Elections I have Known

Despite having just posted a blog (on the ups and downs of British imperialism), the experience of Labour’s extraordinary triumph in the recent general election has inspired me to reflect on past experiences of this kind in my own life and times. I had quite forgotten the feelings of euphoria, excitement, joy and hope that such events can generate. As part of my celebration of Labour’s landslide victory, I’ll reflect here on my personal and family memories of other British elections I have lived through during what we might call the ‘long twentieth century.’

1945

My very first political memory is of sharing, somewhat uncomprehendingly, in the popular response to Labour’s unexpected and (to many) shocking landslide victory in the postwar election in 1945. Just 7 years old, I sat on my father’s shoulders to watch chaotic scenes in a park near Wallsend-on-Tyne, originally my mother’s home. The daughter of a mineworker, she had lived as a child through the General Strike of 1926, as had the thousands of ‘Geordies’ now singing, shouting and dancing in the streets, giving full throat to a sort of wild joy, a sense of which I still carry deep inside me.

My father had already made his mark in the 1945 election, when he worked on a Bradford mill-owner’s estate not far from York, employed as a horseman. He was asked to be an assistant election agent for the Labour candidate, Bert Hazell, a farmworkers union organiser, in the constituency of Barkston Ash. The Conservative incumbent, a wealthy true-blue High Tory who had held the seat comfortably since 1931, was Colonel Sir Leonard Ropner, Harrow and Cambridge educated, whose money came from shipping. Dad’s boss, Sir Benjamin Dawson, knighted for services to the Conservative Party, was mortified to discover that one of his own farm labourers should show this degree of defiance. At well attended and passionate meetings, Bert and Dad repeatedly drew attention to the long working hours, low pay and poor living conditions of farm workers, a theme contemptuously ignored by the other side, employers to a man of overworked, badly paid, and poorly housed farm labour.

In Mum’s smiling account to me when I was older, the infuriated Sir Benjamin (Benny behind his back) came to a Labour meeting and from the front row sought to catch out his presumed inferiors with questions about gold reserves, and the future of Singapore. From the platform, Dad batted this back: “Never mind about Singapore,” he cried, “and it’s your gold reserves we are after, so that we can all share in the benefits of labour that lets your lot ride about in Rolls Royces!” Dad scored a palpable class hit here, for a Rolls Royce could cost £2,500, unimaginable riches for farm workers on about £250 a year at most, and ‘Benny’ had two of them, plus a yacht.

Amazingly, the posh Sir Leonard Ropner got an almighty shock, when Bert Hazell came within a hairsbreadth of success, the Tory majority a wafer thin 116 votes. And while Bert and Dad had lost this battle, they had won the war.

It’s fascinating to trace the history of this constituency, which as Selby and Ainsty would remain Conservative well into the twenty-first century. It produced a major shock when, in a 2023 by-election, ultimately triggered by Boris Johnson’s resignation, a very young Labour candidate called Keir (a pregnant political name, he might go far…) would defeat the Tories with a swing of 33%, one of the nails in Prime Minister Sunak’s political coffin. Keir Mather would for a year be the youngest MP in the House of Commons, the ‘Baby of the House’, and held the seat again in 2024. Baby of the Year position has now been taken over by a 22 year old, Sam Carling, in the North West Cambridgeshire seat. Dad and Bert would have been delighted by these outcomes. Bert himself would enter Parliament in 1964 for North Norfolk but his main lifetime interest was the condition of agricultural workers, and he was for 10 years President of the National Union of Agricultural Workers. Like Dad, he had left school at the age of 14 and both had as their first task chasing off crows. His farm work and political endeavours must have been good for him, for he lived to a ripe 101.

1955

As we constantly lived in those poorly maintained tied cottages, which led to many a confrontation between our feisty Mum and the farmers employing Dad, we made a peripatetic progress around bits of Yorkshire, and in 1953 ended up in the village of Roecliffe near Boroughbridge, settling there long enough to feel that we belonged. Needless to say, Dad had politicised his little flock of children, required at every election to be glued to the radio, filling in and counting up the red and blue dots on a vast constituency chart. In those days the whole process took at least three days before a final result could be announced. Happily there were no exit polls of any consequence to cloud our visions of glory, so it was exciting and fun. Even now I still think in terms of red dots and blue dots, no other parties seemed to exist in Mum and Dad’s political landscape. But the joy of the Labour transformation of the postwar world for poor families made more disappointing the defeats of Labour by the Conservatives in the 1951 and 1955 elections (and there would be another even worse one in 1959).

Bowed but not beaten, Dad decided that if he could not win these electoral battles at the national level, he’d pull out all the political stops at the local level, i.e. the upcoming elections to the village parish council. He knew that all the existing parish councillors purported to be ‘independent’, but that this label concealed a set of self satisfied Tory farmers and landowners. Moreover, he knew that there might be hidden political depths to be exploited in the local brickyard, the nearest local thing to an industry, and full of workers almost as badly paid as agricultural workers.

Dad announced that he would campaign on a National Platform and produced this in the form of a large poster attached to the tree on the village green which did duty as a village noticeboard; the stunned villagers awoke to the early morning summons VOTE LABOUR. Dad threw everything into his one man campaign, and received a visit from the Parish Council Chairman, Henry Cambage, a well to do farmer and a very decent man who got on well with Dad. He suggested that Dad should drop his campaign ‘for the good of the village’ which hitherto had been innocent of political conflicts. Dad was unbending: when had Henry and his lot ever cared about the good of the village? When had they ever had a contested election? He wanted to keep a socialist eye on them, his forebears had fought and died for the right to vote and it was high time the village remembered how to do it. Henry retired, pink faced and nonplussed.

Polling day turned out bitterly wet and cold. When Dad had fed the various pigs and hens who would have happily voted for him, he went along to the village school where voting would take place under the eye of a local council returning officer. To Dad’s surprise, he then encountered Horace, our next door neighbour, someone Dad regularly exchanged garden plants and gossip with. It seemed Horace, who was sitting next to the warm stove chatting to the returning official, had been enlisted by the farming lobby to collect voting intentions: clearly the resident councillor clique were running scared.

Dad registered his vote then, completely ignoring Horace, said to the startled official; “I’m off to fodder t’calves now and when I come back I don’t want to see that man in here, it’s against election regulations as you very well know. Otherwise you might have to have all the votes here declared invalid”. When Dad returned he found the unfortunate Horace shivering on the wet and windy school doorsteps. But Horace, if down, was not yet out and shared Dad’s Yorkshire stubbornness, producing a pencil and the list of names of those eligible to vote.

“Now then” he declared, confronting Dad “Can I have your name please?

“Never you mind what my name is.“ said Dad.

“Nay, Martin” began Horace, but Dad broke in

“Oh, so you already know my name, then?”

“Well dammit,” snorted Horace, “I know your name as well as you know mine! Don’t be so bloody daft.”

Dad was unmoved. “I don’t know you, not officially, and I’ll not tell you who I’m votin’ for because this is a secret ballot, and if you think the people in this village will tell you who they are really votin’ for, you don’t know them any more than you know me”. Horace gave up, shaking his head.

But Dad knew his electorate. The combination of brickyard workers and disaffected farm workers put the National Platform into office: they had voted for Dad, One of Us, and a poke in the eye for Them. Democracy had broken out in the village, to general satisfaction.

1964

This year marked another famous if short-lived victory for Labour, to bring to an end ‘thirteen years’ of Tory rule. There were some similarities to 2024 in that by 1964 a Tory government was again mired in scandal and sleaze (the Profumo affair etc.) though without the horrendous levels of corruption experienced in these last 14 years. By this time, I had myself become something of a rarity, the son of a farmworker and a miner’s daughter following an upward social and career path through Cambridge and into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I would find myself parachuted to the top of the system, at the heart of Whitehall, in Downing Street, working as a Private Secretary in the office of Duncan Sandys, Secretary of State, and on occasion in the office of the Minister of State, the Duke of Devonshire. The social distance I had travelled was mind-boggling.

Dad was not so sure about all that because I was now working directly for what he thought of as ‘the other lot’; how could I be working for the enemy? I had misgivings about this myself, but soon learned that as civil servants we worked within strong conventions of independence and impartiality (I know, I know, what happened to all that? Tell you later…)

Dad was happier in October 1964 when Labour won by a tiny majority, and I would now be working for ‘our lot’. Our lot took the shape of Arthur Bottomley, a seasoned trade unionist and party man, and close to Prime Minister Harold Wilson. But my abiding memory of that election is celebrating with a group of like-minded Labour friends in Trafalgar Square as the results rolled out on special screens. My generation, then in our late twenties, were longing for change as much as our counterparts now must do. We could not have anticipated the fraught years that Thatcherism would bring with its relentless assault on the welfare state, an assault we might hope now will finally be relegated to the scrap heap of defunct ideologies.

1968-9

This is a bit of a side step, into the inner workings of the Labour Party, as it was for me at the time. In 1965-6 I resigned from my career in government and began a new life as a Lecturer in Government and Politics at the University of Kent, then one of the ‘new’ universities. This was in the late sixties when dissent and rebellion were in the air, particularly in the Universities, and national politics too were in a fairly fractured state. Feeling that I should try my hand at doing instead of lecturing, I stood as a Labour candidate in the Canterbury local elections. At that time Canterbury City Council was pretty much stitched up by Conservatives and Liberals, and there was zero chance of me being elected. This was perhaps as well, as if I had been elected I would have found myself in opposition to the Liberal wife of my Professorial boss, never a good look.

I was then encouraged to put myself forward as the Parliamentary candidate for Canterbury, but during the key interview was told that I was too middle class, and would have no understanding of working class people and their problems. Besides how could I be a serious candidate when I had chosen to work for a Conservative government? I protested weakly, but it was apparent both to me and to them that I was not cut out for the rough and tumble of real grass roots politics.

So what you see here is the perfect poster boy for a would-be Labour politician, though I wisely resigned myself to teaching instead of doing. But I have never lost the wild joy of a Labour win over that life-long class enemy, the entitled Tory party and particularly over its most recent despicable incarnations. My electoral journey from 1945 to 2024, has been bookended by two wonderful and sensational moments. As a good friend commented to me, ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’. The then-radical Wordsworth had revolutions in mind, but elections are now our contemporary version, out with ‘their lot’ and in with ‘our lot’, now bringing new hope for our children and grandchildren, who must now carry our political torch, and find their own ‘wild joy’ from time to time. For as Wordsworth continued: ‘But to be young was very heaven’.