Child Voters

The Belfast Telegraph of 7 February 1906 ran a story under the headline ‘The Youngest Voter in the Kingdom’. It concerned Alexander Atkinson, a mill worker from County Antrim, who had recently cast his ballot in that year’s General Election: as a ‘thoroughgoing loyalist’, he had voted for the Conservative candidate. What made Atkinson newsworthy was that he was just 14 years old and had been on the electoral register since he was ten. Presenting himself at the polling station, he had initially been told by the presiding officer to ‘run away, boy, and play outside’. Instead, Atkinson went and found the Conservative candidate’s election agent, who, ‘after a brief legal argument’, convinced the officer to issue a ballot paper to the ‘triumphant’ teenager.

Atkinson had been placed on the electoral register through a simple administrative error. His father was deceased, leaving his home in his son’s name. In a system which linked the right to vote to property value, the council workers responsible for preparing the register had assumed that Atkinson was old enough to qualify and had included him without closer investigation. In the extremely polarised politics of the time, it is also possible that the Conservative agent, so conveniently available at the polling station, had helped him escape attention.

But why was a 14-year-old boy permitted to vote in a parliamentary election at all? The law explicitly barred anyone under 21 from voting and the presiding officer was clearly under no illusions as to Atkinson’s age. The truth was, Atkinson had exploited an interesting quirk of electoral law. It was certainly illegal for children to vote, but it was also (and remains) against the law for polling station staff to refuse to give a ballot paper to a registered individual. Once on the register, a person could only be struck off by order of a judge, regardless of the legality of their qualification.

What is most remarkable about Atkinson’s case, however, is that he is not the youngest person to have voted in a 20th-century UK election. He was not even the youngest documented in 1906: a couple of days before, 11-year-old James Griggs had cast a vote for the MP for South-East Essex. Indeed, the phenomenon of child voters remained a feature of UK elections for almost 50 years, offering a curious and unique lesson in the chaotic history of British democracy.

Infant electors

After 1906, reports of the offence grew. At least five boys voted in the two general elections of 1910 and, in one instance, the child’s identity was vouched for by his schoolmaster at the polling station. These voters also represented a dramatic drop in age compared with Atkinson and Griggs, as three of them were aged five years and under. The youngest, Robert Algernon Lord, was carried to the polling station on his father’s shoulders and cheered as he left the voting booth: on the day he cast his ballot, Lord was just two years and 19 days old. 

The 1918 Representation of the People Act expanded and simplified the right to vote and abolished many of the worst abuses of the old system. Yet, far from removing child voters, it opened the gates to a stream of cases. This was because voter registration was now reliant on self-reporting by individual households, a process vulnerable to mistake and abuse at the best of times. These were not the best of times: the new regime was accompanied by a massive expansion of the electorate and serious political instability, with general elections held every year in 1922, 1923 and 1924.

Electoral administrators were overwhelmed as a consequence and the approach of each election revealed, to quote one newspaper, ‘the usual crop’ of registered children. A handful voted in the General Election of December 1918, including the first girl; a nine-year-old in Enfield. Cases also began to appear regularly at parliamentary by-elections. At the 1921 Cardiganshire by-election, Nancy Roberts, the five-year-old daughter of Professor Stanley Roberts of University College, Aberystwyth, voted with her parents. ‘We took her along by way of protest against the state of the register’, Roberts told The Times. ‘Last year my own name was omitted from it while my wife’s appeared, and many of my colleagues and a good many Cardigan ex-Servicemen find that they are not on the register.’

Watershed

The watershed moment came at the 1922 General Election, when a series of high-profile cases of child voters suggested that the offence had achieved a degree of normalisation. In Wandsworth, the comedian Alfred Lister made national news by carrying a three-year-old girl to the polling station. At Peterborough, an 11-year-old boy presented a decorated horseshoe to the Conservative candidate for whom he had cast his ballot, the candidate attaching it to his car as a mascot. At Hull, three-year-old Andrew Ford attended his polling station with an orange rosette pinned to his coat to vote for the Liberal MP Joseph Kenworthy, whose staff later met and shook hands with their youngest voter. In an especially bizarre display at Ogmore Vale in South Wales, a boy of two who had voted for Labour MP Vernon Hartshorn was presented with a signed photo in a silver frame at a ceremony organised by the victorious candidate. Across the country a number of other children voted with less fanfare, while many more were refused papers at the polling station, including the four-year-old son of a policeman at Canterbury, whose father surely must have known he was breaking the law.

Things were getting out of hand. With another election declared for 1923, the Home Office decided to act. It issued a memorandum for confused presiding officers, confirming that anyone found guilty of registering to vote or voting under the age of 21, or assisting an underage person to do so, was liable for prosecution under the terms of the Corrupt Practices Act. Yet the advice also confirmed that no presiding officer could legally refuse a ballot paper to a registered individual. Instead, the Home Secretary suggested that a voting slip should only be handed to a ‘child obviously of tender age’ after the law had been clearly explained, whereupon if the vote was still proceeded with, the officer should report it with a view to prosecution.

It seems that this threat was enough to dissuade most parents from insisting on ballots for their infants: in Somerset, a miner who had encouraged his six-year-old son to vote was subsequently convicted and fined ten shillings. Yet though declining, incidents of child voters did not disappear overnight. At the 1924 General Election, a boy of four voted at Berwick (when asked, he simply said that he voted for ‘the right man’); a photograph circulated of a two-year-old voter talking to a police officer in West Ham; and an unregistered mother guided the hand of her one-year-old son to mark the ballot paper in Truro. Cases of registered children continued to be reported in the press throughout the 1920s (one ‘elector’ in Sheffield was revealed to be still in the womb). Such was the concern, that the Home Office reissued its memorandum for the 1929 election.

End in sight

The last General Election in which young children can reliably be said to have voted was that of 1935, when at least five between the ages of two and 12 cast ballots. But the conviction and fining of a Newport father, whose son of seven had been taken to the polling station after his grandfather had found he was on the register, made national news and offered a useful deterrent. After this date, only in Northern Ireland did child voters continue to make anything like a regular attendance at the polls. In 1943, four children voted in the West Belfast and Antrim by-elections, including eight-year-old Edith Holmes, whose mother told the Belfast Telegraph: ‘I felt strongly that she should vote. I thought the election might be won by one vote, and that vote Edith’s.’

What, then, are we to make of the rise and fall of the child voter? Their existence tells us much about the unreliability of the electoral registers compiled during a period of chaotic transition, stretching from the late 19th century to 1945. But the fact that so many of these children were allowed to vote – and that so few prosecutions were brought – suggests a relaxed attitude to electoral anomalies quite different from now. This was a period in which the right to vote was a limited, shifting and ill-defined concept. Only a minority of women had access to the franchise even during the 1920s, while business owners and university graduates could often claim two or more votes. In this context, the occasional infant voter must have seemed a minor problem. 

The decline of the child voter after the 1940s reflected an improvement in the process of registration and a more serious attitude towards the integrity of elections with the dawning of true universal suffrage. This is evident in the last reported case of a child ‘obviously of tender age’ casting a ballot in a UK election. This took place on 10 May 1952, when seven-year old Yvonne Stover voted in the Berkhamsted local elections. She had been brought to the polling station by her mother, Elizabeth, who, against resistance from the polling station staff, ‘aggressively’ demanded a ballot for the child and refused to leave until one was issued. Far from the blind eye with which earlier cases were met, Elizabeth was instead immediately charged, convicted and fined for procuring a child a vote.

Nevertheless, though the system may have hardened, Elizabeth’s attitude to the affair had more in common with that of the 1920s. ‘Silly, wasn’t it?’, she told the court. ‘It was all a joke.’ ‘It would have been funny’, she later told a reporter from the Daily Mirror, ‘if a candidate had got in by just one vote.’

Peter Keeling is author of ‘The Armed Forces and Parliamentary Elections in the United Kingdom, 1885-1914’, English Historical Review, August 2019.