Baner ac Amserau Cymru
Overview
Baner ac Amserau Cymru was a weekly Welsh-language newspaper published in Denbigh, in north Wales, and distributed throughout Wales and among the large Welsh population of Liverpool. It was formed in 1859 by the amalgamation of Baner Cymru, founded by the Denbigh printer and publisher Thomas Gee in 1857, and Yr Amserau, a Liverpool-based Welsh newspaper founded in 1846. Under Gee the combined paper became the most influential Welsh-language newspaper of the nineteenth century, a Liberal and Nonconformist voice that was described in its own time as an oracle in Wales and that played a major part in stirring the Welsh nationalist and home rule movement. It continued, in changing forms, until 1972, when it was replaced by Y Faner, giving it a life of well over a century from its Baner Cymru beginnings.
Few provincial newspapers anywhere in Britain can match that combination of longevity and political consequence. The Baner was not merely a record of Welsh life; it was an instrument of it, campaigning for the secret ballot, for the disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Wales, for the abolition of tithes and for Welsh home rule, and giving Welsh-speaking readers, most of whom read little or nothing in English, a direct connection to Parliament and to national politics in their own language.
Thomas Gee and Gwasg Gee
The paper's founder was Thomas Gee (1815-1898), born in Denbigh on 24 January 1815. At fourteen he entered his father's printing office, Gwasg Gee, the Gee Press, while continuing to attend the grammar school in the afternoons. In 1837 he went to London to improve his knowledge of printing, and on his return to Wales in 1838 he threw himself into literary, educational and religious work. He was ordained to the Calvinistic Methodist ministry at Bala in 1847, though he believed throughout his life in an itinerant, unpaid ministry rather than a settled pastorate, and he became one of the commanding platform speakers of Welsh Nonconformity.
Gee's press was one of the great Welsh publishing houses. Among its productions were the quarterly magazine Y Traethodydd, the Encyclopaedia Cambrensis, the largest work ever published in Welsh, issued in ten volumes between 1854 and 1879 at a cost to Gee of some £20,000, and Dr Silvan Evans's English-Welsh dictionary of 1868. The firm Gee's father had founded in Denbigh in 1808 remained a principal publisher of Welsh books for almost two centuries, passing out of the family in 1914, being run in the 1930s by the novelist Kate Roberts and her husband Morris Williams, and ceasing publication only in 2001. The newspaper was thus one product of a much larger Welsh-language print enterprise centred on a small market town.
Baner Cymru and the Amalgamation of 1859
Gee launched Baner Cymru, "The Banner of Wales", on 4 March 1857. He brought to it some twenty years of business experience and of writing for the press, and he intended something more ambitious than the monthly religious journals that then dominated Welsh publishing: a weekly newspaper in Welsh that would give a large potential audience of Welsh speakers a wider view of the world directly, in their own language. The paper quickly found readers. Two years later, in 1859, Gee took over the Liverpool newspaper Yr Amserau, "The Times", founded in 1846, and merged the two titles as Baner ac Amserau Cymru.
The merger made geographical as well as commercial sense. Liverpool was in effect a Welsh city in this period: the paper's own advertising in Mitchell's Press Directory for 1861 put the Welsh population of Liverpool alone at about eighty thousand, and estimated that between seven and eight hundred thousand people in Wales itself read almost exclusively the productions of the Welsh press. A paper published in Denbigh, printed for Wales and sold in Liverpool, addressed a single Welsh-reading public that happened to live on both sides of the border.
Contents and Journalism
The Baner carried local and national news and information for that public. Its journalism was more professional than that of most Welsh contemporaries. Gee attracted able journalists, most famously John Griffith, known by his pen name Y Gohebydd, "the correspondent", whom he appointed as the paper's London reporter. Griffith spent much of his time reporting parliamentary debates and attending political meetings throughout Wales, so that Welsh readers received accounts of Westminster written for them, from a Welsh Liberal standpoint, rather than translated extracts. The bookseller and writer Ellis Pierce was another contributor to the paper's pages.
The paper was well laid out and well printed, advantages that reflected Gee's training as a printer. In 1861 it cost 3d; by 1870 the price had fallen to 2d for the Wednesday edition and 1d on Saturday, bringing it within reach of working readers as the taxes on newspapers were reduced. Falling prices and a weekly rhythm turned the Baner from a paper for ministers, teachers and shopkeepers into something closer to a mass medium for Welsh-speaking Wales.
Politics: Liberal, Nonconformist, Nationalist
The Baner's editorial line was Gee's own: Liberal and Nonconformist, and increasingly Welsh nationalist. Its pages aired the great Welsh campaigns of the Victorian period: the vote by ballot, so that tenant farmers could vote against their landlords without fear; the disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales, where most worshippers were Nonconformists who resented paying tithes to a church they did not attend; the abolition of those tithes; and Welsh home rule. On disestablishment Gee fought a celebrated newspaper duel with Dr John Owen, later Bishop of St Davids, conducted in print between the paper and its Anglican opponents.
Contemporaries recognised the paper's authority. Reference works of the Edwardian period, summarising Gee's career, concluded that the paper soon became an oracle in Wales and played a great part in stirring up the nationalist movement in the principality. That judgement reflects how thoroughly the Baner shaped opinion in the chapels, reading rooms and homes of Welsh Wales. In education, too, Gee used his influence in long campaigns for undenominational schools and for the intermediate school system that gave Wales its pioneering secondary schools, and in 1886 he founded the Welsh Land League to campaign for the rights of tenant farmers.
Denbigh and the Welsh Press
That such a paper came from Denbigh rather than from Cardiff or London says much about Victorian Wales. Publishing followed the language: the Welsh-reading public was strongest in the north and west, and towns such as Denbigh and Caernarfon became print capitals whose presses served the whole country. Gwasg Gee made Denbigh one of those capitals. Gee himself, a commanding presence with a resonant voice and a mastery of Welsh diction, was a national figure from his Denbigh base: a counsellor and friend of the National Eisteddfod, a temperance and Sunday school worker, and a leader whose funeral in 1898, after his death on 28 September, was described as the most imposing ever seen in north Wales.
The Baner's reach into Liverpool completed the picture. The Welsh of Liverpool, many of them building workers, merchants and seamen who had crossed the border for work, maintained Welsh chapels, eisteddfodau and reading habits, and the Amserau inheritance gave the merged paper an established place in that community. The paper's full title, preserved in the amalgamation, is a small map of its market: the Banner of Wales and the Times, Denbigh and Liverpool, in one weekly sheet.
Later Years and Y Faner
The Baner outlived its founder by three quarters of a century. It continued as a weekly Welsh newspaper through the wars of the twentieth century and the long decline of Welsh as a majority language, adapting as its readership changed. In 1972 the title came to an end in its newspaper form and was replaced by Y Faner, a current affairs journal under the shortened version of the old name. Y Faner itself continued into the early 1990s before ceasing publication, closing a publishing lineage that stretched back, through the 1859 amalgamation, to Gee's first Baner Cymru of 1857, a span of more than 135 years.
The Gee family connection with the paper's successor world continued in other ways: in the 1950s Gwilym R. Jones, the editor of Y Faner, enlisted the help of Emlyn Hooson and others to rescue Gwasg Gee itself when the press was in difficulty, and the firm the Baner's founder had built published on until 2001.
The Archive
The Baner's early issues are among the most accessible of any Welsh newspaper. Welsh Newspapers Online, the National Library of Wales's digital archive, has digitised many of the early issues from the Library's collection. The British Newspaper Archive's holdings for the title are extensive: its catalogue records some 3,808 issues and more than 47,000 pages for the years from 1857 to 1900 alone, covering Baner Cymru and the merged title. Family historians, political historians and historians of the Welsh language all use the run, which preserves everything from parliamentary reports and eisteddfod results to the advertisements through which the paper addressed the Welsh of Liverpool.
The survival of so full an archive is fitting. The Baner was written to be kept and reread: copies passed around chapels and households, and its leaders were treated as statements of position by a whole political culture. Digitisation has given that culture's newspaper a second life as one of the principal sources for nineteenth-century Wales.
Legacy
Baner ac Amserau Cymru demonstrated, earlier and more completely than any rival, that a Welsh-language newspaper could set the political agenda of a nation. It made Denbigh, briefly, one of the capitals of Welsh public life; it trained and employed Welsh journalists; it connected the Welsh of Wales and of Liverpool in a single conversation; and it carried the campaigns of Liberal, Nonconformist Wales, disestablishment, land reform and home rule among them, into hundreds of thousands of homes.
Its founder's other monuments, the Encyclopaedia Cambrensis and Gwasg Gee itself, have their own histories, but the Baner was the achievement by which Thomas Gee moved events. When reference books call the paper an oracle, they are describing authority earned week by week over more than a century of publication, from the first Baner Cymru of 4 March 1857 to the last Baner ac Amserau Cymru of 1972.
