Post by andrewteale on Mar 11, 2021 20:29:15 GMT
(I'm not sure why this has been left undone for so long. I had a lot of fun putting this together.)
People have been living in what's now Ashton-under-Lyne for a very long time. Consider Ashton Moss, a peat bog not far out of the town centre. Stone Age flints have been found in the bog, along with an adult male skull found in 1911. The consensus of scientific opinion at the time was that the skull dated from the Roman occupation of Britain; later radiocarbon testing gave a date for the Ashton Moss skull some time in the tenth to fourteenth centuries BC.
By the fifteenth century Ashton was home to seriously important people: the de Assheton family, from their manor house at Ashton Old Hall. Henry V granted Ashton-under-Lyne a market charter in 1414. Sir Ralph de Assheton became a major player on the Yorkist side of the Wars of the Roses, being knighted for his courage at the 1482 capture of Berwick upon Tweed; during the reign of Richard III Sir Ralph was second-in-command at the Tower of London. He was not popular among his Lancashire tenants, and legend has it that he was eventually shot by one of them; into the eighteenth century his effigy was regularly paraded around the town before being ceremonially killed.
The eighteenth century also saw the coming of the textile industry to Ashton, the development of the Ashton Canal linking the town to Manchester, and the demolition of much of the town and its rebuilding in a grid pattern. This has left us with a town centre filled with fine Victorian buildings, including a neoclassical town hall dating from 1840 and a large redbrick market hall. These buildings escaped the flattening of much of the town in a 1917 explosion at a factory making TNT for the war effort. The market hall was severely damaged in a 2004 fire but has been restored.
The twenty-first century has brought something of a renaissance to Ashton-under-Lyne. The completion of the M60 motorway in 2000 and the extension of the Metrolink tram network to the town in 2013 have made the town much more accessible to the casual traveller. The tram terminus is opposite a large IKEA store, which opened in 2006; it was IKEA's first town-centre store and at the time their tallest British shop. Part of Ashton Moss has been redeveloped into out-of-town shopping, although there is still an awful lot of peat left.
Ashton was enfranchised by the Great Reform Act of 1832. It exclusively elected Radicals and Liberals until 1868, when an expanded franchise resulted in close competition between the Liberals and Conservatives. The 1885 general election, on expanded boundaries, saw the Conservatives' John Addison defeat outgoing Liberal MP and millowner Hugh Mason by 3,153 votes to 3,104, a majority of 49 votes.
Mason died in the short interval between the 1885 and 1886 general elections, forcing the Ashton-under-Lyne Liberals to select a new candidate to try and get the seat back. They alighted on Alexander Rowley, who had had a distinguished first-class cricket career and was one of the founders of the Lancashire county cricket club. By now Rowley was 49 and working as a lawyer in Manchester. Once the votes were out of the ballot boxes and had been counted, and presumably re-counted a time or two, John Addison and Alexander Rowley were declared tied on 3,049 votes each. The Mayor of Ashton-under-Lyne James Walker, in his capacity as returning officer, gave his casting vote to Addison who was thereupon re-elected. This was the last time to date that a general election in the UK has delivered a tied result.
Like Alex Rowley, John Addison had made his career in the law. He was called to the bar in 1862 and took silk in 1880, six years after being appointed as Recorder of Preston. While an MP, Addison led the prosecution case in the Florence Maybrick murder trial.
After being re-elected as MP for Ashton in 1892 with a majority of 135 votes, John Addison retired from the green benches in 1895 to transfer to the judicial benches as a county court judge. The Conservatives held Ashton in the 1895 general election with an increased majority of 754, that increase being largely thanks to the intervention of the dockers' union leader James Sexton as a candidate of the newly-founded Independent Labour Party. The new Tory MP was Herbert Whiteley (later Herbert Huntington-Whiteley), who came from a cotton-spinning family in Blackburn and had been Mayor of Blackburn in 1892; his brother, George Whiteley, was already in the Commons as an MP for Stockport.
Whiteley was swept away in the Liberal landslide of 1906 by the Liberal candidate Alfred Scott, a Manchester city councillor and merchant. A rematch between Scott and Whiteley in January 1910, with an Independent Labour candidate intervening, resulted in a reduced majority for Scott of 293 on a turnout of over 95%. As we shall see, high turnouts were a regular feature of the Ashton-under-Lyne seat until relatively recently.
For the December 1910 general election the Conservatives decided to deploy the big guns. Aged 31, William Maxwell Aitken was already a millionaire with his control of the Royal Securities Corporation, a brokerage firm from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Max Aitken's talent for entrepreneurship had led him to gain control of a power company in Calgary and a virtual monopoly on Canadian cement production. He had recently moved from Canada to the UK, and was persuaded to stand for Parliament by his fellow-countryman Arthur Bonar Law. Aitken's business talent transferred to the political scene, as he defeated Alfred Scott by 4,044 votes to 3,848, a majority of 196.
Sir Max Aitken, as he quickly became, continued his business dealings in the UK with the same gusto as he had shown in Canada. By 1916 he was the majority shareholder in the Daily Express newspaper, although this was kept secret at the time.
In December 1916 David Lloyd George became Prime Minister and offered Sir Max the post of President of the Board of Trade. As this was a Cabinet-level position, this would have entailed Aitken seeking re-election to Parliament in Ashton-under-Lyne. However, Lloyd George then changed his mind and offered the Board of Trade post to Albert Stanley, who was not in Parliament at the time. A deal was reached whereby Stanley would take over Aitken's Commons seat of Ashton-under-Lyne at a by-election, with Max Aitken entering the Lords under the title of Lord Beaverbrook. It was from the Lords that Beaverbrook became one of the UK's most powerful press barons, served as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister of Information during the First World War, and served as Minister of Aircraft Production, Minister of Supply and Lord Privy Seal during the Second World War; and it was under his peerage title that Bjørge Lillelien referenced Aitken along with seven other notable Britons in the notorious "Your boys took one hell of a beating" commentary following a football victory for Norway over England in 1981.
The first Ashton-under-Lyne by-election, held two days before Christmas 1916, duly returned Albert Stanley who was elected unopposed with the Conservative nomination. Stanley was a businessman very much in the mould of Beaverbrook. Born in Derbyshire in 1874 under the name Albert Knattriess, he had emigrated to Detroit in the USA at the age of 6 and left school at 14 to work on the horse-drawn trams of the Detroit Street Railways Company. By 17, he was preparing the timetables; by 20, he was general superintendent of the company. He served on the USS Yosemite in the 1898 Spanish-American War. In January 1907, Stanley became general manager of all the street railways in New Jersey, running a network with 25,000 employees and 1,000 route miles of track.
That appointment didn't last long. The following month, Stanley returned to the UK as general manager of the Underground Electric Railways of London, which ran four underground railways in the metropolis: the forerunners of the modern District, Bakerloo and Piccadilly lines were already in place, with the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway (now part of the Northern line) nearly ready to open. Because of the enormous cost of building three major tube lines at the same time, the UERL was almost bankrupt. With a combination of improved branding, integrated ticketing and debt restructuring, Stanley quickly stabilised the company's finances to the extent that they were able to go on a consolidation spree: within a decade, the "Combine" controlled all of London's Underground railways except for the Metropolitan and the Waterloo and City, together with London's dominant bus operator LGOC.
Stanley himself was now President of the Board of Trade, aged just 42, and became the youngest member of the Lloyd George coalition cabinet. Once the war was over, he was re-elected in Ashton-under-Lyne in 1918 with a majority of 2,927 - then the largest majority in the history of the seat. His only opponent was Frederick Lister, standing for the National Federation of Discharged and Demobilised Sailors and Soldiers, who would go on to become the first chairman of the Royal British Legion.
Albert Stanley was elevated to the House of Lords in the 1920 New Year honours list, taking the title Lord Ashfield. It was from the Lords that Ashfield oversaw the Golden Age of London's transport, serving from 1933 to 1947 as chairman of the London Passenger Transport Board.
All this lay in the future at the time of the second Ashton-under-Lyne by-election, held on the last day of January 1920. This by-election broke the mould with the intervention of the Labour Party, whose candidate was William Robinson, the general secretary of the Amalgamated Association of Beamers, Twisters and Drawers. The Conservatives selected Sir Walter de Frece; the husband of the male impersonator Vesta Tilley, Sir Walter had recently left a showbusiness career where he ran theatres and music halls across the country. He had the coalition's coupon, but this didn't deter the local Liberals: they nominated Arthur Marshall, who had been MP for Wakefield during the Great War. Marshall performed poorly, and de Frece beat Robinson by the close margin of 738 votes.
After being re-elected in Ashton-under-Lyne by a much more comfortable margin in 1922, and by 239 votes in a three-way contest in 1923 (third, with 29% of the vote, was the future education minister Ellen Wilkinson), Sir Walter de Frece left Ashton in 1924 to seek re-election in the safer seat of Blackpool. The Conservatives selected Cornelius Homan, who defeated the former Labour/Communist MP for Leyton East Cecil Malone with an increased majority of 1,520.
Cornelius Homan was declared bankrupt in 1928 and was forced to leave the Commons. The resulting third Ashton-under-Lyne by-election, held in October 1928, turned into another three-way contest. The Liberal candidate was William Greenwood, an accountant. The Labour candidate was Albert Bellamy, who had been the first president of the National Union of Railwaymen and was president of the Trades Council in Stockport. The defending Conservatives selected Gordon Touche, a Gallipoli veteran and barrister specialising in commercial and tax cases. (He would later serve for many years as MP for Reigate, then for Dorking, and rose to the position of Deputy Speaker.) The Returning Officer had arranged for the result to be communicated to the people of Ashton by coloured rockets fired from the roof of the town hall. After a very quick count, considering the turnout of 89.1% - which to this day is a record turnout for a parliamentary by-election - the night sky was lit up by yellow rockets. Yellow was the colour of the local Labour party; Albert Bellamy had won the by-election with a majority of 2,406. He was the first Labour MP for Ashton-under-Lyne.
After being re-elected with an increased majority in 1929, Bellamy died in March 1931 at the age of 60. The resulting fourth Ashton-under-Lyne by-election, held on the last day of April 1931, was the first election contested by Oswald Mosley's New Party, whose candidate Allan Young narrowly saved his deposit. The Conservatives reselected Colonel John Broadbent who had stood here in 1929; Broadbent was a Boer War and Great War veteran who owned a large amount of land in the Hope Valley in Derbyshire. The Labour candidate was John William Gordon, an Irishman who like the late Albert Bellamy was an National Union of Railwaymen figure: he was the union's chief accountant. Broadbent won the by-election with a majority of 1,415. In dramatic scenes following the declaration, the crowd outside the town hall shouted down Oswald Mosley as he tried to make a speech.
John Broadbent was re-elected with an increased majority at the 1931 general election six months later, but lost his seat to Labour in the 1935 election by 14,140 votes to 14,026, a majority of 114. To date, he was the last Conservative MP for Ashton-under-Lyne. The new Labour MP was Fred Simpson who was an alderman of Leeds city council, serving as Lord Mayor of Leeds in 1931; he was also president of the Railway Clerks' Association.
Fred Simpson died suddenly in September 1939 while playing golf in Leeds. He was only 52 years old. The resulting fifth Ashton-under-Lyne by-election in October 1939 came during the wartime political truce, and the Labour candidate Sir William Jowitt was elected without a contest. Jowitt was a skilled barrister who had been an MP before: he was the Liberal MP for the two Hartlepools from 1922 to 1924 and had been elected as Liberal MP for Preston in 1929. Following his election for Preston he was appointed as Attorney-General in the Macdonald government and accordingly joined the Labour party. While he was serving as Attorney-General, Jowitt successfully prosecuted Sidney Fox for the murder of Fox' mother. After joining the National Government with Macdonald in 1931 Sir William fought the Combined English Universities as a National Labour candidate, but failed to secure re-election. Back in the Commons from 1939, Sir William served in the wartime coalition government as Solicitor General, Paymaster General and Minister of National Insurance.
Sir William Jowitt was re-elected in 1945 as MP for Ashton with a majority of 3,394 over the Conservatives. He was immediately appointed as Lord Chancellor in the Attlee government, and accordingly was translated to the House of Lords as Lord Jowitt (subsequently promoted to Viscount Jowitt and then Earl Jowitt). It was from the Lords that Jowitt agreed the procedure for the Nuremburg Trials, piloted the United Nations Act through Parliament and started to put into practice the revolutionary idea of appointing judges purely on merit. Jowitt's legacy also includes his Dictionary of English Law, published posthumously in 1959 and still in print today.
The resulting sixth Ashton-under-Lyne by-election took place in October 1945 and was a convincing win for the Labour candidate Hervey Rhodes, who obtained a swing in the party's favour. The chairman of Saddleworth urban district council and a mill-owner in Delph, Rhodes had unsuccessfully fought Royton in the general election three months previously. He had served in the First World War in the Royal Flying Corps, winning a DFC and bar, and walked with a limp for the rest of his long life after being wounded in September 1918.
Until the redistribution of 1950, the Ashton-under-Lyne constituency was very tightly drawn around the town and didn't include any of the towns around it on the Lancashire side of the Tame. The 1885 boundaries had split the surrounding area, with Denton included within the Gorton constituency and the rest of Ashton's Lancastrian hinterland forming part of the sprawling Prestwich constituency. The 1918 redistribution created a new constituency called Mossley, which as well as the town of that name wrapped around the northern side of Ashton to take in Lees (previously part of the two-seat Oldham borough constituency), Failsworth, Droylsden, Audenshaw and Denton.
Compared to the dizzying series of MPs (and no fewer than six by-elections) in Ashton-under-Lyne during the first half of the twentieth century, the Mossley constituency was much more politically settled. Throughout its existence it was dominated by the figure of Austin Hopkinson. An industrialist from an academic family (his father had been vice-chancellor of Manchester University, and served as an MP for the Combined English Universities), Hopkinson had fought in the Boer War and the Great War, in between inventing a revolutionary coal-cutting machine. He got his leg-up into Parliament in 1918 when Oswald Cawley, the Liberal MP for Prestwich, was killed in action in Palestine. Hopkinson won the resulting by-election without a contest, and started his unconventional parliamentary career as he meant to go on by taking his seat while wearing his Royal Dragoon Guards uniform.
The Prestwich constituency was broken up shortly afterwards, and Hopkinson decided to seek re-election in the new Mossley constituency which covered his main powerbase in Audenshaw. He won easily with the coupon and that set him up for a long parliamentary career as essentially an independent MP. Hopkinson lost Mossley only twice: in 1929, to Labour; and at his last election in 1945 when he lost his deposit and Labour won convincingly.
The first time Hopkinson lost in 1929 it was to Labour's Herbert Gibson, who worked in local government and was heavily involved in the co-operative movement. Gibson enjoyed a majority of 5,029 votes in 1929 but lost the rematch to Hopkinson in 1931 by 1,430 votes with the Conservatives close behind in third. A second rematch between Gibson and Hopkinson in 1935 saw Hopkinson's majority increase to 2,170.
Austen Hopkinson's political career was finally ended in the 1945 Attlee landslide by Labour's George Woods, a Unitarian minister who had joined Labour through the co-operative movement. In the 1935--45 Parliament Woods had been the MP for Finsbury in London.
The 1950 redistribution transferred Mossley town into the Ashton-under-Lyne constituency and Lees back into the new seat of Oldham East, with the remaining four towns in the Mossley seat constituting the new and short-lived Droylsden constituency. Both Ashton and Droylsden turned in marginal results at the 1950 election: Hervey Rhodes held Ashton by 20,970 votes to 20,046, a majority of 924, while the Revd Woods had a larger lead of 4,136 in Droylsden. Woods died in July 1951 at the age of 65, and his seat was vacant going into the general election that October. The Labour party selected William Williams, a Welshman who had lost his seat the previous year in the Middlesex constituency of Heston and Isleworth; Williams had represented that seat since 1945 after previously being assistant secretary of the Post Office Workers' Union. He won Droylsden with a reduced majority of 1,870. Ashton-under-Lyne swung the other way that year, with Hervey Rhodes increasing his majority to 1,684 over Conservative candidate Kenneth Lewis (who subsequently served as the MP for Rutland and Stamford, then Stamford and Spalding, from 1959 to 1987).
The 1955 redistribution resulted in more major changes in this corner of south-east Lancashire, with the Droylsden constituency being broken up. Droylsden itself was transferred into the Ashton-under-Lyne seat, with Denton and Audenshaw moving back into Manchester Gorton and Failsworth included within the Manchester Openshaw seat. William Williams successfully sought re-election in Manchester Openshaw, and Hervey Rhodes continued as MP for Ashton with an almost unchanged majority of 1,965. He won a fifth and final term in 1959, increasing his majority against the national trend.
Hervey Rhodes retired to the Lords in 1964, and with Labour now back in government he picked up in the Upper House where he had left off with the defeat of the Attlee government in 1951, as parliamentary secretary to the Board of Trade. Lord Rhodes retired from the frontbench in 1967, subsequently serving from 1968 to 1971 as Lord-Lieutenant of Lancashire before being appointed as a Knight of the Garter in 1972.
Rhodes passed the Ashton-under-Lyne seat on to Robert Sheldon, who would go on to represent the area in Parliament for thirty-seven years. Born with the name Isaac Shamash, which he changed at the age of 20 by deed poll, Sheldon was from a Jewish Iraqi immigrant family; at the time of his first election he was a Manchester city councillor.
Sheldon's only government office came in the final Wilson and Callaghan governments, when he served for four years as a Treasury minister. He brought that experience to bear in the 1983, 1987 and 1992 parliaments, during which he was one of the most powerful figures in the Commons as chairman of the Public Accounts select committee.
In 1964 Sheldon won his first term with a majority of 4,107 votes over the Conservatives; by 1992, on virtually unchanged boundaries (Ashton-under-Lyne was one of only two Greater Manchester seats left almost completely intact by the 1983 redistribution, the other being Manchester Wythenshawe) that had risen to 10,935. The 1997 redistribution transferredAudenshaw into the Denton and Reddish constituency and Mossley into the Stalybridge and Hyde seat, to be replaced by Failsworth from Oldham West; this and the general swing to Labour increased Sheldon's majority for his tenth and final term of office to 22,965 votes. During this time Sheldon saw off two future MPs: Richard Spring (Bury St Edmunds 1992-97, West Suffolk 1997-2010) was the Conservative candidate here in 1983, Mark Hunter (Cheadle 2005-15) was the Liberal candidate in 1987.
Robert Sheldon collapsed in the street in 2000, but was successfully resuscitated by a passer-by who was health and safety trained: that passer-by was none other than Duncan Goodhew, the British Olympic swimmer. It's a small world. Goodhew's actions saved us from a seventh Ashton-under-Lyne by-election; Sheldon retired to the Lords the following year and lived until 2020. Like his predecessor Hervey Rhodes, he made it into his nineties.
From 2001 the Labour MP for Ashton-under-Lyne was David Heyes, who had worked for many years in local government in Manchester and Oldham before becoming a graphic designer. Immediately before becoming an MP Heyes was an Oldham councillor. His initial majority was 15,518, falling to 9,094 at the 2010 election where the Conservative candidate was future MP Seema Kennedy (South Ribble 2015-19).
In the sixty years from 1885 to 1945, the Ashton-under-Lyne constituency was represented by twelve MPs. Angela Rayner, who took over from David Heyes in 2015, is only the fourth MP for the seat since 1945. Rayner had left school at 16, pregnant and with no qualifications; she eventually qualified in social care and worked her way up the Unison trade union hierarchy. In 2015 she won Ashton-under-Lyne with an increased majority of 10,756. The following year, with Jeremy Corbyn running out of Labour MPs who were prepared to serve under his leadership, Rayner made it to the shadow cabinet as shadow education secretary. She was 36 years old. The following year, Rayner became a grandmother for the first time.
Angela Rayner retained the post of shadow education secretary throughout the rest of the Corbyn leadership. In April 2020 she was elected as deputy leader of the Labour party. Four months earlier she won a third term as MP for Ashton-under-Lyne with a 48-37 lead over the Conservatives and a majority of 4,263; the lowest numerical and percentage majority in the seat since 1970, but still safe enough.
Rayner's constituency is made up of the six north-western wards of Tameside council plus the two wards covering Failsworth, which is part of the Oldham metropolitan borough. In a decent year Labour can expect to win all eight wards; 2019 was not a decent year, with Failsworth East being won by an independent candidate and Ashton Waterloo surprisingly going Green. The best Conservative ward is Ashton Hurst, which currently has a full slate of Labour councillors but often turns in a very close result. In 2008 both Failsworth wards voted Conservative, and Failsworth West returned a UKIP candidate in 2014, but both of those results proved to be one-offs.
As stated, Ashton-under-Lyne still retains a lot of its Victorian housing stock, as does Failsworth. Droylsden is significantly newer, having grown strongly in the 1930s, and both it and Failsworth merge seamlessly into the city of Manchester. Much of the area is demographically homogeneous, although St Peter's ward (covering Ashton town centre and points south) is significantly more deprived than the rest of the seat and has large populations of Polish and Pakistani heritage.
The present constituency is undersized in population terms and the Boundary Commission are going to have to do something about that. However, Angela Rayner's position in Parliament should be safe unless something goes seriously wrong in the years ahead.
People have been living in what's now Ashton-under-Lyne for a very long time. Consider Ashton Moss, a peat bog not far out of the town centre. Stone Age flints have been found in the bog, along with an adult male skull found in 1911. The consensus of scientific opinion at the time was that the skull dated from the Roman occupation of Britain; later radiocarbon testing gave a date for the Ashton Moss skull some time in the tenth to fourteenth centuries BC.
By the fifteenth century Ashton was home to seriously important people: the de Assheton family, from their manor house at Ashton Old Hall. Henry V granted Ashton-under-Lyne a market charter in 1414. Sir Ralph de Assheton became a major player on the Yorkist side of the Wars of the Roses, being knighted for his courage at the 1482 capture of Berwick upon Tweed; during the reign of Richard III Sir Ralph was second-in-command at the Tower of London. He was not popular among his Lancashire tenants, and legend has it that he was eventually shot by one of them; into the eighteenth century his effigy was regularly paraded around the town before being ceremonially killed.
The eighteenth century also saw the coming of the textile industry to Ashton, the development of the Ashton Canal linking the town to Manchester, and the demolition of much of the town and its rebuilding in a grid pattern. This has left us with a town centre filled with fine Victorian buildings, including a neoclassical town hall dating from 1840 and a large redbrick market hall. These buildings escaped the flattening of much of the town in a 1917 explosion at a factory making TNT for the war effort. The market hall was severely damaged in a 2004 fire but has been restored.
The twenty-first century has brought something of a renaissance to Ashton-under-Lyne. The completion of the M60 motorway in 2000 and the extension of the Metrolink tram network to the town in 2013 have made the town much more accessible to the casual traveller. The tram terminus is opposite a large IKEA store, which opened in 2006; it was IKEA's first town-centre store and at the time their tallest British shop. Part of Ashton Moss has been redeveloped into out-of-town shopping, although there is still an awful lot of peat left.
Ashton was enfranchised by the Great Reform Act of 1832. It exclusively elected Radicals and Liberals until 1868, when an expanded franchise resulted in close competition between the Liberals and Conservatives. The 1885 general election, on expanded boundaries, saw the Conservatives' John Addison defeat outgoing Liberal MP and millowner Hugh Mason by 3,153 votes to 3,104, a majority of 49 votes.
Mason died in the short interval between the 1885 and 1886 general elections, forcing the Ashton-under-Lyne Liberals to select a new candidate to try and get the seat back. They alighted on Alexander Rowley, who had had a distinguished first-class cricket career and was one of the founders of the Lancashire county cricket club. By now Rowley was 49 and working as a lawyer in Manchester. Once the votes were out of the ballot boxes and had been counted, and presumably re-counted a time or two, John Addison and Alexander Rowley were declared tied on 3,049 votes each. The Mayor of Ashton-under-Lyne James Walker, in his capacity as returning officer, gave his casting vote to Addison who was thereupon re-elected. This was the last time to date that a general election in the UK has delivered a tied result.
Like Alex Rowley, John Addison had made his career in the law. He was called to the bar in 1862 and took silk in 1880, six years after being appointed as Recorder of Preston. While an MP, Addison led the prosecution case in the Florence Maybrick murder trial.
After being re-elected as MP for Ashton in 1892 with a majority of 135 votes, John Addison retired from the green benches in 1895 to transfer to the judicial benches as a county court judge. The Conservatives held Ashton in the 1895 general election with an increased majority of 754, that increase being largely thanks to the intervention of the dockers' union leader James Sexton as a candidate of the newly-founded Independent Labour Party. The new Tory MP was Herbert Whiteley (later Herbert Huntington-Whiteley), who came from a cotton-spinning family in Blackburn and had been Mayor of Blackburn in 1892; his brother, George Whiteley, was already in the Commons as an MP for Stockport.
Whiteley was swept away in the Liberal landslide of 1906 by the Liberal candidate Alfred Scott, a Manchester city councillor and merchant. A rematch between Scott and Whiteley in January 1910, with an Independent Labour candidate intervening, resulted in a reduced majority for Scott of 293 on a turnout of over 95%. As we shall see, high turnouts were a regular feature of the Ashton-under-Lyne seat until relatively recently.
For the December 1910 general election the Conservatives decided to deploy the big guns. Aged 31, William Maxwell Aitken was already a millionaire with his control of the Royal Securities Corporation, a brokerage firm from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Max Aitken's talent for entrepreneurship had led him to gain control of a power company in Calgary and a virtual monopoly on Canadian cement production. He had recently moved from Canada to the UK, and was persuaded to stand for Parliament by his fellow-countryman Arthur Bonar Law. Aitken's business talent transferred to the political scene, as he defeated Alfred Scott by 4,044 votes to 3,848, a majority of 196.
Sir Max Aitken, as he quickly became, continued his business dealings in the UK with the same gusto as he had shown in Canada. By 1916 he was the majority shareholder in the Daily Express newspaper, although this was kept secret at the time.
In December 1916 David Lloyd George became Prime Minister and offered Sir Max the post of President of the Board of Trade. As this was a Cabinet-level position, this would have entailed Aitken seeking re-election to Parliament in Ashton-under-Lyne. However, Lloyd George then changed his mind and offered the Board of Trade post to Albert Stanley, who was not in Parliament at the time. A deal was reached whereby Stanley would take over Aitken's Commons seat of Ashton-under-Lyne at a by-election, with Max Aitken entering the Lords under the title of Lord Beaverbrook. It was from the Lords that Beaverbrook became one of the UK's most powerful press barons, served as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister of Information during the First World War, and served as Minister of Aircraft Production, Minister of Supply and Lord Privy Seal during the Second World War; and it was under his peerage title that Bjørge Lillelien referenced Aitken along with seven other notable Britons in the notorious "Your boys took one hell of a beating" commentary following a football victory for Norway over England in 1981.
The first Ashton-under-Lyne by-election, held two days before Christmas 1916, duly returned Albert Stanley who was elected unopposed with the Conservative nomination. Stanley was a businessman very much in the mould of Beaverbrook. Born in Derbyshire in 1874 under the name Albert Knattriess, he had emigrated to Detroit in the USA at the age of 6 and left school at 14 to work on the horse-drawn trams of the Detroit Street Railways Company. By 17, he was preparing the timetables; by 20, he was general superintendent of the company. He served on the USS Yosemite in the 1898 Spanish-American War. In January 1907, Stanley became general manager of all the street railways in New Jersey, running a network with 25,000 employees and 1,000 route miles of track.
That appointment didn't last long. The following month, Stanley returned to the UK as general manager of the Underground Electric Railways of London, which ran four underground railways in the metropolis: the forerunners of the modern District, Bakerloo and Piccadilly lines were already in place, with the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway (now part of the Northern line) nearly ready to open. Because of the enormous cost of building three major tube lines at the same time, the UERL was almost bankrupt. With a combination of improved branding, integrated ticketing and debt restructuring, Stanley quickly stabilised the company's finances to the extent that they were able to go on a consolidation spree: within a decade, the "Combine" controlled all of London's Underground railways except for the Metropolitan and the Waterloo and City, together with London's dominant bus operator LGOC.
Stanley himself was now President of the Board of Trade, aged just 42, and became the youngest member of the Lloyd George coalition cabinet. Once the war was over, he was re-elected in Ashton-under-Lyne in 1918 with a majority of 2,927 - then the largest majority in the history of the seat. His only opponent was Frederick Lister, standing for the National Federation of Discharged and Demobilised Sailors and Soldiers, who would go on to become the first chairman of the Royal British Legion.
Albert Stanley was elevated to the House of Lords in the 1920 New Year honours list, taking the title Lord Ashfield. It was from the Lords that Ashfield oversaw the Golden Age of London's transport, serving from 1933 to 1947 as chairman of the London Passenger Transport Board.
All this lay in the future at the time of the second Ashton-under-Lyne by-election, held on the last day of January 1920. This by-election broke the mould with the intervention of the Labour Party, whose candidate was William Robinson, the general secretary of the Amalgamated Association of Beamers, Twisters and Drawers. The Conservatives selected Sir Walter de Frece; the husband of the male impersonator Vesta Tilley, Sir Walter had recently left a showbusiness career where he ran theatres and music halls across the country. He had the coalition's coupon, but this didn't deter the local Liberals: they nominated Arthur Marshall, who had been MP for Wakefield during the Great War. Marshall performed poorly, and de Frece beat Robinson by the close margin of 738 votes.
After being re-elected in Ashton-under-Lyne by a much more comfortable margin in 1922, and by 239 votes in a three-way contest in 1923 (third, with 29% of the vote, was the future education minister Ellen Wilkinson), Sir Walter de Frece left Ashton in 1924 to seek re-election in the safer seat of Blackpool. The Conservatives selected Cornelius Homan, who defeated the former Labour/Communist MP for Leyton East Cecil Malone with an increased majority of 1,520.
Cornelius Homan was declared bankrupt in 1928 and was forced to leave the Commons. The resulting third Ashton-under-Lyne by-election, held in October 1928, turned into another three-way contest. The Liberal candidate was William Greenwood, an accountant. The Labour candidate was Albert Bellamy, who had been the first president of the National Union of Railwaymen and was president of the Trades Council in Stockport. The defending Conservatives selected Gordon Touche, a Gallipoli veteran and barrister specialising in commercial and tax cases. (He would later serve for many years as MP for Reigate, then for Dorking, and rose to the position of Deputy Speaker.) The Returning Officer had arranged for the result to be communicated to the people of Ashton by coloured rockets fired from the roof of the town hall. After a very quick count, considering the turnout of 89.1% - which to this day is a record turnout for a parliamentary by-election - the night sky was lit up by yellow rockets. Yellow was the colour of the local Labour party; Albert Bellamy had won the by-election with a majority of 2,406. He was the first Labour MP for Ashton-under-Lyne.
After being re-elected with an increased majority in 1929, Bellamy died in March 1931 at the age of 60. The resulting fourth Ashton-under-Lyne by-election, held on the last day of April 1931, was the first election contested by Oswald Mosley's New Party, whose candidate Allan Young narrowly saved his deposit. The Conservatives reselected Colonel John Broadbent who had stood here in 1929; Broadbent was a Boer War and Great War veteran who owned a large amount of land in the Hope Valley in Derbyshire. The Labour candidate was John William Gordon, an Irishman who like the late Albert Bellamy was an National Union of Railwaymen figure: he was the union's chief accountant. Broadbent won the by-election with a majority of 1,415. In dramatic scenes following the declaration, the crowd outside the town hall shouted down Oswald Mosley as he tried to make a speech.
John Broadbent was re-elected with an increased majority at the 1931 general election six months later, but lost his seat to Labour in the 1935 election by 14,140 votes to 14,026, a majority of 114. To date, he was the last Conservative MP for Ashton-under-Lyne. The new Labour MP was Fred Simpson who was an alderman of Leeds city council, serving as Lord Mayor of Leeds in 1931; he was also president of the Railway Clerks' Association.
Fred Simpson died suddenly in September 1939 while playing golf in Leeds. He was only 52 years old. The resulting fifth Ashton-under-Lyne by-election in October 1939 came during the wartime political truce, and the Labour candidate Sir William Jowitt was elected without a contest. Jowitt was a skilled barrister who had been an MP before: he was the Liberal MP for the two Hartlepools from 1922 to 1924 and had been elected as Liberal MP for Preston in 1929. Following his election for Preston he was appointed as Attorney-General in the Macdonald government and accordingly joined the Labour party. While he was serving as Attorney-General, Jowitt successfully prosecuted Sidney Fox for the murder of Fox' mother. After joining the National Government with Macdonald in 1931 Sir William fought the Combined English Universities as a National Labour candidate, but failed to secure re-election. Back in the Commons from 1939, Sir William served in the wartime coalition government as Solicitor General, Paymaster General and Minister of National Insurance.
Sir William Jowitt was re-elected in 1945 as MP for Ashton with a majority of 3,394 over the Conservatives. He was immediately appointed as Lord Chancellor in the Attlee government, and accordingly was translated to the House of Lords as Lord Jowitt (subsequently promoted to Viscount Jowitt and then Earl Jowitt). It was from the Lords that Jowitt agreed the procedure for the Nuremburg Trials, piloted the United Nations Act through Parliament and started to put into practice the revolutionary idea of appointing judges purely on merit. Jowitt's legacy also includes his Dictionary of English Law, published posthumously in 1959 and still in print today.
The resulting sixth Ashton-under-Lyne by-election took place in October 1945 and was a convincing win for the Labour candidate Hervey Rhodes, who obtained a swing in the party's favour. The chairman of Saddleworth urban district council and a mill-owner in Delph, Rhodes had unsuccessfully fought Royton in the general election three months previously. He had served in the First World War in the Royal Flying Corps, winning a DFC and bar, and walked with a limp for the rest of his long life after being wounded in September 1918.
Until the redistribution of 1950, the Ashton-under-Lyne constituency was very tightly drawn around the town and didn't include any of the towns around it on the Lancashire side of the Tame. The 1885 boundaries had split the surrounding area, with Denton included within the Gorton constituency and the rest of Ashton's Lancastrian hinterland forming part of the sprawling Prestwich constituency. The 1918 redistribution created a new constituency called Mossley, which as well as the town of that name wrapped around the northern side of Ashton to take in Lees (previously part of the two-seat Oldham borough constituency), Failsworth, Droylsden, Audenshaw and Denton.
Compared to the dizzying series of MPs (and no fewer than six by-elections) in Ashton-under-Lyne during the first half of the twentieth century, the Mossley constituency was much more politically settled. Throughout its existence it was dominated by the figure of Austin Hopkinson. An industrialist from an academic family (his father had been vice-chancellor of Manchester University, and served as an MP for the Combined English Universities), Hopkinson had fought in the Boer War and the Great War, in between inventing a revolutionary coal-cutting machine. He got his leg-up into Parliament in 1918 when Oswald Cawley, the Liberal MP for Prestwich, was killed in action in Palestine. Hopkinson won the resulting by-election without a contest, and started his unconventional parliamentary career as he meant to go on by taking his seat while wearing his Royal Dragoon Guards uniform.
The Prestwich constituency was broken up shortly afterwards, and Hopkinson decided to seek re-election in the new Mossley constituency which covered his main powerbase in Audenshaw. He won easily with the coupon and that set him up for a long parliamentary career as essentially an independent MP. Hopkinson lost Mossley only twice: in 1929, to Labour; and at his last election in 1945 when he lost his deposit and Labour won convincingly.
The first time Hopkinson lost in 1929 it was to Labour's Herbert Gibson, who worked in local government and was heavily involved in the co-operative movement. Gibson enjoyed a majority of 5,029 votes in 1929 but lost the rematch to Hopkinson in 1931 by 1,430 votes with the Conservatives close behind in third. A second rematch between Gibson and Hopkinson in 1935 saw Hopkinson's majority increase to 2,170.
Austen Hopkinson's political career was finally ended in the 1945 Attlee landslide by Labour's George Woods, a Unitarian minister who had joined Labour through the co-operative movement. In the 1935--45 Parliament Woods had been the MP for Finsbury in London.
The 1950 redistribution transferred Mossley town into the Ashton-under-Lyne constituency and Lees back into the new seat of Oldham East, with the remaining four towns in the Mossley seat constituting the new and short-lived Droylsden constituency. Both Ashton and Droylsden turned in marginal results at the 1950 election: Hervey Rhodes held Ashton by 20,970 votes to 20,046, a majority of 924, while the Revd Woods had a larger lead of 4,136 in Droylsden. Woods died in July 1951 at the age of 65, and his seat was vacant going into the general election that October. The Labour party selected William Williams, a Welshman who had lost his seat the previous year in the Middlesex constituency of Heston and Isleworth; Williams had represented that seat since 1945 after previously being assistant secretary of the Post Office Workers' Union. He won Droylsden with a reduced majority of 1,870. Ashton-under-Lyne swung the other way that year, with Hervey Rhodes increasing his majority to 1,684 over Conservative candidate Kenneth Lewis (who subsequently served as the MP for Rutland and Stamford, then Stamford and Spalding, from 1959 to 1987).
The 1955 redistribution resulted in more major changes in this corner of south-east Lancashire, with the Droylsden constituency being broken up. Droylsden itself was transferred into the Ashton-under-Lyne seat, with Denton and Audenshaw moving back into Manchester Gorton and Failsworth included within the Manchester Openshaw seat. William Williams successfully sought re-election in Manchester Openshaw, and Hervey Rhodes continued as MP for Ashton with an almost unchanged majority of 1,965. He won a fifth and final term in 1959, increasing his majority against the national trend.
Hervey Rhodes retired to the Lords in 1964, and with Labour now back in government he picked up in the Upper House where he had left off with the defeat of the Attlee government in 1951, as parliamentary secretary to the Board of Trade. Lord Rhodes retired from the frontbench in 1967, subsequently serving from 1968 to 1971 as Lord-Lieutenant of Lancashire before being appointed as a Knight of the Garter in 1972.
Rhodes passed the Ashton-under-Lyne seat on to Robert Sheldon, who would go on to represent the area in Parliament for thirty-seven years. Born with the name Isaac Shamash, which he changed at the age of 20 by deed poll, Sheldon was from a Jewish Iraqi immigrant family; at the time of his first election he was a Manchester city councillor.
Sheldon's only government office came in the final Wilson and Callaghan governments, when he served for four years as a Treasury minister. He brought that experience to bear in the 1983, 1987 and 1992 parliaments, during which he was one of the most powerful figures in the Commons as chairman of the Public Accounts select committee.
In 1964 Sheldon won his first term with a majority of 4,107 votes over the Conservatives; by 1992, on virtually unchanged boundaries (Ashton-under-Lyne was one of only two Greater Manchester seats left almost completely intact by the 1983 redistribution, the other being Manchester Wythenshawe) that had risen to 10,935. The 1997 redistribution transferred
Robert Sheldon collapsed in the street in 2000, but was successfully resuscitated by a passer-by who was health and safety trained: that passer-by was none other than Duncan Goodhew, the British Olympic swimmer. It's a small world. Goodhew's actions saved us from a seventh Ashton-under-Lyne by-election; Sheldon retired to the Lords the following year and lived until 2020. Like his predecessor Hervey Rhodes, he made it into his nineties.
From 2001 the Labour MP for Ashton-under-Lyne was David Heyes, who had worked for many years in local government in Manchester and Oldham before becoming a graphic designer. Immediately before becoming an MP Heyes was an Oldham councillor. His initial majority was 15,518, falling to 9,094 at the 2010 election where the Conservative candidate was future MP Seema Kennedy (South Ribble 2015-19).
In the sixty years from 1885 to 1945, the Ashton-under-Lyne constituency was represented by twelve MPs. Angela Rayner, who took over from David Heyes in 2015, is only the fourth MP for the seat since 1945. Rayner had left school at 16, pregnant and with no qualifications; she eventually qualified in social care and worked her way up the Unison trade union hierarchy. In 2015 she won Ashton-under-Lyne with an increased majority of 10,756. The following year, with Jeremy Corbyn running out of Labour MPs who were prepared to serve under his leadership, Rayner made it to the shadow cabinet as shadow education secretary. She was 36 years old. The following year, Rayner became a grandmother for the first time.
Angela Rayner retained the post of shadow education secretary throughout the rest of the Corbyn leadership. In April 2020 she was elected as deputy leader of the Labour party. Four months earlier she won a third term as MP for Ashton-under-Lyne with a 48-37 lead over the Conservatives and a majority of 4,263; the lowest numerical and percentage majority in the seat since 1970, but still safe enough.
Rayner's constituency is made up of the six north-western wards of Tameside council plus the two wards covering Failsworth, which is part of the Oldham metropolitan borough. In a decent year Labour can expect to win all eight wards; 2019 was not a decent year, with Failsworth East being won by an independent candidate and Ashton Waterloo surprisingly going Green. The best Conservative ward is Ashton Hurst, which currently has a full slate of Labour councillors but often turns in a very close result. In 2008 both Failsworth wards voted Conservative, and Failsworth West returned a UKIP candidate in 2014, but both of those results proved to be one-offs.
As stated, Ashton-under-Lyne still retains a lot of its Victorian housing stock, as does Failsworth. Droylsden is significantly newer, having grown strongly in the 1930s, and both it and Failsworth merge seamlessly into the city of Manchester. Much of the area is demographically homogeneous, although St Peter's ward (covering Ashton town centre and points south) is significantly more deprived than the rest of the seat and has large populations of Polish and Pakistani heritage.
The present constituency is undersized in population terms and the Boundary Commission are going to have to do something about that. However, Angela Rayner's position in Parliament should be safe unless something goes seriously wrong in the years ahead.
