Clan Scrymgeour People
Edwin Scrymgeour
Edwin Scrymgeour, ‘Neddy’ (1866 – 1947)
Member of Parliament for Dundee. He is the only person ever elected to the House of Commons on a prohibitionist ticket as the candidate of the Scottish Prohibition Party.
Scrymgeour was a native Dundonian educated at West End Academy. He established his party in 1901 and served on Dundee City Council. He began contesting elections in the 1908 Dundee by election which saw Winston Churchill first elected for Dundee and continued to fight at every election thereafter, increasing his vote. Because of his popularity, general left-wing sympathies and history with the labour movement, from 1922 the Labour Party came to an arrangement whereby they nominated only one candidate for the two-member Dundee constituency and ran what was in effect a joint campaign.
In the 1922 election, Scrymgeour and Labour candidate E. D. Morel jointly ousted Winston Churchill, who had represented the city as a Liberal (at that point Coalition Liberal). Scrymgeour remained an M.P. for Dundee until the 1931 general election when he lost his seat to the first British female Conservative M.P., Florence Horsbrugh. Out of Parliament Scrymgeour worked as an evangelical Chaplain at East House and Maryfield Hospitals in Dundee. Scrymgeour was a leader of the unsuccessful opponents of disbanding the Scottish Prohibition Party in January 1935.