British Elections 1918-1945

[stepney]

Al, you may have seen my Leicestershire map in the other place; if it can help you finish a 1945 map off, feel free to use it - or indeed as I have too few posts here to upload images, if you want to post it here and do the seat descriptions, feel free.

[stepney]

Thanks for putting that up.

As soon as I get home in the New Year and dig out my copy of the 1945 boundary changes, I'll get Warwickshire done. Including solidly Tory Unionist Brummagem -(until the 1945 deluge).

[stepney]

Thanks for putting that up.

As soon as I get home in the New Year and dig out my copy of the 1945 boundary changes, I'll get Warwickshire done. Including solidly Tory Unionist Brummagem -(until the 1945 deluge).

Unfortunately I don’t have enough posts on here to put either images or links up, but if anyone is interested in this particular thread, in addition to Leicestershire which Al has kindly posted I have put maps of the inter-war elections for Warwickshire (inc. Birmingham), Worcestershire, Wiltshire, Sheffield, and Manchester and Salford on the Pretty Maps thread of the Vote-2012 Proboards forum. What I haven’t done is run down the electoral history or demographic make-up of each seat – a task for someone else, I think.

[stepney]

I'm looking forward to you clocking up another 8 posts or so and posting links and images!

It does seem a rather odd rule, does it not? I'll try to get round to it as soon as I can.

(BTW this is rather obviously a gratuitous post just to count towards my 20, while trying not to be completely off topic. I wonder if there's a special thread one can work out the 20 posts on?)

[stepney]

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

Bless you: not only have you put up the pretty maps for everyone, you give me an excuse to get to 20 posts.

Postimage is a pain in the backside for changing the URLs of images one uploads; Al, I think, uploads them direct to here, I'll see if I'm able to do that.

So, yeah, those are the pretty maps so far. Nowhere near as good quality as Al's because I'm basically converting a series of 1930s Ordnance Survey maps straight into blank maps (not quite as easy) and, of course, I'm not adding descriptions. If anyone has any requests for more pretty maps, just say.

[stepney]

and, of course, I'm not adding descriptions. If anyone has any requests for more pretty maps, just say.

My request would be to change the policy regarding descriptions. Or else to badger Al to do it (and IIRC he did Somerset at one point, or was that for the postwar era?)

Al's inter-war Somerset is here.

Descriptions mean doing research and stuff. Whereas drawing maps, consulting FWS Craig, and colouring them in is fun, like an internet version of playing with finger paints.

[stepney]

Swindon went Labour in 1929? I know it has a railroad history, but that surprised me.

Also, lol at Manchester 23 vs Manchester 31!

Well, 1923 was the best Liberal year since 1910 while it was the worst Conservative year in the inter-war period. 1931 was rather better for the Tories (weak sarcasm alert).

Part of that came from local Conservative Associations brooking no quarter with Samuelite Liberals even if it was meant to be National Government, unity, all pulling at the bit, etc. Where there were Liberals arguing for free trade the local Tory parties (having just been convulsed for two years by the protectionist crusade, although this was more a southern thing) generally fought them and generally won, including in this case against a sitting MP in Blackley and a new Liberal candidate in Withington.

[stepney]

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.

You say West Birmingham was basically Hockley, true enough: the seat was actually called the Hockley Division by the 1917 Commission and was renamed West Birmingham by the House (in memory of Old Joe and all that). It's worth remembering Austen got a swing against him in 1929 of 17%, and if I remember right in Jenkins' book on Chancellors he attributed it to "poor sods, how the other half must live, and how they suffer, I can hardly blame them voting Socialist" (I paraphrase); but next door (literally) in Ladywood Neville did a runner and Geoffrey Lloyd as the new Tory Unionist candidate suffered a 0.1% swing (which nonetheless was enough to turn a Tory Unionist majority of 77 into a Labour majority of 11).

Part of me wants to put the difference down to Geoffrey Lloyd's excellent campaigning (he was described somewhere as "an exquisite homosexual who inherited the Chamberlain machine in Birmingham"). Then again, part wants to put it down to Austen not really being part of the whole Chamberlain Brummagem machine, never having served on the Council, never having been Mayor (unlike practically the entirety of his male extended family), and naturally spending the last five years as Foreign Secretary travelling the world and not Brummagem.

Selly Oak (I say using a mixture of Davies-Morley and intuition) had the Bournville Estate (Cadbury Quaker influence?), the "Selly Oak-Stirchley metal-working district" and, presumably, a lot of workers at Longbridge - the workers' trains from New Street to Longbridge via Selly Oak started in 1915, and of course the Bristol Road was always there, though I don't know about the trams.

EDIT: Correction. The trams did run down the Bristol Road to Longbridge. Three routes, in fact.

[stepney]

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!

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.

Huh, I remember at some point looking through historical constituency names in Birmingham and spotting that odd survival of a single cardinal point. So that has been cleared up for me now.

The Hansard account of it is mangled on the Millbank website, but here it is. Austen had of course by now done his seat hop and was sitting for Da's old seat. There was no discussion; must have taken ninety seconds, if that. Might be easier if I render it in full:

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[stepney]

Helpfully I have a copy of the 1939 (and probably final) edition of the Constitutional Yearbook, which has profiles of all the MPs in 1939 complete with home addresses.  Unhelpfully this is the 1939 edition and therefore gives Neville's address as "10, Downing Street, S.W.1."

I'm somewhat deviating from the initial purpose of the thread, but I suppose I should disprove my own incorrect argument:

	Austen	Neville
Constitutional Year Book, 1906	11, Downing Street, S.W.	-
Popular Guide to the House of Commons, 1906	40, Prince’s-gardens, S.W.; Highbury, Moor Green, Birmingham	-
Constitutional Year Book, 1919	9, Egerton Place, S.W.3.	Westbourne, Edgbaston, Birmingham
Debrett’s Guide to the House of Commons, 1922	11, Downing Street, S.W.1.	35, Egerton Crescent, S.W.3; Westbourne, Edgbaston, Birmingham
Constitutional Year Book, 1932	58, Rutland Gate, S.W.7	37, Eaton Square, S.W.1
Constitutional Year Book, 1937	House of Commons, S.W.1	11, Downing Street, S.W.1
Constitutional Year Book, 1939	-	10, Downing Street, S.W.1

I am looking at doing some descriptions of the Wiltshire seats, at which point I’ll get the thread back on track.

[stepney]

For the 1945 elections, they split all those constituencies that had grown to over half the average size in two, but didn't do anything about the very undersized constituencies. (As it happens, both these groups were somewhat Labour-favorable that year. To a degree we're talking about the cleared slums and the places they had been cleared to.)

Sort of, although in the case of the undersized seats this was massively accelerated by wartime displacement. Postage stamp-size constituencies like Southwark North or Limehouse didn't have their inevitable scrubbing off the map by pre-war slum clearance but by the Luftwaffe.

Of course the 1945 mini-redistribution used the 1939 electorates to decide which seats needed splitting, so to that extent it was pre-war population movement which defined the redistribution. By the way, it was a figure of 190% of the average that was needed to split, not 150%. Detail of the redistribution is here.

I have often wondered why the opportunity wasn't taken to merge some of the very small seats at the same time; I think the upshot was that these places had had their populations massively reduced through bombing and evacuation, and that it wouldn't have been fair to remove Parliamentary representation at that point (particularly as some of the expectation was the population would move back after the war). There may have been Labour self-interest in it in arguing that, too.

Oh, and obviously this map now needs to be colored in by result.

I don't know if Al wants to do these for himself; I am happy to make a start on 1923 (if only to see the mildly amusing Liberal gain of a shed load of English seats that had been safe Tory since 1885).

[stepney]

I suppose maps of electorate change in London 1918-45 aren’t off topic. My interest was piqued by the discussion above about slum clearance v. wartime displacement.



Electorate growth, 1918 election to 1935 election

Not clear what’s going on here. Every electorate in London grew in this period. Partly this was a function of granting the vote to under-30 women in 1928. The electorate in England grew by 59.9% in the same period.

The growth in London did not keep pace with this, particularly inner south London. In fact apart from Chelsea, Hackney, Hampstead, Kensington and Lewisham, the growth in none of London kept pace with the English average. Middlesex and west Essex clearly did and then some.

The lowest growth in this period was Kennington (16.8%), the highest Romford (353.2%).

NB. This is the growth in electorate, not population. The City would have obviously been massively skewed by the business vote, some of the surrounding seats a little too.



Electorate growth, 1935 election to 1945 election

A little more clear what happened here, isn’t it? The electorate in England grew by 5.6% in these ten years.

There were boundary changes in Essex, Kent, Middlesex and Surrey in 1945. Some were very minor (e.g. in Croydon, Finchley) so I’ve treated them as unchanged. Epping and Ilford were simply split directly in two, so comparison was easy. Romford was split in four (with some minor adjustments), so ditto. Middlesex was more complicated, so I’ve compared like with like. Bromley, Dartford and Mitcham were too complicated to compare.

The heaviest fall was in the City (73.3%) followed by Silvertown (62.9%). The highest growth was in Enfield (44.8%)

[stepney]

The colouring helps, especially with that Gloucestershire border...

One of my three - massively churlish - criticisms would be that that border is actually too simplified: most of the Worcestershire exclaves have been excised. (The other two are that Lincolnshire and Rutland were three parliamentary counties, not one, and that Epsom seems to have been shown as two seats).

[stepney]

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.

Kids these days. No dedication. Here:

[stepney]

This will probably get wiped off PostImage as soon as I put it up, but here's 1923:



I only have generic colours for four seats: Harrow (Ind majority 19.8%), Mossley (Ind majority 1.6%), Cardiganshire (Ind L majority 19.2%) and Liverpool Scotland (Irish Nationalist unopposed). Scrymgeour at Dundee has been coloured in using "ILP, etc" colours. Some fudging has been done for two-member seats.

Apologies for not adding back the universities, and in advance for any errors.

Also apologies to Al for doctoring his map to include a larger London, and for spotting an extra error in the map: the Eccles and Stretford seats had been merged.

[stepney]

Inadvertently edited, damn it. I did have some wittering on here, along the lines of:

a) Jos Wedgwood at Newcastle is down in Labour colours even though he was unendorsed. All the other unendorsed Independent Labour winners are in "ILP etc" colours.
b) The "National" and "National Independent" (Hopkinson at Mossley) winners are down in Simonite sea-green, not Tory blue.
c) I think there was something else I can't now remember. It's late.

[stepney]

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

"Tend to". Not always. Here it is.

[stepney]

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

Out of interest, where do you get the boundaries for the Scottish divided burghs from? Also, any plans to add Northern Ireland to this map?

[stepney]

Bradford and Leeds, 1918-1945.

[stepney]

Bucks. Bigger map in the gallery.

[stepney]

Just further to the maps up top about the causes of electorate decline in London in the inter-war period, here's a similar map indicating population change between 1914 and 1961. A bit of late inter-war clearance, but nothing compared to the post-1940 flight.

[stepney]

Can anyone upload a map of results for Plymouth for the 1922 GE?

This should cover it, but the outline map's a little rough I'm afraid.

[stepney]

Report of the Boundary Commission (England & Wales), Volume 1, 1917 (Cd. 8756)

[stepney]

So I finally got round to taking Al's map and added in the boundary review for 1945:



Bigger map here.

I also spotted a few tiny errors with Al's 1918-35 map in Herts, Surrey and Warwicks, so I'm taking the liberty of posting a revised version so that the boundaries that didn't change match up with the 1945 map.



Bigger map here.

E&OE, of course. And all kudos to Al whose map it is.

(EDIT: Worcestershire exclaves)
(EDIT: Amending Warks/Leics border)

[stepney]

So I finally got round to taking Al's map and added in the boundary review for 1945:

That's great.

Comparing them to my own map, the only major difference is that the Evesham/Cirencester boundary mess isn't quite perfect in the amended 1918-35 map, though it's right in the 1945 map.

Damn it, I thought I'd put them in. And now, thanks to the power of ninja editing, I have!