This year marks the 100-year anniversary of the close of the Edwardian era, when the Great War broke out in 1914; the poet Philip Larkin wistfully remarked in his famous poem, ‘MCMXIV’: ‘Never such innocence/Never before or since’. Perhaps the politics of the period was less innocent. On the left, the dominant force was the Liberal party, which had won a landslide general election victory with over 400 parliamentary seats in 1906.

The Labour Representation Committee had been formed in 1900, with trade unionists and socialist societies combining to campaign for greater working-class representation in Parliament. In 1903, the infant Labour party entered into the Gladstone-MacDonald Pact, named after the Liberal chief whip, Herbert Gladstone, and the Labour’s Ramsay MacDonald. The pact was designed to avoid straight contests between Labour and the Liberals, to maximise the anti-Tory vote.

For the Labour party, the pact was both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, it led to growth, keeping it as the junior partner within the ‘Progressive Alliance’ on the left, able to put pressure on the Liberal party to pass legislation it saw as necessary, but leaving the Liberals dominant.

It was not until after the first world war, in 1922, that Labour became the official opposition at Westminster; it was only in the 1924 general election that the Liberals were finally relegated to clear third-party status behind the Conservatives and Labour. However, there were signs in the pre-1914 period that Labour could supplant the Liberals.

On Thursday 18 July 1907, there was a parliamentary by-election in the West Yorkshire constituency of Colne Valley. The sitting Liberal MP, Sir James Kitson, had been given a peerage and gone to the House of Lords. The Liberal party were unconcerned by the prospect of a by-election; Kitson had not even faced a contest in 1906, having been returned unopposed. Such optimism turned up to be misplaced.

The local Labour party selected the 25-year-old Victor Grayson as its candidate. Grayson ran as a ‘Socialist and Labour Candidate’ despite not receiving the national Labour party’s official endorsement of his candidacy. He was a brilliant orator, able to inspire crowds about socialism; people hung on to his every word. The Liberal by-election candidate was Philip Bright, son of John Bright, the radical Liberal free-trader of the Victorian era. In a three-horse race, Grayson triumphed by 153 votes, taking 3,648 to Bright’s 3,495; the Tory, Granville Wheler took 3,227.

The Liberals regained the seat at the next general election in January 1910. And the level of interest in Grayson himself has varied over time. In 1985, David Clark published a fascinating biography, labelling him ‘Labour’s Lost Leader’. Clark was well placed to write the book, selected as the prospective Labour parliamentary candidate for Colne Valley himself in 1968, holding the seat from 1970 to 1974. Clark later sat for South Shields and served as chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the first 14 months of Tony Blair’s government before going to the House of Lords.

Grayson’s political career did not flourish after he lost Colne Valley. He gained just over 400 votes as the Socialist candidate for Kennington in the general election of December 1910. Allegedly, his reliance on alcohol grew though he did serve in the first world war. In 1918, he suffered the dreadful double blow of losing his newborn baby and his wife Ruth in childbirth. And then in 1920 he disappeared in mysterious circumstances, alleging corruption at the top of British public life.

But Grayson had did make his mark on British politics. The Colne Valley by-election was an indication to the Liberals that they could not rely on old certainties about their dominance on the left of British politics.

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Nick Thomas-Symonds is the author of Attlee: A Life in Politics published by IB Tauris (2010). He writes the Labour history column for Progress and tweets @NThomasSymonds