The Territorial Army (TA) was founded as a result of the Territorial and Reserve Forces Act 1907, the work of the then war minister, Lord Haldane. He wrote the introduction to The Territorial Force: a Manual of Its Law, Organisation and Administration by Harold Baker in 1909. The next year, Baker was elected as the Liberal MP for Accrington and became Haldane’s PPS. He lost the seat to the Coalition Conservative Ernest Gray, a TA major, in 1918.
In 1931, the Tory Major H A Procter won the seat. He became the president of the Film Artistes’ Association for extras in 1935, saying that “useful work was to be done in maintaining the wage standard of lower-salaried film artists”.