West Carmarthenshire (UK Parliament constituency)

West Carmarthenshire
Former County constituency for the House of Commons
1885–1918
Number of members	one
Created from	Carmarthenshire

West Carmarthenshire was a parliamentary constituency in Wales which returned one Member of Parliament to the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.

It was created for the 1885 general election, when the old two-member Carmarthenshire constituency was divided into two new single-member seats: East Carmarthenshire and West Carmarthenshire, both of which were in turn abolished for the 1918 general election.

The constituency included the Sessional Divisions of Carmarthen, Llanboidy, Llanfihangel-ar-Arth, Newcastle Emlyn, and St Clears, and parts of the Sessional Divisions of Llandilo and Llandovery.

At the first election in 1885, the two sitting member for the former constituency of Carmarthenshire faced each other. The Conservative candidate, Viscount Emlyn, although most of his family property lay in the eastern part of the county, calculated that his chances there would be negligible given the growing industrial population which had been a key factor in the triumph of the Liberal candidate, Edward Sartoris at the 1868 General Election. He was opposed by the Liberal W.R.H. Powell, himself a former Conservative supporter who had first declared his support for the Liberals at the 1874 election. Powell now proclaimed that he had a duty to the Liberal cause to oppose Emlyn.

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