Like first love, your first General Election is a special and precious thing.
Mine was 1983 and this post is inspired by the earlier one about Simon Hughes’ 40th anniversary celebration.
It must be pretty much exactly 40 years since I first walked into Bob Maclennan’s campaign HQ in Wick to ask for a copy of the manifesto. It certainly was a Saturday afternoon about 3 weeks before the election. They didn’t have one, but it took them an impressively short time to persuade me to deliver leaflets for them.
But all didn’t go smoothly. There was a lady in her garden burning some rubbish. I put on my best and most charming smile, and handed the leaflet to her. She gave me an absolute death stare and tossed the leaflet on the burning pile. I later discovered that she was a leading light in the local Conservatives. I have to say, that if a young person from an opposition party handed me a leaflet, I’d be impressed that they were interested in politics and I’d be very nice to them.
Anyway, that didn’t put me off and I became an an enthusiastic part of the campaign team. At 15, I was obviously the youngest by a very long way. It was great to spend my first campaign in the company of Bob, his wife Helen, his agent Peter Kelly and Ken and Brenda Fraser who were my friend’s parents but became my friends. Bob’s staff Jeanne and Con were also up with him. They were an impressive bunch to learn from.
Campaigning was so different back in those days. We actually had to cut up the electoral register to make canvass cards. I remember one soggy Friday when we all got on to this truck thing and drove around Wick, with posters and megaphones, generally annoying everyone.
For me, I had just finished my O Grade exams so didn’t have to be in school much during May unless I had an exam. However, about a week before the election on 9 June, I had permission to be out of school to compete in the Caithness Music Festival. My bit was finished earlier than I expected so Helen spirited me away to the other side of the county to go canvassing. Unfortunately, one of my teachers saw me get into her car, so I ended up with the only detention I ever had to do as a result. However, I had learned about how to canvass with warmth and the personal touch. If people weren’t in, Helen left them a personal note to come home to.
It was a bit of a tense and anxious campaign in many ways. It was Bob’s first defence since he left Labour for the SDP. Labour fought hard and with considerable hostility. He had first won the seat for Labour from Liberal George Mackie by just 64 votes in 1966 and his majority had grown to 2,539 in 1979.
Bob was always very humble and never expected to win even when it was very obvious he was going to. It was such a relief when the result came through on Friday 10th June. Bob had won with 52% of the vote, a majority of 6,843 and Labour had been pushed into third place. Not only that, but Charles Kennedy won in the neighbouring seat of Ross and Cromarty so we had Alliance MPs from the Northern Isles all the way to Inverness.
Local success was one thing but I remember being so livid about the results across the UK. In what universe was it fair that Labour on 27.6% of the vote got 209 seats while we on just 2.2% less won only 23? And we only got 662,164 votes less than they did.
I was so lucky that my first campaign was a winning one where I was welcomed and appreciated in a very friendly team. I joined the SDP on my 16th birthday a few weeks later. I was probably more of a liberal to be honest, but the average age of the SDP, around 50, was less than that of the liberals.
If you were involved in 1983, what are your memories of the campaign? And for those of our readers whose parents were barely born then, tell us about your memories of your first General Election.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
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8 Comments
I was living in Aberdeen in the years up to the 1983 election and I desperately wanted to see Ian Sproat, the Tory MP for Aberdeen South, given the boot. It is one of my happier memories of that election that Ian Sproat decided to stand for a ‘safer’ seat in the borders where he was defeated by Archie Kirkwood while the Tories managed to hang on to Aberdeen South with a new candidate.
What lovely memories. Writing a personal note on the “out” leaflets is certainly something it we can all aspire to. 😊
I joined the old Liberal party via personal letter to David Steel, the leader, in December 1986 because I was so upset about the death of fellow Cornishman David Penhaligon.
My first proper general election when I helped was 1987 when I turned up at the old Liberal Hall in Newbury and collected a bundle of leaflets to deliver in Thatcham and also joined the polling day operation there.
But I did have an earlier brush with the Liberal party. In the 1970 general election campaign, John Pardoe used to come in a Land Rover to Bude and park at the bottom of our drive by Lloyds Bank and make a big rallying speech to a big crowd. I was really inspired by him – he was such charismatic speaker – so much so that on election day June 18th 1970 I somehow managed to find a complete set of orange clothes to dress in to attend Bude Primary School, to show my sympathies. In fact, I thought my father would disapprove (it turned out that he wouldn’t have done) so I left home in a set of blue clothes as a sort of pretend Tory and then changed into the orange clothes in the school loos when I got there!
1983 was also my first, and possibly more typical of a Liberal electoral experience – i.e. losing! A month earlier I had been agent in my ward in local elections (in Worthing), in the days where you could be an election agent at 18 (which I was) but had to be 21 to be a candidate. We went into that all-up election level pegging with the Tories and with four years of momentum, but lost badly. My first lesson in the importance of targeting – the local leadership had got me to spend all my time on my own hopeless ward. The General Election that followed was little better – we were obviously disheartened by what had just happened, and were thumped by a 20,000 majority. I also remember cutting up electoral registers and Pritt sticking them to canvas card templates, also Focus was produced on in-house Roneo printers, and Shuttleworths on election day were hand-written lists of Defs and Probs on 4-part self-carbonating sheets (one for each knock up) on which Committee room volunteers crossed out supporters who had voted with ruler and biro. The arrival of Polly for the 1992 general election (and then EARS), was a technical – and cultural – earthquake.
In 1983 I was the Liberal Alliance candidate in Leicester South. We had an excellent team creating canvass cards and artwork in the old fashioned way and I printed some of the leaflets. I look back in awe at the energy and time put in by the team. Exciting times when we had a strong clear message and a good reception from many voters.
On election night we got 9410 votes 17.7% while Labour and Tories fought it out through 5 recounts with the Tory John Spencer winning by 7 votes at the end. Our 9410 votes were simply ignored after the second recount. A deeply frustrating example of the distortions of FPTP. We must move to STV ASAP.
My first election was the 1970 General Election won by Ted Heath which was not expected. I was 14 & had joined the Young Liberals. Our Parliamentary Candidate died & was not replaced. So I campaigned for Rowland Moyle defending his marginally seat. Polling Day evening was spent running tellers numbers back to the Committee Rooms. When the polls closed the Labour Agent quietly told me that it was not going to be a good night & I should go home. Rowland Moyle just hung on but I recall listening to my transistor radio up the blankets as Eric Lubbock lost Orpington. Only 6 Liberal MPs survived with only Jo Grimmond achieving a four figure majority (2015 was a horrible reminder!). But just like back then, we surged back with amazing byelection victories and 6 million votes followed in the ’74 elections. Pur lack of targeting failed to see us breakthrough back then. We’ve learned a lot since. General Election – BRING IT ON!
Joined the party between the elections in 1974; fought West Gloucestershire in 1979 (Forest of Dean plus some outskirts of Gloucester). Mostly very rural. Labour incumbent (John Watkinson) defending against a Tory of whom it was said locally that his IQ was smaller than his hat size; however as he owned a very large number of sheep in the Cotswolds this was sufficient qualification to be the candidate. Had had an orange VW camper van for years; kitted this out as a mobile office complete with loud-hailer and drove the Liberal BattleBus around the constituency. One day I stopped to obey a call of nature by the roadside (the bus wasn’t that well-equipped) and managed to lock myself out of it. It could be unlocked with a loop of very stiff wire forced down alongside the window – but I didn’t have the wire coathanger I normally used for this. While I was pondering what to do a car drew up – John Watkinson got out, removed two feet of fence wire from the nearby hedgerow and neatly burgled the van for me. I thanked him and then observed that the local press would probably find out about this. He grinned: ‘If you don’t tell them I don’t think I need to’, he said. And he didn’t.
Unfortunately I didn’t win, and he lost.
My first GE was 1964, when I think I helped my parents ensure the re-election of Eric Lubbock in Orpington. I have been involved in every GE since then apart from 1992 and 2017. I fought 5 general elections and have been involved in countless by-elections from Orpington in 1962 to North Shropshire most recently. Sadly, I never got to fight a by-election and probably, at the age of 73, I won’t now get to do that.
When I started, there were no computers or mobile phones and you often lost deliverers and canvassers who had taken a wrong turn or been stuck in someone’s house and had no means to contact them. Canvass cards were stuck up from the register and we used the Thor system conceived by James Woodward-Nutt and of course, handwritten shuttleworth. Leaflets were designed using typewriters and lettraset and pictures were a rarity. Makes you wonder how we ever won anything? Lots of personal canvassing if I remember rightly. Oh, and loudspeakers. We still had a lot of public meetings in the early days too and people actually came and asked real questions!
In my first Yorkshire election, in February 74, it snowed heavily, but people were queuing up to vote for most of the evening and turnout in Todmorden exceeded 80%.
Oh happy days.
At Ming Campbell’s second (unsuccessful) attempt in NE Fife in 1983 I arranged with a local Lib Dem supporting farmer to put up a Vote Campbell hoarding in a prominent position beside a road into Cupar. I was shocked and bewildered to find a few days later that it had been knocked over and most of the poster had gone. It turned out that the [clearly Tory] cows in the field liked the taste of the glue used for the poster.