Introduction

The history of Welsh newspapers over the twentieth century encompasses a wider shift in which a consciously politicised national identity began to emerge. This chapter intends to examine the evolution of that form of identity politics throughout the century: to use it as a prism through which to view wider developments in Welsh journalism and an opportunity to engage in a meaningful comparison between the English and Welsh language press in Wales. To that end, the chapter will take five pivotal events relating to the evolution of Welsh nationalist politics, distributed broadly equally throughout the century. It will use archival material to assess the reception of those events in newspapers from each region of Denis Balsom's ‘Three Wales Model’ (1985), a much-cited attempt to encapsulate the cultural and political fragmentation of Wales. Those five events are: the General Election of 1900, the foundation of Plaid Cymru 1925, the arson attack on the Penyberth ‘bombing school’ 1936, the election of Plaid Cymru MP Gwynfor Evans 1966, and the devolution referendum 1997.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Wales underwent a period of profound cultural change in which a nascent identity politics developed, arguably for the first time. The consciousness of nationhood was deeply rooted, but the notion that political structures might give expression to that consciousness began to emerge in political debate (Davies 1994). The role of newspapers in forging, interpreting and critiquing this politicised version of national identity forms the basis of this chapter.

Applying Anderson's (1983) theories on the role of newspapers in creating and sustaining a sense of nation is rendered problematic in Wales, partly because of the highly contested nature of the ‘project’, and partly because it is always underpinned by the changing nature of the relationship with ‘Britishness’. However, to echo Bingham and Conboy's (2015) findings in the wider British context, though the way this was done changed over time, there was continuity in the fact that the same issues were returned to continually by the popular press. The five events analysed in this chapter therefore provide some kind of temporal (as well as thematic) framework with which to underpin what would otherwise be an unwieldy and unhelpfully broad topic.