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THE MERTHYR ELECTION OF 19061 THE election of 1906 was a significant watershed in the political history of Britain; the polls reflected the popular waning of the chauvinism which had attended the now-terminated Boer War, wrecking the eleven-year administration of the Unionists at this first election in a time of peace, whilst the Labour Representation Committee signified its precocious electoral maturity by adopting the name Labour Party. In South Wales those constituencies which had been lost to the Unionists in 1895 returned to their historic Liberal context and the South Wales Miners' Federation, contesting its first general election since the formation in 1901 of its Parliamentary Scheme, joined the Liberals in promoting the further success of the established principle of Liberal-Labour representation in the working class constituencies. In the constituency of Merthyr Boroughs the result of this election vindicated the peculiar alliance of the Central Liberal Office and the Labour Representation Committee and sustained the apparently fortuitous return of Keir Hardie at the 'Khaki' election of 1900. At first it had seemed that there would be no opposition to the sitting members of Parliament, D. A. Thomas and Keir Hardie: the Con- servatives had made no effort to select a candidate and Dan Davies, a Cardiff merchant who had hoped to stand as an unofficial Tariff Reform candidate, had been forced to withdraw before the election contest because of a lack of support for his unpopular programme.2 The belated appearance of Henry Radcliffe, a Cardiff shipowner and a member of the South Glamorgan Liberal Association as a candidate, however, introduced the element of rivalry into the contest and tested the durability of Hardie's triumph in 1900. Certainly, Radcliffe had every reason for confidence. As his broad- sides pointed out to the Merthyr electors, Hardie's nomination at the Abernant conference of trades union delegates which had been convened by the trades councils of Merthyr and Aberdare in September 1900 had been secured by a small socialist pressure group only after the hostile delegates of 12,000 miners had left the conference. Nor could it be forgotten that the chance antagonism of the sitting members, D. A. Thomas and W. Pritchard Morgan, had conditioned the climate of opinion during this election contest and that Thomas' support of Hardie against Morgan had won a large number of votes for the architect of the Independent Labour Party. Radcliffe concentrated his campaign against Hardie in a determined effort to woo the labour voters away from the political heresy which they had endorsed at the previous election, and he encouraged the