1. Smethwick - oh dear. Smethwick was a large industrial town just west of Birmingham and was already functionally a Birmingham suburb by this point (though it has always been forbidden to actually mention this fact out loud in Smethwick). Initially it was a fairly safe Labour seat, as you'd expect. It was held by Labour's Shadow Foreign Secretary, a Gaitskellite former academic called Patrick Gordon Walker. Yet the town had become a major focal point for Commonwealth immigration. I presume that anyone with even a slight interest in British politics during this period knows what happened next, but in case anyone doesn't: the Tory candidate in 1964 - Peter Griffiths - ran an openly and horrifically racist campaign (his slogan was, infamously, 'If you want a n neighour, vote Labour') and defeated Gordon Walker on an against-the-grain swing of 7pts. Griffiths was branded a 'parliamentary leper' by Harold Wilson and was comfortably beaten in 1966. Which is the point at which things start to get slightly surreal, because the Labour candidate was Andrew Faulds, a well-known actor who first became politically active at the suggestion of Paul Robeson. Smethwick (which, for the benefit of people who don't know, is pronounced Smeth-ick) ended up taking to Faulds and re-elected him through successive boundary changes until he retired in 1997.
Also Griffiths reappeared as Tory MP for Portsmouth North and lasted until he was defeated in 1997; I don't know to what extent he modified his views. (Presumably he did modify his campaigning techniques a little.)
