Author Archives: Nick Winch

There may be some LDV readers with elephantine memories who can recall Phoebe Winch who died last week in Bristol aged 92. 

Described by Tony Greaves as “an outstanding community politician” she joined the Liberal Party in the early 1960s after attending a Jo Grimond meeting and served the inevitable apprenticeship as membership secretary in a (then) derelict Surrey seat. In 1966 she moved to Dorset and started campaigning on local issues – rural bus subsidies and the like – and then led a successful campaign to stop Sherborne being moved from Dorset into Somerset under the proposals for local government reform. This provided the platform for her election as the first Liberal ever to sit on Sherborne urban District Council in 1971. Two years later she was elected to the reformed Dorset Council County beating the sitting Tory by a majority of 2 to 1 in an election with an astonishing 69% turnout. This was the first time a Good Morning leaflet and a blue letter had been used in Dorset, and while now old hat, their impact was astonishing. 

On the renamed Sherborne Town Council, she ensured the introduction of a Public Question Time at Council meetings and stopped the extraordinary tradition of holding Planning Committee meetings in secret! She became Sherborne’s first female Mayor in 1976 – ending something like a billion years of male domination. The sky did not fall in. 

She lost her County seat in 1977 (partly the result of a poor national result but also because she supported comprehensive education in a grammar school-dominated town) and resigned her town Council seat two years later in protest at the decision of the Town Clerk not to accept Focus Grumble Sheets as expressions of public views. “I will not sit on a Council which only listens to the middle classes writing on Basildon Bond paper” she said as she left the Council Chamber.

In 1980 she moved to Bristol and was agent for Don Foster in his first successful council campaign but turned to being an “inky-fingered Liberal” printing, she estimated, about 4 million leaflets over a period of 20 years.