Artists such as William Hogarth (whose 1754-55 painting Triumph of the Deputies is shown here) captured the colourful and often riotous proceedings of local elections
The political contest I am about to describe between Peter McLagan (1823- 1900) and John Pender (1816-96) for the seat of Linlithgowshire (roughly, present-day West Lothian) which took place in 1868, was labelled at the time by the Falkirk Herald as ‘the bitterest contest that has taken place in Scotland in connection with the present appeal to the country’. It arose as a result of the then Liberal prime minister, William Gladstone’s request for a general election to be held in November of that year. This was the first election to be held after the Reform Act of 1867, which had extended the number of men who could vote by two thirds and created an increase in the number of Scottish MPs from 53 to 60. In addition, the contest between the two men has claims on our attention in that it is the first recorded instance in Scottish political history of an electoral battle between a man of mixed race origins; Peter McLagan, one of the sons of a coffee plantation owner who had been born in Demerara (modern-day Guyana) in 1823, and John Pender, a wealthy and prosperous Scottish industrialist who had made his fortune in textiles both in Glasgow and subsequently in Manchester. It also provides a rare, if not unique, example of an attempted political assassination in mid-Victorian Scotland.
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