LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS, 1918-39
Parliamentary Elections. In 1918 the Boundary Commission extended the Chester constituency to cover
Hoole urban district and Chester rural district as well
as the county borough, while retaining the name City
of Chester and keeping the city sheriff as the returning
officer. (fn. 13) The Conservatives dominated the constituency between the wars, usually winning over half the
votes cast. Sir Owen Philipps was succeeded as M.P. in
1922 by Sir Charles Cayzer, Bt., who served until his
death in 1940. The Liberals were in second place at
each general election apart from 1922, but were well
behind except in 1929. The Labour Party fielded a
candidate for the first time in 1918 and from the 1920s
mustered between 4,500 and 6,500 votes. (fn. 14) An attempt
to establish a Chester branch of the British Union of
Fascists in 1934 failed when the organizer could find
no one to rent him a hall for a meeting to be addressed
by Sir Oswald Mosley. (fn. 15)
Municipal Politics. (fn. 16) Municipal politics were also
dominated by the Conservatives, who remained the
majority party on the council. The two main parties
generally chose the mayor alternately and invited him
to serve a second successive term. Aldermen, usually
former mayors, were appointed by the council, and
held office until resignation or death. The Labour
Party made little headway. Until the collapse of the
coalition government in 1922, there was a pact
between Tories and Liberals not to compete with
one another in local elections. Afterwards, out of a
total council membership of 40 (44 after 1936), the
Conservatives usually had between 16 and 19 seats, and
the Liberals between 10 and 14. Until 1919 the only
representative of organized labour was not a candidate
of the official Labour Party; thereafter, there were
usually between seven and nine official Labour councillors, although in 1928, their worst year, they shrank
to three. Even so, in 1930 Labour took its turn in
choosing the mayor, as well as aldermen in proportion
to the number of its councillors, an arrangement which
often caused dissension. A mayor's purse of £250 was
first granted in 1925 after a highly respected councillor
turned down the mayoralty on financial grounds. The
first female councillor was Mrs. Phyllis Brown, from the
department store family, who was elected as a Liberal in
1920. In 1933 she became the first female alderman and
in 1939 the first female mayor. Another prominent
woman councillor was Labour's Mrs. Kate Clarke, first
a candidate in 1920, elected to the council in 1929, the
first female sheriff in 1937, and mayor 1939-40. (fn. 1)
The most influential council official was the town
clerk, the universally respected and often outspoken
J. H. Dickson, who served from 1903 to 1939 and was
also closely involved with the work of the Council of
Social Welfare and the Royal Infirmary. (fn. 2) Also notable
was Charles Greenwood, who made a significant
contribution to town planning and conservation
during his long period as city engineer and surveyor
(1922-53). (fn. 3)
Because Labour was relatively weak in Chester, the
question whether responsibility for social and environmental reform was to be public or private was debated
on its merits rather than on party-political lines.
Opponents of public provision could not, as elsewhere,
denigrate and often defeat proposals merely by asserting that they were advocated on impractical ideological
grounds by a profligate Labour Party. The chief
exponent of publicly owned utilities before the First
World War had been a Conservative, B. C. Roberts, (fn. 4)
but after his death in 1923 there was little enthusiasm
for public enterprise, apart from the purchase of the
Overleigh cemetery in 1933 after complaints about its
upkeep. (fn. 5)
The burden of the rates was largely borne by
householders and retailers. Unusually for a town of
Chester's size, shopkeepers were poorly represented on
the corporation: in 1925 the mayor claimed that they
paid three quarters of the rates but formed only a
third of the council. (fn. 6) The Chester Chamber of Trade,
inaugurated in 1921, periodically exhorted its members to obtain greater representation but recognized
that they disliked being 'politically labelled' and
apparently relied on householders to keep down the
rates. An additional weapon in the battle for 'economy' was the threat to call an electors' meeting
under the Borough Funds Acts. A short-lived ratepayers' association was formed in the late 1930s under
the pressure of rapidly rising rates. (fn. 7) Its absence earlier
may well have reflected satisfaction with the council:
finance committee chairmen could boast that rates in
Chester were much lower than the national average
for county boroughs. As elsewhere, the rates increased
because of central government initiatives rather than
local ones. Health and education were the main
spending areas. In 1939 2s. 9d. out of Chester's total
rate of 13s. 3d. in the pound was spent on public
health, largely on the City Hospital. Education cost
almost as much, and public assistance was third, at 1s.
9d. Housing and town planning together cost the
ratepayers only 6¼d. (fn. 8)
Public Services. The corporation's chief assets in offsetting the rates were its public and livestock markets.
It also had an income from letting the Roodee for the
race meeting and for pasture during the rest of the
year. (fn. 9) Neither the electricity works nor the tram system
made any significant contribution. Electricity was from
1913 provided by a hydroelectric generating station,
cost-effective but of limited capacity, built on the site
of the Dee Mills. (fn. 10) After the acquisition in 1922 of the
government-owned power station at Queensferry, the
area supplied was extended beyond the city, and by
1930 the municipal undertaking supplied an area of
144 square miles around Chester. Costs were kept
down by avoiding investment in modernization, and
the long-overdue transfer to alternating current in
1930 increased electricity bills by 33 per cent. By
1939, however, the enterprise was in profit again, and
able to reduce its prices. (fn. 11)
Chester's municipally owned transport system illustrates the pressures brought by private interests able to
harness ratepayers' anger at utilities which burdened
the rates. The tram system was not financially selfsupporting between the World Wars, partly because of
the debt incurred when the council bought and electrified it, (fn. 12) and partly because the tramways committee
was responsible for street repairs. In 1928, rather than
renovate the system, which needed new cars and tracks,
the council converted to motor buses which it proposed to run on routes extending over a 10-mile radius
from the city centre. The move was vigorously
opposed, and a campaign was mounted to abandon
the city routes to the privately owned Crosville Bus
Company, whose proprietor, Claude Crosland-Taylor,
was a member of the council. The council compromised and agreed to reduce the corporation's bus
routes to a radius of three miles from the centre,
sufficient to serve the built-up areas outside the borough boundary at Newton, Hoole, and Great
Boughton. (fn. 1) Although the first corporation buses
appeared in 1930, there was continuing pressure to
sell or lease the routes to Crosville. The transport
committee claimed that it ran at a profit and had
contributed greatly to reducing traffic jams in the
city; by 1936 it was indeed profitable, but still financing
the tramway debt incurred in 1903. (fn. 2)
Among the privately owned utilities, the Gas Company provoked little public comment and was evidently
adequate for the city's needs. The water supply, however, remained an issue, because dirty water contributed to Chester's poor health record, a fact not publicly
acknowledged. From 1914, the corporation made
several attempts to buy the Water Company, which
had failed to provide sedimentation tanks and still
relied on the less effective method of sand filtration
to purify the supply. (fn. 3) In 1928, after the failure of yet
another attempt at purchase, (fn. 4) the chairman of the
public health committee admitted publicly that the
standard of water was unsatisfactory. Its quality was
in fact deteriorating. From 1928 the Water Company
briefly chlorinated the supply, before beginning extensive improvements, virtually complete by 1933. (fn. 5) In
1932 the corporation opened a new sewage works
costing over £100,000. (fn. 6) Those improvements were
complemented by the establishment of the Dee Catchment Board to control pollution on the river as a
whole. By 1939 the river, which had hitherto been
seriously polluted, was considered relatively clean. (fn. 7)
Borough Extension. (fn. 8) The council had difficulty in
finding land for development within the borough
boundaries, and sometimes had to buy sites for housing in the surrounding rural districts. In such areas the
cost of roads, electricity, sewerage, and other services
laid on by the borough could not be recovered because
the rates went to the county. The population within the
city boundary rose very slowly, and Chester, one of the
smallest county boroughs, was in danger of losing its
independent status. The incorporation of the built-up
areas outside the boundary into the county borough
thus became extremely desirable. (fn. 9) In 1932 the council
planned a large extension into both Cheshire and
Flintshire, but dropped the proposal when it became
clear that a parliamentary Bill would be vigorously
contested by Cheshire county council and that the
government would not allow the borough to extend
across the Welsh border. (fn. 10) In 1936, however, the
county agreed to surrender Blacon, the built-up part
of Newton, and a part of Hoole which included the
City Hospital and the railway station. (fn. 11)