British Elections 1918-1945

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Idea: do shrunken versions of the big maps, post them here. And also add links to the full size thing.

Regarding the burghs, they can be found here if you poke around.

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Well there were no large scale slum clearance programmes in Britain until the Luftwaffe decided to embark on an unnecessarily and excessively brutal one, so this is very much the pattern you'd expect.

This is what a lot of people get wrong about council housing; the early estates and even the 1930s estates weren't actually built for the slummies, but for the respectable workers in by-law houses. The thinking - more accurately hope - was that market forces would somehow do most of the rest. You don't get big intentional slum clearance programmes until the 1950s and 1960s.

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Almost every detail has changed, but the basic pattern is much the same. 1935 is a much underrated election.

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I'd say that the biggest change from then to now is that the Labour Party's base was in the industrial (mining, shipbuilding, steel etc.) areas while it's now in the urban areas - a great deal of overlap, obviously, but just compare Birmingham (or Bristol, Manchester, suburban London etc.) in 1935 to now.

Except that many of those urban areas mentioned were actually very industrial in 1935. Birmingham was dominated by metal bashing of one sort or another (historically guns and cheap consumer crap, but increasingly also cars and related industries), while Manchester was still a major centre of heavy industry and of lighter industries relating to textiles.

Or to point out the really obvious: Labour underperformed in most larger urban areas (compared to how they'd polled in the 20s) quite badly in 1935. In 1929 (for instance) Labour dominated the representation of Manchester/Salford and Newcastle/Gateshead, while there was a large clutch of Labour MPs from Birmingham. On the other hand, Labour recovered very strongly in the various coalfields and in some more rural textile districts as these places had been particularly devastated by the later stages of the depression. That, and the power of the MFGB. The reason why 1935 is (to me at least) important isn't because it was some kind of perfect baseline election or whatever, but because it basically set patterns that had been emerging since 1918 as permanent.

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Newark was redrawn in 1983 as a basically safe Conservative seat (though the old Newark would have drifted Torywards anyway as the pit villages in the Dukeries depopulated and as more Nottingham commuters moved into the prosperously rural end of the constituency), and Romford is a middle class suburban constituency of the sort that Labour has only ever been able to win in extremely good years.* The issue in the Harrows and Brent North is their transformation from middle class suburbia to ethnic banlieues (for lack of a good English word for this).

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.

_{*In the interests of clarity however... it should be noted that the Romford constituency that existed in the 1930s included both Barking and Dagenham, while the Romford constituency that existed prior to 1974 combined the middle class 'burbs of Romford proper with the Harold Hill estate.}

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That's Cannock, and presumably the Labour vote came from there rather than from what is now South Staffordshire.

Quite so. At the time the area that is now South Staffs was still very rural and had a low population. Almost all of the settlements in the area are almost entirely post-war (and frequently post-1960 at that).

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Good grief, I hadn't even noticed, that, even though I knew the Midlands urban area as a whole was very historically Conservative. Wow. Surely that had something to do with Neville, Joseph & Austin Chamberlain, or Stanley Baldwin being relatively local?

Birmingham was still dominated by the political machine that had run it (more or less) since the middle of the 19th century (note that Conservative candidates in the city were still officially described as Unionists), and which was in practice the political wing of local business and professional interests (a hell of a lot of Edgbaston lawyers were senior Aldermen). It was strongly associated with the Chamberlain family, though by the interwar period they didn't have much to do with the actual operation of things. It had been given a few scares in the 20s, but was very much in full control by '35. Then the city had what amounted to a democratic revolution in 1945, and that was the end of that.

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

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I wasn't so much referring to the Tories winning those seats as doing much better in them than in the more posh north London areas that had always been strongholds.

But the people who had made those formerly posh - though really we're talking more humdrum suburban boring middle class actually* - parts of North London Tory strongholds no longer (at least for the most part) lived there by then.

_{*And not always that safe: in 1966, Labour won Harrow East, came close in Harrow Central, and only very narrowly failed to gain Hendon North. Even in '74, Labour managed to vaguely menace in Harrow Central and came close in Hendon North. At the same time, Battersea North was a Labour stronghold and Fulham was a reliable Labour seat.}

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Ah, so mostly a - productive! - misunderstanding then.

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Any idea why it was drawn like that?

Alcohol?

It was actually slightly less insane when it was first drawn (the bits in Wolves weren't then and so on: these were areas of major growth), but still bats. I suspect it may have come about from the rules used to draw up the boundaries: you have that bizarre dip into the Black Country because points west of that were in one set of designated borough constituencies, and points east were in another. Though its possible that they were consciously trying to draw a barrier between the Black Country and designated agricultural constituencies further north in Staffs.

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A very safe Labour seat in Yorkshire - held at all elections during the period - seemingly made up of leftovers from other constituencies. Note that the part in Morley was not Morley town but the Ardsley area, while the bits that were (by 1940) in Denby Dale and Kirkburton were basically just the villages of Emley and Flockton.

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Indeed it is.

As well as being a leftovers constituency, it was also pretty clearly an attempt to draw another mining seat: Emley and Flockton are/were pit villages (with their own UDCs until the 30s!), and Hunslet RD had an important mining element at Middleton (later annexed to Leeds and the site of a huge council estate). Those that drew the boundaries in 1917 seem to have often prioritised economic similarities to geographical links.

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Charles White (Labour MP from 1944 until he retired in 1950 - the seat immediately reverted to type) was the son of Charles White (Liberal MP from 1918 until his death in 1923 - in that case the seat also immediately reverted to type). Both were popular local government figures in Matlock.

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Regarding High Peak, it seems to have included about half of Marple UD in 1945. Might that have made some difference? There's also the issue that most of the population was (is) on the eastern fringes of Manchester, where in '45 Labour performances were generally less stunning than in Derbyshire.

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Oh - As for Rothwell, it's the old Normanton constituency from 1885, minus the expanded boroughs of Normanton and Wakefield, with those parts replaced by Ardsley and Hunslet to the north. Ardsley was associated with the Wakefield poor law union. The only alternative constituency for Hunslet was Barkston Ash, given the integrity of the Leeds borough boundary, and Rothwell was much more socially similar. In the modern era, we'd probably have "Rothwell and Wakefield North", and "Emley and Wakefield South", but that's the borough boundary question again!

Ah, so more an attempt (a successful one, obviously) to preserve a mining constituency, rather than to create one. Makes sense.

Though Hunslet Rural (which may win the coverted prize for most absurd sounding local government area name) didn't actually include Hunslet, which was in Leeds South.

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A phenomenon that also saw the highly questionable retention of the Caernarvon Boroughs constituency, of course.

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The 1917 boundary changes are the key to that result: in order to make the seat even vaguely excusable, they added the upmarket coastal resort of Llandudno (a much larger town than any of the Boroughs the constituency was named for) and also a couple of granite quarrying towns (Llanfairfechan and Penmaenmawr) which boosted the population nicely. Llandudno would normally have been a Tory stronghold and the quarrying towns would likely have leaned towards Labour, but this wasn't an issue so long as Lloyd George was the Liberal candidate, because otherwise staunchly Labour working class people in North Wales loved him. Once removed from the picture, the seat was always going to be highly vulnerable. I think the Liberals blamed the loss of the seat (a loss they'd expected) on 'wartime changes' to the constituency (i.e. BBC people in Bangor and so on), which remains one of the worst excuses for a lost seat I've ever come across.

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Most excellent.

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Electorate of 90,000 by 1935!

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Normal would have been about half that.

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The interesting thing is that the changes in local government areas were generally driven by population changes: this is the area of ribbon development, 'metroland' and the first big suburban council estates.

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

Actually Caithness & Sutherland wasn't; just an extremely close (six votes) Tory win.* And oddly there's confusion over the labelling of the winner in Ross & Cromarty: he was not actually a member of either Liberal party. I've coloured the seat National Liberal because that's where he ended up.

_{*Con 33.5, Labour 33.4, Liberal 33.1. The defeated Liberal incumbent was the party's leader, Archibald Sinclair.}

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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.

And that one was only preserved because the incumbent at the time of the 1917 boundary review happened to be the Prime Minister...