The 1915 Merthyr Tydfil by-election was a parliamentary by-election held on 25 November 1915 for the British House of Commons constituency of Merthyr Tydfil in Glamorganshire, Wales.
The seat had become vacant when the constituency's Labour Member of Parliament (MP), Keir Hardie, died on 26 September 1915, aged 59. He had held the seat since the 1900 general election, when he was elected as one of the first two Labour MPs.
In May 1915 the Liberals, the Conservatives and Labour had formed a Coalition Government, although the majority of the Labour Party had stayed outside the Government. Furthermore, from August 1914 until June 1918, a war-time electoral truce existed between the three parties; the party holding a seat would not be opposed by the other two at a by-election. The Conservatives and Liberals therefore did not contest the by-election.
Merthyr Tydfil was a miners' seat, and power within the local Labour Party lay within the locally dominant trade union, the South Wales Miners' Federation. The SWMF balloted their members to determine the Labour candidate.
The selection procedure quickly became a battle between competing factions of the Independent Labour Party, played out within the administrative structures of the SWMF. The two principal candidates were James Winstone, the President of the Federation, and Charles Stanton, a miners' agent in the constituency.
Winstone was anti-conscriptionist and pro-Union of Democratic Control. Stanton, on the other hand, was Vice-President of the British Workers League, a 'patriotic labour' group which was anti-socialist and pro-war.[1] Stanton had fought East Glamorganshire as a Labour candidate in December 1910.
The SWMF conducted three successive ballots after which Winstone was narrowly selected.
| Candidate | First ballot[2] | Second ballot[3] | Third ballot: 28 October | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Votes | Votes | Votes | % | ||
| James Winstone | 2,641 | 4,405 | 7,832 | 55.7 | |
| Charles Stanton | 2,699 | 4,838 | 6,232 | 44.3 | |
| John Williams | 2,508 | 4,391 | N/A | N/A | |
| Robert Smillie | 1,816 | N/A | N/A | N/A | |
| Enoch Morrell | 1,623 | N/A | N/A | N/A | |
| Majority | 1,600 | 11.4 | |||
| Turnout | 14,064 | Unknown | |||
Following the result of the selection, Stanton resigned as a miners' agent and fought the election as a pro-war 'National' candidate. He attracted support from the local Liberals and Conservatives on a 'straight war ticket "to fight against the Huns for our homeland."'[4] He was designated as Independent Labour.[5]
The wife of David Watts Morgan, Agent of the No. 1 Rhondda District of the SWMF and to be elected Labour MP for Rhondda East in 1918, supported Stanton, an act he (Morgan) later had to apologise for.[6]
On a reduced turnout, Stanton won the seat with a majority of 4,206 votes.
At the 1918 general election, the Merthyr seat was divided into two single-member constituencies. Stanton fought the Aberdare seat and won it by a larger majority, defeating the pacifist Labour candidate Thomas Evan Nicholas. The British Workers League had transformed itself into the National Democratic and Labour Party and Stanton stood under its label, with the Coalition Coupon.