ABSTRACT
The Chronicle for the same day, 6 November, revised its estimate of the numbers of men involved in the attack on Newport, citing one source for putting it at 20,000 and another at 10,000: ‘blowing out all the furnaces as they proceeded, and pressing every man into their service, chiefly from the neighbourhood of Blackwood, Pont-y-pool, and Caerfilly’. A leader writer for the Morning Herald displayed something like a touch of admiration for the ‘iron men who descended from the mines and levels of the mountains upon the town of Newport’. The Sun was remarkable for the rapidity if not the lucidity of its attempt to establish a whig position. Its evening edition of 5 November carried a short leader on the matter. After the English chartists had rejected violence in pursuit of their aims, agitators turned their attention to Wales and in particular to ‘the rude population of the mining districts about Newport’.
