The Returning Officer: Petersfield

In 1922 and 1923, Labour’s candidate for Petersfield was Major D L Aman, who had won a DSC after the second battle of Ypres in 1915. He lost to the Tory and former Liberal Unionist MP Colonel W G Nicholson, who had served in the Boer war. Aman was ennobled in 1930 as Lord Marley and later became the Labour chief whip in the Lords. In 1933, he wrote the foreword of The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror; its cover was designed by the German artist John Heartfield (Helmut Herzfeld). Aman was a supporter of the Jewish autonomous region set up by Stalin in Siberia. In 1934, the Friends of the Soviet Union published his book on the subject, Biro-Bidjan.