About Monmouthshire Merlin

Monmouthshire Merlin

The Monmouthshire Merlin was a weekly English-language broadsheet newspaper published in Monmouth from 23 May 1829 until 27 November 1891. It was founded by Charles Hough and Reginald James Blewitt and circulated well beyond its home town, across Monmouthshire and the neighbouring counties on both sides of the Welsh border.

For sixty-two years the Merlin reported local and national news for that border territory. Its early history was shaped by Blewitt, a solicitor turned proprietor who became member of Parliament for the Monmouth Boroughs, and its life covered the age of the Newport Rising, the growth of the South Wales iron and coal industries, and the transformation of the provincial weekly press.

Foundation on 23 May 1829

The first issue of the Monmouthshire Merlin appeared on 23 May 1829. Charles Hough was its original publisher, and Reginald James Blewitt helped to establish the paper with him. A later book-trade record placed Blewitt at the Merlin General Printing Office in Monnow Street, Monmouth, as newspaper proprietor and printer, in partnership with Hough from 1829.

The partnership did not last in that form. Hough went bankrupt in 1831, and Blewitt became sole proprietor. Trade records listed Blewitt as proprietor of the Merlin from 1829 to about 1835, first in partnership and then on his own, before the paper passed to other hands in Monmouth.

Reginald James Blewitt, co-founder and proprietor

Blewitt was born in 1799, the second son of Edward Blewitt, and was descended through his father from the Morgan family of Newport. He was educated at Rugby School, practised as a solicitor, retired from that practice in 1827 and kept his terms at Lincoln's Inn in the hope of going to the bar. In the same period he published a satirical poem about the characters of the Court of Chancery, issued as a book of more than a hundred pages.

In 1836 Blewitt restored Llantarnam Abbey, historically a Catholic house, as his home. In July 1837 he was elected MP for the Monmouthshire Boroughs, succeeding Benjamin Hall and defeating the Conservative Crawshay Bailey by 172 votes to 117. He sat as a Whig, and the Merlin gave him a printed base in the constituency politics of Monmouthshire.

A rival paper and a political contest

The Merlin operated in an openly adversarial press culture. Joseph Bailey junior and the Bailey family were political adversaries of Blewitt, and Joseph Bailey financially backed a rival paper, the Beacon, to attack Blewitt in public. The existence of a financed rival showed that a county weekly in the 1830s was not only a commercial venture but a weapon in contests between local industrial and parliamentary families.

Blewitt's own business interests widened alongside his politics. In July 1836 he joined with others to set up the Monmouthshire and Glamorganshire Banking Company. In the 1840s he owned iron and coal works at Cwmbran, was proprietor of the Blaendare iron and coal works and established the Old Llanhilleth Colliery in 1846. The Merlin's proprietor was therefore part of the industrial development his paper reported.

The Merlin and the Newport Rising

Blewitt was a well-known critic of Chartism through his Newport paper. That position brought him a minor but direct role in the Newport Rising of 1839, when three groups of Chartists descended on Newport to free a fellow Chartist from custody. Two groups reached the hotel in Newport and were turned back by soldiers who fired on them.

The third group, from Pontypool and led by William Jones, was late and was met on the road by Blewitt, who cautioned the men against insurrection. The group continued, and scattered only after news arrived of Chartists shot dead and wounded in Newport. Blewitt meanwhile travelled through Caerleon to the site of the rising and took over the role of mayor, the mayor having been wounded. Jones and two others were later transported for their part in the uprising.

Publishers after Blewitt

After Hough, the succession of publishers was comparatively stable and long-serving. John Nash published the paper briefly in about 1835. Edward Dowling then published it from about 1835 until 1858, a tenure of more than two decades that covered the Chartist years and the early railway age in Monmouthshire.

William Christopher succeeded Dowling and published the Merlin from about 1858 until 1884, an even longer tenure. The paper therefore spent most of its life under two successive publishers, Dowling and Christopher, whose combined years accounted for almost half a century of its sixty-two-year run, before its final years in the 1880s and early 1890s.

Circulation across five counties

Although published in Monmouth, the Merlin circulated in Monmouthshire, Brecknockshire, Glamorgan, Gloucestershire and Herefordshire. That distribution crossed the modern boundary between Wales and England as a matter of course, reflecting Monmouth's position as a border market town serving readers in the Wye valley and beyond.

The paper primarily reported local and national news for that readership. In a period before daily provincial papers reached such towns routinely, a weekly broadsheet of that kind carried court and market intelligence, parliamentary and national reports, and the local announcements on which a largely rural and increasingly industrial readership depended.

Changing subtitles

The Merlin's subtitle changed several times, recording the absorptions and ambitions of a county paper. From 1853 to 1855, and again from 1860, it used the style Monmouthshire Merlin and South Wales Advertiser, a title that advertised a reach beyond its home county.

From 1856 to 1859 it appeared as the Monmouthshire Merlin and Glamorgan and Brecon Silurian. That form folded the name of the older Silurian, a South Wales title associated with Brecon and Glamorgan, into the Merlin's own. The changes of subtitle were the visible trace of a competitive market in which weeklies merged their identities as readily as they attacked one another.

Monmouth, Newport and the place of publication

The paper was a Monmouth publication, printed at its Monnow Street office, and its proprietor's career was rooted in Monmouth and Llantarnam. Yet contemporary and later records sometimes associated Blewitt's paper with Newport, the larger Monmouthshire town where his political battles and his role in 1839 were enacted and where the Blewitt family connections lay.

That double association was a strength rather than a confusion in its own time. A Monmouth weekly that circulated in five counties did not serve a single town; it served a county and a border region, and its news columns ranged from Monmouth itself to Newport, the Glamorgan valleys and the English counties across the Wye and the Severn.

Final years and cessation in 1891

William Christopher's publishership ended in about 1884, seven years before the paper itself ended. No successor of comparable recorded length followed, and the Merlin entered a final, less fully documented phase at a time when weekly papers faced daily competitors, cheaper production and new railway distribution that favoured larger centres.

Publication ceased on 27 November 1891. The Merlin had survived the age of the stagecoach, the Chartist crisis and the mid-Victorian expansion of the Welsh coalfield, but it did not continue into the last decade of the nineteenth century. Its run of sixty-two years made it, at its close, one of the longer-lived English-language weeklies founded in Wales in the 1820s.

Survival in archives

The Merlin's full run was preserved in archive holdings. Commercial newspaper archives recorded more than three thousand issues and more than twenty-two thousand pages for the title between 1829 and 1891, figures that reflected a weekly that rarely missed its place in the calendar for over six decades.

Digitised copies were made available through Welsh Newspapers Online at the National Library of Wales. Through that digitisation, a paper founded to fight the political battles of Reginald Blewitt in Monmouth became a primary source for the local history of Monmouthshire, Brecknockshire, Glamorgan, Gloucestershire and Herefordshire throughout the Victorian period.