The barrister and statistician Frederick McCalmont was born in Highfield in 1846, the first son of the Reverend Thomas McCalmont of Highfield. He was educated at Eton and Oxford and became a barrister in 1872. He continued to live in Southampton and was elected an alderman in 1877. He was actively involved in local Tory politics and became master of both Shirley and Southampton Freemason lodges.
He is best remembered for his statistical analysis of British elections. His Parliamentary Poll Book of All Elections, first published in 1879, went much further than previous compilations by including the size and rateable value of constituencies and the number of electors. It was successively revised by other editors until the election of January 1900. It was regarded as the most convenient (single volume) and accurate record of nineteenth-century elections. He died, aged just 34, at Radley’s Hotel on Terminus Terrace in 1880 and was buried in the Old Cemetery.
His obituary in the Southampton Times, 06/11/1880, also notes that Frederick McCalmont was a friend of Charles Bravo, who died in a sensational case of poisoning in 1876, and that McCalmont gave evidence at the enquiry into Bravo's death.
Frederick Haynes McCalmont
Photograph from Southern Reformer, July 24th 1880
Clippings:
Frederick H. McCalmont - (The Southern Reformer, 24/07/1880)
Melancholy death of Mr. Alderman McCalmont - (Southampton Times, 06/11/1880)
see also
Further reading:
Highfield; A Village Remembered, by John Edgar Mann, p15. (HS/h)
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, Volume 35
Southern Reformer, July 24 1880 p1-2. (HS/y)
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