page_title: 1910 Walthamstow by-election
section_title: Candidates
hierarchical_section_title: 1910 Walthamstow by-election / Candidates
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Rufus Isaacs, 1st Marquess of Reading
context_page_description: The Walthamstow by-election, 1910 was a parliamentary by-election held in England on 1 November 1910 for the House of Commons constituency of Walthamstow. It was then a division of Essex, but the area is now part of Greater London.
  This was a ministerial by-election. The laws of the time required that an MP who had joined the government had to seek re-election, and the early stages of the campaign saw controversy about whether the election should be contested. However, the main issue in the election was the Osborne judgment, in which the courts had banned trade unions from imposing a political levy on their members. After a prolonged campaign, the outgoing Liberal MP John Simon was re-elected.
context_section_description: Ministers forced to seek re-election were often unopposed, as had happened at Reading earlier that year when Simon's predecessor Rufus Isaacs had been returned unopposed after his appointment as Solicitor General.
  Some senior members local Conservatives wanted to follow the example set in Reading,
  but on 8 October a majority of the local party selected as their candidate 41-year-old Stanley Johnson, who had been Simon's opponent at the last general election, in January 1910.
  Johnson was a solicitor in the firm of Downer and Johnson, based in London Wall, and had been a member of Hackney Council for 9 years. He described his first priorities for the campaign as being support for the Osborne judgment, a case brought by a Walthamstow trade unionist which restricted the ability of unions to impose a political levy on their members. 
  He also stressed his opposition to the payment of MPs, and proclaimed himself a "whole hogger" for tariff reform.
  The Liberal candidate, 37-year-old Simon, was a barrister who had risen fast in politics. The son of a Congregationalist minister in Bath,
  he was educated at Fettes College and then at Wadham College, before becoming a Fellow of All Souls. In 1903 he had been the British government's counsel in the Alaska boundary dispute, and he entered the Commons in 1906 at the age of 33, making a strong impression with his speeches. He became a Kings Counsel in 1908, at the unusually young age of 35, and developed a large practice, serving as standing counsel to the University of Oxford. At the time of the election, he was a widower with three children.
caption: Rufus Isaacs, Simon's predecessor as Solicitor General
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