Post by andrewteale on Jan 27, 2024 11:41:18 GMT
Back in the day, a Lancashire farmer found one of his cows in a tight spot. Its head had got stuck in a five-barred gate, and wasn't going to come out without being cut out by a saw. The farmer considered the situation, did a cost-benefit analysis of the least expensive way of extricating the cow from the gate and replacing the damaged goods thereafter ... and proceeded to cut the cow's head off.
Thus was born a thousand memes relating to Keawyed City, or as outsiders call it, Westhoughton. Like much of Salfordshire, the origins of Westhoughton are obscure: there are no ancient buildings here. The main street in the town centre, running from the church at one end to the town hall and library at the other end, is dotted with buildings from no earlier than the Victorian era.
A quick look at the plaques on the sides of the buildings will quickly give the impression that Westhoughton is a place apart. Other towns have war memorials; Westhoughton has those as well, but they are outnumbered by memorials to the dead of a single event. England's second-worst mining disaster, the Pretoria Pit explosion, claimed the lives of 344 men and boys from Westhoughton four days before Christmas 1910. The town's library has an exhibition on the disaster, jostling for space with an exhibition on one of the most-recorded musical ensembles in the world. The Wingates Band have rehearsed in Westhoughton since 1873, and in 1906 and 1907 they did the "double double" by winning both the Open and National brass band championships in consecutive years. A number of the bandsmen who achieved that feat (which has only been matched once in all the years since) were killed in the Pretoria Pit explosion three years later.
Although Westhoughton has ended up within the Metropolitan Borough of Bolton, it's really a poor fit within that district. The town is cut off from Bolton by a low hill, and its traditional economic mix of textiles and coalmining is shared more by the small towns on the Lancashire plain towards Wigan.
Nonetheless, when the Westhoughton parliamentary constituency was originally drawn up for the 1885 general election it was essentially a grouping of all the Bolton satellite towns which weren't part of the Bolton county borough as it existed at the time. The seat wrapped around the northern side of Bolton as far as Little Lever, and also took in a few areas which didn't make it into the modern Bolton metropolitan borough: North Turton (now part of Blackburn with Darwen), Rivington (now part of the Chorley district of Lancashire), and Aspull (now part of the Metropolitan Borough of Wigan).
With this seat including some of Bolton's most middle-class suburbs, it probably wasn't much of a surprise when its first election in 1885 returned a Conservative MP very comfortably. Frank Hardcastle was one of the select band of MPs who had played first-class cricket, turning out for Lancashire in a few matches in the late 1860s; by 1885 he was running the family bleachworks in Tonge and a colliery in Breightmet. Tonge and Breightmet are now part of eastern Bolton, but at the time they were outside the county borough. Hardcastle won the 1885 election by a 62--38 margin over the Liberals, and nobody opposed him in the early general election the following year.
Frank Hardcastle retired from the Commons on health grounds in 1892, and passed the Westhoughton seat on to one of the great aristocratic figures of the age. Aged 27 at the time, Edward Stanley was the grandson of the 14th Earl of Derby, who earlier in the century had served as Prime Minister three times; the 1867 Reform Act was passed by Parliament during his premiership. Edward was recently returned from Canada, where his father Frederick, Lord Stanley, had just spent three years as Governor-General and donated a trophy for Canada's top-ranking ice hockey club. More than a century later, the Stanley Cup is still hotly contested by the hockey teams of North America. Before entering Parliament Edward's career had been in the military, where he was a Grenadier Guards officer.
Stanley was elected as MP for Westhoughton in 1892 with a reduced majority of 58-42 over the Liberal candidate Lewis Haslam, who owned a string of Bolton cotton mills and had more than enough new money to put up a decent fight against the old money of the Stanleys. When Haslam eventually made it to Parliament in the 1906 Liberal landslide (as MP for the Monmouth Boroughs), he was described as one of the wealthiest men in the Commons.
In 1893 Frederick Stanley became the 16th Earl of Derby and Edward took the courtesy title of Lord Stanley. His military and political careers blossomed, and after service in the Boer War he was appointed in 1903 to the Cabinet post of Postmaster General. At the time, accepting a Cabinet post entailed seeking re-election to the Commons; the resulting 1903 Westhoughton by-election re-elected Lord Stanley without a contest.
That was Stanley's last election win, as he was swept away in the 1906 Liberal landslide. Not by the Liberals, though: the winning candidate was William Tyson Wilson, a carpenter and trade unionist with the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners. Elected by a 60-40 margin over Stanley, Wilson was one of 29 MPs elected in that year for the Labour Representation Committee.
Stanley didn't return to the Commons, as two years later he inherited his father's titles and entered the Lords as the 17th Earl of Derby and uncrowned King of Lancashire. It was from the Lords that Derby served as Secretary of State for War under Lloyd George, Bonar Law and Baldwin; he had been instrumental in recruitment during the Great War, and after that war he was a regular at the annual Gallipoli Sunday parade in the town of Bury, which he essentially owned.
Upon his election in 1906 as MP for Westhoughton, Tyson Wilson immediately made his mark on politics and on the future by introducing a private members' bill to create a statutory school meals service. The bill was taken up by government and passed as the Education (Provision of Meals) Act 1906. It's Tyson Wilson you have to thank for the school dinners of your childhood.
Wilson's seat was substantially redrawn for the 1918 general election. Much of the area of the Westhoughton seat had been incorporated into Bolton in the 1890s, and now became part of the two-seat Bolton parliamentary borough; the new Westhoughton seat was entirely west of Bolton, covering the five towns of Westhoughton, Hindley, Horwich, Blackrod and Aspull. With the exception of Horwich which was a railway centre, these were all towns focused on the Lancashire coalfield; and with many of the more middle-class parts of the seat having been transferred to Bolton, the Westhoughton seat now fundamentally swung to the left. Wilson had been re-elected for a third term in December 1910 with a majority of 1,090 voters over the Conservatives; some of his voters would have perished in the Pretoria Pit disaster later that month. In 1918 he was opposed only by an independent Liberal candidate who lost rather more decisively. Following that election the Labour Party became the official opposition and Wilson became the chief opposition whip.
Tyson Wilson suddenly died in 1921, having suffered a brain haemorrhage while walking in the street in Bolton. The resulting October 1921 Westhoughton by-election returned the new Labour candidate Rhys Davies with a reduced majority of 4,009 over James Tonge, who had been the independent Liberal candidate in 1918; this time Tonge was the official Liberal candidate with the endorsement of the coalition government.
Rhys Davies was in Wilson's mould as a trade unionist. He was originally from South Wales and had mined coal in the Rhondda for ten years, but he was also involved in the co-operative movement and that got him into trade unionism. He had moved to Manchester to take up a post with the Amalgamated Union of Co-operative Employees, and served for thirty years both in the House of Commons and on Manchester city council. Despite those three decades in Parliament, his only government office came in 1924 when he was briefly a junior Home Office minister.
Davies retired from the Commons in 1951, by which time his Westhoughton seat had been expanded to include the town of Standish and a few other villages to the north of Wigan, not all of which made it into Greater Manchester at the 1974 reorganisation. That change was made by the redistribution of 1950, which also divided the two-seat Bolton parliamentary borough into two single-member constituencies and created a seat called Bolton West for the first time.
The new Bolton West seat was entirely within the county borough and was a mix of areas, from the affluent suburbs of Heaton, Lostock and Smithills to the millworkers' Coronation Streets of Halliwell and Rumworth. This resulted in a polarised constituency with an unusual electoral history, although you wouldn't have guessed this from its inaugural result in 1950 when John Lewis, one of the outgoing Labour MPs for Bolton, was re-elected with a majority of 5,048 over the Conservatives. There was a decent 20% third-place score for the Liberal candidate Alan Tillotson (whose father Fred was the manager of the local newspaper, the Bolton Evening News). Lewis subsequently attracted adverse publicity in July 1951 after attempting to use Parliamentary privilege to escape charges for driving into a police officer while hurrying to Parliament for a division. Some years later Lewis was one of the prime movers in the Profumo affair, playing a major part in the arrest of Stephen Ward whom Lewis held a grudge against.
John Lewis lost his seat in Bolton West in the autumn of 1951 in very unusual circumstances, thanks to an anti-Labour electoral pact in Bolton between the Conservatives and the Liberals. In the elections from 1951 to 1959 the Liberals didn't contest Bolton East, while the Tories gave the Liberal candidate Arthur Holt a free run against Labour in Bolton West. The pact worked. Labour were shut out in both seats and Holt became the Bolton West MP.
After serving in the Second World War, where he was taken prisoner upon the fall of Singapore, Arthur Holt had gone into the textile manufacturing business. So far, so normal for south-east Lancashire MPs in times past; but unusually for Bolton, Holt's mills concentrated on hosiery. The electoral pact enabled him to win three terms in the constituency, during which time he served for a year as Liberal chief whip.
The Conservative-Liberal pact broke down after the Liberals contested the Bolton East by-election in 1960. The Conservatives intervened in 1964, Arthur Holt fell to third place with 25%, and Labour gained the seat. The Liberals and their successors haven't got anywhere near winning Bolton West since.
The new Labour MP for Bolton West was Gordon Oakes, a solicitor who at the time of his election was Mayor of Widnes. He took over a seat which quickly turned from a Labour-Liberal marginal into a Labour-Tory marginal, which generally voted with the national tide but often had small majorities. Oakes lost Bolton West in 1970, but subsequently returned to Parliament by winning the 1971 Widnes by-election, serving for that seat and its successors until 1997.
Tory MP Robert Redmond held on by 603 votes in February 1974 before Labour's Ann Taylor gained Bolton West eight months later by 906 votes. A teacher and tutor before entering Parliament, Taylor quickly became the first female MP to serve in the Whips' Office (in which role she is portrayed in the 2012 play This House). Her majority fell to 600 votes in the 1979 general election which brought Thatcher to power.
During this time, Westhoughton was by contrast a safe Labour constituency with large majorities. Tom Price had taken over from Rhys Davies in the 1951 general election. Like Davies, Price had a trade union background in the retail industry: in 1921 he had become chief legal officer for USDAW. He was also a keen hillwalker and had done much to get the Youth Hostel movement set up in the UK.
Tom Price died in February 1973 at the age of 70. The resulting May 1973 Westhoughton by-election returned Labour's Roger Stott with an increased majority over the Conservatives of 6,783. Aged 29 at the time, Stott was a Rochdale councillor sponsored by the Post Office Engineering Union.
The 1983 redistribution was particularly radical in the towns north of Manchester, with the two seats covering Bolton county borough replaced by three seats covering Bolton metropolitan borough. So far as this affected Bolton West, strongly-Labour (and by now increasingly Pakistani) areas near the town centre were moved into the new seats of Bolton North East and South East, and replaced by the towns of Blackrod, Horwich and Westhoughton which had previously been the major part of the Westhoughton constituency. The result was effectively a new seat, and it was projected to be safely Conservative. Westhoughton MP Roger Stott moved (successfully) to the redrawn Wigan seat along with Aspull and Standish, and outgoing Bolton West MP Ann Taylor moved (unsuccessfully) to the new Bolton North East, leaving an open seat which was duly picked up by Tory candidate Tom Sackville with a strong majority of over 7,000.
The second son of the 10th Earl de la Warr, and brother of the present Earl de la Warr, Tom Sackville had come to Parliament from a career in merchant banking. He was run quite close in the 1992 election, finishing with a majority of 1,079 over Bolton councillor and Labour candidate Clifford Morris, who later became a long-serving and controversial leader of Bolton council. Favourable boundary changes for the 1997 election, which moved Cliff Morris' strongly-Labour Halliwell ward into Bolton North East, might have given Sackville some hope of a fourth term had the Major government not made such a complete hash of things; but in the end he was swept away in the Blair landslide by Labour's Ruth Kelly. A Bank of England economist at the time of her election, Kelly was heavily pregnant during the campaign, and eleven days after the poll she had her first child - a boy.
Ruth Kelly climbed the ministerial greasy pole and entered cabinet in December 2004 as education secretary. A few months later, her majority over the Conservatives was cut to 2,064 at the 2005 general election. Kelly by this time was becoming a controversial figure in what is always a high-profile department, and the controversies followed her to two other Cabinet positions. She left the political frontline in 2008, and retired from the Commons in 2010.
This retirement must have caused some alarm in Labour ranks, as they had to defend a marginal seat where local election results had been patchy at best. In 2004 the Labour Party had won just one council seat in the entire constituency (in Atherton). The party had managed to shore up its Bolton West majority with a boundary review, which moved the divided but generally Conservative Hulton ward out of the seat and replaced it with the town of Atherton, and the party had gained some council seats here over the 2005-10 parliament. The Labour party selected Julie Hilling, an Atherton-based youth worker, to hold the seat against a challenge from Tory candidate Susan Williams, a former leader of Trafford council. It was clear that this was going to be a key result, and the BBC went so far as to broadcast a candidate debate from Westhoughton town hall. (Given that it went out on the BBC News 24 channel, I was possibly the only elector who watched the broadcast.) In one of the closest results of the 2010 general election, Hilling held Bolton West for Labour with a majority of just 92 votes.
That was the first of three consecutive photofinishes in Bolton West. The Conservatives finally broke though in 2015, with mass spectrometry engineer Chris Green defeating Hilling by 801 votes. A rematch in 2017 saw his majority increase to 936, and a second rematch in December 2019 saw a huge swing to Green who prevailed with a majority of 8,855 over Hilling. It's a result that breaks the mould, as 8,855 votes is the largest majority in the history of the Bolton West constituency. What happened?
This is the point where Cliff Morris needs to come back into the story. Morris became leader of Bolton council following the 2006 elections, at which a minority Lib Dem administration was defeated, and stayed in that role for nearly twelve years as controversy after controversy, scandal after scandal piled up around how Bolton Labour were running the town. The most notorious was probably the Asons Solicitors affair, in which the council's cabinet used emergency powers to give a grant to a firm of personal injury lawyers which subsequently went bust very publicly. (The council did get the money back, just before the administrators swooped in.) However, the last straw as far as this constituency was concerned was probably the proposal to redevelop Hulton Park for housing and as a championship-standard golf course, something which went down like a cup of cold sick in nearby Westhoughton. The 2018 and 2019 local elections saw Labour lose seats in Bolton by the bucketload, including all of the four wards in this constituency which they were defending in 2019. As a result Bolton became the only metropolitan borough in the north of England run by the Conservatives, who had a minority administration between 2019 and 2023.
The wards in the current Bolton West are a diverse bunch at local election time. The only reliable Conservative area is Heaton, Lostock and Chew Moor, which is a filthy rich area full of million-pound houses: the predecessor ward of Heaton and Lostock was one of only a handful of wards in Greater Manchester which did not vote for Andy Burnham in the 2017 mayoral election. The neighbouring Smithills ward, which is also part of Bolton proper, is more mixed but generally middle-class. At local election time it's Bolton's longest-standing Liberal Democrat ward, but this can be overstated: the Lib Dems polled more votes in Smithills at the 2015 local elections than they did in the entire Bolton West constituency at the 2015 general election on the same day. Hulton ward, which moves back into the seat in the boundary changes, is an uneasy mix of middle-class Over Hulton and the more left-wing Deane area of Bolton proper; also here are some massive distribution warehouses off the M61 motorway and most of the Hulton Park development, if that ever gets off the ground.
Of the towns in the seat outside Bolton, Horwich (a now-former railway centre on the southern slopes of Winter Hill) was a Lib Dem hotspot up until 2010 when Labour started to win here. In 2019 the two wards covering Horwich and nearby Blackrod fell to a brand-new localist party, Horwich and Blackrod First, which now holds all six council seats in the two towns and effectively has the balance of power of Bolton council. There has been a lot of redevelopment in Horwich in recent years, with large numbers of new houses going up on the former Loco Works site, so keep an eye out for demographic change here. Westhoughton is, as stated, a former coalmining town but it doesn't follow the usual coalfield pattern in local elections of Labour versus independent: Keawyed City has an active Lib Dem group, and its two wards are both capable of voting for any of the three main parties.
The excision of Atherton and addition of Hulton is good news for the Conservatives' Chris Green, as the boundary changes improve his position in what was already the safest Conservative seat in Greater Manchester. Rallings and Thrasher have projected an increased notional Conservative majority of 10,619 votes. Between 1997 and 2005 there was only one Conservative MP in this metropolitan county; it's not impossible that if that happens again, this active and relatively high-profile backbencher could be the last man standing.
Thus was born a thousand memes relating to Keawyed City, or as outsiders call it, Westhoughton. Like much of Salfordshire, the origins of Westhoughton are obscure: there are no ancient buildings here. The main street in the town centre, running from the church at one end to the town hall and library at the other end, is dotted with buildings from no earlier than the Victorian era.
A quick look at the plaques on the sides of the buildings will quickly give the impression that Westhoughton is a place apart. Other towns have war memorials; Westhoughton has those as well, but they are outnumbered by memorials to the dead of a single event. England's second-worst mining disaster, the Pretoria Pit explosion, claimed the lives of 344 men and boys from Westhoughton four days before Christmas 1910. The town's library has an exhibition on the disaster, jostling for space with an exhibition on one of the most-recorded musical ensembles in the world. The Wingates Band have rehearsed in Westhoughton since 1873, and in 1906 and 1907 they did the "double double" by winning both the Open and National brass band championships in consecutive years. A number of the bandsmen who achieved that feat (which has only been matched once in all the years since) were killed in the Pretoria Pit explosion three years later.
Although Westhoughton has ended up within the Metropolitan Borough of Bolton, it's really a poor fit within that district. The town is cut off from Bolton by a low hill, and its traditional economic mix of textiles and coalmining is shared more by the small towns on the Lancashire plain towards Wigan.
Nonetheless, when the Westhoughton parliamentary constituency was originally drawn up for the 1885 general election it was essentially a grouping of all the Bolton satellite towns which weren't part of the Bolton county borough as it existed at the time. The seat wrapped around the northern side of Bolton as far as Little Lever, and also took in a few areas which didn't make it into the modern Bolton metropolitan borough: North Turton (now part of Blackburn with Darwen), Rivington (now part of the Chorley district of Lancashire), and Aspull (now part of the Metropolitan Borough of Wigan).
With this seat including some of Bolton's most middle-class suburbs, it probably wasn't much of a surprise when its first election in 1885 returned a Conservative MP very comfortably. Frank Hardcastle was one of the select band of MPs who had played first-class cricket, turning out for Lancashire in a few matches in the late 1860s; by 1885 he was running the family bleachworks in Tonge and a colliery in Breightmet. Tonge and Breightmet are now part of eastern Bolton, but at the time they were outside the county borough. Hardcastle won the 1885 election by a 62--38 margin over the Liberals, and nobody opposed him in the early general election the following year.
Frank Hardcastle retired from the Commons on health grounds in 1892, and passed the Westhoughton seat on to one of the great aristocratic figures of the age. Aged 27 at the time, Edward Stanley was the grandson of the 14th Earl of Derby, who earlier in the century had served as Prime Minister three times; the 1867 Reform Act was passed by Parliament during his premiership. Edward was recently returned from Canada, where his father Frederick, Lord Stanley, had just spent three years as Governor-General and donated a trophy for Canada's top-ranking ice hockey club. More than a century later, the Stanley Cup is still hotly contested by the hockey teams of North America. Before entering Parliament Edward's career had been in the military, where he was a Grenadier Guards officer.
Stanley was elected as MP for Westhoughton in 1892 with a reduced majority of 58-42 over the Liberal candidate Lewis Haslam, who owned a string of Bolton cotton mills and had more than enough new money to put up a decent fight against the old money of the Stanleys. When Haslam eventually made it to Parliament in the 1906 Liberal landslide (as MP for the Monmouth Boroughs), he was described as one of the wealthiest men in the Commons.
In 1893 Frederick Stanley became the 16th Earl of Derby and Edward took the courtesy title of Lord Stanley. His military and political careers blossomed, and after service in the Boer War he was appointed in 1903 to the Cabinet post of Postmaster General. At the time, accepting a Cabinet post entailed seeking re-election to the Commons; the resulting 1903 Westhoughton by-election re-elected Lord Stanley without a contest.
That was Stanley's last election win, as he was swept away in the 1906 Liberal landslide. Not by the Liberals, though: the winning candidate was William Tyson Wilson, a carpenter and trade unionist with the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners. Elected by a 60-40 margin over Stanley, Wilson was one of 29 MPs elected in that year for the Labour Representation Committee.
Stanley didn't return to the Commons, as two years later he inherited his father's titles and entered the Lords as the 17th Earl of Derby and uncrowned King of Lancashire. It was from the Lords that Derby served as Secretary of State for War under Lloyd George, Bonar Law and Baldwin; he had been instrumental in recruitment during the Great War, and after that war he was a regular at the annual Gallipoli Sunday parade in the town of Bury, which he essentially owned.
Upon his election in 1906 as MP for Westhoughton, Tyson Wilson immediately made his mark on politics and on the future by introducing a private members' bill to create a statutory school meals service. The bill was taken up by government and passed as the Education (Provision of Meals) Act 1906. It's Tyson Wilson you have to thank for the school dinners of your childhood.
Wilson's seat was substantially redrawn for the 1918 general election. Much of the area of the Westhoughton seat had been incorporated into Bolton in the 1890s, and now became part of the two-seat Bolton parliamentary borough; the new Westhoughton seat was entirely west of Bolton, covering the five towns of Westhoughton, Hindley, Horwich, Blackrod and Aspull. With the exception of Horwich which was a railway centre, these were all towns focused on the Lancashire coalfield; and with many of the more middle-class parts of the seat having been transferred to Bolton, the Westhoughton seat now fundamentally swung to the left. Wilson had been re-elected for a third term in December 1910 with a majority of 1,090 voters over the Conservatives; some of his voters would have perished in the Pretoria Pit disaster later that month. In 1918 he was opposed only by an independent Liberal candidate who lost rather more decisively. Following that election the Labour Party became the official opposition and Wilson became the chief opposition whip.
Tyson Wilson suddenly died in 1921, having suffered a brain haemorrhage while walking in the street in Bolton. The resulting October 1921 Westhoughton by-election returned the new Labour candidate Rhys Davies with a reduced majority of 4,009 over James Tonge, who had been the independent Liberal candidate in 1918; this time Tonge was the official Liberal candidate with the endorsement of the coalition government.
Rhys Davies was in Wilson's mould as a trade unionist. He was originally from South Wales and had mined coal in the Rhondda for ten years, but he was also involved in the co-operative movement and that got him into trade unionism. He had moved to Manchester to take up a post with the Amalgamated Union of Co-operative Employees, and served for thirty years both in the House of Commons and on Manchester city council. Despite those three decades in Parliament, his only government office came in 1924 when he was briefly a junior Home Office minister.
Davies retired from the Commons in 1951, by which time his Westhoughton seat had been expanded to include the town of Standish and a few other villages to the north of Wigan, not all of which made it into Greater Manchester at the 1974 reorganisation. That change was made by the redistribution of 1950, which also divided the two-seat Bolton parliamentary borough into two single-member constituencies and created a seat called Bolton West for the first time.
The new Bolton West seat was entirely within the county borough and was a mix of areas, from the affluent suburbs of Heaton, Lostock and Smithills to the millworkers' Coronation Streets of Halliwell and Rumworth. This resulted in a polarised constituency with an unusual electoral history, although you wouldn't have guessed this from its inaugural result in 1950 when John Lewis, one of the outgoing Labour MPs for Bolton, was re-elected with a majority of 5,048 over the Conservatives. There was a decent 20% third-place score for the Liberal candidate Alan Tillotson (whose father Fred was the manager of the local newspaper, the Bolton Evening News). Lewis subsequently attracted adverse publicity in July 1951 after attempting to use Parliamentary privilege to escape charges for driving into a police officer while hurrying to Parliament for a division. Some years later Lewis was one of the prime movers in the Profumo affair, playing a major part in the arrest of Stephen Ward whom Lewis held a grudge against.
John Lewis lost his seat in Bolton West in the autumn of 1951 in very unusual circumstances, thanks to an anti-Labour electoral pact in Bolton between the Conservatives and the Liberals. In the elections from 1951 to 1959 the Liberals didn't contest Bolton East, while the Tories gave the Liberal candidate Arthur Holt a free run against Labour in Bolton West. The pact worked. Labour were shut out in both seats and Holt became the Bolton West MP.
After serving in the Second World War, where he was taken prisoner upon the fall of Singapore, Arthur Holt had gone into the textile manufacturing business. So far, so normal for south-east Lancashire MPs in times past; but unusually for Bolton, Holt's mills concentrated on hosiery. The electoral pact enabled him to win three terms in the constituency, during which time he served for a year as Liberal chief whip.
The Conservative-Liberal pact broke down after the Liberals contested the Bolton East by-election in 1960. The Conservatives intervened in 1964, Arthur Holt fell to third place with 25%, and Labour gained the seat. The Liberals and their successors haven't got anywhere near winning Bolton West since.
The new Labour MP for Bolton West was Gordon Oakes, a solicitor who at the time of his election was Mayor of Widnes. He took over a seat which quickly turned from a Labour-Liberal marginal into a Labour-Tory marginal, which generally voted with the national tide but often had small majorities. Oakes lost Bolton West in 1970, but subsequently returned to Parliament by winning the 1971 Widnes by-election, serving for that seat and its successors until 1997.
Tory MP Robert Redmond held on by 603 votes in February 1974 before Labour's Ann Taylor gained Bolton West eight months later by 906 votes. A teacher and tutor before entering Parliament, Taylor quickly became the first female MP to serve in the Whips' Office (in which role she is portrayed in the 2012 play This House). Her majority fell to 600 votes in the 1979 general election which brought Thatcher to power.
During this time, Westhoughton was by contrast a safe Labour constituency with large majorities. Tom Price had taken over from Rhys Davies in the 1951 general election. Like Davies, Price had a trade union background in the retail industry: in 1921 he had become chief legal officer for USDAW. He was also a keen hillwalker and had done much to get the Youth Hostel movement set up in the UK.
Tom Price died in February 1973 at the age of 70. The resulting May 1973 Westhoughton by-election returned Labour's Roger Stott with an increased majority over the Conservatives of 6,783. Aged 29 at the time, Stott was a Rochdale councillor sponsored by the Post Office Engineering Union.
The 1983 redistribution was particularly radical in the towns north of Manchester, with the two seats covering Bolton county borough replaced by three seats covering Bolton metropolitan borough. So far as this affected Bolton West, strongly-Labour (and by now increasingly Pakistani) areas near the town centre were moved into the new seats of Bolton North East and South East, and replaced by the towns of Blackrod, Horwich and Westhoughton which had previously been the major part of the Westhoughton constituency. The result was effectively a new seat, and it was projected to be safely Conservative. Westhoughton MP Roger Stott moved (successfully) to the redrawn Wigan seat along with Aspull and Standish, and outgoing Bolton West MP Ann Taylor moved (unsuccessfully) to the new Bolton North East, leaving an open seat which was duly picked up by Tory candidate Tom Sackville with a strong majority of over 7,000.
The second son of the 10th Earl de la Warr, and brother of the present Earl de la Warr, Tom Sackville had come to Parliament from a career in merchant banking. He was run quite close in the 1992 election, finishing with a majority of 1,079 over Bolton councillor and Labour candidate Clifford Morris, who later became a long-serving and controversial leader of Bolton council. Favourable boundary changes for the 1997 election, which moved Cliff Morris' strongly-Labour Halliwell ward into Bolton North East, might have given Sackville some hope of a fourth term had the Major government not made such a complete hash of things; but in the end he was swept away in the Blair landslide by Labour's Ruth Kelly. A Bank of England economist at the time of her election, Kelly was heavily pregnant during the campaign, and eleven days after the poll she had her first child - a boy.
Ruth Kelly climbed the ministerial greasy pole and entered cabinet in December 2004 as education secretary. A few months later, her majority over the Conservatives was cut to 2,064 at the 2005 general election. Kelly by this time was becoming a controversial figure in what is always a high-profile department, and the controversies followed her to two other Cabinet positions. She left the political frontline in 2008, and retired from the Commons in 2010.
This retirement must have caused some alarm in Labour ranks, as they had to defend a marginal seat where local election results had been patchy at best. In 2004 the Labour Party had won just one council seat in the entire constituency (in Atherton). The party had managed to shore up its Bolton West majority with a boundary review, which moved the divided but generally Conservative Hulton ward out of the seat and replaced it with the town of Atherton, and the party had gained some council seats here over the 2005-10 parliament. The Labour party selected Julie Hilling, an Atherton-based youth worker, to hold the seat against a challenge from Tory candidate Susan Williams, a former leader of Trafford council. It was clear that this was going to be a key result, and the BBC went so far as to broadcast a candidate debate from Westhoughton town hall. (Given that it went out on the BBC News 24 channel, I was possibly the only elector who watched the broadcast.) In one of the closest results of the 2010 general election, Hilling held Bolton West for Labour with a majority of just 92 votes.
That was the first of three consecutive photofinishes in Bolton West. The Conservatives finally broke though in 2015, with mass spectrometry engineer Chris Green defeating Hilling by 801 votes. A rematch in 2017 saw his majority increase to 936, and a second rematch in December 2019 saw a huge swing to Green who prevailed with a majority of 8,855 over Hilling. It's a result that breaks the mould, as 8,855 votes is the largest majority in the history of the Bolton West constituency. What happened?
This is the point where Cliff Morris needs to come back into the story. Morris became leader of Bolton council following the 2006 elections, at which a minority Lib Dem administration was defeated, and stayed in that role for nearly twelve years as controversy after controversy, scandal after scandal piled up around how Bolton Labour were running the town. The most notorious was probably the Asons Solicitors affair, in which the council's cabinet used emergency powers to give a grant to a firm of personal injury lawyers which subsequently went bust very publicly. (The council did get the money back, just before the administrators swooped in.) However, the last straw as far as this constituency was concerned was probably the proposal to redevelop Hulton Park for housing and as a championship-standard golf course, something which went down like a cup of cold sick in nearby Westhoughton. The 2018 and 2019 local elections saw Labour lose seats in Bolton by the bucketload, including all of the four wards in this constituency which they were defending in 2019. As a result Bolton became the only metropolitan borough in the north of England run by the Conservatives, who had a minority administration between 2019 and 2023.
The wards in the current Bolton West are a diverse bunch at local election time. The only reliable Conservative area is Heaton, Lostock and Chew Moor, which is a filthy rich area full of million-pound houses: the predecessor ward of Heaton and Lostock was one of only a handful of wards in Greater Manchester which did not vote for Andy Burnham in the 2017 mayoral election. The neighbouring Smithills ward, which is also part of Bolton proper, is more mixed but generally middle-class. At local election time it's Bolton's longest-standing Liberal Democrat ward, but this can be overstated: the Lib Dems polled more votes in Smithills at the 2015 local elections than they did in the entire Bolton West constituency at the 2015 general election on the same day. Hulton ward, which moves back into the seat in the boundary changes, is an uneasy mix of middle-class Over Hulton and the more left-wing Deane area of Bolton proper; also here are some massive distribution warehouses off the M61 motorway and most of the Hulton Park development, if that ever gets off the ground.
Of the towns in the seat outside Bolton, Horwich (a now-former railway centre on the southern slopes of Winter Hill) was a Lib Dem hotspot up until 2010 when Labour started to win here. In 2019 the two wards covering Horwich and nearby Blackrod fell to a brand-new localist party, Horwich and Blackrod First, which now holds all six council seats in the two towns and effectively has the balance of power of Bolton council. There has been a lot of redevelopment in Horwich in recent years, with large numbers of new houses going up on the former Loco Works site, so keep an eye out for demographic change here. Westhoughton is, as stated, a former coalmining town but it doesn't follow the usual coalfield pattern in local elections of Labour versus independent: Keawyed City has an active Lib Dem group, and its two wards are both capable of voting for any of the three main parties.
The excision of Atherton and addition of Hulton is good news for the Conservatives' Chris Green, as the boundary changes improve his position in what was already the safest Conservative seat in Greater Manchester. Rallings and Thrasher have projected an increased notional Conservative majority of 10,619 votes. Between 1997 and 2005 there was only one Conservative MP in this metropolitan county; it's not impossible that if that happens again, this active and relatively high-profile backbencher could be the last man standing.
