We are very pleased to welcome Ian East for the first time as a speaker at the Old Low Light. Ian, who is keenly interested in local history often attends our talks and is involved with other local history groups.
We were delighted when he offered to share his research on the Borough’s first Parliamentary election.
He will explain how Tynemouth and North Shields became a Parliamentary Borough in their own right as a result of the Great Reform Acts 1832.
The campaign for electoral reform had been going on for many years with a view to extending the right to vote to more people and redistributing parliamentary seats to ensure more just representation. But the proposal to make North Shields a Borough was not without its opponents in Parliament and what were the boundaries of the new Borough to be?
Ian talk looks at these issues and the first election to be held in the Borough which was quite bitterly contested. The two contenders were Sanderson Ilderton (1776-1853), son of a Newcastle solicitor and a member of the gentry, and Sir George Frederick Young (1791-1870), a London ship-owner and ship builder.
He will also share his efforts to discover what our first MP looked like.
