Welsh Elections 1832 - 2005

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Oh dearie dear, googleing helps. It was Rhondda East. And Horner didn't stand in 1945 (he'd stood in the 30s.) The CPGB's national secretary or something like that did. Man named Pollitt.

My memory isn't so good at times

Anyways, here's the '45 results in Rhondda East:

Mainwaring (Lab) 48.4%
Pollitt (CPGB) 45.5%
Davies (PC) 6.1%

But I did remember something correctly; the Labour candidate was W.H.Mainwaring (a co-author of The Miners Next Step in 1910).

[Harry Hayfield]

Brecon and Radnor 1979
Con 22,660 (47.2%)
Lab 19,633 (40.9%)
Lib 4,654 (9.7%)
PC 1,031 (2.2%)
Con maj 3,027 (6.3%)

Brecon and Radnor Notional 1979
Con 17,344 (47.2%)
Lab 14,898 (40.5%)
Lib 3,676 (10.0%)
PC 853 (2.31%)
Con maj 2,446 (6.7%)

Impossible; the main settlements to be removed were Brynmawr, Vaynor and Penderyn, all of which are Labour, and strongly so, as a general rule.

Where'd you get those figures from, btw? I've seen a notional set for the new constituency from the early '80's and it looked nothing like that.

The first figures are the Brecon and Radnor election result from 1979 as taken from the book Welsh Elections 1885 - 1997 published by Yr Lolfa in 1998. The second figures are the BBC / ITN Notional Calculations published before the 1983 General Election.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The second figures are the BBC / ITN Notional Calculations published before the 1983 General Election.

How on earth did they manage to come up with those numbers? Something similer to the Baxter method?

[Cubby]

What made the rural seats in the center of Wales different and not prone to voting Labour? There's one called Montgomeryshire on that map that according to Wikipedia has been Liberal/Lib Dem/Whig for "centuries"!

As for Montgomery; Labour didn't exactly have a good start for the reasons above, but also because of the landlord factor (as late as the '30's Labour literature in places like Montgomery would include a line informing voters that the ballot was secret).

So much for traditional English liberty

Tell me more about this landlord factor, please.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I've checked Caernarfon Boroughs; yep, by this point the seat had been reduced to just those four boroughs. But I'm pretty sure the boundaries of some of them (Bangor especially) are very wrong; I'll get a map up soon.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

So much for traditional English liberty

Traditional English Liberty was never supposed to something that the working classes were supposed to have any of...

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What's there to tell? Tyrannical landlords are much the same World over; back in the early 20th century (and the 19th century, obviously) most of the people working in agriculture were either tenant farmers or agricultural labourers, they often lived in tied cottages (ie; tied to their landlord and to their occupation. Lose your job, lose your home) and their employers/owners would use this fact as a form of blackmail to get them to vote for their (ie; the landlords) candidate; vote against the landlord's candidate, lose your home (this happend in Wales a lot during the years in which the Liberal party (which in Wales got much of it's early strength from it's opposition to landlords and landlordism) first started to sweep all before it).

[Cubby]

Tell me more about this landlord factor, please.

What's there to tell? Tyrannical landlords are much the same World over; back in the early 20th century (and the 19th century, obviously) most of the people working in agriculture were either tenant farmers or agricultural labourers, they often lived in tied cottages (ie; tied to their landlord and to their occupation. Lose your job, lose your home) and their employers/owners would use this fact as a form of blackmail to get them to vote for their (ie; the landlords) candidate; vote against the landlord's candidate, lose your home (this happend in Wales a lot during the years in which the Liberal party (which in Wales got much of it's early strength from it's opposition to landlords and landlordism) first started to sweep all before it).

Well that situation is very different from the American South, where the white tenant farmers and landlords all voted for the same party without coercion due to animosity over the Civil War (War of the Northern Aggression as they called it) and half the population in some places (i.e. the black sharecroppers/tenant farmers) weren't allowed to vote at all until 1964/68.) This continues in the South today, voting is based on race, not class. But you know this so I'll shut up now.

By the way, most of what I know about Wales I learned from the movie and book How Green was my Valley which is one of my favorite films, and I'm glad it won Best Picture over the boring and over-rated Citizen Kane. This is partly why I'm asking a lot about Wales.

[Harry Hayfield]

You are aware that "How Green was my Valley" was actually written by an Englishman are you?

[Cubby]

You are aware that "How Green was my Valley" was actually written by an Englishman are you?

No, I had no idea.