Glamorganshire

Administration

From the 1790s a call was made for parliamentary reform to address the imbalance between the number of Members of Parliament for each Welsh county and the population each seat represented. Radnorshire had only a tenth of the population of Glamorganshire, though Radnorshire had one MP to Glamorganshire's two (Glamorgan and the District of Cardiff). The First Reform Act (1832) gave five more seats to Wales, three went to Glamorganshire. The Act increased the number of MPs for Glamorganshire from one to two, it created the separate District of Swansea and Merthyr Tydfil became a borough constituency. Reflecting the increased importance and wealth of Merthyr the borough was given a second MP after the Reform Act 1867. However, the 1867 Act had only a limited impact in Glamorgan as the majority of the population lived in the county constituency. Out of 162,241 inhabitants of the county in 1880, only 12,785 had the vote. Conversely, the borough electorate, in Cardiff, Swansea and Merthyr Tydfil had been greatly expanded. This was particularly true of Merthyr where the electorate was increased tenfold to 14,577. As a result, the nonconformist radical, Henry Richard, was returned as senior member for Merthyr, an important watershed in Welsh political history.