On This Day, 16 December 1918

Birmingham Daily Post 

Monday 16 December 1918

THE POLLING IN THE MIDLANDS

BIRMINGHAM’S UNEVENTFUL DAY.

ENTHUSIASM OF THE WOMEN VOTERS.

The polling in Birmingham on Saturday was as quiet and generally uneventful as if there were no great issues to be decided. Now and again cars displaying party placards were seen in the streets, but, on the whole, there was little or no excitement, and the polling stations, until the last hours, were not unduly crowded. Such was the apathy in some quarters that people who are ordinarily regarded as intelligent had be reminded that they had a duty to perform by registering their vote. Party favours were probably less in evidence than ever before, perhaps a welcome evidence that sectional feeling was forgotten in the desire to back the Coalition as the only national party. Up till ten o’clock some of the polling stations had been visited by less than a score of people, but after noon, when work was over, the presiding officers were kept more busily employed.

One of the most surprising features of the situation was the heavy polling by women in some of the industrial districts. Whilst the electoral campaign was in progress, women were usually in very small minority at candidates’ meetings, but on Saturday they came forward in surprisingly large numbers. At the Montgomery Street booth, in the Sparkbrook Division, for instance, it was estimated that, at five o’clock, women had voted in the proportion of four to one. In the better class districts the ladies, as was expected, took advantage in considerable numbers of their newly-won rights, and there is little doubt that Sir Francis Lowe and Alderman Neville Chamberlain profited largely in Edgbaston and Ladywood Divisions by the extension of the franchise. In some of the other districts it is not easy to say what happened. It should be remembered that Labour politicians are among the keenest, and that they have probably been able to get their womenfolk to second their efforts. In Sparkbrook, Mr. Spires, the Labour and Co-operative candidate, was much indebted to ladies for the support he got, although it is quite true to say that many women co-operators, distrustful of the confiscatory designs of Labour, preferred to support other candidates.

PATRIOTIC SOLDIERS RELATIVES

Soldiers’ mothers and wives were strongly in favour of the Coalition, as far as one could gather. Not that they were satisfied with the present arrangements for pensions and allowances, but they saw more hope for betterment in the return of a patriotic combination of statesmen than in the specious promises of Labour men, which common sense shows cannot be redeemed. Writing of patriotism, one thinks with some amusement of the eleventh-hour conversion of the so-called Progressive candidates in the Yardley Division. Both the Labour and the Liberal candidates, putting them in the order of their standing in the election, were urging in their mural literature that Germany should be made to bear the cost of war. Hitherto the Labour Party especially, has been urging conscription of wealth in this country as a means of meeting war taxation, but in Yardley, at any rate, scruples in favour of “our German brothers” were forgotten at the last moment, and a popular bait was set.

As has been indicated, the surprise of the polling was the number of women voters. As in Ladywood and Edgbaston, so in Moseley and King’s Heath they were strongly in evidence, and Sir Hallewell Rogers was favourite with them. In Aston and Deritend the ladies were less in evidence, but a good many of them visited the stations in the evening with their husbands. A claim to be the first woman in Birmingham to vote for the Coalition is made Mrs. Fanny E. Vince, of Chantry Road, Moseley. She marked her paper at 7 a.m., and was on the scene before the returning officer. In the Duddeston Division of the voters was lady over 90 years of age, but many old women did not choose to exercise their privilege regarding women’s suffrage as a new-fangled innovation.

In the afternoon and evening voting was more brisk, but there was nothing to retrieve the dullness of the day. At the close of the poll the ballot boxes were conveyed from the stations in the eleven divisions in which there were contests to the Council House, those in the outlying districts being collected by motor-bus.