United Kingdom Historical Election Maps 1918-50

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I've decided to do a new set of inter-and-immediate-postwar election maps in a new and more detailed style. New ones will appear here on a strictly irregular timescale.

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I've decided to start with something entirely new for me, and that is with some maps of Dublin for the 1918 General Election, the last time that that city (and the bulk of Ireland) was part of the United Kingdom. The Sinn Fein MPs elected did not, of course, take their seats in Westminster and instead formed the First Dáil. For all British constituency series I will provide a degree of commentary on each constituency, but my knowledge of Irish social geography during this period is a lot weaker and so others will have to fill that gap, if they so desire.




Will do some party vote maps etc. shortly.

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It always seems amazing that Belfast was once considered worthy of having nine constituencies of its own.  Today it struggles to find enough territory outside the expanded city boundary for four.

There isn't a major population centre in either Great Britain or elsewhere in Ireland that feels as thoroughly wrecked and ruined by the 20th century as Belfast: not even industrial cities that have lost their primary economic function like Liverpool or Bradford.

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Yes: essentially if a party polls below 5% then that's such a low share of the vote that I'm not sure if there's any meaningful difference between that and not running a candidate at all. There's the option of showing the latter in e.g. grey instead, but I don't like that aesthetically.

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The process for drawing boundaries in 1917 was different to the regular reviews from the 1950s onwards and there was more room for consciously political decisions: one we can confirm for definite would be the curious decision to go against the general policy of abolishing all District of Boroughs constituencies outside of Scotland in the case of the constituency in North Wales that just so happened to be represented by the Prime Minister. My suspicion (and it can only be a suspicion) is that if the boundaries had been drawn before the Conservatives entered the Wartime Coalition, then the boundaries in certain parts of Ireland would have been drawn rather differently.

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If Caernarfonshire had instead been given the more obvious division into an eastern constituency based on Conwy, Llandudno and Bangor and a western one based on Caernarfon, Porthmadog and the Llŷn (i.e. basically the 1950 to 1983 arrangement), would that have given Lloyd George any problems?

No. Lloyd George would have comfortably won any constituency (no matter how drawn) in North Wales (let alone North West Wales) throughout the second half of his career, which makes what happened at the boundary review all the more ridiculous.

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Quite a complex set of boundaries, think it's fair to say. A grand total of three constituencies with detached parts, one of which was comprised (infamously, notoriously, completely unjustifiably) entirely of detached parts. Much more information about each constituency to follow with later maps, but for now a little note on nomenclature: I personally prefer 'f' to 'v' in the spelling of 'Caernarfon', but 'v' was widely and officially used at the time. 'Carn' rather than 'Caern' was also quite common, but I draw the line at that. 'Merioneth' might seem inconsistent alongside 'Flintshire' and 'Caernarvonshire', but reflects common usage: no one normal ever used 'Merionethshire', but both 'Caernarvonshire' and 'Flintshire' were (and are) frequent. 'Caernarvonshire' is also, obviously, necessary to draw a verbal distinction between that constituency and the absurd division of Caernarvon Boroughs - which, anyway, contained the county town.

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While most contextual notes can wait for later, a brief explanation for Anglesey in 1918 and 1922 is probably required. In 1918 it was won by Brigadier General Sir Owen Thomas as an Independent Labour candidate against the incumbent Coalition Liberal MP in what was possibly the biggest shock of an election full of them,* as Anglesey was generally regarded at the time as being one of the very safest Liberal seats in Britain. It was a rare example of the atmosphere of the Khaki Election working against the Coalition: Sir Owen, who was previously an active Liberal and who had been a well-known public figure on the Island for decades, had led the recruiting drive on Anglesey during the war and there was a great deal of public sympathy for him as he had lost three of his own sons as a result of it. He joined the PLP on his election, but left it a few years later and ran as an Independent Labour candidate again in 1922, before dying a few months later.

_{*Outside Ireland in any case, obviously.}

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It is a little strange that Liberal dominance of the region really only ended after the death of David Lloyd George: the Welsh Wizard, indeed.

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The first set of party vote maps! Couple of things to note:

1. Various unofficial and Independent Liberal/Labour candidates have been included in the Liberal and Labour maps. Party labels were looser and nomination processes rather more Byzantine at the time: what matters is what people thought they were voting for, and doing this for certain candidacies shows that better.

2. The incredibly messy Liberal Party civil war has been represented by a) producing a map showing the combined results of all Liberal candidates and b) a map showing the results in 1918 and 1922 for the principal Liberal factions.

3. Rather obviously, parties were not especially concerned with running candidates in every constituency at the time and a lot of the more drastic shifts reflect decisions to run or not run candidates in this or that constituency. It isn't a major problem if you're aware of it, but please always be aware of it.

4. Keys for party vote maps will not be the same across each series: even the North Wales maps for 1929-45 will not have identical keys to this series. The point, after all, is to represent and display information.

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Quite striking that N Wales still returned just two Labour MPs even in *1945*.

This actually takes us back to earlier discussions about the boundaries used in the region at the time: a more reasonably drawn set in Caernarvonshire would have elected two Labour MPs, and had Flintshire (which was oversized even in 1918 and was quite grossly so by 1945) been divided into two seats, the division included Deeside would have been comfortably Labour in 1945. The other issue, of course, is that 1945 was the election at which Liberal resilience in North Wales finally broke: had this occurred earlier, as it did in most of the rest of Britain, then Anglesey and Merioneth would have been swept up in the general tide and the Conservatives wouldn't have held Flintshire on a split vote as there would have been no confusion as to which party was best place to oust them there. And the final issue is that, well, Lady Megan was the only Liberal would could have held Anglesey against Labour in 1945.

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There's an interesting argument to be made as to which map the Liberal Nationals belong to, but I would argue that right from the start they were Conservative auxiliaries and that we shouldn't allow the continued administrative links (!) to the official Liberal Party to confuse what was hardly a secret to the electorate.

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Anglesey

A rural and largely agricultural constituency covering the eponymous island county, Anglesey was predominantly Welsh-speaking and was a notable centre of Nonconformist sentiment and practice. This all contributed to making it a natural Liberal stronghold, but there was another side to the island, and that was the presence of the industrial port of Holyhead and a large number of strongly working class villages and small towns scattered across the island, many of which contributed to the army of labourers who took the ferry across the Menai every week to work at the Dinorwic slate quarry on the mainland. Under the right circumstances this could cause trouble, and did in 1918 when the Independent Labour candidate Brigadier General Sir Owen Thomas defeated the incumbent Liberal MP in one of the biggest upsets in an election full of them.

Like all the best freak results, his election was the result of multiple factors all happening to align perfectly at the right moment: the tone and atmosphere of the 'Khaki Election' favoured a candidate who happened to have been the main force behind the army's recruiting drive on the Island during the First World War and who further benefited from considerable local sympathy as two of his own sons were killed on the Western Front, and, as a former member of the Liberal Party and an active figure in local government, disillusioned Asquith supporters were likely to have voted for him rather than the Coalition Liberal incumbent. Like a large number of Labour-aligned candidates in 1918, Thomas was as much a dissident left-Liberal as a social democrat, and though he joined the PLP on his election he found organized party politics distasteful and soon left it. Re-elected as an Independent Labour candidate again in 1922 (the National Liberals having made the rather curious decision to try to oust him with the incumbent MP for Wrexham), he died early in 1923 and the Liberals easily regained the seat in the ensuing by-election, with the same former Wrexham MP defeating the former Liberal MP for East Denbighshire, who tried to repeat Thomas's trick by running for Labour.

After 1929 the MP was Megan Lloyd George, David Lloyd George's daughter and favourite child. Lloyd George, the first female MP to represent a Welsh constituency, was on the left-wing of the Liberal Party and had good relations with Labour, which presumably contributed to the party not seriously bothering with Anglesey until 1945. In 1931 she stood, along with the rest of the Lloyd George family group of MPs, as a Liberal opposed to the National Government. Lady Megan, as she was universally known after her father's elevation to the Peerage in 1945, was a popular figure locally and was almost certainly the only Liberal who could have held Anglesey against Labour that year, though even then only as the Conservatives did not run a candidate. After her eventual defeat in 1951, she defected to the Labour Party and spent the last decade of her life as MP for Carmarthen, having gained the seat from her old party at a by-election in 1957. The Labour candidate in 1945, Cledwyn Hughes, was the son of a prominent Presbyterian minister and would go on to hold Anglesey from 1951 until 1979.

The largest town on Anglesey was Holyhead, an important port for trade with and transport to Ireland and a minor industrial centre. It will have voted heavily for Thomas in 1918 and 1922 and later for Hughes in 1945. The surrounding area will have provided a reasonable vote for Conservative candidates when they actually contested, as will the Bangor suburbs of Menai Bridge and Llanfairpwll and the ancient and historically Anglican town of Beaumaris, though Liberal candidates will still have been comfortably ahead, even in 1931. Beaumaris was actually relatively industrial and, again, Thomas and Hughes certainly won't have polled poorly there. It is hard to think that Llangefni - a Welsh-speaking, Nonconformist market town - would have been anything other than an absolute Liberal stronghold during this period: it might actually be the very archetype of one. Labour strength would also have been notable around Amlwch, with its then not yet distant history as a centre of copper mining and export, and in all those villages in the south of the island where labourers at Dinorwic lived, some of which actually had an industrial history of their own (there was a small colliery at Gaerwen in the 19th century). The rest of the countryside will have been solidly Liberal (with reasonable Conservative minority votes in places), except in 1918 and 1922 when Thomas will almost certainly have dominated in the North West of the island where he was from and was very well known.