Canterbury Christ Church University’s repository of research outputs http://create.canterbury.ac.uk Please cite this publication as follows: Stevens, C. (2013) A life of public service, the career of Benjamin Owen Davies, 1866-1958. Cleveland History: The Bulletin of the Cleveland and Teesside Local History Society (104). pp. 3-22. Link to official URL (if available): This version is made available in accordance with publishers’ policies. All material made available by CReaTE is protected by intellectual property law, including copyright law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Contact:
[email protected] A Life of Public Service: the Career of Benjamin Owen Davies, 1‐1 Christopher Stevens, Canterbury Christ Church University 1 The assumption that early and mid-twentieth-century British politics was determined nationally by class alignment has, it might be surmised, led to a decline in the number of detailed local studies of the sort, which historians of the nineteenth-century use to understand political change. Teesside is an area of particular neglect. Neither Stockton- on-Tees, which elected the Tory, Harold Macmillan, in 1924, 1931 and 1935, nor Middlesbrough, where an authentic Liberalism held sway until 1945, meet the expectations of the class-based model. Only a detailed local study will fill the gap.1 The lack of interest in twentieth-century local studies has, in turn, led to the neglect of a number of local actors, those who either forsook, or were unable to acquire, a rôle on the national stage, but were, nevertheless, significant in a local or regional setting.