‘An Odious Campaign’: The Ross and Cromarty By-Election 1936

by Rob McInroy

When former Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and his son Malcolm lost their seats in the 1935 General Election, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin wanted both men returned to Parliament quickly. The seemingly safe seat of Ross and Cromarty became vacant in January 1936. Malcolm MacDonald was selected to be the National Government candidate. What should have been a formality became a bitter and extraordinary by-election. Enraged by this apparent attempt to foist a former Labour MP on them, the local Liberal and Unionist Associations decided to field independent candidates. The Unionists’ choice of candidate – Randolph Churchill, son of Winston Churchill – proved explosive.

So began a memorable, abusive and ‘odious’ campaign contested by the sons of two British Prime Ministers, men who loathed one another and made no attempt to conceal the fact. Remarkably, no fewer than six children of previous, current or future Prime Ministers would be involved in the campaign, a record that is unlikely to be beaten. The campaign, occurring during the worst winter for 50 years, encompassed the death of King George V, the hospitalisation of a candidate, car crashes aplenty, rampaging deer and candidates coming perilously close to being run out of town by enraged locals.

The 1936 Ross and Cromarty by-election is an entertaining slice of history that resonates with current British Parliamentary politics.

Paperback

First published January 1, 2025

About the author

Rob McInroy is the author of Cuddies Strip, a novel based on true crimes in 1930s Scotland, published by Ringwood Publishing. He has won four short story competitions in the past eighteen months (Hissac, ChipLit Fest, Writing Magazine and the Bedford International Writing Competition). His short stories have been placed or shortlisted in a further sixteen competitions in the past eighteen months. In 2018 he was a winner of the Bradford Literature Festival Northern Noir Crime Novel competition with Cuddies Strip and in 2019, he won the Darling Axe Novel First Page Prize with another novel, Cloudland. He was born in Crieff, Perthshire and his writing is all based on the Perthshire area, from the 1920s to the 2010s. He has an MA (with distinction) in Creative Writing and a PhD in American Literature, both from the University of Hull. He currently lives in Yorkshire.

The follow-up to Cuddies Strip, Barossa Street, set during the abdication crisis of 1936, is published on 11 May 2022