Carmarthen by-election, 1924

The Carmarthen by-election, 1924 was a parliamentary by-election for the British House of Commons constituency of Carmarthen in West Wales held on 14 August 1924.

The by-election was caused by the resignation of the sitting Liberal MP, Sir Ellis Ellis-Griffith. Ellis-Griffith was 64 years old and had first been elected an MP in 1895. Soon after being elected for Carmarthen at the 1923 general election he made it known to his local party that he would not be standing again at the next election. He had been in public life a long time and was one Liberal who had not supported the decision of the party to allow the minority Labour government to take office in January 1924. According to one source, local Liberal opinion in July 1924 favoured an immediate appeal to the electorate and Ellis-Griffith resigned from Parliament using the traditional device of applying for the Chiltern Hundreds at the end of that month.

The main local issue in the by-election was the importance of agriculture, given the largely rural nature of the constituency. However an interesting question was how far would the fact that Sir Alfred Stephens and the Reverend Owen were both Welsh speakers, whereas Mond was not, affect the attitude of the electors and how far, if at all, this matter would resonate with Welsh national feeling in the area. On UK wide issues, the main battleground was the fight between socialist and anti-socialist feeling. Mond took up the anti-socialist crusade with vigour and had Lloyd George come to Carmarthen to support him on this, against the background of the record and statements of the Labour government and Labour ministers.

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