Post by andrewteale on Feb 4, 2024 17:09:42 GMT
Welcome to Old Bexley and Sidcup. These are two towns which are administratively part of Greater London, and to all intents and purposes part of the London urban sprawl, but socially and demographically are very different to it. Old Bexley and Sidcup still are, to a large extent, Kentish towns which have been swallowed up by the capital.
Of the two towns in the constituency name Bexley is the outermost, lying 13 miles from Charing Cross on the River Cray as it flows north towards the Thames estuary. A couple of miles further in is Sidcup, which has a hilltop location on what was once the main road from London to Maidstone.
That road has been replaced by the A20, an arterial road which bypasses Sidcup to the south. The Sidcup bypass forms the southern boundary of the constituency, while to a large extent the seat's northern boundary is defined by another arterial road: the A2 Rochester Way, which relieves the Roman road passing though Welling and Bexleyheath. However, part of the constituency extends over the A2, to take in the areas of Welling, Falconwood and East Wickham to the north.
This area was relatively undeveloped into the twentieth century, with all the places named still being independent countryside towns and villages. The railways came here quite late: the Dartford Loop line through Sidcup and Bexley opened in 1866, the Bexleyheath line through Welling wasn't completed until 1895. And it wasn't until the Great War, when the expansion of the Woolwich Arsenal led to major housing developments at East Wickham, that housebuilding in this area really started to get going.
We can see this in the area's parliamentary history. Before 1885 the area now covered by this constituency had been part of the large two-seat West Kent constituency, which was broken up into single-member seats. From 1885 to 1918 the modern-day London Borough of Bexley was covered by the Dartford constituency, with the exception of the parish of Foots Cray which formed part of the Sevenoaks constituency.
Sevenoaks was safely Conservative throughout this period, returning two MPs. Charles Mills, who represented the seat from 1885 to 1892 and also sat in the Lords from 1898 to 1919 as the second Lord Hillingdon, is recorded by Hansard as speaking only once in Parliament: he asked a question in 1889 on the Delagoa Bay railway in South Africa. Henry Forster, who was MP for Sevenoaks from 1892 to 1918, was rather more active in politics: he was a junior Treasury minister under Balfour and Financial Secretary to the War Office in the wartime coalition government, before leaving these shores in 1920 to become Governor-General of Australia. Forster was also a noted cricketer, having played at first-class level for Oxford University and Hampshire and serving as president of the Marylebone Cricket Club.
The first MP for Dartford was even more active in politics, being one of the major figures of the Conservative Party in the 1870s and 1880s. A former world rackets champion, Sir William Hart Dyke had first been elected in 1865 for West Kent and was one of the two MPs for Mid Kent in the previous parliament. Hart Dyke had been the chief whip in Disraeli's second government from 1874 to 1880, and going into the 1885 election he was part of Lord Salisbury's cabinet as Chief Secretary for Ireland. The Liberals won the 1885 election, but Hart Dyke won the new Dartford constituency safely enough: he defeated the Liberal candidate James Saunders (one of the architects of the London Pavilion on Piccadilly Circus) by 482 votes in the 1885 election, increasing his majority to 1,233 votes the following year.
The 1886 election returned the Conservatives to power. Following a government reshuffle in early 1887 Sir William Hart Dyke returned to the Cabinet as vice-president of the Committee of the Council on Education, roughly equivalent to the modern-day post of Education Secretary. Under the rules at the time, this required him to seek re-election in a by-election (as this was an office of profit under the Crown). Ministerial by-elections were common in those days, and were often left uncontested: the 1886-92 Parliament had 34 ministerial by-elections, of which only two went to a poll. This was not one of them. The first Dartford by-election, in February 1887, duly re-elected Sir William Hart Dyke unopposed.
The Conservatives lost power in the 1892 general election, and that was the end of Hart Dyke's ministerial career. However, he stayed in the Commons until 1906 when he was swept away in the Liberal landslide while seeking a twelfth term of office. Hart Dyke had served for 41 unbroken years, and if he had held his seat that year he would likely have become Father of the House.
The new MP for Dartford was James Rowlands, who had been an MP before: he had represented Finsbury East from 1886 to 1895. A watch-case maker by trade, Rowlands was a freeman of the Goldsmiths' Company. Most of his work as an MP was on the subject of property law and housing: he ended up as secretary of the Land Law Reform Association, and he had also been associated with the Gas Consumers' Protection League and the Leaseholds Enfranchisement Association.
Rowlands was defeated in January 1910 by the Conservative candidate William Foot Mitchell, who had recently become the first managing director of Royal Dutch Shell. Much of Mitchell's previous career had been spent in the Far East: he chaired the Yokohama Foreign Chamber of Commerce for two years, and he was appointed to the Order of the Sacred Treasure by the Meiji Emperor of Japan.
Mitchell was Royal Dutch Shell's managing director for 35 years, but he only served as MP for Dartford between the two 1910 elections. James Rowlands won the rematch in the December general election of that year, overturning Mitchell's majority of 817 to win by 234 votes.
Rowlands had a much easier time at his final re-election in 1918, in which he had the Coalition's coupon and was not opposed by the Conservatives. This time Labour stood a candidate against him, but they didn't get very far.
By this time the Dartford constituency was the largest seat in Kent by electorate, and it stayed that way even after boundary changes for the 1918 election. That redistribution created a new constituency of Chislehurst, which took in Foots Cray urban district. That district covered Sidcup, which in pre-development days was a smaller and less important settlement than Foots Cray; the urban district was, however, renamed as Sidcup in the 1920s. A subsequent reorganisation in 1934 saw Sidcup urban district abolished, replaced by a new urban district of Chislehurst and Sidcup.
James Rowlands died in 1920, aged 68. He was the last Liberal MP for Dartford, as the resulting Dartford by-election of 27th March 1920 marked a seachange in the constituency's politics. The coalition government gave its coupon to the Conservative candidate Richard Meller, who was a Surrey county councillor and the official lecturer on National Insurance. He would later serve for 17 years as MP for Mitcham. Judging from the candidate list, this selection appears to have offended quite a lot of people. The Dartford Liberal association nominated their own candidate, the former Grimsby and Houghton-le-Spring MP Thomas Wing. Meller was also opposed from the right by the Boer War and Great War veteran and machine-gun pioneer Lt-Col Reginald Applin, standing for the short-lived National Party; and by an independent Unionist candidate, Frank Fehr. Coming through the middle of all this mess was the Labour candidate John Mills, an Australian engineer who had become the senior union rep at the Woolwich Arsenal. Mills won the by-election with just over 50% of the vote against 17% for the Liberals and 16% for the Conservatives, Applin and Fehr losing their deposits; he enjoyed a majority of 9,048.
That was the first of three non-consecutive terms for Mills as MP for Dartford. He was defeated at the 1922 general election by George Jarrett, who stood as a National Liberal candidate without Conservative opposition: in contrast to the by-election two years earlier, this time the left-wing vote was split with the Liberals selecting the suffragist Alison Garland. Garland, the first woman to seek election as MP for this area, polled 2,175 votes and lost her deposit; Jarrett defeated Mills by 1,918 votes.
Lloyd George folded the National Liberals back into the Liberal Party after the 1922 election, but George Jarrett didn't join them. Instead, he became a "Constitutionalist" MP, a label which came to be used by a number of independent right-wingers at this point including Winston Churchill. It didn't do Jarrett much good. Although he was supported by the Conservatives in his re-election bid as a Constitutionalist candidate in 1923, this time the left-wing vote was unified behind Mills who returned as MP for Dartford with a majority of 2,829. Jarrett never returned to the green benches.
For the 1924 general election the Conservatives selected their own candidate, Angus McDonnell. A son of the 6th Earl of Antrim, McDonnell had spent much of his time up to this point in the USA where he worked in the railway business. He put this experience to good use in the Great War, serving with a Canadian unit which built railways behind the front lines of the Western Front. McDonnell defeated John Mills by 20,108 votes to 19,352, a majority of just 756.
Angus McDonnell stood down after one term in the Commons to concentrate on his business interests. John Mills returned as Labour MP for Dartford in 1929 with a large majority thanks to the intervention of the Liberals, who saved their deposit. However, he was swept away in the 1931 disaster by the Conservative candidate Frank Clarke, who won by 34,095 votes to 27,349. In 1935 Clarke became the first MP for Dartford to be re-elected in seventeen years, defeating the new Labour candidate Jennie Adamson.
Frank Clarke died in 1938 at the early age of 51. For the resulting third Dartford by-election, held on 7th November 1938, the Conservatives selected Godfrey Mitchell. A veteran of the Great War where he had served in the Royal Engineers, Mitchell had taken over the construction company George Wimpey in 1919; he had already built the company up into a major player in the housebuilding business, with a pre-war peak of 1,370 homes completed in 1934. A seat like Dartford, which by now had become grossly oversized thanks to housebuilding and the growth of London, must have seemed appropriate. On the left-wing side Labour reselected their 1935 candidate Jennie Adamson, a member and former chair of the party's National Executive Committee. Adamson had also previously served on the London County Council (as a councillor for Lambeth North), and she was married to William Adamson who was the Labour MP for Cannock. When the votes came out of the ballot boxes Adamson had won by 46,514 votes to 42,276, a majority of 4,238 on a turnout of 68%. Adamson ascribed her victory to the Munich Agreement, which had been concluded a few weeks earlier.
By contrast to this rapid turnover of MPs for Dartford, the Chislehurst constituency was safely Conservative throughout this period. Its first MP was Alfred Smithers, a businessman in the railway industry: Smithers was chairman of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway in Canada, and the town of Smithers in British Columbia was named after him. He was knighted in 1919. Smithers stood down in 1922 and was replaced by Robert Nesbitt, a London solicitor. From 1924 to 1945 the MP for Chislehurst was Sir Waldron Smithers, the son of Sir Alfred Smithers, who remained on the backbenches throughout this period.
The scale of housebuilding in this corner of Kent meant that by the Second World War both the Chislehurst and the Dartford constituencies were grossly oversized: Chislehurst had a 1939 electorate of almost 115,000, Dartford almost 135,000. In 1918 the figures had been 27,000 and 46,000 respectively, although this isn't a like-for-like comparison because women under 30 didn't have the vote in 1918. The emergency redistribution of 1945 reorganised this area into four new parliamentary constituencies called Bexley, Chislehurst, Dartford and Orpington.
The new Dartford and Orpington seats contained no part of the modern Old Bexley and Sidcup, which means that Sir Waldron Smithers (who sought and won re-election in the new Orpington seat) now leaves our story. And a good thing too from his point of view, as the revised Chislehurst fell to Labour in the 1945 landslide. The Conservatives and Labour both put up candidates who were straight from war service: the Tories' Major Nigel Fisher, who earlier in the year had been awarded a Military Cross on the field, lost to Labour's Sergeant George Wallace, RAF. Wallace enjoyed a majority of 6,279.
George Wallace was defeated in 1950 by just 167 votes by the Conservatives' Patricia Hornsby-Smith. A former civil servant who had sat on Barnes borough council in Surrey from 1945 to 1949, Hornsby-Smith went on to increase her majority over Wallace at two rematches, winning by 980 votes in 1951 (Hornsby-Smith 31,679, Wallace 30,699) and by nearly 4,000 votes in 1955. She served as a junior minister in the Home Office from 1957 to 1959, and was sworn of the Privy Council in 1959.
Hornsby-Smith continued to serve as MP for Chislehurst until 1974 with the exception of the 1966-70 Labour government. During this time Chislehurst was a Labour seat represented by Alistair Macdonald, a bank clerk and officer of the National Union of Bank Employees. Macdonald had previously been a Chislehurst and Sidcup urban district councillor, and he was elected as an alderman of Bromley council on its creation in 1964.
The Bexley constituency of 1945-74 had the same boundaries as the pre-1964 Borough of Bexley, which covered Old Bexley, Bexleyheath, East Wickham and Welling. Dartford's Labour MP Jennie Adamson sought and won re-election here in 1945. Adamson's reward for this was to get a junior ministerial post in the Attlee government, in the Ministry of Pensions.
However, Adamson's time as MP for Bexley was a brief one. She resigned from Parliament in 1946 to become deputy chair of the Unemployment Assistance Board. The resulting Bexley by-election of 22nd July 1946 resulted in a sharp swing to the Conservatives, and the Labour candidate Ashley Bramall held the seat by just 1,851 votes.
This was the start of a long political career for Ashley Bramall, who had previously chaired the Labour club at Oxford University and served as treasurer of the Oxford Union, where he had often faced off in debate against the president of the Union, a young man called Edward Heath. Bramall had served in the Second World War in the Reconnaissance Corps and at the time of the by-election he had the rank of Major and was part of the Allied administration in Germany. (His younger brother Edwin did rather better in the military, winning an MC in the Normandy landings and ending up as Chief of the Defence Staff with the rank of Field Marshal.)
Ashley Bramall made his political career not on the national stage but on the municipal stage. He was elected as an alderman of Westminster city council in 1959, joined the London County Council in 1961 and transferred to the new Greater London Council in 1964. Bramall was one of eight councillors who served for the entire period of the GLC's existence (1964-86), chairing the council in 1982-83, and from 1970 to 1981 he was leader of the Inner London Education Authority. During this period he was a contestant on Mastermind, appearing on the 1976 series with the specialist subject "British politics since 1918". (In the Magnus Magnusson era of Mastermind specialist rounds on British politics were generally written by the psephologist David Butler.)
All that lay in the future when Bramall lost the Bexley seat in 1950 to his old university sparring partner Edward Heath. Heath polled 25,854 votes to Bramall's 25,721, a majority of 133. A rematch in 1951 resulted in an increased majority of 1,639 for Heath. On both occasions a young Conservative candidate for the neighbouring Dartford seat, Margaret Roberts (later Thatcher), lost.
After graduating from Oxford, Heath had served in the Second World War as a Royal Artillery officer, taking part in the Normandy landings as an adjutant; he was mentioned in despatches for his service in France, and awarded a military MBE. After that he became a civil servant, but resigned from that to seek the Conservative nomination for Bexley. In Parliament he rose up the greasy pole via the Whips office, joining Cabinet in 1955 as Chief Whip. Following the Conservative loss of the 1964 general election Heath won the Conservative leadership contest of 1965, polling 150 votes against 133 for Reginald Maudling and 15 for Enoch Powell. He became Leader of the Opposition.
Party leaders usually get a boost in their constituencies at general election time, and that might well have saved Heath in 1966; he held his seat by just 2,333 votes. He did rather better in 1970, increasing his majority in Bexley to 8,058 despite the presence of an independent spoiler candidate who had changed his name to Edward Heath for the election. The Conservatives unexpectedly won the 1970 general election, and Heath became Prime Minister.
Heath's three-and-a-half years as Prime Minister reshaped the country. They certainly reshaped the local government map: the two-tier system of county and district councils dates from the Heath administration and in many areas of England remains almost unaltered today. Heath saw his greatest achievement as Britain's accession to the European Economic Community, which took effect on 1st January 1973. The decimalisation of Britain's coinage was completed. Against this, Heath's government came at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and his power-sharing deal to bring peace - the Sunningdale Agreement - quickly fell apart in the face of Unionist opposition. The Ulster Unionist MPs resigned the Conservative whip, and Northern Ireland's party system has been divorced from Great Britain's ever since. The Barber economic boom quickly turned into a Barber economic bust, inflation soared, and the winter of 1973-74 saw the introduction of a three-day week in the face of industrial action from the National Union of Mineworkers. On 7th February 1974, Heath asked the Queen for a dissolution on the question of "Who governs Britain?" Because the Queen was in New Zealand at the time for the Commonwealth Games in Christchurch, the dissolution was granted by the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret acting as Counsellors of State.
The February 1974 election was fought on new boundaries, reflecting the reorganisation of London government in the previous decade. The new London Borough of Bexley was allocated three parliamentary seats, which meant that the Chislehurst constituency - which straddled the boundary between Bexley and Bromley - would have to be broken up. The Sidcup part of the Chislehurst seat was added to Old Bexley to create a new Sidcup constituency, while the rest of the Bexley constituency was renamed as Bexleyheath to reflect the boundary change. The boundary changes effectively forced the Chislehurst MP Dame Patricia Hornsby-Smith out of Parliament: she had intended to seek the Conservative nomination for Sidcup, but found herself unable to challenge her party leader. Hornsby-Smith instead contested the Aldridge-Brownhills seat in the West Midlands, which she lost.
"Who governs Britain?" Well, not Edward Heath as it turned out. The result of the February 1974 general election was inconclusive, with a hung parliament being returned for the first time since 1929. Heath's Conservatives had won the most votes, but Labour had won the most seats. After an attempt to seek Liberal support for a Conservative minority government failed, Heath tendered his resignation as Prime Minister. Harold Wilson, returning for a third term as Labour Prime Minister, called a new election for October 1974 at which his administration won a bare majority.
That was the end of Edward Heath's government career. He was challenged for the Conservative leadership in 1975 by Margaret Thatcher, resigned after finishing behind Thatcher in the first round, and went to the backbenches. There he remained until finally retiring from the Commons in 2001, after more than 50 years' continuous service as an MP. In 1992 Heath became a Knight of the Garter and (following the retirement of Sir Bernard Braine) the Father of the House.
Sir Edward Heath's Sidcup constituency was renamed as Old Bexley and Sidcup in 1983, with no change to its boundaries. The current seat of that name contains the Welling and East Wickham areas, which as previously stated were in the Bexleyheath constituency from 1974 to 1997. Bexleyheath was a more marginal Conservative seat than Old Bexley and Sidcup, but it only returned one MP during this period. Sir Cyril Townsend had been an officer in the Durham Light Infantry for ten years before entering politics, serving in Cyprus and Malaya and as ADC to the governor of Hong Kong. Townsend remained on the backbenches throughout his 23 years in the Commons; his lasting legacy is the private member's bill he introduced in 1977, which became the Protection of Children Act 1978.
The constituencies in Bexley borough were redrawn for the 1997 election, with the number of seats in Bexley and Greenwich reducing from six to five. The Old Bexley and Sidcup seat was expanded to take in Welling and East Wickham from the former Bexleyheath seat, together with a small area around Falconwood railway station which had been transferred into Bexley borough from Greenwich in the early 1990s. The new boundaries produced a Conservative seat which was strong enough to withstand the Labour landslde of 1997: Heath, by now in his seventies, held the redrawn seat with a majority of 3,569.
Sir Edward Heath's successor as MP for Old Bexley and Sidcup had also started his political career young. Derek Conway had been elected to Gateshead council in 1974 at the age of 21, and he became leader of the Conservative group on Tyne and Wear county council at 26. After contesting Labour seats in the north-east in October 1974 and 1979, in 1983 Conway was elected to Parliament as MP for Shrewsbury and Atcham. He served three terms as MP for that seat, and was a government whip from 1993 until 1997 when he was swept away by the Labour landslide. Old Bexley and Sidcup, which Conway represented from 2001 to 2010, was a safer berth for him.
Derek Conway's fall from grace was spectacular. In January 2008 the Commons Standards and Privileges committee reported that he had paid a large salary to his son Freddie for work as a part-time researcher, while Freddie was a full-time student at Newcastle University. The committee concluded that there was no record of what work Freddie had done and that his salary was too high to represent a good use of Commons money. Conway was ordered to repay £13,000, was suspended for ten sitting days, and had the Conservative whip withdrawn. A further report by the standards committee the following year resulted in Conway being ordered to repay a further £3,758 which he had overpaid to his other son Henry.
The disgrace of Derek Conway provided an opportunity for another Conservative MP. James Brokenshire, a former corporate lawyer, had entered the Commons in 2005 by gaining the Hornchurch constituency, in the London Borough of Havering, from Labour. The Hornchurch seat was due to be abolished at the 2010 general election, and Brokenshire unsuccessfully applied for the Conservative nomination in a string of safe seats before he finally won the selection for Old Bexley and Sidcup in 2008. Old Bexley and Sidcup's boundary changes in 2010 were minor, with the Danson Park area transferred out of the seat into the Bexleyheath and Crayford constituency.
James Brokenshire served as a Home Office minister throughout the Coalition government, piloting the Modern Slavery Act 2013 through Parliament. He was sworn of the Privy Council in 2015. In 2016 he was appointed to Theresa May's first Cabinet with the traditionally-difficult role of Northern Ireland secretary, in which role he called snap elections to the Stormont Assembly in 2017 following the Renewable Heat Incentive scandal.
In December 2017, Brokenshire started coughing up blood. He sought medical advice, and tests revealed early-stage lung cancer. He had never smoked. Brokenshire resigned as Northern Ireland secretary on his 50th birthday to put his health first, and in January 2018 he had part of his lung removed. Three months later he was back in the Cabinet with the job of Housing, Communities and Local Government secretary. He brought in legislation restricting landlords' rights to evict their tenants and capping most tenancy fees and deposits.
James Brokenshire was not included in the Johnson cabinet, but did go back to being a junior Home Office minister in 2020 in recognition of his effectiveness and competence as a minister. Unfortunately, his cancer returned. He took leave of absence in January 2021 in advance of another lung operation, and resigned from government in July after failing to recover. He passed away on 7th October 2021, at the appallingly early age of 53.
The by-election to replace James Brokenshire took place on 2nd December 2021 and was comfortably won by the new Conservative candidate Louie French, the deputy leader of Bexley council where he represents Falconwood and Welling ward. In December 2019 French was the Conservative candidate for the neighbouring constituency of Eltham. Before entering the Commons he worked in financial services in the City, specialising in sustainable investing and research. He enjoyed a majority of 4,478 votes over Labour, just over 20 percentage points.
French represents a seat which, as already stated, is part of Greater London in practice but very unlike it in character. The 2021 census returns from Old Bexley and Sidcup's constituent wards are very consistent and paint a clear picture of a seat which is dominated by the lower middle class. If we exclude three wards whose census return is distorted by large RAF bases, then Old Bexley and Sidcup has both of the top two wards in England and Wales for those working in administrative and secretarial occupations (Blackfen and Lamorbey, and Blendon and Penhil), with a third ward (Falconwood and Welling) in the top 100. Four of the constituency's seven wards are in the top 10 in London for population born in the UK, three are in the top 10 in London for White British ethnicity, two are in the top 10 in London for level 2 qualifications (5+ GCSE passes or equivalent), and Blensdon and Penhill ward is in the top 10 in London for owner-occupation. East Wickham ward just makes the top 100 wards in England and Wales for Buddhism (1.6%). This is an area which has been relatively unaffected by the transformation of London into a world city, where detached and semi-detached housing, much of it built on garden-city principles, predominates.
The 2024 boundary changes leave this seat largely unchanged apart from realignment to Bexley's ward boundaries, which were redrawn in 2018; this had the effect of expanding the seat slightly by moving Damson Park back in from Bexleyheath and Crawford. A draft proposal to drop Old Bexley from the name of the constituency, with a renaming to "Sidcup and Welling", did not make the final cut.
With no worries from the Boundary Commission in the near future, Louie French has that increasingly rare thing: a safe Conservative seat within Greater London. Old Bexley and Sidcup has already given us one Conservative Prime Minister; there's no reason why that might not happen again some time in the future.
Of the two towns in the constituency name Bexley is the outermost, lying 13 miles from Charing Cross on the River Cray as it flows north towards the Thames estuary. A couple of miles further in is Sidcup, which has a hilltop location on what was once the main road from London to Maidstone.
That road has been replaced by the A20, an arterial road which bypasses Sidcup to the south. The Sidcup bypass forms the southern boundary of the constituency, while to a large extent the seat's northern boundary is defined by another arterial road: the A2 Rochester Way, which relieves the Roman road passing though Welling and Bexleyheath. However, part of the constituency extends over the A2, to take in the areas of Welling, Falconwood and East Wickham to the north.
This area was relatively undeveloped into the twentieth century, with all the places named still being independent countryside towns and villages. The railways came here quite late: the Dartford Loop line through Sidcup and Bexley opened in 1866, the Bexleyheath line through Welling wasn't completed until 1895. And it wasn't until the Great War, when the expansion of the Woolwich Arsenal led to major housing developments at East Wickham, that housebuilding in this area really started to get going.
We can see this in the area's parliamentary history. Before 1885 the area now covered by this constituency had been part of the large two-seat West Kent constituency, which was broken up into single-member seats. From 1885 to 1918 the modern-day London Borough of Bexley was covered by the Dartford constituency, with the exception of the parish of Foots Cray which formed part of the Sevenoaks constituency.
Sevenoaks was safely Conservative throughout this period, returning two MPs. Charles Mills, who represented the seat from 1885 to 1892 and also sat in the Lords from 1898 to 1919 as the second Lord Hillingdon, is recorded by Hansard as speaking only once in Parliament: he asked a question in 1889 on the Delagoa Bay railway in South Africa. Henry Forster, who was MP for Sevenoaks from 1892 to 1918, was rather more active in politics: he was a junior Treasury minister under Balfour and Financial Secretary to the War Office in the wartime coalition government, before leaving these shores in 1920 to become Governor-General of Australia. Forster was also a noted cricketer, having played at first-class level for Oxford University and Hampshire and serving as president of the Marylebone Cricket Club.
The first MP for Dartford was even more active in politics, being one of the major figures of the Conservative Party in the 1870s and 1880s. A former world rackets champion, Sir William Hart Dyke had first been elected in 1865 for West Kent and was one of the two MPs for Mid Kent in the previous parliament. Hart Dyke had been the chief whip in Disraeli's second government from 1874 to 1880, and going into the 1885 election he was part of Lord Salisbury's cabinet as Chief Secretary for Ireland. The Liberals won the 1885 election, but Hart Dyke won the new Dartford constituency safely enough: he defeated the Liberal candidate James Saunders (one of the architects of the London Pavilion on Piccadilly Circus) by 482 votes in the 1885 election, increasing his majority to 1,233 votes the following year.
The 1886 election returned the Conservatives to power. Following a government reshuffle in early 1887 Sir William Hart Dyke returned to the Cabinet as vice-president of the Committee of the Council on Education, roughly equivalent to the modern-day post of Education Secretary. Under the rules at the time, this required him to seek re-election in a by-election (as this was an office of profit under the Crown). Ministerial by-elections were common in those days, and were often left uncontested: the 1886-92 Parliament had 34 ministerial by-elections, of which only two went to a poll. This was not one of them. The first Dartford by-election, in February 1887, duly re-elected Sir William Hart Dyke unopposed.
The Conservatives lost power in the 1892 general election, and that was the end of Hart Dyke's ministerial career. However, he stayed in the Commons until 1906 when he was swept away in the Liberal landslide while seeking a twelfth term of office. Hart Dyke had served for 41 unbroken years, and if he had held his seat that year he would likely have become Father of the House.
The new MP for Dartford was James Rowlands, who had been an MP before: he had represented Finsbury East from 1886 to 1895. A watch-case maker by trade, Rowlands was a freeman of the Goldsmiths' Company. Most of his work as an MP was on the subject of property law and housing: he ended up as secretary of the Land Law Reform Association, and he had also been associated with the Gas Consumers' Protection League and the Leaseholds Enfranchisement Association.
Rowlands was defeated in January 1910 by the Conservative candidate William Foot Mitchell, who had recently become the first managing director of Royal Dutch Shell. Much of Mitchell's previous career had been spent in the Far East: he chaired the Yokohama Foreign Chamber of Commerce for two years, and he was appointed to the Order of the Sacred Treasure by the Meiji Emperor of Japan.
Mitchell was Royal Dutch Shell's managing director for 35 years, but he only served as MP for Dartford between the two 1910 elections. James Rowlands won the rematch in the December general election of that year, overturning Mitchell's majority of 817 to win by 234 votes.
Rowlands had a much easier time at his final re-election in 1918, in which he had the Coalition's coupon and was not opposed by the Conservatives. This time Labour stood a candidate against him, but they didn't get very far.
By this time the Dartford constituency was the largest seat in Kent by electorate, and it stayed that way even after boundary changes for the 1918 election. That redistribution created a new constituency of Chislehurst, which took in Foots Cray urban district. That district covered Sidcup, which in pre-development days was a smaller and less important settlement than Foots Cray; the urban district was, however, renamed as Sidcup in the 1920s. A subsequent reorganisation in 1934 saw Sidcup urban district abolished, replaced by a new urban district of Chislehurst and Sidcup.
James Rowlands died in 1920, aged 68. He was the last Liberal MP for Dartford, as the resulting Dartford by-election of 27th March 1920 marked a seachange in the constituency's politics. The coalition government gave its coupon to the Conservative candidate Richard Meller, who was a Surrey county councillor and the official lecturer on National Insurance. He would later serve for 17 years as MP for Mitcham. Judging from the candidate list, this selection appears to have offended quite a lot of people. The Dartford Liberal association nominated their own candidate, the former Grimsby and Houghton-le-Spring MP Thomas Wing. Meller was also opposed from the right by the Boer War and Great War veteran and machine-gun pioneer Lt-Col Reginald Applin, standing for the short-lived National Party; and by an independent Unionist candidate, Frank Fehr. Coming through the middle of all this mess was the Labour candidate John Mills, an Australian engineer who had become the senior union rep at the Woolwich Arsenal. Mills won the by-election with just over 50% of the vote against 17% for the Liberals and 16% for the Conservatives, Applin and Fehr losing their deposits; he enjoyed a majority of 9,048.
That was the first of three non-consecutive terms for Mills as MP for Dartford. He was defeated at the 1922 general election by George Jarrett, who stood as a National Liberal candidate without Conservative opposition: in contrast to the by-election two years earlier, this time the left-wing vote was split with the Liberals selecting the suffragist Alison Garland. Garland, the first woman to seek election as MP for this area, polled 2,175 votes and lost her deposit; Jarrett defeated Mills by 1,918 votes.
Lloyd George folded the National Liberals back into the Liberal Party after the 1922 election, but George Jarrett didn't join them. Instead, he became a "Constitutionalist" MP, a label which came to be used by a number of independent right-wingers at this point including Winston Churchill. It didn't do Jarrett much good. Although he was supported by the Conservatives in his re-election bid as a Constitutionalist candidate in 1923, this time the left-wing vote was unified behind Mills who returned as MP for Dartford with a majority of 2,829. Jarrett never returned to the green benches.
For the 1924 general election the Conservatives selected their own candidate, Angus McDonnell. A son of the 6th Earl of Antrim, McDonnell had spent much of his time up to this point in the USA where he worked in the railway business. He put this experience to good use in the Great War, serving with a Canadian unit which built railways behind the front lines of the Western Front. McDonnell defeated John Mills by 20,108 votes to 19,352, a majority of just 756.
Angus McDonnell stood down after one term in the Commons to concentrate on his business interests. John Mills returned as Labour MP for Dartford in 1929 with a large majority thanks to the intervention of the Liberals, who saved their deposit. However, he was swept away in the 1931 disaster by the Conservative candidate Frank Clarke, who won by 34,095 votes to 27,349. In 1935 Clarke became the first MP for Dartford to be re-elected in seventeen years, defeating the new Labour candidate Jennie Adamson.
Frank Clarke died in 1938 at the early age of 51. For the resulting third Dartford by-election, held on 7th November 1938, the Conservatives selected Godfrey Mitchell. A veteran of the Great War where he had served in the Royal Engineers, Mitchell had taken over the construction company George Wimpey in 1919; he had already built the company up into a major player in the housebuilding business, with a pre-war peak of 1,370 homes completed in 1934. A seat like Dartford, which by now had become grossly oversized thanks to housebuilding and the growth of London, must have seemed appropriate. On the left-wing side Labour reselected their 1935 candidate Jennie Adamson, a member and former chair of the party's National Executive Committee. Adamson had also previously served on the London County Council (as a councillor for Lambeth North), and she was married to William Adamson who was the Labour MP for Cannock. When the votes came out of the ballot boxes Adamson had won by 46,514 votes to 42,276, a majority of 4,238 on a turnout of 68%. Adamson ascribed her victory to the Munich Agreement, which had been concluded a few weeks earlier.
By contrast to this rapid turnover of MPs for Dartford, the Chislehurst constituency was safely Conservative throughout this period. Its first MP was Alfred Smithers, a businessman in the railway industry: Smithers was chairman of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway in Canada, and the town of Smithers in British Columbia was named after him. He was knighted in 1919. Smithers stood down in 1922 and was replaced by Robert Nesbitt, a London solicitor. From 1924 to 1945 the MP for Chislehurst was Sir Waldron Smithers, the son of Sir Alfred Smithers, who remained on the backbenches throughout this period.
The scale of housebuilding in this corner of Kent meant that by the Second World War both the Chislehurst and the Dartford constituencies were grossly oversized: Chislehurst had a 1939 electorate of almost 115,000, Dartford almost 135,000. In 1918 the figures had been 27,000 and 46,000 respectively, although this isn't a like-for-like comparison because women under 30 didn't have the vote in 1918. The emergency redistribution of 1945 reorganised this area into four new parliamentary constituencies called Bexley, Chislehurst, Dartford and Orpington.
The new Dartford and Orpington seats contained no part of the modern Old Bexley and Sidcup, which means that Sir Waldron Smithers (who sought and won re-election in the new Orpington seat) now leaves our story. And a good thing too from his point of view, as the revised Chislehurst fell to Labour in the 1945 landslide. The Conservatives and Labour both put up candidates who were straight from war service: the Tories' Major Nigel Fisher, who earlier in the year had been awarded a Military Cross on the field, lost to Labour's Sergeant George Wallace, RAF. Wallace enjoyed a majority of 6,279.
George Wallace was defeated in 1950 by just 167 votes by the Conservatives' Patricia Hornsby-Smith. A former civil servant who had sat on Barnes borough council in Surrey from 1945 to 1949, Hornsby-Smith went on to increase her majority over Wallace at two rematches, winning by 980 votes in 1951 (Hornsby-Smith 31,679, Wallace 30,699) and by nearly 4,000 votes in 1955. She served as a junior minister in the Home Office from 1957 to 1959, and was sworn of the Privy Council in 1959.
Hornsby-Smith continued to serve as MP for Chislehurst until 1974 with the exception of the 1966-70 Labour government. During this time Chislehurst was a Labour seat represented by Alistair Macdonald, a bank clerk and officer of the National Union of Bank Employees. Macdonald had previously been a Chislehurst and Sidcup urban district councillor, and he was elected as an alderman of Bromley council on its creation in 1964.
The Bexley constituency of 1945-74 had the same boundaries as the pre-1964 Borough of Bexley, which covered Old Bexley, Bexleyheath, East Wickham and Welling. Dartford's Labour MP Jennie Adamson sought and won re-election here in 1945. Adamson's reward for this was to get a junior ministerial post in the Attlee government, in the Ministry of Pensions.
However, Adamson's time as MP for Bexley was a brief one. She resigned from Parliament in 1946 to become deputy chair of the Unemployment Assistance Board. The resulting Bexley by-election of 22nd July 1946 resulted in a sharp swing to the Conservatives, and the Labour candidate Ashley Bramall held the seat by just 1,851 votes.
This was the start of a long political career for Ashley Bramall, who had previously chaired the Labour club at Oxford University and served as treasurer of the Oxford Union, where he had often faced off in debate against the president of the Union, a young man called Edward Heath. Bramall had served in the Second World War in the Reconnaissance Corps and at the time of the by-election he had the rank of Major and was part of the Allied administration in Germany. (His younger brother Edwin did rather better in the military, winning an MC in the Normandy landings and ending up as Chief of the Defence Staff with the rank of Field Marshal.)
Ashley Bramall made his political career not on the national stage but on the municipal stage. He was elected as an alderman of Westminster city council in 1959, joined the London County Council in 1961 and transferred to the new Greater London Council in 1964. Bramall was one of eight councillors who served for the entire period of the GLC's existence (1964-86), chairing the council in 1982-83, and from 1970 to 1981 he was leader of the Inner London Education Authority. During this period he was a contestant on Mastermind, appearing on the 1976 series with the specialist subject "British politics since 1918". (In the Magnus Magnusson era of Mastermind specialist rounds on British politics were generally written by the psephologist David Butler.)
All that lay in the future when Bramall lost the Bexley seat in 1950 to his old university sparring partner Edward Heath. Heath polled 25,854 votes to Bramall's 25,721, a majority of 133. A rematch in 1951 resulted in an increased majority of 1,639 for Heath. On both occasions a young Conservative candidate for the neighbouring Dartford seat, Margaret Roberts (later Thatcher), lost.
After graduating from Oxford, Heath had served in the Second World War as a Royal Artillery officer, taking part in the Normandy landings as an adjutant; he was mentioned in despatches for his service in France, and awarded a military MBE. After that he became a civil servant, but resigned from that to seek the Conservative nomination for Bexley. In Parliament he rose up the greasy pole via the Whips office, joining Cabinet in 1955 as Chief Whip. Following the Conservative loss of the 1964 general election Heath won the Conservative leadership contest of 1965, polling 150 votes against 133 for Reginald Maudling and 15 for Enoch Powell. He became Leader of the Opposition.
Party leaders usually get a boost in their constituencies at general election time, and that might well have saved Heath in 1966; he held his seat by just 2,333 votes. He did rather better in 1970, increasing his majority in Bexley to 8,058 despite the presence of an independent spoiler candidate who had changed his name to Edward Heath for the election. The Conservatives unexpectedly won the 1970 general election, and Heath became Prime Minister.
Heath's three-and-a-half years as Prime Minister reshaped the country. They certainly reshaped the local government map: the two-tier system of county and district councils dates from the Heath administration and in many areas of England remains almost unaltered today. Heath saw his greatest achievement as Britain's accession to the European Economic Community, which took effect on 1st January 1973. The decimalisation of Britain's coinage was completed. Against this, Heath's government came at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and his power-sharing deal to bring peace - the Sunningdale Agreement - quickly fell apart in the face of Unionist opposition. The Ulster Unionist MPs resigned the Conservative whip, and Northern Ireland's party system has been divorced from Great Britain's ever since. The Barber economic boom quickly turned into a Barber economic bust, inflation soared, and the winter of 1973-74 saw the introduction of a three-day week in the face of industrial action from the National Union of Mineworkers. On 7th February 1974, Heath asked the Queen for a dissolution on the question of "Who governs Britain?" Because the Queen was in New Zealand at the time for the Commonwealth Games in Christchurch, the dissolution was granted by the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret acting as Counsellors of State.
The February 1974 election was fought on new boundaries, reflecting the reorganisation of London government in the previous decade. The new London Borough of Bexley was allocated three parliamentary seats, which meant that the Chislehurst constituency - which straddled the boundary between Bexley and Bromley - would have to be broken up. The Sidcup part of the Chislehurst seat was added to Old Bexley to create a new Sidcup constituency, while the rest of the Bexley constituency was renamed as Bexleyheath to reflect the boundary change. The boundary changes effectively forced the Chislehurst MP Dame Patricia Hornsby-Smith out of Parliament: she had intended to seek the Conservative nomination for Sidcup, but found herself unable to challenge her party leader. Hornsby-Smith instead contested the Aldridge-Brownhills seat in the West Midlands, which she lost.
"Who governs Britain?" Well, not Edward Heath as it turned out. The result of the February 1974 general election was inconclusive, with a hung parliament being returned for the first time since 1929. Heath's Conservatives had won the most votes, but Labour had won the most seats. After an attempt to seek Liberal support for a Conservative minority government failed, Heath tendered his resignation as Prime Minister. Harold Wilson, returning for a third term as Labour Prime Minister, called a new election for October 1974 at which his administration won a bare majority.
That was the end of Edward Heath's government career. He was challenged for the Conservative leadership in 1975 by Margaret Thatcher, resigned after finishing behind Thatcher in the first round, and went to the backbenches. There he remained until finally retiring from the Commons in 2001, after more than 50 years' continuous service as an MP. In 1992 Heath became a Knight of the Garter and (following the retirement of Sir Bernard Braine) the Father of the House.
Sir Edward Heath's Sidcup constituency was renamed as Old Bexley and Sidcup in 1983, with no change to its boundaries. The current seat of that name contains the Welling and East Wickham areas, which as previously stated were in the Bexleyheath constituency from 1974 to 1997. Bexleyheath was a more marginal Conservative seat than Old Bexley and Sidcup, but it only returned one MP during this period. Sir Cyril Townsend had been an officer in the Durham Light Infantry for ten years before entering politics, serving in Cyprus and Malaya and as ADC to the governor of Hong Kong. Townsend remained on the backbenches throughout his 23 years in the Commons; his lasting legacy is the private member's bill he introduced in 1977, which became the Protection of Children Act 1978.
The constituencies in Bexley borough were redrawn for the 1997 election, with the number of seats in Bexley and Greenwich reducing from six to five. The Old Bexley and Sidcup seat was expanded to take in Welling and East Wickham from the former Bexleyheath seat, together with a small area around Falconwood railway station which had been transferred into Bexley borough from Greenwich in the early 1990s. The new boundaries produced a Conservative seat which was strong enough to withstand the Labour landslde of 1997: Heath, by now in his seventies, held the redrawn seat with a majority of 3,569.
Sir Edward Heath's successor as MP for Old Bexley and Sidcup had also started his political career young. Derek Conway had been elected to Gateshead council in 1974 at the age of 21, and he became leader of the Conservative group on Tyne and Wear county council at 26. After contesting Labour seats in the north-east in October 1974 and 1979, in 1983 Conway was elected to Parliament as MP for Shrewsbury and Atcham. He served three terms as MP for that seat, and was a government whip from 1993 until 1997 when he was swept away by the Labour landslide. Old Bexley and Sidcup, which Conway represented from 2001 to 2010, was a safer berth for him.
Derek Conway's fall from grace was spectacular. In January 2008 the Commons Standards and Privileges committee reported that he had paid a large salary to his son Freddie for work as a part-time researcher, while Freddie was a full-time student at Newcastle University. The committee concluded that there was no record of what work Freddie had done and that his salary was too high to represent a good use of Commons money. Conway was ordered to repay £13,000, was suspended for ten sitting days, and had the Conservative whip withdrawn. A further report by the standards committee the following year resulted in Conway being ordered to repay a further £3,758 which he had overpaid to his other son Henry.
The disgrace of Derek Conway provided an opportunity for another Conservative MP. James Brokenshire, a former corporate lawyer, had entered the Commons in 2005 by gaining the Hornchurch constituency, in the London Borough of Havering, from Labour. The Hornchurch seat was due to be abolished at the 2010 general election, and Brokenshire unsuccessfully applied for the Conservative nomination in a string of safe seats before he finally won the selection for Old Bexley and Sidcup in 2008. Old Bexley and Sidcup's boundary changes in 2010 were minor, with the Danson Park area transferred out of the seat into the Bexleyheath and Crayford constituency.
James Brokenshire served as a Home Office minister throughout the Coalition government, piloting the Modern Slavery Act 2013 through Parliament. He was sworn of the Privy Council in 2015. In 2016 he was appointed to Theresa May's first Cabinet with the traditionally-difficult role of Northern Ireland secretary, in which role he called snap elections to the Stormont Assembly in 2017 following the Renewable Heat Incentive scandal.
In December 2017, Brokenshire started coughing up blood. He sought medical advice, and tests revealed early-stage lung cancer. He had never smoked. Brokenshire resigned as Northern Ireland secretary on his 50th birthday to put his health first, and in January 2018 he had part of his lung removed. Three months later he was back in the Cabinet with the job of Housing, Communities and Local Government secretary. He brought in legislation restricting landlords' rights to evict their tenants and capping most tenancy fees and deposits.
James Brokenshire was not included in the Johnson cabinet, but did go back to being a junior Home Office minister in 2020 in recognition of his effectiveness and competence as a minister. Unfortunately, his cancer returned. He took leave of absence in January 2021 in advance of another lung operation, and resigned from government in July after failing to recover. He passed away on 7th October 2021, at the appallingly early age of 53.
The by-election to replace James Brokenshire took place on 2nd December 2021 and was comfortably won by the new Conservative candidate Louie French, the deputy leader of Bexley council where he represents Falconwood and Welling ward. In December 2019 French was the Conservative candidate for the neighbouring constituency of Eltham. Before entering the Commons he worked in financial services in the City, specialising in sustainable investing and research. He enjoyed a majority of 4,478 votes over Labour, just over 20 percentage points.
French represents a seat which, as already stated, is part of Greater London in practice but very unlike it in character. The 2021 census returns from Old Bexley and Sidcup's constituent wards are very consistent and paint a clear picture of a seat which is dominated by the lower middle class. If we exclude three wards whose census return is distorted by large RAF bases, then Old Bexley and Sidcup has both of the top two wards in England and Wales for those working in administrative and secretarial occupations (Blackfen and Lamorbey, and Blendon and Penhil), with a third ward (Falconwood and Welling) in the top 100. Four of the constituency's seven wards are in the top 10 in London for population born in the UK, three are in the top 10 in London for White British ethnicity, two are in the top 10 in London for level 2 qualifications (5+ GCSE passes or equivalent), and Blensdon and Penhill ward is in the top 10 in London for owner-occupation. East Wickham ward just makes the top 100 wards in England and Wales for Buddhism (1.6%). This is an area which has been relatively unaffected by the transformation of London into a world city, where detached and semi-detached housing, much of it built on garden-city principles, predominates.
The 2024 boundary changes leave this seat largely unchanged apart from realignment to Bexley's ward boundaries, which were redrawn in 2018; this had the effect of expanding the seat slightly by moving Damson Park back in from Bexleyheath and Crawford. A draft proposal to drop Old Bexley from the name of the constituency, with a renaming to "Sidcup and Welling", did not make the final cut.
With no worries from the Boundary Commission in the near future, Louie French has that increasingly rare thing: a safe Conservative seat within Greater London. Old Bexley and Sidcup has already given us one Conservative Prime Minister; there's no reason why that might not happen again some time in the future.
