British Elections 1950-1970

[Chancellor of the Duchy of Little Lever and Darcy Lever]

A similar map for the area covered by your London map would be appreciated.

Will this do?

[Chancellor of the Duchy of Little Lever and Darcy Lever]

Yes - thanks! The odd outline made it hard to read for me.

I've wondered this before - why was the more southerly Hackney constituency named "Hackney Central"?

Southern Hackney was part of the Bethnal Green seat at this point.

[Chancellor of the Duchy of Little Lever and Darcy Lever]

Anyway, I'm currently working on outline maps for quite a few metropolitan areas, mostly as something to keep things ticking over between my actual work (which, hahaha, relates to the politics of this period, though at a local level). Currently trying to work out whether to include Bolton in the Manchester map or the central South Lancs map. Leaning towards the latter, can be persuaded otherwise. Or I could included it in both, but only include descriptives in the latter.

Fine decision there.  TBH I think Bolton belongs better in the Manchester map - way, way before this period it was part of the Salford Hundred which covered SE Lancs as it properly is.  Here be the ancient parish boundaries in Salfordshire (lol at Middleton):

[Chancellor of the Duchy of Little Lever and Darcy Lever]

Could you identify the constituency of the following villages please (as it has been causing me a lot of grief). Nether Whitacre, Coleshill, Shustoke and Arley

Al's map puts all four villages in Sutton Coldfield at this time.

Vision of Britain shows them as in Meriden from 1949 to 1982, but that seems to be an error as the Meriden seat wasn't created until 1955.

[Chancellor of the Duchy of Little Lever and Darcy Lever]

I've tried to be clever with the colour scheme, which is probably a mistake. Manchester constituencies are in one colour (though you'll note that two extended beyond the boundary of the city), constituencies containing part of a County Borough in another, constituencies entirely within the area covered by Lancashire County Council in the last.

I never realised that Heywood and Royton had such a strange shape.

[Chancellor of the Duchy of Little Lever and Darcy Lever]

I never realised that Heywood and Royton had such a strange shape.

What do you think the logic of drawing it like that was?

My surprise was basically that I had assumed that the seat included Castleton (this being the obvious way from Heywood to Royton) and went around the south of Rochdale rather than the north.

Looking at the old Urban District boundaries, it's starting to make some sort of sense.  The Rochdale seat is contiguous with the old county borough, while Heywood and Royton is Heywood, Whitworth, Wardle, Littleborough, Milnrow, Crompton and Royton UDs.  Castleton was part of Rochdale CB which is why my assumption was off.

I can only assume that the boundary commissioners thought that this configuration was a better idea than splitting Rochdale between two constituencies.  The problem is that while Whitworth looks contiguous with Wardle and Heywood on the map, in fact the boundaries run through trackless moorland - to get to Wardle or Heywood from Whitworth you have to go through Rochdale.

EDIT: This is my 200th post.

[Chancellor of the Duchy of Little Lever and Darcy Lever]

Very interesting Al, thank you.

You've mentioned Cheetham Hill and Moss Side as major immigrant centres, but these days the same applies to Longsight and Rusholme of course - was this also a feature of this period or did it happen later?

Also the name "Manchester Exchange" was actually slightly misleading - while the seat did include the city centre with its big cotton and corn exchanges, the railway station of the same name was in Salford East.

[Chancellor of the Duchy of Little Lever and Darcy Lever]

I remember hearing one very old reason for the prevelance of working-class Toryism in SE Lancs - the mill-owners were Liberals.  Not having researched this I don't know if there's anything in that.

[Chancellor of the Duchy of Little Lever and Darcy Lever]

I remember hearing one very old reason for the prevelance of working-class Toryism in SE Lancs - the mill-owners were Liberals.  Not having researched this I don't know if there's anything in that.

I'm pretty sure that the mill-owners were indeed Liberals, more or less as a rule, in the 19th century; but whether that has anything to do with anything, I do not know.
Richard Oastler was a Tory, of course, though he was a hero mostly to the working class of Yorkshire.

There's an anecdote in one of Churchill's writings about his first election campaign in Oldham, which was a two-seat borough.  Both the Liberal candidates were local mill-owners, and (according to Churchill) despite claiming to speak up for the common man were worth a million pounds each.  Meanwhile Winston and his running-mate would probably have struggled to get a few hundred quid together.

[Chancellor of the Duchy of Little Lever and Darcy Lever]

Bumpity bump and some more of the eternal S.E. Lancs descriptions. This is part three, obviously. It looks as though there will be four in total.

Excellent work as always Al which deserves a proper reply.

I actually don't know an awful lot about Bolton politics of this period, my knowledge is more about Bury - I grew up in Prestwich and went to college in Bury.

BOLTON WEST: I think I should nail one canard which is that there's a bizarrely-named suburb of Bolton called Deane-cum-Heaton.  There was, up until 2004, a bizarrely-named ward of Bolton called Deane-cum-Heaton.  However, this ward covered two different places called Deane and Heaton with an undeveloped valley between them (without so much as a road crossing it).  Deane has some history as there was a very ancient church there which had a very large parish, while Heaton is just a filthy rich suburb.  

There are several competing ideas as to how Doffcocker got its name, but most local people think it comes from the pub on Chorley Old Road called the Doffcocker...

The seat also included the rather beautiful planned mill village of Barrow Bridge, which appears under an assumed name in Disraeli's Coningsby.

BOLTON EAST: Breightmet didn't really get going until about the middle of this period - the terraces around Trinity Street railway station in the centre were cleared around then.  (I'm not sure whether these were in West or East - I would love to see a really large-scale map of the boundary).

Harper Green wasn't in this seat - it's part of Farnworth and was never part of the county borough.  However, it does look like the seat had all of Great Lever in it which would more than make up for that.  In fact, when you look at the areas which were in the seat now it's really difficult to see where the Tory vote comes from.  Astley Bridge is a given - Tonge Moor and The Haulgh would probably have been swing areas - perhaps the nicer bits of Great Lever before the white flight got going?  I think I'm going to have to go to the library and see if they have any old local results.

BURY AND RADCLIFFE: Funny you should say that about political careers lasting a long time - Frank White, who was Labour MP for this seat in the 1970s on knife-edge majorities, still sits on Bolton Council.

The really rough area of east Bury is the Dickie Bird Estate (it got built with a large gap running north to south down the middle of it, through which a motorway was built a few years later), but again that didn't really get going until the middle of this period.  There were some rather nasty slum terraces just south-east of the town centre which got cleared around that time.

I had no idea that Bury County Borough had a large Liberal group and am struggling to think where they might have been strong.  There's no Liberal vote in the town at all these days - all the Lib Dem councillors on Bury MBC come from Prestwich and have done as long as I've been following Bury elections.

BLACK PUDDING: Don't knock it till you've tried it.  But try it before you find out what the recipe is  It's worth pointing out that Bury black pudding is different from the black pudding you get elsewhere; elsewhere it tends to be fried, but Bury black pudding is boiled and served with lots and lots of mustard.

Fun fact: Bury people eat so much black pudding it's impossible to test them for colorectal cancer. (http://www.bmj.com/content/325/7378/1444.full.pdf)

[Chancellor of the Duchy of Little Lever and Darcy Lever]

Thanks for the reply; was pretty sure that there'd be a few errors in Bolton as the changes to local government boundaries were so confusing in places that... well, you can see, can't you?

BOLTON WEST: I think I should nail one canard which is that there's a bizarrely-named suburb of Bolton called Deane-cum-Heaton.  There was, up until 2004, a bizarrely-named ward of Bolton called Deane-cum-Heaton.  However, this ward covered two different places called Deane and Heaton with an undeveloped valley between them (without so much as a road crossing it).  Deane has some history as there was a very ancient church there which had a very large parish, while Heaton is just a filthy rich suburb.

Oh well. At least there will always be a Doffcocker.

To be fair, you're not the first person to have been confused by Deane-cum-Heaton - I keep seeing it in constituency profiles written by people who should know better. 

If you're going to list weirdly named suburbs of Bolton it is incumbent on you to mention Darcy Lever and Daubhill (which is pronounced Dobble).

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Is there a common name for those bits of Bolton south of the town centre?
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Well, it's basically all covered by the current Great Lever ward but then there are various sub-districts of that like Rose Hill and Burnden.

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I think it's a bit like those places east of Manchester that must have voted Tory in 1955 and 1959, something that seems barely credible now. Though the odd part wrt to Bolton East is 1970, of course. Were there particularly bad tensions over immigration in the area? Would be the right year.
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No idea, sorry.  I'll mention this to my quiz team-mate who knows everything about the town ever