Welsh Journals

CHARLES MASTERMAN AND THE SWANSEA DISTRICT BY-ELECTION, 1915* THE successful candidate in the Swansea District by-election was returned unopposed on 6 February 1915. There was no party contest in the conventional sense. The significance of the by-election does not lie in any campaign between rival political parties with different programmes. Yet the Swansea District by-election is illuminating in several ways. At a parochial level, one finds in the arguments surrounding the selection of the Liberal candidate for the seat a fascinating example of the influence of local rivalries and prejudices on major political events. In 1915 these local prejudices were part of a significant regional resentment against political dictation by outside bodies. Such local resentment in Wales at that time became magnified easily by the ready rhetoric of Welsh nationalism into a national protest against domination from Westminster. In this light, events at Swansea in 1915 can be seen as part of the last declining phase of a specifically Welsh nationalist attitude towards British politics. With the advantage of hindsight, however, one wonders also what part the developing forces of Labour played at Swansea. What light do these events throw upon the changing pattern of politics in Wales during the early part of this century? And lastly, on a purely personal level of interest, there is the fact that the Swansea District affair saw the end of the career of one of the most brilliantly promising of radical Liberal politicians, C. F. G. Masterman. The Swansea District division had been created by the 1885 Redistribution Act. The Boundary Commissioners had followed almost too faithfully the recommendation that a constituency should be based upon some common industry or occupation among its electors and, having applied it to the copper and tinplate industry of the Swansea area, had contrived a parliamentary division scattered for twenty miles along the hinterlands of the Loughor, Tawe, Dulais and Afan Rivers. Swansea District was made up of half the municipal borough of Swansea, together with the boroughs of Neath, Aberavon, Kenfig and Loughor. The electorate numbered 14,712 among a population of 85,137. Swansea provided the largest I am grateful to Mr. A. J. P. Taylor and the trustees of the Beaverbrook Foundation for permission to publish extracts from letters in the Lloyd George Papers at the Beaverbrook Library.