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Liberals Win Willesden By-Election! LIBERALS WIN WILLESDEN BY-ELECTION! You may think this is about Sarah Teather winning the Brent East by-election in September 2003, when the Liberal Democrats took the seat from Labour, with a 29% swing, pushing the Conservatives down into third place. But there is a saying, ‘history repeats itself’, and a similar thing had happened here eighty years earlier. I came across the story in the “Willesden Chronicle” for 9th March 1923, while viewing local newspaper microfilms at Brent Archives. The General Election in December 1918 was the first parliamentary election in which women (over the age of 30) were allowed to vote. It began a turbulent few years in parliamentary history, returning a Liberal / Conservative coalition led by the Liberal, David Lloyd George, with 478 seats, and the emerging Labour Party as the main opposition with 63 seats. In October 1922, the Tories split from the coalition, and under their new leader, Andrew Bonar Law, won a General Election the following month with an overall majority of 75 seats. Sir Harry Mallaby-Deeley (aside) retained the Willesden East seat for the Conservatives, but three months later made a surprise resignation, ‘owing to ill health.’ He asked his Constituency Association to accept Colonel the Hon. George Stanley as his successor. Col. Stanley was the grandson of Lord Derby, a Tory Prime Minister in the mid-19th century. He had lost his seat in Preston at the General Election, but Bonar Law kept him as a Home Office minister, while his Party sought a way to get him back into Parliament. Many local Conservatives were unhappy that a new candidate had been “foisted” on them in this way. A letter in the “Willesden Chronicle” of 14th February 1923 gave a hint of what was to follow, saying: ‘The presumption is that the Government considers East Willesden a safe seat, and so in ordinary circumstances it probably is ….’ The headline in the newspaper, three weeks later, summarised the result:- 1 Having got off to a bad start, Col. Stanley’s campaign hit further problems, and not just because the new Government’s policy on housing was proving unpopular. Although Willesden Council had some Labour councillors, most of their support was in the more working class West Willesden, and they did not plan to contest the by-election. During the campaign, Labour’s Cllr. Saville alleged that an unknown man had approached him, and offered to pay his election expenses if he stood as a Labour candidate. The same man, he said, had later offered him a cash payment, if the Conservative candidate was elected! The Liberal candidate, W. Harcourt Johnstone (aside), had a much smoother campaign. He was young (27 years old), and had served in the Rifle Brigade during the First World War. He had a strong Liberal pedigree (one of his relatives had been a senior minister under William Gladstone in Victorian times). And he was already well known in the constituency, having lost to Mallaby-Deeley in the previous election. Another advantage he had, which may have helped his standing with female voters, is that his mother also campaigned for him. The Willesden East constituency had 40,661 electors, 18,465 of them women, and there was a turn-out of over 60% in the by-election. Lady Antoinette Johnstone (aside), like Lady Nancy Astor, the first woman M.P. to take her seat in the House of Commons, came from a wealthy American family, and had married into the English upper class. Lady Johnstone was present at the by-election count, as was Col. Stanley’s wife, Lady Beatrix Stanley. It was still common then for M.P.s to come from wealthy families, as their annual payment to cover salary and expenses was only £400. The count took place at Willesden’s Town Hall (aside), in Dyne Road, Kilburn. More than 24,000 votes had to be counted, but the “Willesden Chronicle” reported that it was soon clear: ‘… from the relative heights of the piles of ballot papers in front of the returning officer that the Liberal candidate had been returned to Parliament with a big majority.’ 2 When the result was declared inside the hall: ‘… it was evident from the excitement among Mr Harcourt Johnstone’s supporters that they were genuinely astonished at the huge majority.’ But this was nothing compared to the response when the figures were announced to the public waiting outside, as this extract from the 9th March “Willesden Chronicle” shows: - Two months later, Bonar Law stood down as Prime Minister (this time genuinely because of ill health), and the King asked Stanley Baldwin to take over as the Conservative P.M.. Baldwin called another General Election in December 1923, because he “needed a new mandate” for his trade tariff policy. W. Harcourt Johnstone was re-elected as M.P. for Willesden East, with a reduced majority, (just as Sarah Teather was re-elected for Brent East in the General Election following her by-election victory). As happened in a more recent General Election, the Conservatives lost seats, and their overall majority. They were still the largest party in a “hung Parliament”, with 258 M.P.s, but Labour were now in second place with 191 seats. Willesden West was one of the constituencies that Labour gained from the Conservatives, and Sam Viant M.P. held the seat for them from 1923 until 1959 (except 1931-35). In January 1924, a coalition with the Liberals saw James Ramsey MacDonald become Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister. Yet another General Election in October 1924 saw W. Harcourt Johnstone lose his Willesden East seat. He would serve twice more as a Liberal M.P., for South Shields (1931-1935) and for Middlesborough West (1940-1945), when he was a minister in Winston Churchill’s wartime coalition government. The man who beat him to become East Willesden’s M.P. from October 1924 was none other than Col. George Stanley (aside). He was a Conservative government minister until knighted in 1929, and appointed as Governor of Madras. During his five years in India, he set up a government medical school, which is now the Stanley Medical College in Chennai (named after him). Philip Grant, Wembley History Society, October 2018. This article was originally written for a Parliament Week event in November 2018, organised by Brent Arts. Note: Apart from the newspaper cuttings and photograph of Willesden Town Hall (all from Brent Archives), images are from the internet. 3 .
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