"[3] Morris decided to print one issue a month due to the Stamp Tax laws at the time only applying to newspapers published every 28 days.

It was originally printed as a broadsheet on 6 February 1854 and titled the "Swindon Advertiser and Monthly Record" using a hand press in his father's shop in Wood Street.

Other newspaper companies were influenced by Morris' example of a penny priced paper and quickly produced their own in the region and ultimately throughout the country, resulting in the government amending the stamp tax laws to a more favourable version.

This having been done, a bon-fire was made in the Market Square, in which all these copies, also an effigy of the Editor himself, were committed to the flames.In the same year, the paper was printed using steam power for the first time.

Using a boiler and engine built in the Swindon Works of the Great Western Railway, they produced 5,000 copies a week.

[citation needed] Due to a petition raised and successfully imposed by Mathew Purvis (a local Swindon resident) the price will remain fixed at 65p for at least until 2016.