Catalogue description Records of the Bristol South-East Constituency Labour Party

Unless otherwise stated the records relate to the Bristol South East Constituency Labour party

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Labour Party, Bristol South East Constituency

Searchers wishing to consult records less than 30 years old must obtain prior permission from the Secretary.

Deposited in the Bristol Record Office by Cllr. P.Tatlow, Secretary, Bristol East Constituency Labour Party

The East Bristol Divisional Labour Party was founded in St.George in May 1918. There had already been Labour representation on the Bristol Council but many of the early councillors were radical rather than socialist. On four previous occasions Labour had contested the Bristol East seat which had been held by the Liberals since its creation in 1885. It was a predominantly working class area, and in no other Bristol constituency did Labour put up a candidate before 1918. In the election of that year, the Labour candidate in Bristol East came a close second and in 1922 closer still. In 1923 the candidate was Walter Baker, general Secretary of the U.P.W., and this time Bristol East returned its first Labour MP. Baker worked tirelessly for the unemployed until his death in 1930. By now Bristol East was regarded as a safe Labour seat, and a member of the second Labour government, the Solicitor-General, Sir Stafford Cripps, was without a seat. In 1931 he was elected to represent the constituency.

The 1930s saw a very strong drive to increase membership, particularly among women and women's sections flourished, so did a Labour League of Youth branch. In 1932 the Bristol East Labour Party acquired new premises at 326 Church Road, St.George, which formed the party headquarters, while the new Walter Baker Hall was used for public meetings and social events. Some of Cripp's surviving constituency correspondence illustrates the type of problems with which he and the Labour Councillors for the area were grappling.

The support given by Stafford Cripps, with the full backing of his constituency party, to the United Front of the Socialist League (which he helped to found), the ILP and the Communist Party to fight fascism, was opposed by the parliamentary leadership. His support for a more broadly based Popular Front eventually led in 1939 to his expulsion from the party. Bristol East Labour Party immediately launched a petition campaign to get him re-instated. It was unsuccessful. In 1943 the constituency party was itself disaffiliated for supporting a small group of members who attemped to contest an election in Bristol Central, contrary to government and party policy during the war. After the war both Cripps and the party were accepted back into the fold and with the subsequent Labour victory, Cripps became Chancellor of the Exchequer. He resigned through ill-health in 1950. In 1948 after a series of boundary changes, the Bristol East constituency became the Bristol South East constituency. In 1950 Anthony Wedgwood Benn was selected to replace Cripps. Ten years later on the death of his father, Lord Stansgate, Tony Benn inherited his peerage and was therefore ineligible to retain his seat in the Commons. For the next three years, he and the constituency party fought for his right to retain his seat and 1963 the Peerage Act permitted individuals to renounce an inherited peerage for life. He continued to serve as MP for Bristol South East until boundary changes in 1983 abolished the constituency.

During that period he served as Minister for Industry and then as Minister for Energy in the 1974-1979 Labour government and was a candidate for the leadership of the Labour party in 1976.

The surviving constituency records include minute books and annual reports from 1922, correspondence files from 1931, accounts from 1918, and election material from 1931. Many of the issues already referred to in the Introduction are reflected in the records. The key figure throughout the collection is Herbert Rogers, a founder member of the constituency party, and for many years its secretary, as well as a councillor for St.George East ward. For further details of the history of the constituency party, see 39035/151

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