This fascinating pair of maps, issued by The Graphic, show the before and after results of the important 1892 elections. The election was principally fought over the deeply divisive subject of Irish Home Rule.

But it is three, seemingly unimportant byelection results in West Ham South, Battersea, and Middlesbrough, for a party that had at this point no official name, that would prove to be politically the most significant. This party was the Independent Labour Party – it was to receive its official name the following year. It was Keir Hardie, the combative and charismatic leader of this embryonic Labour party, who won West Ham South, from the Conservatives.

The question of Irish Home Rule split not only the country but also the traditional political parties. While the Conservatives were staunchly Unionist, the Liberal Party split into Unionist and Home Rule Factions. Even the Irish Home Rulers split into two factions, the Parnellites and the Anti-Parnellites, principally on religious grounds after Charles Stewart Parnell, their leader, was cited as correspondent in a notorious adultery case.

This tiny seed - the election of three working-class MPs in 1892 - established the modern Labour Party, which over the next 130 years would displace the once all-powerful Liberals as the principal opposition to the Conservatives. The result of the 1892 election was that the ruling Conservatives lost their overall majority and were forced to accept, after losing a vote of confidence, a government by coalition of the minority parties: Liberal and Nationalists (Home rulers).

Despite a landslide win by Liberals in 1906, and indeed winning twice in one year in elections in 1910, the Liberal Party never recovered from the deep divisions revealed in the 1892 election. The Liberal Unionists continued to vote with their erstwhile political enemies, the Conservatives, until, in 1912, they merged together to form the Conservative and Unionist Party.

It is fair to say that the Election of 1892 heralded the arrival of our modern political system, with the birth of the Labour Party, the death of the old Whig Party, and the transformation of the traditional Tory Party that had dominated the political landscape of the UK throughout the 19th century.

Printed colour. [GB2103]