British Elections 1918-1945

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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)

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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!

What I might do - though I'll have to check the maps I'd be working off - would be to draw an outline map for all of the West Riding south of the Wharfe and split it up when posting. I suppose I should look after my sanity occasionally.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

http://www.archive.org/stream/representationof00frasrich#page/448/mode/2up

Of course, you then have to have a ward map for that period to answer your question

There is that drawback, yeah. But at least I can know for sure which areas were included within borough constituencies, which is better for descriptions, so thanks for the link

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Bump!

Actually nothing to show for the present. But something that will lead to other things is about two-thirds done or so.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

They're the names of Wapentakes, as is Bassetlaw. And, actually, Newark.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

You can see that when my team wins the Premiership. I support Sunderland.


...actually... well... maybe you'll see it sooner. But quite a few steps away for now, even if the general direction of travel is very positive.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I did see it, and here it is:



Nice work.

I don't have a copy of Craig 1918-49 on hand at the moment, so can't really add much, but people should note that the (very heavily) defeated Labour candidate in Leicester West in 1918 was Ramsay MacDonald, an incumbent for the old two-member Leicester division and at the time a hate figure because of his opposition to the recently ended war. The National Labour member elected for the same seat in 1935 was Harold Nicolson, while the successful Labour candidate in 1945 was Barnett Janner, previously a Liberal MP in the East End and an important figure in the Jewish community (he was President of the Board of Deputies in the 50s and 60s) who represented the area until 1970 when he was succeeded by his son.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Think of this as some sort of New Year present or other.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

That's so; error corrected.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I think - by which I mean 'I read somewhere that' - the Tories actually won the most votes in Manchester in 1923 (finishing second everywhere syndrome). Though the best part of Manchester '23 was that the lone Tory seat was Hulme. Manchester Labour had real trouble breaking into the slums for various reasons. Platting was generally weaker than the other East Manchester seats, and that's despite a high profile candidate (J.R. Clynes).

Over in Salford, Ben Tillett was a notoriously lousy candidate; an agents nightmare.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Labour's early strength in Manchester is in the mining parts and not in the textiles dominated slummy city centre. As a very broad summary.

Loco works, engineering, chemicals and other heavy industrial delights as well as mining, but, yeah. Bradford - which had a large colliery until the 1960s - was one of Labour's first proper strongholds in the city. Similar patterns in some other large cities, of course; in Birmingham in 20s the Labour councillors were generally elected from wards dominated by heavy industry rather than the properly slummy areas, even if most of the latter were certainly capable of going Labour from a fairly early date (you get an echo of this in 1929 when Austen Chamberlain hung on in Birmingham West, despite said constituency being basically Hockley). Oh, and Selly Oak, an odd case that I think I've mentioned before.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

...but if I haven't, the ward included the Bournville works (and village), and one of the Labour councillor for the ward in the 20s went by the name of George Cadbury Junior.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

By the 1920s none of the Chamberlain's were really part of the machine; they'd abdicated in favour of a bunch of Edgbaston lawyers, though did remain its ceremonial head(s). This might be slightly unfair, but I think Austen basically turned up in the city at election time (whether he was needed or not) and drove around like some sort of seigneur, while other people did the actual work. Of course similar things were said about Roy Jenkins in the 60s!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Oh, I'm not disagreeing one iota re. Austen, but it might not be fair with regard to Neville, who of course followed in his old man's footsteps by being three times Mayor. Austen though cleared out of Highbury as soon as he could and took up residence at the unhappily-named Twitt's Ghyll (in deepest Sussex, not far from Uckfield). I don't know where Neville would have been listed on the ballot paper as living, but I think he would have had more pull and more interaction with Brum than Austen.

Oh sure; up until the 1920s he was very much an active part of the machine (unlike Austen), and presumably kept up his contacts with it a little better than his brother. Of course the machine predated the Chamberlains; you can probably date it back to the Birmingham Political Union, which would mean domination over the city's politics for well over a century, which isn't so far off Tammany Hall in terms of longevity.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Sneak preview:

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Sneak preview:

The Map is finished. I'll post a prettified version of it tomorrow (with colours and all that). Modifications for 1945 will follow soon after, I think. They won't be quite so accurate, but, meh.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Bigger picture.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

They are very much the opposite of off topic!

---

Anyways;

It should be possible to make the changes for '45 without much bother: which is excellent news.

I'll be doing maps of all the elections in this period (maybe with some informative text or other pretty stuff; dunno), but quite randomly and to no particular timescale, so absolutely no objections to anyone doing stuff in the meantime. After all, the point of the map is for it to be used, so feel free to do so. I can also upload a properly blank one (without county colouring) if that's easier to work from.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Epsom is an error, yeah (caused by a confusing source map; an unusually thick link for a local government boundary). I'll correct it on future maps based on the map, but probably not on the map itself. I think wrt Worcestershire I gave up. There are limits.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Nice. That was a seriously bizarre election, even for the period.

Anyways, it's not a bad thing to spot errors!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A lot of deeply weird candidates were successful during this period, but he was probably one of the funnier ones.

Something that probably needs pointing out on that map is Holland with Boston; the Labour candidate (and MP!) in 1918, 1922 and 1923 was William Royce, a most unlikely Labour MP^* who had actually been the Tory candidate in the predecessor constituency in 1910. He died in 1924, Labour lost the by-election (one of Hugh Dalton's many pre-Bishop Auckland contests) and never got the seat back. Ten point Tory margin in 1945.

_{*Before heading home and entering politics he was a railway construction magnate in South Africa!}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Anyways, I've been working on the changes for '45. About halfway through, or so, in terms of material. Who knows in terms of time.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Fascinating map! What explains the Liberal support in Devon, Somerset, Wiltshire and those parts of Lancashire and the West Riding?

By this point mostly Tradition (one heading for an almighty crash in 1924, obviously), with the roots of that mostly being sectarian. The West Country, the West Riding and East Lancs all had strong Nonconformist traditions; this was also true of some other 'surprising' areas of Liberal strength, like Lindsey, Bedfordshire and Hull. Note that most of the really, really strong Tory rural areas were Anglican strongholds.

Though '23 was weird; the Liberals won some rural constituencies (like the new Shrewsbury seat) that were certainly not traditionally Liberal.

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Birmingham during this period was still dominated by the political machine associated with Joseph Chamberlain; note that in the city the Tories always ran as Unionists during this period. This machine dominated political life in Birmingham from the middle of the 19th century until the city's strange democratic revolution in 1945.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Absolutely, yes. I'm toying with (maybe) doing some for Glasgow, Brum, Liverpool and Manchester as well. Toying.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If you post the link, doesn't the link still tend to work?