Post by andrewteale on Jan 28, 2024 11:05:42 GMT
The Dunscar Conservative Club is a very well-appointed venue. Its entrance hall proudly proclaims that it was opened in 1974 by Enoch Powell; a lot of money has been spent on the place over the fifty years since then, and with its large performance space, decent-sized breakout room (from which a bust of Churchill looks disapprovingly at your quiz answers), and good food and drink offerings it's always a bustling place when I turn up there to play quiz.
Which is appropriate for the area it's located in. We're in Bromley Cross, a prosperous northern suburb of Bolton on the railway line towards Blackburn. With its attractive location in the Pennine hills and regular trains to the big city, Bromley Cross is an excellent location for the well-heeled Manchester commuter who might not be sufficiently well-heeled to afford a mansion in Cheshire. In 2011 the place was ranked by an investment and savings firm as the fifth-best place for a family to live in England and Wales. You can see why Theresa May, in her ill-fated 2017 general election campaign, made Bromley Cross her first stop.
Further down the hill towards the big town can be found two of Bolton's three Grade I listed buildings, both dating from the 16th century and both associated with the same man. Samuel Crompton was born in December 1753 at 10 Firwood Fold, and in his younger years he was living at Hall i' th' Wood and working in the spinning trade. Unhappy with the performance of Hargreaves' Spinning Jenny, Crompton started working during the late 1770s on something better. The result was a hybrid of the jenny with Arkwright's water frame. He named his invention after that other well-known hybrid, the mule.
Crompton's Mule is still in production today. It was an instant success and turned Lancashire into the textile capital of the world. Samuel, however, never got the financial return he deserved: he didn't have the money to apply for a patent, and when he took the alternative step of publishing his design in 1779 he was thoroughly shortchanged by the manufacturers who had promised to pay him for the invention. By 1812 at least 4 million mule spindles were in use in Lancashire and Scotland, and the fast-growing town of Bolton-le-Moors was dotted with cotton mills; but Crompton was getting no royalties, and eventually he had to shame Parliament into awarding him a grant of £5,000. Two centuries later, Bolton council named an electoral ward covering 10 Firwood Fold and Hall i' th' Wood in Samuel Crompton's honour. (This ward disappeared in boundary changes in 2023.)
By the 1950s many of the millworkers' terraces had became slums, and two major changes to the town of Bolton started to take effect. The first was the development of the council estates of Breightmet, on land either side of the main road towards Bury, to house people cleared from the slumlands in the town centre. The second was the recruitment of large numbers of people from Pakistan to work in the town's cotton mills, which were by now on their last legs. With the final death of textiles in Lancashire, Bolton as we know it came into being.
The town of Bolton was enfranchised by the Great Reform Act of 1832, and remained as a two-seat borough all the way up to 1950 - albeit with boundary extensions at each redistribution, particularly in 1918, as the town of Bolton-le-Moors expanded and the moors gradually disappeared under housing. Despite those boundary changes, throughout this period of 118 years Bolton was a marginal parliamentary seat and many of its general elections returned split representation.
We can see this in the very first Bolton poll of 1832, which elected Robert Torrens of the Whigs and William Bolling of the Tories; Bolling defeated the second Whig candidate by ten votes. Torrens had transferred here from the Devon borough of Ashburton, which was reduced to one seat by the 1832 reform; he was a former Royal Marines officer turned economist who was about to become one of the prime movers behind the founding of the colony of South Australia, and his son (also called Robert Torrens) served as Premier of that State. However, the Tory MP William Bolling set the tone for Bolton's representation going forward: he was a textile mill owner in a town utterly dependent on textiles and related industries.
After Torrens lost his seat in 1835 to his Whig running-mate Peter Ainsworth (who lived at Smithills Hall and derived his income from the family bleachworks in Halliwell), we have a long run of Bolton MPs - whether Whig, Radical or Tory - who were millowners. The main exception to this rule was the Radical MP John Bowring, who represented the seat from 1841 until his resignation in 1849. Bowring was a bit of a polymath with many views which were ahead of his time, but what probably attracted Bolton's electors to him was his election platform combining free trade with Chartism. It was in 1841, the year he became MP for Bolton, that Bowring was quoted as saying that "Jesus Christ is free trade and free trade is Jesus Christ".
In the nineteenth century MPs were not paid and needed an independent source of income to keep their position in the House. John Bowring accordingly invested heavily in the iron industry, opening an ironworks in Maesteg in south Wales to supply the railway boom. This boom went bust in the economic depression following the Panic of 1847, and Bowring's investment was wiped out. Needing the money, in 1849 he took up a government post as British consul in Canton, China and left the Commons in consequence. Bowring then spent the rest of his career abroad, including five years as Governor of Hong Kong.
The Bolton by-election to replace Bowring in February 1849 was the second in five months, as the Conservative MP William Bolling had died the previous year; the resulting September 1848 had returned the Conservatives' Stephen Blair, the first Tory mayor of Bolton, without a contest. The February 1849 by-election, by contrast, saw the Radical Sir Joshua Walmsley (a Liverpool businessman) defeat the Conservative candidate by 621 votes to 568.
Walmsley tranferred to Leicester at the 1852 general election, at which Bolton returned two Radical MPs, Thomas Barnes and Joseph Crook. Don't be confused by the political label: they were both millowners, and J and J Crook's mill at the bottom of Deane Road was one of the town's largest employers. (Its site is now occupied by the University.) Barnes lost his seat in 1857 to the Conservatives' William Gray, a former mayor of Bolton who owned a large mill at Lever Bridge. Gray and Crook were both re-elected unopposed in 1859; Crook then resigned to concentrate on his business interests, and Barnes got his seat back in the resulting February 1861 by-election without a contest.
The Second Reform Act greatly expanded the franchise, and this had a huge effect on the Bolton constituency: the electorate in the 1868 general election was 12,650, nearly six times what it had been in 1865. For the first time, both of Bolton's seats went to the Conservatives; William Gray was re-elected for his fourth and final term of office, while top of the poll was John Hick. He was the Hick in Hick Hargreaves, a heavy engineering firm based on the town which supplied steam engines and boilers for factories and ships; Hick Hargreaves had a large ironworks on Crook Street to the south of the town centre, a site now occupied by Sainsbury's. One of their mill engines now stands under glass in the town centre; several other examples can be seen at the Bolton Steam Museum, off Chorley Old Road, which is well worth a visit on bank holidays when the engines are in steam.
In 1874 the Conservatives' William Gray lost his seat to the Liberal candidate John Kynaston Cross, another millowner, who won Bolton's second seat by 132 votes - a win which was upheld by the Election Court following a legal challenge. On the day of the poll Cross' campaign had placed agents in polling stations to challenge voters who were suspected of personation, and those agents had fed back lists of people who had voted to the campaign; under the rules at the time, this was illegal, but the Court held that had not affected the result of the election. 1874 was the first general election to use the secret ballot, so it's not surprising that some of the rough edges of campaigning under the new system still needed to be ironed out.
John Hick retired from the Commons in 1880 and his seat went to the Liberal candidate John Pennington Thomasson, marking the first time that the Liberals/Radicals had held both Bolton seats since 1857. Thomasson was yet another millowner, this time from a Quaker family, but his name is remembered in Bolton now for the school which he founded. The Thomasson Memorial School, on Devonshire Road, was founded in 1907 in his memory and is still going; it educates deaf children from the ages of 4 to 16.
Cross and Thomasson both lost their seats to the Conservatives in 1885, and Herbert Shepherd-Cross and Francis Bridgeman went on to win three terms of office. This marked a decisive break in Bolton's representation because neither Shepherd-Cross nor Bridgeman were millowners, although Shepherd-Cross was a partner in a Halliwell bleachworks. Bridgeman, by contrast, was from the upper class: his father Orlando Bridgeman was the 3rd Earl of Bradford, and major road names like Bridgeman Street, Bradford Street and Orlando Bridge are evidence that the Earls of Bradford were major landowners in Bolton. Francis Bridgeman was an Army officer who had just come back from the Suakin Expedition to the Sudan, an abortive effort in the Mahdist War to build a railway from the Red Sea to the Nile following the fall of Khartoum in January 1885.
In 1895 split representation returned to Bolton as Bridgeman lost his seat to the Liberals' George Harwood, who owned cotton mills in the town but by now was working in London as a barrister. From this point onwards the Liberals rarely ran a full slate in Bolton, instead often running on a joint ticket with a socialist candidate; however, the first socialist to stand for election in Bolton, Frederick Brocklehurst of the Independent Labour Party, did very poorly in 1895. As we shall see, Liberal electoral pacts have often been a feature of past Bolton politics. However, there was no socialist candidate in 1900 when the Liberals' George Harwood and the Conservatives' Herbert Shepherd-Cross were both re-elected unopposed.
Socialist representation in Bolton had to wait until 1906, when Shepherd-Cross retired and the Conservative seat was gained by Alfred Gill of the Labour Representation Committee. One of the original 29 members of the Parliamentary Labour Party, Gill was a trade unionist with a big local profile as general secretary of the Bolton and District Operative Cotton Spinners' Provincial Association.
Labour's Alfred Gill and the Liberals' George Harwood both served as MP for Bolton until their deaths. Harwood passed away in 1912 at the age of 67; in the resulting Bolton by-election of 23rd November 1912 Labour gave the Liberals a free run, and Liberal millowner Thomas Taylor defeated the Conservatives by 10,011 votes to 8,835, a majority of 1,176. Alfred Gill died at the age of 57 in August 1914, a few weeks after the outbreak of the First World War; the wartime political truce meant that the Labour candidate Robert Tootill, a Bolton town councillor and until recently secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Machine and General Labourers, was elected unopposed in the resulting by-election on 22nd September 1914. The Liberal by-election winner Thomas Taylor resigned on health grounds in 1916 (he died later that year), and the Liberals' William Edge was likewise unopposed in the resulting Bolton by-election of 29th February 1916. Stated by Lord Derby to be one of the three originators of the Derby recruiting scheme, Captain Edge was a Bolton manufacturer.
Edge and Tootill were both re-elected unopposed at the 1918 general election, at which the boundaries of the Bolton constituency were greatly expanded in all directions to take in areas which had been annexed by the town since 1885. Heaton, Smithills and Lostock to the west, Sharples to the north, Tonge Moor and Breighmet to the east, and Great Lever, Darcy Lever and Burnden to the south all now became represented by the two MPs for Bolton.
The first poll on the new lines had to wait until 1922, when Bolton rather swung to the right. Liberal MP William Edge was re-elected as a National Liberal, while Labour MP Robert Tootill retired and his seat went rather easily to the Conservatives' William Russell. He was a solicitor whose firm, Russell and Russell, is still going in Bolton today. (They employed me as a temp once.)
William Russell stood down in 1923 after one term, and a very close three-way result in Bolton resulted in two new MPs. Top of the poll was Labour's Albert Law, president of the Bolton Trades Council and past president of the Bolton and District Operative Cotton Spinners' Provincial Association. Second, and with a majority of just 193 votes over his running-mate Cecil Hilton, was the Conservatives' Herbert Cunliffe, a barrister. William Edge, by this time back in the Liberals, finished fourth 660 votes behind Cunliffe. The Tories won both seats in 1924, with Cecil Hilton defeating Albert Law, but in 1929 Bolton swung to Labour. Law returned for his second term of office and was joined by Michael Brothers, a Blackburn councillor who was secretary of the Blackburn branch of the Cardroom Workers' Amalgamation, another trade union for textile workers. It was the first time that Bolton had returned a full slate of Labour MPs.
Law and Brothers were both swept away by the 1931 Conservative landslide, which saw the Tories won Bolton by about 2 to 1. Top of the poll with over 66,000 votes was Cyril Entwistle, a millowner and barrister who had started his political career in the Liberals: he had been the Liberal MP for Hull South West from 1918 to 1924 before joining the Conservatives. In second place was Entwistle's running-mate Sir John Haslam, who had been knighted for political and public service in 1927; he had made his money in the grocery trade, in which he was so successful that he was able to retire at 45 and devote the rest of his life to good works. Cyril Entwistle got his own knighthood for political and public service in 1937. Sir John Haslam died in 1940 at the age of 62, and the resulting Bolton by-election of 13th September 1940 was uncontested thanks to the wartime political truce; the elected Conservative candidate was Sir Edward Cadogan, who had previously represented Reading and Finchley in Parliament.
The 1945 Attlee landslide delivered Bolton back into Labour hands, and the Labour slate of Jack Jones and John Lewis won both seats by over 12,000 votes. Neither of them had much connection to Bolton: Jones had been a steelworker in Rotherham, while Lewis had become a rich man as a result of developments in the rubber industry.
The 1950 redistribution split up all the remaining two-seat boroughs, including Bolton which was divided into East and West constituencies. The East seat covered much of the current Bolton North East, including Astley Bridge, Tonge Moor, Breightmet and Darcy Lever. Also here were Great Lever and (slightly dubiously for a constituency with "East" in its name) Daubhill. Jack Jones successfully sought re-election in his native Rotherham and John Lewis decided to fight Bolton West, so Bolton East got a new Labour candidate for its first election in 1950. Alfred Booth, who had been mayor of Bolton in 1941-42, defeated the Conseravtives' Philip Bell by 3,709 votes.
Bolton East was a key marginal seat throughout its existence, partly thanks to a Conservative--Liberal pact in the 1950s where the Liberals did not stand in this constituency and the Tories gave the Liberals a free run in Bolton West. The pact worked well at its first election in 1951, in which the Conservatives' Philip Bell gained Bolton East from Labour MP Alfred Booth. Bell was a barrister who had served in both World Wars and had worked on the Belsen trial of the SS men and women who ran the Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz concentration camps. Bell's initial majority was just 355 votes, and his subsequent re-elections in 1955 and 1959 were also quite marginal.
Philip Bell had continued to advance his legal career while sitting on the green benches, and in 1960 he was appointed as a county court judge and in consequence had to leave the Commons. The resulting Bolton East by-election led to a breakdown of the Tory-Liberal pact in Bolton as the Liberals fielded a candidate. Frank Byers was a businessman and broadcaster who had been the Liberal MP for North Dorset in the 1945 parliament, and would later serve as leader of the Liberal group in the House of Lords. He didn't win a seat in industrial Lancashire on this occasion, although his granddaughter Lisa Nandy has had better luck since. Byers polled 25% of the vote, but his candidacy and that of a fringe New Conservative candidate didn't stop the Tories winning albeit on a low share of the vote. Their new MP was "the Dancing Pieman", Eddie Taylor, who ran a bakery in the town and had been Mayor of Bolton in 1959-60.
Taylor's win came by just 641 votes over Labour candidate Robert Howarth, a draughtsman, Bolton councillor and trade unionist, whose campaign was thought to have been sunk by party splits over nuclear disarmament. Howarth got his revenge in the 1964 general election at which he defeated Taylor by 3,152 votes, and he more than doubled his majority in a second rematch with Taylor in 1966. Howarth was, however, surprisingly defeated in the 1970 general election, after which he went back to the council chamber in Bolton town hall: he was leader of Bolton council from 1980 to 2004.
The new Tory MP for Bolton East, Laurance Reed, had a majority of just 471 votes. Reed was one of those MPs whose career was dominated by politics: after National Service in the Navy he read law at Oxford, spent two years in Europe studying the EEC and its institutions, and then joined the staff of the Public Sector Research Unit think-tank. Reed had written a book, Europe in a Shrinking World, setting out the case for British membership of the EEC which was achieved during his only parliamentary term. While in the Commons he concentrated on environmental issues, writing books on marine pollution and lobbying for environmental improvement schemes in the old industrial cities.
Laurance Reed was defeated in the February 1974 snap election by Labour's David Young, a former teacher, insurance executive and Nuneaton councillor. Young was re-elected in October, seeing off the ill-fated future Staffordshire MP John Heddle, and in 1979 he broke Bolton East's reputation as a bellwether by holding his seat.
David Young's constituency did not include the former Turton urban district, covering the affluent towns and villages to the north of Bolton such as Bromley Cross. This was part of the Westhoughton seat from 1885 to 1918; from 1918 to 1983 Turton had a very different political tradition as part of the Darwen parliamentary constituency, which stretched north over the hills through the eponymous town to take in the strongly Conservative villages to the west and north of Blackburn. Although Darwen had been the seat of Liberal MP Herbert Samuel from 1929 to 1935, in the postwar years it was normally a safe Conservative seat (only in 1966 did Labour get anywhere near winning). While Bolton East went through five MPs from 1951 to 1983, Darwen only had one during this period: the Tories' Sir Charles Fletcher-Cooke. A QC and former president of the Cambridge Union, Sir Charles' political opinions had swung strongly to the right over the years: he had been a Communist at university, and was a Labour candidate in the 1945 general election. His political legacy is the Suicide Act 1961, which decriminalised suicide in England and Wales.
At the 1983 general election the Boundary Commission caught up with the local government reorganisation of nine years earlier, at which most of Turton urban district became part of the Metropolitan Borough of Bolton. The expanded Bolton was expanded to three parliamentary constituencies, and in consequence Bolton East was split up. Its larger part combined with South Turton to form a new constituency of Bolton North East. This was projected to have a Conservative majority and was pretty much an open seat, because David Young sought re-election in Bolton South East (which was projected to be Labour-held) and Sir Charles Fletcher-Cook retired. In the event the Labour candidate was outgoing MP Ann Taylor, a small part of whose Bolton West constituency had ended up here; but she was defeated by 2,443 votes by the new Conservative candidate Peter Thurnham.
Thurnham had spent much of his early life in southern India where his father worked in the tea industry, but he had made his name in engineering. By 1983 he was running a successful company in the refrigeration and air-conditioning sector, and the previous year he had been elected to South Lakeland council in Cumbria. He won Bolton North East three times on very small majorities. In the 1987 general election Labour selected as their candidate Frank White, the former Bury and Radcliffe MP and a councillor for Tonge ward in this constituency; Thurnham held on by 813 votes. In the 1992 general election the Labour candidate was David Crausby, an AEEU figure and Bury councillor; Thurnham held on by 185 votes.
Things got worse for Peter Thurnham when Bolton North East was redrawn for the 1997 general election to include Halliwell ward, a strongly-Labour area which would wipe out the Conservative majority. Thurnham attempted to do the chicken run, applying for the Conservative selection in Westmorland and Lonsdale where he lived and where his business was based; after failing to get that, he resigned the Tory whip and eventually ended up in the Liberal Democrats. He didn't seek re-election in 1997.
The 1997 landslide returned David Crausby at his second attempt with a huge majority of 12,669 votes, the biggest majority in Bolton North East to date. That set Sir David, as he eventually became, up for a 22-year career on the Labour backbenches. A strong reputation for constituency work will have helped him in 2010 and 2017 when his majority fell below 10 points; but an against-the-trend swing to the Conservatives in 2017 was a precursor of what was to come two years later.
In the 2019 general election Bolton North East was one of several Labour seats in northern Greater Manchester to fall to the Conservatives on small majorities. Sir David lost by 378 votes to the new Conservative Mark Logan, a former media and communications director at the British consulate in Shanghai. Logan is originally from Northern Ireland, and his two previous tilts at election came there: he was the Conservative candidate for South Antrim in the 2017 Stormont election and for East Antrim in the 2017 general election, finishing last on both occasions.
A look at the eight or so wards making up the seat will show that this is one of the most demographically polarised constituencies in the country. Of the five wards in Bolton proper, Halliwell is heavily Asian (mostly Pakistani Muslim) and dependent on the retail and wholesale trade (its biggest employer is the Warburton's bread factory), Queen's Park and Central is a rather new ward based on the town centre and points west which will be more of the same, while Tonge with the Haulgh and Breightmet are white working-class areas. All of these are heavily deprived wards, whereas Astley Bridge is much higher up the social scale. The South Turton wards of Bradshaw and Bromley Cross, by contrast, are as already pointed out very middle-class areas. The wild card is Little Lever and Darcy Lever ward, which is based on the small town of Little Lever to the south-east of Bolton and has been transferred into Bolton North East by the 2024 boundary changes; this town has a rather different history in that its traditional industries were mining and chemicals. On its previous boundaries Bolton North East was one of the seats named in the canonical "Red Wall"; in truth, Little Lever is far better described as "Red Wall" territory than anywhere else in the seat.
At local elections Queen's Park and Central, and Tonge with the Haulgh wards are safe Labour. Halliwell ward is normally safe Labour too but is prone to the unpredictable large swings which are sometimes seen in Asian Pennine wards; the Tories had a go at the Muslim vote here in 2023, but came up narrowly short. The two South Turton wards (Bradshaw and Bromley Cross) are Tory bankers; Astley Bridge is usually in that category as well, but it's trending towards Labour who broke through and won a seat here in 2023 for the first time. Breightmet is a longstanding marginal ward which regularly flips between Labour and Conservative. Little Lever and Darcy Lever at one point in the 2010s had a full slate of UKIP councillors, but the 2023 all-up elections returned a split between two Conservatives and one Labour councillor.
The addition of Little Lever and Darcy Lever will not be the boost to the Tory majority that Mark Logan was hoping for from the boundary changes. His margin in 2019 was 378 votes; Rallings and Thrasher project a Conservative lead of 1,278 on the new lines, but this is still seat number 8 on the Labour target list. It won't take much of a swing for the Labour candidate Kirith Entwistle to find herself on the green benches.
Which is appropriate for the area it's located in. We're in Bromley Cross, a prosperous northern suburb of Bolton on the railway line towards Blackburn. With its attractive location in the Pennine hills and regular trains to the big city, Bromley Cross is an excellent location for the well-heeled Manchester commuter who might not be sufficiently well-heeled to afford a mansion in Cheshire. In 2011 the place was ranked by an investment and savings firm as the fifth-best place for a family to live in England and Wales. You can see why Theresa May, in her ill-fated 2017 general election campaign, made Bromley Cross her first stop.
Further down the hill towards the big town can be found two of Bolton's three Grade I listed buildings, both dating from the 16th century and both associated with the same man. Samuel Crompton was born in December 1753 at 10 Firwood Fold, and in his younger years he was living at Hall i' th' Wood and working in the spinning trade. Unhappy with the performance of Hargreaves' Spinning Jenny, Crompton started working during the late 1770s on something better. The result was a hybrid of the jenny with Arkwright's water frame. He named his invention after that other well-known hybrid, the mule.
Crompton's Mule is still in production today. It was an instant success and turned Lancashire into the textile capital of the world. Samuel, however, never got the financial return he deserved: he didn't have the money to apply for a patent, and when he took the alternative step of publishing his design in 1779 he was thoroughly shortchanged by the manufacturers who had promised to pay him for the invention. By 1812 at least 4 million mule spindles were in use in Lancashire and Scotland, and the fast-growing town of Bolton-le-Moors was dotted with cotton mills; but Crompton was getting no royalties, and eventually he had to shame Parliament into awarding him a grant of £5,000. Two centuries later, Bolton council named an electoral ward covering 10 Firwood Fold and Hall i' th' Wood in Samuel Crompton's honour. (This ward disappeared in boundary changes in 2023.)
By the 1950s many of the millworkers' terraces had became slums, and two major changes to the town of Bolton started to take effect. The first was the development of the council estates of Breightmet, on land either side of the main road towards Bury, to house people cleared from the slumlands in the town centre. The second was the recruitment of large numbers of people from Pakistan to work in the town's cotton mills, which were by now on their last legs. With the final death of textiles in Lancashire, Bolton as we know it came into being.
The town of Bolton was enfranchised by the Great Reform Act of 1832, and remained as a two-seat borough all the way up to 1950 - albeit with boundary extensions at each redistribution, particularly in 1918, as the town of Bolton-le-Moors expanded and the moors gradually disappeared under housing. Despite those boundary changes, throughout this period of 118 years Bolton was a marginal parliamentary seat and many of its general elections returned split representation.
We can see this in the very first Bolton poll of 1832, which elected Robert Torrens of the Whigs and William Bolling of the Tories; Bolling defeated the second Whig candidate by ten votes. Torrens had transferred here from the Devon borough of Ashburton, which was reduced to one seat by the 1832 reform; he was a former Royal Marines officer turned economist who was about to become one of the prime movers behind the founding of the colony of South Australia, and his son (also called Robert Torrens) served as Premier of that State. However, the Tory MP William Bolling set the tone for Bolton's representation going forward: he was a textile mill owner in a town utterly dependent on textiles and related industries.
After Torrens lost his seat in 1835 to his Whig running-mate Peter Ainsworth (who lived at Smithills Hall and derived his income from the family bleachworks in Halliwell), we have a long run of Bolton MPs - whether Whig, Radical or Tory - who were millowners. The main exception to this rule was the Radical MP John Bowring, who represented the seat from 1841 until his resignation in 1849. Bowring was a bit of a polymath with many views which were ahead of his time, but what probably attracted Bolton's electors to him was his election platform combining free trade with Chartism. It was in 1841, the year he became MP for Bolton, that Bowring was quoted as saying that "Jesus Christ is free trade and free trade is Jesus Christ".
In the nineteenth century MPs were not paid and needed an independent source of income to keep their position in the House. John Bowring accordingly invested heavily in the iron industry, opening an ironworks in Maesteg in south Wales to supply the railway boom. This boom went bust in the economic depression following the Panic of 1847, and Bowring's investment was wiped out. Needing the money, in 1849 he took up a government post as British consul in Canton, China and left the Commons in consequence. Bowring then spent the rest of his career abroad, including five years as Governor of Hong Kong.
The Bolton by-election to replace Bowring in February 1849 was the second in five months, as the Conservative MP William Bolling had died the previous year; the resulting September 1848 had returned the Conservatives' Stephen Blair, the first Tory mayor of Bolton, without a contest. The February 1849 by-election, by contrast, saw the Radical Sir Joshua Walmsley (a Liverpool businessman) defeat the Conservative candidate by 621 votes to 568.
Walmsley tranferred to Leicester at the 1852 general election, at which Bolton returned two Radical MPs, Thomas Barnes and Joseph Crook. Don't be confused by the political label: they were both millowners, and J and J Crook's mill at the bottom of Deane Road was one of the town's largest employers. (Its site is now occupied by the University.) Barnes lost his seat in 1857 to the Conservatives' William Gray, a former mayor of Bolton who owned a large mill at Lever Bridge. Gray and Crook were both re-elected unopposed in 1859; Crook then resigned to concentrate on his business interests, and Barnes got his seat back in the resulting February 1861 by-election without a contest.
The Second Reform Act greatly expanded the franchise, and this had a huge effect on the Bolton constituency: the electorate in the 1868 general election was 12,650, nearly six times what it had been in 1865. For the first time, both of Bolton's seats went to the Conservatives; William Gray was re-elected for his fourth and final term of office, while top of the poll was John Hick. He was the Hick in Hick Hargreaves, a heavy engineering firm based on the town which supplied steam engines and boilers for factories and ships; Hick Hargreaves had a large ironworks on Crook Street to the south of the town centre, a site now occupied by Sainsbury's. One of their mill engines now stands under glass in the town centre; several other examples can be seen at the Bolton Steam Museum, off Chorley Old Road, which is well worth a visit on bank holidays when the engines are in steam.
In 1874 the Conservatives' William Gray lost his seat to the Liberal candidate John Kynaston Cross, another millowner, who won Bolton's second seat by 132 votes - a win which was upheld by the Election Court following a legal challenge. On the day of the poll Cross' campaign had placed agents in polling stations to challenge voters who were suspected of personation, and those agents had fed back lists of people who had voted to the campaign; under the rules at the time, this was illegal, but the Court held that had not affected the result of the election. 1874 was the first general election to use the secret ballot, so it's not surprising that some of the rough edges of campaigning under the new system still needed to be ironed out.
John Hick retired from the Commons in 1880 and his seat went to the Liberal candidate John Pennington Thomasson, marking the first time that the Liberals/Radicals had held both Bolton seats since 1857. Thomasson was yet another millowner, this time from a Quaker family, but his name is remembered in Bolton now for the school which he founded. The Thomasson Memorial School, on Devonshire Road, was founded in 1907 in his memory and is still going; it educates deaf children from the ages of 4 to 16.
Cross and Thomasson both lost their seats to the Conservatives in 1885, and Herbert Shepherd-Cross and Francis Bridgeman went on to win three terms of office. This marked a decisive break in Bolton's representation because neither Shepherd-Cross nor Bridgeman were millowners, although Shepherd-Cross was a partner in a Halliwell bleachworks. Bridgeman, by contrast, was from the upper class: his father Orlando Bridgeman was the 3rd Earl of Bradford, and major road names like Bridgeman Street, Bradford Street and Orlando Bridge are evidence that the Earls of Bradford were major landowners in Bolton. Francis Bridgeman was an Army officer who had just come back from the Suakin Expedition to the Sudan, an abortive effort in the Mahdist War to build a railway from the Red Sea to the Nile following the fall of Khartoum in January 1885.
In 1895 split representation returned to Bolton as Bridgeman lost his seat to the Liberals' George Harwood, who owned cotton mills in the town but by now was working in London as a barrister. From this point onwards the Liberals rarely ran a full slate in Bolton, instead often running on a joint ticket with a socialist candidate; however, the first socialist to stand for election in Bolton, Frederick Brocklehurst of the Independent Labour Party, did very poorly in 1895. As we shall see, Liberal electoral pacts have often been a feature of past Bolton politics. However, there was no socialist candidate in 1900 when the Liberals' George Harwood and the Conservatives' Herbert Shepherd-Cross were both re-elected unopposed.
Socialist representation in Bolton had to wait until 1906, when Shepherd-Cross retired and the Conservative seat was gained by Alfred Gill of the Labour Representation Committee. One of the original 29 members of the Parliamentary Labour Party, Gill was a trade unionist with a big local profile as general secretary of the Bolton and District Operative Cotton Spinners' Provincial Association.
Labour's Alfred Gill and the Liberals' George Harwood both served as MP for Bolton until their deaths. Harwood passed away in 1912 at the age of 67; in the resulting Bolton by-election of 23rd November 1912 Labour gave the Liberals a free run, and Liberal millowner Thomas Taylor defeated the Conservatives by 10,011 votes to 8,835, a majority of 1,176. Alfred Gill died at the age of 57 in August 1914, a few weeks after the outbreak of the First World War; the wartime political truce meant that the Labour candidate Robert Tootill, a Bolton town councillor and until recently secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Machine and General Labourers, was elected unopposed in the resulting by-election on 22nd September 1914. The Liberal by-election winner Thomas Taylor resigned on health grounds in 1916 (he died later that year), and the Liberals' William Edge was likewise unopposed in the resulting Bolton by-election of 29th February 1916. Stated by Lord Derby to be one of the three originators of the Derby recruiting scheme, Captain Edge was a Bolton manufacturer.
Edge and Tootill were both re-elected unopposed at the 1918 general election, at which the boundaries of the Bolton constituency were greatly expanded in all directions to take in areas which had been annexed by the town since 1885. Heaton, Smithills and Lostock to the west, Sharples to the north, Tonge Moor and Breighmet to the east, and Great Lever, Darcy Lever and Burnden to the south all now became represented by the two MPs for Bolton.
The first poll on the new lines had to wait until 1922, when Bolton rather swung to the right. Liberal MP William Edge was re-elected as a National Liberal, while Labour MP Robert Tootill retired and his seat went rather easily to the Conservatives' William Russell. He was a solicitor whose firm, Russell and Russell, is still going in Bolton today. (They employed me as a temp once.)
William Russell stood down in 1923 after one term, and a very close three-way result in Bolton resulted in two new MPs. Top of the poll was Labour's Albert Law, president of the Bolton Trades Council and past president of the Bolton and District Operative Cotton Spinners' Provincial Association. Second, and with a majority of just 193 votes over his running-mate Cecil Hilton, was the Conservatives' Herbert Cunliffe, a barrister. William Edge, by this time back in the Liberals, finished fourth 660 votes behind Cunliffe. The Tories won both seats in 1924, with Cecil Hilton defeating Albert Law, but in 1929 Bolton swung to Labour. Law returned for his second term of office and was joined by Michael Brothers, a Blackburn councillor who was secretary of the Blackburn branch of the Cardroom Workers' Amalgamation, another trade union for textile workers. It was the first time that Bolton had returned a full slate of Labour MPs.
Law and Brothers were both swept away by the 1931 Conservative landslide, which saw the Tories won Bolton by about 2 to 1. Top of the poll with over 66,000 votes was Cyril Entwistle, a millowner and barrister who had started his political career in the Liberals: he had been the Liberal MP for Hull South West from 1918 to 1924 before joining the Conservatives. In second place was Entwistle's running-mate Sir John Haslam, who had been knighted for political and public service in 1927; he had made his money in the grocery trade, in which he was so successful that he was able to retire at 45 and devote the rest of his life to good works. Cyril Entwistle got his own knighthood for political and public service in 1937. Sir John Haslam died in 1940 at the age of 62, and the resulting Bolton by-election of 13th September 1940 was uncontested thanks to the wartime political truce; the elected Conservative candidate was Sir Edward Cadogan, who had previously represented Reading and Finchley in Parliament.
The 1945 Attlee landslide delivered Bolton back into Labour hands, and the Labour slate of Jack Jones and John Lewis won both seats by over 12,000 votes. Neither of them had much connection to Bolton: Jones had been a steelworker in Rotherham, while Lewis had become a rich man as a result of developments in the rubber industry.
The 1950 redistribution split up all the remaining two-seat boroughs, including Bolton which was divided into East and West constituencies. The East seat covered much of the current Bolton North East, including Astley Bridge, Tonge Moor, Breightmet and Darcy Lever. Also here were Great Lever and (slightly dubiously for a constituency with "East" in its name) Daubhill. Jack Jones successfully sought re-election in his native Rotherham and John Lewis decided to fight Bolton West, so Bolton East got a new Labour candidate for its first election in 1950. Alfred Booth, who had been mayor of Bolton in 1941-42, defeated the Conseravtives' Philip Bell by 3,709 votes.
Bolton East was a key marginal seat throughout its existence, partly thanks to a Conservative--Liberal pact in the 1950s where the Liberals did not stand in this constituency and the Tories gave the Liberals a free run in Bolton West. The pact worked well at its first election in 1951, in which the Conservatives' Philip Bell gained Bolton East from Labour MP Alfred Booth. Bell was a barrister who had served in both World Wars and had worked on the Belsen trial of the SS men and women who ran the Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz concentration camps. Bell's initial majority was just 355 votes, and his subsequent re-elections in 1955 and 1959 were also quite marginal.
Philip Bell had continued to advance his legal career while sitting on the green benches, and in 1960 he was appointed as a county court judge and in consequence had to leave the Commons. The resulting Bolton East by-election led to a breakdown of the Tory-Liberal pact in Bolton as the Liberals fielded a candidate. Frank Byers was a businessman and broadcaster who had been the Liberal MP for North Dorset in the 1945 parliament, and would later serve as leader of the Liberal group in the House of Lords. He didn't win a seat in industrial Lancashire on this occasion, although his granddaughter Lisa Nandy has had better luck since. Byers polled 25% of the vote, but his candidacy and that of a fringe New Conservative candidate didn't stop the Tories winning albeit on a low share of the vote. Their new MP was "the Dancing Pieman", Eddie Taylor, who ran a bakery in the town and had been Mayor of Bolton in 1959-60.
Taylor's win came by just 641 votes over Labour candidate Robert Howarth, a draughtsman, Bolton councillor and trade unionist, whose campaign was thought to have been sunk by party splits over nuclear disarmament. Howarth got his revenge in the 1964 general election at which he defeated Taylor by 3,152 votes, and he more than doubled his majority in a second rematch with Taylor in 1966. Howarth was, however, surprisingly defeated in the 1970 general election, after which he went back to the council chamber in Bolton town hall: he was leader of Bolton council from 1980 to 2004.
The new Tory MP for Bolton East, Laurance Reed, had a majority of just 471 votes. Reed was one of those MPs whose career was dominated by politics: after National Service in the Navy he read law at Oxford, spent two years in Europe studying the EEC and its institutions, and then joined the staff of the Public Sector Research Unit think-tank. Reed had written a book, Europe in a Shrinking World, setting out the case for British membership of the EEC which was achieved during his only parliamentary term. While in the Commons he concentrated on environmental issues, writing books on marine pollution and lobbying for environmental improvement schemes in the old industrial cities.
Laurance Reed was defeated in the February 1974 snap election by Labour's David Young, a former teacher, insurance executive and Nuneaton councillor. Young was re-elected in October, seeing off the ill-fated future Staffordshire MP John Heddle, and in 1979 he broke Bolton East's reputation as a bellwether by holding his seat.
David Young's constituency did not include the former Turton urban district, covering the affluent towns and villages to the north of Bolton such as Bromley Cross. This was part of the Westhoughton seat from 1885 to 1918; from 1918 to 1983 Turton had a very different political tradition as part of the Darwen parliamentary constituency, which stretched north over the hills through the eponymous town to take in the strongly Conservative villages to the west and north of Blackburn. Although Darwen had been the seat of Liberal MP Herbert Samuel from 1929 to 1935, in the postwar years it was normally a safe Conservative seat (only in 1966 did Labour get anywhere near winning). While Bolton East went through five MPs from 1951 to 1983, Darwen only had one during this period: the Tories' Sir Charles Fletcher-Cooke. A QC and former president of the Cambridge Union, Sir Charles' political opinions had swung strongly to the right over the years: he had been a Communist at university, and was a Labour candidate in the 1945 general election. His political legacy is the Suicide Act 1961, which decriminalised suicide in England and Wales.
At the 1983 general election the Boundary Commission caught up with the local government reorganisation of nine years earlier, at which most of Turton urban district became part of the Metropolitan Borough of Bolton. The expanded Bolton was expanded to three parliamentary constituencies, and in consequence Bolton East was split up. Its larger part combined with South Turton to form a new constituency of Bolton North East. This was projected to have a Conservative majority and was pretty much an open seat, because David Young sought re-election in Bolton South East (which was projected to be Labour-held) and Sir Charles Fletcher-Cook retired. In the event the Labour candidate was outgoing MP Ann Taylor, a small part of whose Bolton West constituency had ended up here; but she was defeated by 2,443 votes by the new Conservative candidate Peter Thurnham.
Thurnham had spent much of his early life in southern India where his father worked in the tea industry, but he had made his name in engineering. By 1983 he was running a successful company in the refrigeration and air-conditioning sector, and the previous year he had been elected to South Lakeland council in Cumbria. He won Bolton North East three times on very small majorities. In the 1987 general election Labour selected as their candidate Frank White, the former Bury and Radcliffe MP and a councillor for Tonge ward in this constituency; Thurnham held on by 813 votes. In the 1992 general election the Labour candidate was David Crausby, an AEEU figure and Bury councillor; Thurnham held on by 185 votes.
Things got worse for Peter Thurnham when Bolton North East was redrawn for the 1997 general election to include Halliwell ward, a strongly-Labour area which would wipe out the Conservative majority. Thurnham attempted to do the chicken run, applying for the Conservative selection in Westmorland and Lonsdale where he lived and where his business was based; after failing to get that, he resigned the Tory whip and eventually ended up in the Liberal Democrats. He didn't seek re-election in 1997.
The 1997 landslide returned David Crausby at his second attempt with a huge majority of 12,669 votes, the biggest majority in Bolton North East to date. That set Sir David, as he eventually became, up for a 22-year career on the Labour backbenches. A strong reputation for constituency work will have helped him in 2010 and 2017 when his majority fell below 10 points; but an against-the-trend swing to the Conservatives in 2017 was a precursor of what was to come two years later.
In the 2019 general election Bolton North East was one of several Labour seats in northern Greater Manchester to fall to the Conservatives on small majorities. Sir David lost by 378 votes to the new Conservative Mark Logan, a former media and communications director at the British consulate in Shanghai. Logan is originally from Northern Ireland, and his two previous tilts at election came there: he was the Conservative candidate for South Antrim in the 2017 Stormont election and for East Antrim in the 2017 general election, finishing last on both occasions.
A look at the eight or so wards making up the seat will show that this is one of the most demographically polarised constituencies in the country. Of the five wards in Bolton proper, Halliwell is heavily Asian (mostly Pakistani Muslim) and dependent on the retail and wholesale trade (its biggest employer is the Warburton's bread factory), Queen's Park and Central is a rather new ward based on the town centre and points west which will be more of the same, while Tonge with the Haulgh and Breightmet are white working-class areas. All of these are heavily deprived wards, whereas Astley Bridge is much higher up the social scale. The South Turton wards of Bradshaw and Bromley Cross, by contrast, are as already pointed out very middle-class areas. The wild card is Little Lever and Darcy Lever ward, which is based on the small town of Little Lever to the south-east of Bolton and has been transferred into Bolton North East by the 2024 boundary changes; this town has a rather different history in that its traditional industries were mining and chemicals. On its previous boundaries Bolton North East was one of the seats named in the canonical "Red Wall"; in truth, Little Lever is far better described as "Red Wall" territory than anywhere else in the seat.
At local elections Queen's Park and Central, and Tonge with the Haulgh wards are safe Labour. Halliwell ward is normally safe Labour too but is prone to the unpredictable large swings which are sometimes seen in Asian Pennine wards; the Tories had a go at the Muslim vote here in 2023, but came up narrowly short. The two South Turton wards (Bradshaw and Bromley Cross) are Tory bankers; Astley Bridge is usually in that category as well, but it's trending towards Labour who broke through and won a seat here in 2023 for the first time. Breightmet is a longstanding marginal ward which regularly flips between Labour and Conservative. Little Lever and Darcy Lever at one point in the 2010s had a full slate of UKIP councillors, but the 2023 all-up elections returned a split between two Conservatives and one Labour councillor.
The addition of Little Lever and Darcy Lever will not be the boost to the Tory majority that Mark Logan was hoping for from the boundary changes. His margin in 2019 was 378 votes; Rallings and Thrasher project a Conservative lead of 1,278 on the new lines, but this is still seat number 8 on the Labour target list. It won't take much of a swing for the Labour candidate Kirith Entwistle to find herself on the green benches.
