On 29 September 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had signed the Munich Agreement, handing over the Sudetenland to German control.
This issue polarised British politics at the time, with many Labour supporters, Liberals, and some Conservatives strongly opposed to this policy of appeasement.
The Liberal Party had selected Ivor Davies,[2] a 23-year-old graduate of Edinburgh University, despite the fact that he was the candidate for Central Aberdeenshire at the same time.
A number of future politicians such as Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins, at the University of Oxford at the time, cut their teeth in the Michaelmas campaign.
A 1988 TV drama-documentary A Vote for Hitler dramatized the events surrounding the by-election, and included interviews with Denis Healey and Frank Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford, who had campaigned for Labour during the election, and Quintin Hogg, by then Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone.