1911 Westbury by-election
1911 UK parliamentary by-election
The 1911 Westbury by-election was a Parliamentary by-election held on 22 February 1911. The constituency returned one Member of Parliament (MP) to the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, elected by the first past the post voting system.
Vacancy
The sitting Liberal Member for Westbury, Sir John Fuller, resigned his seat in the House of Commons on his appointment as Governor of Victoria. He had represented the constituency since 1900, when he gained it from the Conservatives.
Electoral history
Candidates
The new Liberal candidate was Geoffrey Howard, who had previously been the member for Eskdale in Cumberland. He had been defeated at the last general election in December 1910. Since then he had served as a Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith.
The Conservatives re-selected local man George Palmer, their defeated candidate from the last election. He had been High Sheriff of Wiltshire in 1903 and since 1910 had been a Lieutenant-Colonel commanding the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry.
Result
On an increased turnout, the Liberal Party held the seat with only a 1.8% swing against them.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “1911 Westbury by-election” as 1911 UK parliamentary by-election. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as 1911 UK parliamentary by-election. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 28, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7987216. The first chronological checks are 1911, 1900, 1910 and 1903.
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This entry incorporates text from “1911 Westbury by-election” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.