The Westbury by-election was a Parliamentary by-election held on 22 February 1911. The constituency returned one

Member of Parliament A member of parliament (MP) is the representative in parliament of the people who live in their electoral district. In many countries with bicameral parliaments, this term refers only to members of the lower house since upper house members of ...

(MP) to the

House of Commons The House of Commons is the name for the elected lower house of the bicameral parliaments of the United Kingdom and Canada. In both of these countries, the Commons holds much more legislative power than the nominally upper house of parliament. ...

of the

Parliament of the United Kingdom The Parliament of the United Kingdom is the supreme legislative body of the United Kingdom, the Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories. It meets at the Palace of Westminster, London. It alone possesses legislative suprema ...

, elected by the

first past the post In a first-past-the-post electoral system (FPTP or FPP), formally called single-member plurality voting (SMP) when used in single-member districts or informally choose-one voting in contrast to ranked voting, or score voting, voters cast their ...

voting system.

Vacancy

The sitting Liberal Member for Westbury, Sir John Fuller, resigned his seat in the House of Commons on his appointment as

Governor of Victoria The governor of Victoria is the representative of the monarch, King Charles III, in the Australian state of Victoria. The governor is one of seven viceregal representatives in the country, analogous to the governors of the other states, and the ...

. He had represented the constituency since 1900, when he gained it from the

Conservatives Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy that seeks to promote and to preserve traditional institutions, practices, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civilization in ...

Electoral history

Candidates

*The new Liberal candidate was Geoffrey Howard, who had previously been the member for Eskdale in Cumberland. He had been defeated at the last general election in December 1910. Since then he had served as a Private Secretary to the Prime Minister,

H. H. Asquith Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, (12 September 1852 – 15 February 1928), generally known as H. H. Asquith, was a British statesman and Liberal Party politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom f ...

. *The Conservatives re-selected local man George Palmer, their defeated candidate from the last election. He had been

High Sheriff of Wiltshire This is a list of the Sheriffs and (after 1 April 1974) High Sheriffs of Wiltshire. Until the 14th century, the shrievalty was held ''ex officio'' by the castellans of Old Sarum Castle. On 1 April 1974, under the provisions of the Local Gov ...

in 1903 and since 1910 had been a Lieutenant-Colonel commanding the

Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry The Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry (RWY) was a Yeomanry regiment of the Kingdom of Great Britain and the United Kingdom established in 1794. It was disbanded as an independent Territorial Army unit in 1967, a time when the strength of the Territorial ...

.‘PALMER, Brig.-General George Llewellen’, Who Was Who, A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 1920–2007; online edn, Oxford University Press, Dec 200
accessed 12 Dec 2013
/ref>

Result

On an increased turnout, the Liberal Party held the seat with only a 1.8% swing against them.

Aftermath

A general election was due to take place by the end of 1915, and by the autumn of 1914, the following candidates had been adopted to contest it at Westbury. *Liberal Party: Geoffrey Howard *Unionist Party: George Palmer However, due to the outbreak of war, there was no general election until 1918. At the 1918 general election, a former Liberal member of parliament, who had joined the Labour Party in 1916, intervened in the contest, handing the seat to the Unionists. *Candidate endorsed by the Coalition Government.

References

{{By-elections to the 30th UK Parliament 1911 in England 1911 elections in the United Kingdom By-elections to the Parliament of the United Kingdom in Wiltshire constituencies 20th century in Wiltshire