AberdareUrban District Council was a local authority in Aberdare, Wales. It was created in 1894 as a result of the 1894 Local Government of England and Wales Act and the 1894 Aberdare Urban District Council election saw the election of the first members of the authority. The Council existed until 1973 and replaced the Aberdare Local Board of Health which had functioned since the 1840s. Its boundaries were identical to those of the original parish of Aberdare. Initially, the Council had fifteen members but this was increased to twenty in 1906, as a result of the increase in population. There were five wards, namely Aberaman, Blaengwawr, Gadlys, Llwydcoed, and the Town Ward. The first councillors were elected at the 1894 elections. Most of the first members of the authority had served on the Local Board, including the first chairman, Rees Hopkin Rhys who had chaired the Local Board since the 1860s. Other inaugural members included Rees Llewellyn, owner of the Bwllfa Colliery and Edmund Mills Hann who later became a director of Powell Duffryn Collieries. All three of these men were leading figures in the industrial life of the valley and beyond. From the outset there was a strong representation on the Council of middle-class nonconformist liberals, who were typical of the new elite who rose to prominence in Wales in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods. Chief among these were Benjamin Evans, minister of Gadlys Chapel, Thomas Humphreys, minister of Seion, Cwmaman, and Griffith George, a prominent businessman in the town. All three were leading Baptists. Following the inaugural elections there were comparatively few contests during the next few years. The elections of 1896 and 1897 were low key and several seats were uncontested. In the years leading up to the First World War, representatives of the Labour Party began to gain ground. At the initial election, miners' agent David Morgan had been heavily defeated and the workers' candidates made little headway until the turn of the century, and the Town and Gadlys wards remained barren territory for Labour candidates for many years. By 1914, however, they held several seats, and dominated the Aberaman and Blaengwawr wards. The elected representatives included Charles Butt Stanton. In 1974 the authority was abolished, and together with the former urban district of Mountain Ash and some outlying areas, formed the Cynon ValleyBorough Council which, in turn, was subsumed into the unitary authority of Rhondda Cynon Taf in 1996.
