British Elections 1918-1945

[YL]

Can I request the southern West Riding?

[YL]

Can I request the southern West Riding?

Do you mean current South Yorkshire (roughly) or everything south of the Wharfe or so?

(but yes, of course)

The former, essentially, maybe north to about the Calder.  But I'm not going to complain if you do the latter!

[YL]

Here are links to Stepney's maps.  I couldn't get the actual images to work for some reason.

Worcestershire 1918-24
Worcestershire 1929-45

Warwickshire 1918-35

Wiltshire 1918-24
Wiltshire 1929-45

Sheffield 1918-45

Manchester & Salford 1918-45

Staffordshire 1918-45

[YL]

Here are brief descriptions of the Sheffield constituencies.  Names in brackets are the wards they included.   I've started with Central, then clockwise starting with Ecclesall (the darkest blue seat on most of Stepney's maps).

Sheffield Central (St Peter's, St Philip's, part of Broomhall): This consituency was tightly drawn around the city centre, extending west to cover Netherthorpe (in the modern Walkley ward) and south to include part of Highfield.  Most of the housing in this area would have been slums or little better, with not a lot surviving the various slum clearance programmes since 1918.  Presumably because of that, its electorate was distinctly low by 1945.  It seems surprising to me that it was so relatively Tory given the slums (though it was very close in both 1924 and 1935); I suppose this is related to the Manchester discussion.  All this area is now in the revived Sheffield Central.

Sheffield Ecclesall (Ecclesall, Sharrow): This was named after Ecclesall Bierlow, one of the six divisions of the old parish of Sheffield.  In 1918 much of the housing in this constituency would have been middle class villas in areas like Nether Edge, with some areas of by-law terraces and a few areas of genuine slums in the east of Sharrow ward.  Between the wars there was a lot of private middle class housing built in areas undeveloped before the war.  The outer areas are now in Sheffield Hallam, the inner areas in Sheffield Central.

Sheffield Hallam (Crookesmoor, Hallam, part of Broomhall): Nether Hallam and Upper Hallam were two more of the six divisions of the old parish.  This constituency was similar to Sheffield Ecclesall, though perhaps contained more slums (the areas close to the border with Central have seen a lot of slum clearance) but it also contained some very rich areas such as Ranmoor.  The outer areas are still in Hallam, while the inner areas have been removed over various boundary reviews and are now in Central.

Sheffield Hillsborough (Hillsborough, Neepsend, Walkley): This was north-west Sheffield, with Hillsborough having been added to the city at the beginning of the 20th century.  In 1918 the housing would have been a mix of by-law terraces and back-to-backs (mainly in the inner areas) with a few posher pockets.  Inter-war development would have included the western part of the large string of 1930s council estates which now dominate northern Sheffield, and some private development on the fringes of Walkley and Hillsborough.  Walkley is now in Sheffield Central, most of the rest in Brightside & Hillsborough, and a very small part in Hallam.

Sheffield Brightside (Brightside, Burngreave): Brightside Bierlow was another of the divisions of the old parish.  As with Hillsborough we're looking at terraces and back-to-backs in 1918, together with some larger Victorian villas on the top of the hill in Burngreave, with some pretty bad slums in other parts of Burngreave.  There was a lot of council housing built in this constituency between the wards, though the estates extend outside the 1918 city boundaries.  Almost all this area is in the successor seat, Brightside & Hillsborough.

Sheffield Attercliffe (Attercliffe, Darnall): Attercliffe-cum-Darnall was another division of the old parish.  The core of the steel-making area of the Lower Don Valley was split between this and Burngreave.  In 1918 this would have been similar to Brightside, but there wouldn't have been as much council development here, and after the Second World War most of the housing, especially in Attercliffe, was demolished in slum clearance programmes.  This constituency evolved into the present Sheffield South-East (unnecessarily renamed in 2010) but much of the current area of that constituency was outside the city boundary in 1918.

Sheffield Park (Heeley, Park): This was named after the old deer park of Sheffield Manor, most of which had large council estates built on it during this period.  In 1918 there was a slum area (known as Little Chicago) around Park Hill (now the site of the famous/infamous listed 1950s flats) and more mixed areas (by-law terraces and larger villas) further south around Norfolk Park, Heeley, Meersbrook and Woodseats.  The southern part of the constituency was annexed from Derbyshire around 1901.  The northern parts are now in Sheffield Central, the rest in Sheffield Heeley.

[YL]

Yes.  Freefair mentioned Liverpool and Glasgow, with the "Orange" Tory vote, but other cities are striking too.  The Tories won every seat in Birmingham in 1935; that wouldn't happen in a comparable scale landslide today.  They won six out of ten in Manchester; they'd need a bigger landslide than that to come close in any today.  (Of course, today Manchester has only three seats of its own, plus two which are mostly in the city but which cross the borders and have names which don't include the city name.)  They won three out of seven in Sheffield, three out of four in Newcastle (and the other was a Liberal National), and so on.

[YL]

The composition (and boundaries) of Cannock were really quite impressively bizarre:

Any idea why it was drawn like that?

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And with regards to many long term changes, that's the issue in general: people move, industries die, and lifestyles change. The functional metropolitan areas of most British cities in 1935 were much smaller (geographically) than is the case now. My mum grew up in a carpet weaving town on the distant outskirts of Wolverhampton that is now, effectively, a middle class commuter town.

A good point.  In my area, Penistone & Stocksbridge, Rother Valley and North East Derbyshire (the northern arm anyway) are much more suburban in nature than the equivalent seats were in 1935; their relatively small Labour majorities shouldn't really be surprising.  (Of course you have to take account of boundary changes)  In fact I think there are seats in other parts of the country which look demographically similar which are Tory-held.

[YL]

Presumably the "hole" is the Wakefield parliamentary borough?

In 1918 Rothwell was defined as "The rural districts of Hunslet and Wakefield, and
the urban districts of Ardsley East and West, Emley, Flockton, Horbury, Rothwell, and Stanley."  So some of the weirdness is due to local government changes, but even so it would have been an odd seat -- a sort of badly deformed Wakefield doughnut -- in 1918.

[YL]

It's curious, given modern patterns, that West Derbyshire was Labour while High Peak was Tory.  Both seem to have covered basically similar areas to the modern constituencies (West Derbyshire having been renamed Derbyshire Dales in 2010).

In West Derbyshire's case an Independent Labour candidate, Charles White, had won a 1944 by-election and stood as an official Labour candidate in 1945, when he held on narrowly.

[YL]

It appears that there used to be non-contiguous constituencies back in these days? That's weird.

In various counties in Scotland and Wales you had constituencies called "Districts of Boroughs" (or "Burghs" in Scotland) which contained the major towns but not the rural bits between them.  Caernarfon Boroughs (which probably wasn't spelt that way back then) would be a particularly well known example because it was represented by Lloyd George for many years; in this election it's those disjointed bits of pale blue on the north-west Wales coast between the yellow of Anglesey and the deepish red of the rest of Caernarfonshire.  Most of the others had gone by this time.

Other examples will be because constituencies didn't generally contain parts of more than one county and some counties were themselves non-contiguous.  Flintshire is probably the best known example, but it looks like the bizarre boundaries of Worcestershire with Gloucestershire and Warwickshire were still reflected in the constituency map at this point.

[YL]

BTW is there a reason for the three northern Highlands seats all being National Liberal?