Ironically, since it was to be the scene of his triumph in the famous Clare by-election, Daniel O’Connell* found Ennis, which lay in the parish of Drumcliff, unwelcoming and depressing on his visits as a barrister at the assizes.O’Connell Corresp. i. 152. Reckoned to be one of the most dismal county towns in Ireland, it was reported by the Scot Robert Graham of Redgorton in 1835 to consist mainly ‘of a string of wretched looking cabins on both sides of the entries to the town’.
The county town and Tayside port of Perth, whose population (burgh only) rose from 19,068 in 1821 to 20,016 in 1831, served an important agricultural and textile manufacturing district and was known for its salmon fishing, distilleries, ginghams, shawls and muslins. The council of 26 was dominated by its 14 guildry men, whose collective votes under the so-called ‘beautiful order’ required them to comply with the wishes of their majority, so giving them an automatic majority over the 12 trades councillors.
Newcastle-under-Lyme, long ‘famous for the manufacture of hats’ under an incorporated company of felt makers, had a flourishing clothing industry employing some 1,587 families, but the ‘welfare or adversity’ of the surrounding Potteries also affected its ‘trade and prosperity’. Staffs. Dir. (1834), 652; Oldfield, Rep. Hist. (1816), iv. 508; PP (1833), xxxvii. 600; Pigot’s Commercial Dir.
Northampton, one of the largest potwalloper boroughs, was ‘a flourishing town’ whose prosperity was on the increase. Ibid. (1835), xxv. 557. The opening of the branch canal in 1815, which linked the town with the main artery of the Grand Junction Canal four miles away at Blisworth, was the catalyst for its rapid expansion. The waterway gave Northampton’s traditional footwear manufacturers ready access to London, Birmingham and the fast developing industrial regions in the north.
Evesham, with the ‘exception of a ribbon manufactory in a declining state’, was a prosperous market town ‘most famed for the excellency’ of its vegetables and gardening.PP (1835), xxiii. 192; Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1828-9), 865; Bentley’s Worcs. Dir. 14. Electoral corruption, asserted a petition presented by Lord John Russell, 17 Feb. 1831, ‘infected it like a leprosy’. C.R. Dod, Electoral Facts (1853), 113; CJ, lxxxvi.
Grampound, an insignificant village situated on the River Fal in the south of the county, 40 miles north-east of Penzance, was governed by a corporation, consisting of a mayor and eight aldermen, which, as the municipal corporations commissioners noted in 1833, ‘existed but for the purpose of enabling the freemen to derive a revenue from their votes’. The freemen, whose numbers were unlimited, were nominated by a jury of existing freemen empanelled by the corporation. D. and S. Lysons, Magna Britannia (1814), iii. 71;Oldfield, Rep. Hist. (1816), iii.
Between 1754 and 1805 Hertfordshire, a fecund agricultural county, experienced a period of electoral turbulence which made it the most frequently contested county in England: eight of the 11 elections which occurred between those years went to a poll, and there were five successive contests between 1784 and 1805. Thereafter the county was comparatively tranquil, and there were no further contested elections before the passage of the Reform Act.
Elginshire’s arable farming was progressive and it contained many whisky distilleries. Small-scale woollen manufacturing and herring and salmon fishing were its other staples. Its royal burghs were Elgin and Forres. The other principal settlements were Findhorn, Fochabers, Grantown and Rothes and the ports of Burghead, Hopeman and Lossiemouth.Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1895), ii. 540-4. It had not gone to a poll since 1784.
When the municipal corporations commissioners took evidence in public at Cambridge in the autumn of 1833, The Times commented, 16 Nov:
Bramber, a ‘mean village’ situated about eight miles north-west of Brighton, consisted of two intersections of a street, the northern part of which adjoined the borough of Steyning. The boundary was wholly contained within but not entirely coextensive with the parish, covering some 20 acres of built-upon land and 825 acres of open land. It was reported in 1831 that there were 35 cottages, of which 29 were occupied; 12 of the total were actually situated ‘in the town and parish of Steyning’.