[2] He was clearly disillusioned with parliamentarian life, as he was reported to have been absent from his political duties for over a year at the time of the by-election; having emigrated to the backwoods of Western Australia with no intention of returning home.
[4] The Conservatives selected 40-year-old Brigadier General Edward Spears, a noted First World War soldier who had been head of the British Military Mission in Paris and who was from 1922 to 1924 the National Liberal MP for Loughborough.
Spears began the campaign with a public announcement that the political tide was running in favour of the government and the Conservative Party.
[5] Edge's supporters too entered the campaign with public declarations of forthcoming victory [7] and Spears’ team seemed less inclined to predict a good result than their candidate.
The town was the main coal mining centre, where nearly a third of the electorate of the constituency lived [7] and Labour stronghold on the local Urban District Council.
[11] When the candidates’ nominations which had been handed into the Returning Officer were made public on 23 May 1927, it was the Liberals who seemed to have the advantage if the numbers of supporting signatures was an accurate reflection of opinion in the contest.
[14] It is also difficult to estimate the success or otherwise of election publicity but Edge appears to have scored a goal with the working class electorate when he arranged for the visit to the constituency of two former professional football players with Bolton Wanderers.
Later revealed to be a forgery, purported to be a directive from Moscow calling for intensified Communist agitation in Britain and helped ensure the fall of the MacDonald's Labour government at the 1924 general election.
[13] Edge tried to take advantage of this Tory-Labour spat and the fears of socialism that it evoked by painting Minto as being supported by extremist elements in his party.
Over the course of the 1924-1929 Parliament, Labour made thirteen by-election gains in all, eleven from the Tories, and two from the Liberals [22] and went on to win the 1929 general election.