The South Wales Gazette was established as a weekly newspaper in the growing south Wales town of Abertillery in 1888 and published and printed in newly established offices in King Street in the town centre. It continued to be an Abertillery-based newspaper up until 1969 when it changed its title to the Gwent Gazette, which is still published as weekly newspaper. The Gwent Gazette's became what is now the area covered by the Blaenau Gwent local authority, namely the Ebbw Fach, Ebbw Fawr and upper Sirhowy valleys, eventually moving its base to Ebbw Vale where, in 1974, the newly formed Blaenau Gwent had established its headquarters.

In its early years, the South Wales Gazette featured news from what was generally referred to as the Western Valley of Monmouthshire, stretching from Nantyglo in the north in the Ebbw Fach valley down to Risca in the south in the Ebbw valley. But as Abertillery grew rapidly in the 1890s, attaining town status as the head of its own urban district in 1894, the focus increasingly became the town itself which by 1921 had become the second biggest town in Monmouthshire with a population close to 40,000, compared to just about 6,000, 40 years earlier. The crushing depressions of the twenties and thirties that followed devastated Abertillery and many other valley towns and then in 1939, a great war once again broke out in Europe less than twenty-one years after "the war to end all wars".

In consequence, the South Wales Gazette was not only a mirror of those extraordinary times but as Abertillery grew in size and importance, it helped shape and influence public opinion through its stories and editorials as well as its letters section which became the battle ground for winning the hearts and minds of local people. The historic archive of the South Wales Gazette prior to the second world war essentially tells the story of the toil, strife and struggle in what was Monmouthshire''s very own Klondyke.

In 2007, a new community group based in Abertillery called Cybertyleri was established with the aim of promoting Abertillery, past, present and future, through internet-based projects including the long-running Abertillery Online website - www.abertillery.net. One of its major objectives was to digitise the archived editions of the South Wales Gazette to retell the fascinating history of the town through the pages of its local newspaper and make them available for research by local and family historians. To do this, in 2008, the group approached the Trinity Mirror group, which owns the Gwent Gazette newspaper title, and the Reference Library in the city of Newport, which holds microfilmed copies of the newspaper, to obtain permission to digitise all the editions from 1888 through to 1938. Newport Reference Library were extremely helpful and after Cybertyleri obtained funding through HOV, the digitisation was carried out by Iimage Retrieval, which produced a fully searchable archive in pdf format.

We shall be putting stories and articles online although at this time they will not be searchable on this website. We hope you enjoy the site and please feel free to contact us with your views and suggestions to help make the site the best it can be. The microfilmed South Wales Gazette archives are still available to search at Newport Reference Library

We wish to thank Newport Reference Library, Iimage Retrieval and HOV for their support in making this project and website a reality.

FEATURED STORY

Friday January 4th 1929

In early 1929, the new year was ushered in with some optimism as the above sales advert for Pontlottyn from the Gazette shows.

However, just ten months later the world suffered its second major depression in 10 years following the Great Depression of 1919-1922. It has been argued in some quarters that in 1929 Britain suffered less than say the United States, where the Wall Street crash in October that year heralded the depression with world-wise ramifications including the demise of the Weimar Republic in Germany, which had been propped by US loans since the mid 1920s. That though is to severely understate the economic and social ills that beset Great Britain and industrial areas such as  south Wales in particular.

In the UK, the effects from across the Atlantic were felt drastically and huge swathes of the country fell into severe economic decline including the south Wales valleys and towns like Abertillery where unemployment reached nearly 70%. It was not until the outbreak of the war ten years later that full employment was restored.

We shall be following the fortunes of Abertillery and its people in 1929 as seen through the eyes of the Gazette on this site in the months ahead.