Chapter 13 Results

Following the election it took the best part of another day for the electoral patterns to become clear, and those patterns would cast a long shadow over the interwar period. While Labour had done very well in the boroughs, in the counties they had performed much worse. Bonar Law’s Conservatives would have a substantial majority and the hopes of the Lloyd George Liberals to hold the balance of power had been dashed. The Daily Express of 17 November carried the headline: ‘Dominating Conservative Majority’.¹ In The Decline and Fall of Lloyd George, Lord Beaverbrook relates that Lloyd George and his circle were full of open fury against him. They depicted him as a man who had not sought power through the endorsement of the electorate: instead, he sought to be the power behind the throne exercising a hidden influence upon events.²

Lloyd George’s strategy had been defeated by the shift of the electorate towards the Conservatives and Labour, and the breakdown of some local pacts had cost them dear in particular seats. As Morgan has written: ‘In the circumstances, to hold on to over fifty seats was a meritorious achievement. It was at least a useful bargaining counter for Lloyd George’.³ The key thing is that many of them had been returned as a result of their personal standing within their constituencies rather than as a result of enthusiasm for Lloyd George’s brand of Liberalism, and they would be useful elements in the process of Liberal reunion in 1923 rather than as a useful bargaining counter in terms of the formation of the government in 1922. The weakness of the Coalition Liberal cause was further underlined by the fact that so many Liberal ex-ministers had fallen at the election. ‘Churchill, Guest, Montagu, Greenwood and Kellaway had all fallen’.⁴ At least, however, the Coalition Liberal ranks had been swelled by rising Liberal stars such as Archibald Sinclair and Geoffrey Shakespeare and the victories included ‘five of the ten seats lost in by-elections’.⁵ With the numbers of Lloyd George and the Asquith Liberals evenly balanced, the path towards eventual Liberal reunification in 1923 was eased considerably.

It is a truism that every general election breaks down into over 600 separate constituency contests. In the circumstances of 1922 that was especially true with the undeclared and partial truce between the Conservatives and Coalition Liberals which saw ‘local arrangements’ in place in many areas. Partial Liberal reunification in Manchester, Leeds and Sunderland with candidates standing without particular affiliation to either Lloyd George or Asquith added a further layer of complication. The Coalition Liberal losses, and victories, in 1922 hid many quirks which have skewed attempts at statistical analysis. Indeed, as much as it is desirable from a psephological perspective to organise and codify the data, and to make the 1922 General Election accessible and comparable in statistical terms to other elections, the political realities make this all but impossible. At every turn there are issues as regards how to interpret the data in an election in which many candidates, by one means or another, had a problem with narrow definition of their loyalties.

Quirks and anomalies were one of the hallmarks of an election in which at least six children under the age of thirteen voted after having been included on the electoral roll, while trouble was also experienced with absentee ballots for those on military service, despite considerable efforts in 1920 and 1921 to remedy a problem that had dogged the 1918 election.⁶ In the case of North East Derbyshire the unsuccessful Liberal Candidate (he had lost to the Labour candidate by five votes) launched a petition against the outcome of the election when two uncounted ballot papers were discovered on the return of the ballot boxes to County Hall in Derby.⁷ In the subsequent recount the majority of his Labour opponent was increased to fifteen.

The problem of party labels is the major complicating factor in calculations about the party performances of 1922. On 1 November, as the closure of nominations approached, local Conservative grandee Maynard Colchester Weymss in the Forest of Dean had expressed the wonderment of many in 1922: ‘how many candidates there will be, & how they will be labelled’.⁸ The Times newspaper wrestled with the problem of party labels following the closure of nominations. Using information supplied by the parties centrally, then cross-referenced with local constituency associations, on 6 November The Times arrived at the figures in Table 13.1 for the numbers of prospective parliamentary candidates being put forward by the parties.

The Lloyd George and Asquith Liberals being put forward in those places where partial liberal reunification had taken place were classified as ‘Liberal’.⁹ Likewise nine of the ten members of the National Democratic Party (Labour MPs who supported Lloyd George during the war and took the coupon in 1918), such as Clement Edwards in East Ham South, were classed as National Liberals.

The analysis by The Times suggested that, at least in part, pacts between the parties had limited the number of three-cornered contests in which the centre-right parties might fight against each other to the benefit of Labour. In 57 out of 615 seats there was no contest, with only one candidate standing, such as David Lloyd George in Caernarvon. In a further 373 seats there was a straight fight between two candidates, with just 242 seats involving multi-party battles. In twenty-six constituencies (less than five per cent of the whole) there were four-cornered contests, in East Ham North there were five, and five also in the two-member constituencies of Blackburn, Bolton and Oldham. In Sunderland, Southampton and Dundee (also two-member constituencies) there were six candidates.

To this quantitative data, in trying to drill further down, there can be added some impressions gained by the Asquith Liberals in late 1922 and early 1923 as they tried to come to terms with the results and the emerging postwar political landscape. The Asquith Liberals, perhaps more than any other party, tried to understand the nature of the 1922 election. They took a keen interest in what might be described as the state of the Liberal vote in particular constituencies. For example, Sir William Edge had been re-elected for the Lloyd George Liberals in the two-member constituency of Bolton in 1922 with 31,015 votes, behind the Conservative with 37,491. The two Labour candidates came third and fourth, and the Asquith Liberal a distant fifth with 18,534. The importance of the local party pact was evidenced in a later report that suggested that only around 5,000 of Edge’s votes came from voters who could be considered ‘Liberal’.¹⁰ Likewise in the Aberavon constituency, won by Ramsay MacDonald from the National Liberals, local analysis suggested that of the 34,000 registered voters, only 12,000 could be considered Liberal, with a further 7,000 likely Conservative, giving a Labour maximum of 14,000.¹¹ Without an anti-socialist coalition Aberavon was effectively going to be henceforth a very safe Labour seat.

For all parties, analysing the results was complicated by the diversity of labels for candidates. Add in the operation of the coupon in 1918, and one or two other quirks, and a precise accounting of the outcome of the general election was, and remains, all but impossible. For example, Halifax had been captured by the Coalition Liberals in 1918 by John Whitley, who had first been elected as a Liberal in 1906. In 1921 he was elected as speaker of the House, becoming nominally neutral/independent. In 1922 his seat went uncontested in line with the convention that the other parties did not contest the speaker’s constituency. His seat therefore appears as a theoretical loss to the Lloyd George Liberals from 1918 to 1922 when, in fact, it was retained by the same MP who had won it for them at the Coupon Election.¹² This issue of party label in the accountancy of party performance affected a number of other constituencies. For example, in Eye (Suffolk) Alexander Lyle-Samuel had won the seat as a Coalition Liberal in 1918 and had won it again in 1922, although this time as an Asquith Liberal, as he had broken with the Lloyd George government in 1921.¹³ In the process he defeated by 3,531 votes his only opponent, Gerald Howard, the Lloyd George Liberal candidate who enjoyed at least the passive support of the local Conservative Association. Thus, while the seat did not change hands in terms of the sitting member it did equate to a loss to the Coalition Liberals and a victory for the Asquith Liberals.

The haphazard way in which the coupon had been applied in 1918 was, perhaps, the largest single factor adding to complications as to the arithmetic of the Coalition Liberal performance. For example, with the Mossley constituency in Lancashire, the seat had been won in 1918 by Austin Hopkinson, an independent candidate who nevertheless took the Coalition Liberal whip.¹⁴ He was one of seven or eight MPs elected without the coupon in 1918 who took the government whip on entering the House of Commons. Hopkinson won the seat again in 1922 as an independent, so that Mossley is frequently counted as a Coalition Liberal loss.

Another example, of the coupon potentially skewing calculations of seat losses in 1922 occurred with the Sudbury constituency in Suffolk. In 1918 the seat was won by tenant farmer Stephen Howard as a Liberal, despite the fact that the coupon went to the Unionist candidate Richard Proby.¹⁵ On election Howard, like Hopkinson, agreed to take the government whip. In 1922 Howard again contested the constituency, this time as an avowed Lloyd George Liberal. He came second to the Unionist candidate as the Liberal vote was split by the Asquithian Liberal candidate who came third. Sudbury was an effective loss for the Lloyd George Liberals, although on any analysis of the transfer of seats between 1918 and 1922 it might count as a Unionist gain from Liberal.

Liberal reunification in some areas adds a further level of complication. The Coalition Liberal was defeated by the Labour candidate in Leeds South, and in Leeds North and Central the Conservatives gained the seat from sitting Coalition Liberals. Only in Leeds West did John Murray, who had been elected as Coalition Liberal in 1918, retain his seat. Three Leeds seats won in 1918 by the Coalition Liberals (two with the same candidate) fell to either Conservatives or Labour in 1922: the accountancy of the general election was complicated by the fact that in 1922 a reunified local party supported each ‘Liberal’ prospective parliamentary candidate.

To add to the confusion, the politics of some candidates makes it almost impossible to discern their true party affiliations. In 1922 Barnet Kenyon was returned unopposed for the Chesterfield Division. Pit worker, union official and Primitive Methodist preacher, in 1913 he had been selected by the Derbyshire miners to fight the constituency after the death of the sitting Labour member. Kenyon also managed to secure the nomination of the local Liberals and he easily beat the Conservative into second place. In the Coupon Election he was variously listed as the Labour candidate and as the Coalition Liberal candidate in receipt of the coupon. His nomination was also endorsed by some local Conservatives. He was returned unopposed even though he also appeared to support the Asquith Liberal cause elsewhere in Derbyshire. In 1922 he was again returned unopposed with a variety of party labels being applied to his success. The Sheffield Telegraph, conservative and working class, listed him amongst the Coalition Liberal successes.¹⁶ In reality Kenyon was a one-man party pact between the major parties.

Likewise in Caernarvonshire Robert Jones’s stunning win for Labour over the Coalition Liberal candidate Charles Breese by 1,609 votes was not perhaps the victory for the Labour movement that it appeared. Most historians see it as evidence of Labour breaking through in north-west Wales, to complement its existing strength in South Wales, whereas Emyr Price’s examination of Jones’s election in 1922, and subsequent short-lived parliamentary career, calls into question whether his election ‘constituted to any marked extent, a sharp disjuncture with traditional politics’ in the region.¹⁷ His moderation on most matters led some to wonder whether Jones’s sympathies lay more with Asquith than with Clynes and MacDonald.

Local complexities, the circumstances of the 1922 election and the granting of the coupon in 1918, together with the changing allegiances of some candidates, provides considerable qualification to any attempt to reach categorical statistical understandings of the 1922 General Election. In spite of this, however, their representation fell by over half, from 122 to around 57. Had it not been for the absence of Tory opposition in English and Scottish constituencies, this representation might have been cut by at least two-thirds.¹⁸ In Scotland, the truce between the parties had been highly effective. As Chris Cook notes, only in two constituencies, Perth and Glasgow Cathcart, had the pact between Conservatives and Coalition Liberals broken down.¹⁹ In some places Lloyd George Liberals made progress against the rising tide of socialism. At Kirkaldy Burghs, a traditional Liberal seat, captured by Labour in 1921 at a by-election with a majority of 1,473, former soldier Sir Robert Hutchinson captured the seat for the National Liberals from the incumbent socialist with a majority of 683. Hutchinson’s appeal to the electors was based very firmly on the idea of coalition against ‘the wild theories expressed in the Labour manifesto’.²⁰

In England, beyond Lord Derby’s fiefdom of Lancashire Conservatism, the breakdown of relations with the Conservatives brought notable losses of senior Coalition Liberals. For example, the defeat of Major J. E. B. Seely in Ilkeston was ‘fully expected’ with the intervention of a Conservative candidate.²¹ The response to his defeat did at least suggest continuing strong support for co-operation in the name of anti-socialism, with the Derby Daily Telegraph launching an extraordinary attack on the actions of Marshall Freeman in letting his name go forward, and towards Bonar Law for endorsing him.²² Defeated by 1,084 votes, the 5,841 votes that went to Freeman had been, in the opinion of the Derby Daily Telegraph, pivotal in gifting the seat to the socialists. The newspaper’s attack was expressed in personal and emotional terms: ‘We experience no little difficulty in coming to this conclusion – that there is more joy in Birmingham over the defeat of a Coalition Liberal than regret at the triumph of an out and out advocate of Labour policy’.²³ The imperative for the newspaper did appear, however, to be anti-socialism, rather than out-and-out support for co-operation. Despite earlier condemnation of the emergence of a Conservative candidate in neighbouring South Derbyshire, the same newspaper was more than ready after the poll to accept the victory of Henry Lorimer,²⁴ who beat Samuel Truman the Labour candidate into second place with a majority of 4,463.

Beyond the general lines of Labour progress, Conservative revival and Liberal stasis (artificially supported by local pacts), one other noteworthy lesson to emerge from the election was in relation to the women’s vote, which the Coalition Liberals had set great store by. While the votes cast by women remained a subject of conjecture, the failure of women candidates to get elected in 1922 perhaps cast a long shadow over the hopes for more balanced gender representation in the House of Commons in the interwar period. Of the twenty-six women candidates to stand, only two were returned: Nancy Astor for the Conservatives with a majority of 3,903 and Margaret Winteringham for the Liberals with a majority of 83, down on her 1920 by-election majority of 791.²⁵ Of the remaining candidates, many fighting in seats considered hopeless by the parties that had put them forward, only three were denied by slim majorities numbering in the hundreds. The other twenty-one were defeated by thousands of votes. The electorate appeared lukewarm to the idea of women members of parliament, and the issue of the women’s vote, which could be captured en-masse with the right policies, continued to remain something of an elusive enigma to the political parties. As Maynard Colchester Weymss noted:

One curious feature of the Election is that it is the first General Election in which women have had the vote, great doubt was felt as to how they would vote, and I am inclined to think that they now they actually did vote, & will remain an enigma; but perhaps it is a still more curious feature that, though there were nearly 50 women candidates, all of them have been rejected except two, & both those two were [already] members of the House of Commons where they had both made their mark and they had succeeded in gaining the confidence & esteem of their constituents.²⁶