I am writing my dissertation for my final year of university about left-wing organisation in 1930s Britain (Labour, Communist Party, etc) and I have a section where I assess the parties' electoral successes/failures. I can get all election results at both the national and local level for all parties (big and small) on Wikipedia but this does not provide a source for where they got it from - I obviously cannot cite Wikipedia.
Does anyone know an official source for British elections in the 1930s, both national and local, including small parties?
I have asked my dissertation tutor and he is also stumped; searching gov.uk and databases I have access to through uni have also brought nothing.
Any help would be much appreciated, thank you!
The British newspaper archive has all the local newspapers available so you could cite those when your looking at the individual constituencies?
Otherwise Craig, F. W. S. (1969). British parliamentary election results 1918–1949 or any of his other reference books could be of use
Contact the BBC archives centre. You can access them with an appointment.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/informationandarchives/access_archives/bbc_written_archives_centre
When considering election results, the BBC archives are a reasonable source, even for an academic essay.
Election results in the UK are not, in my opinion, something that need to be underpinned by an academic source because they are not opinion, nor are they contentious in any way in terms of the actual result.
We are lucky in the UK that election results are not generally disputed, thereby creating a situation where there is a consensus between the different media outlets as to what the result is, irrespective of their political analysis or point of view. The instances where one media outlet reports one result and another reports a different one are vanishingly rare, if not non existent.
This means that for elections, the BBC’s reports of the results, for example, can be reasonably considered sacrosanct.
Obviously the media source you use must be ‘reputable’ and despite their lack of integrity in the current day, the BBC would be considered reputable in this context.
Be sure to ensure you explain your logic to the examiner in a succinct way, thus not wasting words for your count but clearly recognising you have considered the resource suitability.
I doubt there exists an academic resource that simply lists election results. You would need to consult multiple academic resources that analyse specific results, just to reference the result itself, which is akin to using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
The Parliament website is awful, but does have this information buried deep, often within downloadable fact files or briefing papers. This may be a good place to start.
For local elections in the 1930s, I would very strongly recommend Bob Morley and Sam Davies' wonderful series on County Borough Elections: https://www.crcpress.com/County-Borough-Elections-in-England-and-Wales-1919-1938/book-series/COUNTYBOROUGHS
It remains incomplete but they are going through the County Boroughs in order A-Z and it could be very useful if you wanted to zoom in or take a case study of an area where Labour or the CPGB achieved success, e.g. East Ham. They seem to have got up to Hull.
Hope that might help, or at least prove interesting even if it doesn't!
Getting this information can be a pain, but fortunately the House of Commons actually keeps up to date election statistics stretching back to 1918, buried deep within the catacombs of its terribly designed website.
https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/CBP-7529#fullreport
Scroll to the bottom, there's a PDF with lots of nice tables of results. There is also a variety of statistics on a downloadable Excel document. However, it might not contain smaller parties, which often get clumped under 'other'. Fortunately, there are research briefings on every election.
The book they use as a source is Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, British Electoral Facts 1832-2006, which probably has more information.