harrison et al., The Warwick Guide to Labour Periodicals (1977) 4. See Kenneth Morgan, Keir Hardie. Radical and Socialist (1975), p.237; William Stewart, J. Keir Hardie (1921), p.311; Emrys Hughes, Keir Hardie, (1956), p.200 5. Minutes of the National Administrative Council of the I.L.P., 15-16 June 1904. 6. E.g. editorial comment, 29 July 1911.