Adventures in local elections, Ashford Borough 1981-2005

[yellowperil]

In Summary, 1983
I don't think what was happening in Ashford in 1983 was significantly different from  the national scene. Labour was collapsing, but far from down and out. The Tories were consolidating and reflecting the national mood of renewed patriotism. The Alliance after a promising start was stuttering and the performance was erratic and failing to "break the mould."

In an area where the Conservative lead was already substantial the overall result was little change, except the crucial one that the Conservatives had gone back from virtual control to actual control: 26 seats out of 49, with the Alliance on 8, Labour 6, and assorted independents including the True Liberal adding up to 9. They would go into the ensuing general election pretty confident.

We will look forward to seeing  what Pete made of that graphically!
Edit- the overall map is there but atm the shaded party maps still to come and that's what I'm looking forward to most.

[yellowperil]

The Darling Buds Of May...

Now while we are still at May 1983 and before heading in to the General Election,  I promised a little more detail on our home ward. Pluckley ward was tiny with around 1000 voters or just under, the second smallest ward in Ashford which was in any case remarkable for its very large number of very small wards. It was also geographically quite compact by rural standards, though that still meant it had roughly the same area as the whole of the Ashford urban zone with its 24 members. It was considered so overwhelmingly Tory that when the allocation of wards between the two Alliance parties was made it was not even allocated to one party or the other- the same thing happened to Smarden - altogether only 46 of the 49 places were allocated.

The ward comprised two villages, Pluckley itself with about 800 voters, and Little Chart with about 200.Much of both villages lay within what had been a major landed estate, Surrenden Dering, though the estate had been sold off in 1928 as the Dering family hit hard times and the great house was mostly burnt down in 1952 after a period of being used as a school. There was a second smaller landed estate in Little Chart called Calehill, but again the bulk of the mansion had burnt down. These are two of the most beautiful villages in Kent ,located on the Greensand escarpment , sometimes known locally as the Cliffe, with huge views one way across the Weald and the other way towards the North Downs,and known for its unique building style adopted by the Dering estate with its characteristic round-headed windows. The whole feel of the place was terribly feudal, and though the Derings were no longer around that feudal feeling had attached itself to the occupants of the major farmhouses/manor houses from the Surrenden estate, notably Sheerland Farm , the home farm of the estate where either a member of the Dering Estate or the Estate Manager lived, , Malmains Manor and Pivington Manor. The then occupant of Malmains, Launcelot Dawes , known universally as Slotty, a former Olympic yachtsman , was to this point chairman of the parish council, practically lord of the manor in all but name, and his daughter Merrial Carr who lived in the adjacent Malmains cottage, was the serving Ashford borough councillor. After May Slotty had retired and the succession to the parish council chairmanship passed to Tony Highwood of Sheerland.

The two villages clearly had a significant tourist potential  and apart from landscape and buildings there had developed two other major sources of tourist interest, At this stage the one most dominant was the ghost issue referred to upthread by k9. Pluckley did indeed have the reputation of being the most haunted village in England. My own feeling is that this was not unrelated to the fact that there were 5 pubs in the ward (4 in Pluckley and one in Little Chart) all vying for trade, and I am still sure the spirits came from there. The weakest of the pubs much of the time was the Blacksmith's Arms and in desperation it changed its name to the Spectre, and as that was obviously too subtle for the clientele it was after, changed again to simply Ghosts. That pub, not altogether surprisingly is no longer with us but the other 4 are thriving, and the Black Horse still has a board outside claiming to be the most haunted pub in England. About once a year usually around Halloween one TV channel or other will make a programme on the hauntings of Pluckley. At one time at Halloween we had to have police road blocks stopping people from coming in to the village because the crowds had become unmanageable.

The second issue was the HE Bates factor.  Bates had lived in Little Chart until his death in 1974  (his widow was still one of the voters in 1983) and much of his writing through the fifties and sixties was about the area,  and the people of Pluckley and Little Chart particularly the various books about the Larkin family beginning with the Darling Buds of May, in my view by no means his best writing but unquestionably the most popular. This always brought a steady flood of visitors at the time we are talking  about, but of course this was to become a flood in the nineties as Richard, HE's son, bought the film rights and made the incredibly successful television series (over 20m viewers at its peak). Most people of a certain age know what Pluckley looks like because they saw it on television, and the great majority of it was filmed on location in and around the village. If we went out into the street to go to the shops we stepped into a film set. The church saw the wedding of Charlie and Mariette with our own choir and organist, and after that the coachloads came pouring in. We could identify some of the Bates characters. One elderly lady with severe mobility problems in one of the council houses was, everyone was sure, the original of Mariette and you could see she had that something which led to her being played by Catherine Zeta Jones in the part that made her a star.

So much for Pluckley. Now, that May 1983 election campaign. What we did wrong of course was to start far too late. We needed a couple of years to win over Pluckley to the idea of being represented on the council by SDP, and we only had a few weeks. But though we had only been in the village 7 years we had got ourselves well known in many circles, especially the church and the WI. I was in fact  PCC treasurer from January 1976 and we didn't move into the village until April . Eileen was running the Sunday school. We were pretty well embedded in village life and these things you can't invent. And once we decided we were standing to make an impact if not to win necessarily, we set out to do a total canvass of both villages and to deliver lots of reading matter which we wrote ourselves . Fortunately we were both reasonably fit and liked walking. We got a very warm welcome and even stanch Tories thought a proper contest was a good thing (after all it was unthinkable we would actually win, so they could be encouraging in a slightly patronising way) The village butcher who was definitely a Tory said no when we asked for his support, but came round the next day to  see us and to say he had changed his mind because he didn't agree that there should be politics at this level! His daughter who lived in a house facing the school which was the polling station, was one of the first to put up a poster for us. Our literature was all positive, local and stressing the new - "A new voice for Pluckley" was the slogan- reflecting on it afterwards we should have changed that to "a new voice for Little Chart" when campaigning in Little Chart, but we were still learning, and after all Pluckley was the name of the ward. We know we were closer in Pluckley but were yet to make much impact in Little Chart  and if we ever to win the ward that had to change.   The Con majority was 61 - I guess from the boxes 50 of that might have been in Little Chart.

One further footnote:the parish council elections on the same day were left with one unfilled place in Pluckley - maybe Eileen should have gone for that as well in the first place but it's quite possible had she done so some of her voters would have compromised by voting for her for the parish and reverting to Tory for the Borough. The PC proposed to fill the place by co-option. Eileen argued that as she had demonstrated voter support for herself in the Borough election she should be allowed to take the unfilled place. The Tories were appalled but knowing that if they didn't agree they faced a parish council by-election, gave in. Eileen had shown her ability to negotiate and was started on a twenty year domination of the parish council, comfortably topping the poll on each successive election. 

[matureleft]

It's a real pleasure to read these and I can see that recounting this history brings you pleasure too. Do continue.

Your account of the formation of the SDP and its local implications brought back many memories. I was a Cambridge city councillor then. The initial impact in local government terms for Labour had been quite troubling - the loss of the supposed fortress of Romsey (actually it hadn't been "Red Romsey" for a while - gentrification of the terraces had been under way for some years) in a by-election in the winter of 1981. That prepared us for what we expected to be a tough battle in 1982. In fact the impact on local government voting patterns was pretty modest - the by-election gain was reversed in 1983 and we continued to hang on in areas thought to be clear SDP territory - Newnham in particular - through the 1980s. Arguably the main impact was marginally to accelerate the decline of the Tories as a local government force in the city. I was struck by the initial arrogance of some SDP people who seemed to presume that they'd sweep up votes without much groundwork - I vividly recall their amazement and disappointment at the 1982 count. They'd collected very few knowledgeable Labour activists and they hadn't grasped the need to target, apparently seeing their appeal initially as almost universal. The Liberals (who had been tough campaigners for years in target wards) must have despaired. 

[yellowperil]

General Election 1983

Looking at the SDP minutes from this general election there is a real sense of being caught on the hop with nothing anything like sufficiently prepared. After the Borough elections Eileen and I were much more involved in what was going on than before, but still far from being at the centre of things. Jo Hawkes as a new councillor at least had the prestige of her electoral success at the locals but must have been terribly divided with new council responsibilities and running a parliamentary campaign from scratch at the same time. Because this was always going to be SDP- led she had no experienced Liberal giving her the necessary advice at the right time - I think the feeling was rather that what came from the Liberals was rather "I shouldn't do that if I were you" just after a key decision was taken.Taking on the role of agent for the first time was Joan Sherwood - a calm unflapable character with lots of experience of making quick decisions from her BBC producer days, but crucially absolutely no electoral experience whatsoever, so learning on the job. One key area where I know there was a lot of angst was the issue of a headquarters - it was not to be the last time where this was to be an issue. Unable to get a town centre shop to rent at short notice the decision was taken to have a caravan parked in the town centre - we finished up getting permission for it to be parked on the car park of the main town centre shopping centre, then known as the Tufton Centre. Quite a coup in some ways, but where it was allowed to stay was rather away from the main footfall, and in some ways it looked a bit tatty. There was also some rather unsavoury disputes after the election too about who paid for what- 2 new tyres on the caravan seemed to feature in the arguments. I seem to remember though some good mass canvassing sessions including a number in outlying villages which hadn't seen much activity for a long time _ I remember Chilham and High Halden in particular, and big car parades with lots of balloons and blaring music, which were always in those years organised by Gordon Turner the True Liberal who always liked to bring a bit of razzmatazz to general election campaigns -great fun and we just hoped they didn't lose us too many votes. Anyway the paper got through letterboxes and the votes were cast and the result in the end was much better than 1979 or indeed October 1974 -very similar to what  Clive Dennis had achieved in February 1974 in fact.

K Speed (Con)        27,230   56.8%
J Hawkes (SPD All) 13,319  27.8%
P Lewis (Lab)            6,167    12.9%
C Porter (Ecol)            569      1.19%
JW King  (Nat Lab)     456      0.95%
R Lockwood (BNP)     195      0.41%

[yellowperil]

Local By elections Ashford Borough 1983-7
I hope in due course to include the by-elections in this era especially the ones I was directly involved in and which changed the composition of the council, but I do seem to lack the records for those- until quite recently I know I had paper records for them , so I am going to leave this space to add them when I can.  Any suggestions? Failing all else I will contact Ashford direct and see if they can list them for me. I know 2 significant results but not the exact dates or numbers. There was a Henwood by-election which was a Conservative gain from Liberal, and a Stanhope by election which was SDP gain from Labour, but I am sure there are others where no changes ensued.

[tonyhill]

I like Mature Left's comment about the Liberals despairing at the naivety (arrogance) of the SDP. I remember the first election campaign with SDP candidates insisting that their leaflets had to have their logo printed in blue and red, as well as the black for the text. This was long before colour printing became universal, and meant putting the sheet through the press three times with all the attendant costs involved in additional plate-making, set-up, and wash-ups. Just as I always ask when a candidate starts fretting about some minor problem with his/her literature, "How many votes is it going to lose?", I would ask, "How many votes is printing in three colours going to gain?", the answer being not very many for the extra cost. To be fair they did learn quickly from the Liberals, though there was the fiasco of the creation of a new shade of dayglo - Amber Soleil - which somehow contrived not to be fluorescent at all. Years later I would still have elderly former SDP activists, now Liberal Democrats, insisting that they had to have that shade of dayglo for their posters.

[yellowperil]

Apr 10, 2018 17:06:08 GMT tonyhill said:

I like Mature Left's comment about the Liberals despairing at the naivety (arrogance) of the SDP. I remember the first election campaign with SDP candidates insisting that their leaflets had to have their logo printed in blue and red, as well as the black for the text. This was long before colour printing became universal, and meant putting the sheet through the press three times with all the attendant costs involved in additional plate-making, set-up, and wash-ups. Just as I always ask when a candidate starts fretting about some minor problem with his/her literature, "How many votes is it going to lose?", I would ask, "How many votes is printing in three colours going to gain?", the answer being not very many for the extra cost. To be fair they did learn quickly from the Liberals, though there was the fiasco of the creation of a new shade of dayglo - Amber Soleil - which somehow contrived not to be fluorescent at all. Years later I would still have elderly former SDP activists, now Liberal Democrats, insisting that they had to have that shade of dayglo for their posters.

I remember Amber Soleil and the furore it caused. The attempt to impose uniformity on the party on such matters as colour and fonts came as I recall from the very top and not specifically from the ex-SDP side of the Lib Dems. Maybe a necessary stand at that stage in the party's history but unfortunate when the product proved not to be the best. We now seem to be able to accommodate all sorts of shades of yellow and orange, which may or may not indicate where you are in the party spectrum politically.

Incidentally, I do come to this history with my own bias towards SDP, despite its faults, clearly showing, and I am glad to have got comments from Libs and Labs to redress the balance. We could do with more from the blue corner to get their reaction to the SDP, assuming it's printable, and from kippers who  may recognise some of their own travails in the history of this short-lived party. We need to keep this as history, not a party political.

[yellowperil]

County Council Elections 1985

We move the calendar forward another couple of years and the Alliance approached the Kent County Council elections in a spirit of optimism. They had held one of the six seats for years- now was the time for the maturing Alliance  to break out and win.. two? three? four, even? out of the six. Everything was up for grabs, nothing was certain. Calm heads when it came to targetting decisions would be essential. but uncertainties about prospects in each seat,  the continued Lib/SDP communication problems and indeed branch communication problems inside each party, stood in their way.
In SouthEast, Clive Dennis had decided to stand down, so immediately the question was how big a loss of his personal vote be?(some snide people would say the departure of Dennis the Menace could only help the Alliance cause, but as we all know personal votes are not necessarily about personal popularity,more about name recognition). The new Liberal candidate would be Fred Winslade, capable ex-RDC officer who would make an excellent county councillor, but, hang on, this same Fred Winslade had been given the job of defending the Willesborough Lees seat when John Simpson had defected to the Tories, and had failed miserably, and then had been asked to defend David Blain's Henwood seat in the by-election , and had failed miserably, and now he was being asked to defend Clive Dennis's seat?Was there a pattern emerging here? He would face a four-way fight with Conservatives, Labour and Ecology standing, and certainly nothing could be taken for granted.

If the Liberals had South East, the SDP pick was South, with every chance of wiping out Labour, given that we had taken a Stanhope seat off them and were on a roll.(edit:this is an error-see end of post) The SDP candidate was to be  Jo Hawkes who knew a thing or two about winning elections, it seemed. At least three snags emerged- Labour were backs to the wall and would concentrate all their efforts on holding here -absolutely no problems about identifying the target for them. Second, there was an independent spoiler in the form of Ken Roberts the True Ashfordian, who by now would have a sizeable personal vote in Hampden if not elsewhere, and Jo would probably have needed some of those votes. And then Jo had established a method of working in Victoria Park which depended very much on personal contact, and was perhaps slow to realise this was neither a tiny urban ward where one person could make a huge difference, nor a constituency -wide election where help would pour in on all sides. By the time she realised she needed a lot more help than she was getting, everybody was busy in their own campaigns and she was left, perhaps unfairly, bitterly aggrieved that that help wasn't forthcoming when late in the day she asked for it. Indeed ironically in view of some of the comments upthread this was billed as a case of the SDP complaining that the Liberals weren't understanding the need for targetting. However , I have tried to demonstrate it wasn't as simple as all that.

The Liberal second pick was North, where they faced a new Conservative candidate in Jeanne Brinton, ironically the mother of the present President of the Liberal Democrats. This time it was the Liberal who had the advantage of experience in the form of Paul Burnham, and all the indications were that it was going to be a close match. But it might be said a bit unkindly that for Paul like many Liberals of his generation his experience was all about losing. He knew how to put up a good fight  and then gracefully concede. But if ever there was going to be a chance to succeed in North this was it.

 The SDP second pick was intriguing.  Rural West should have been absolutely solid Conservative, and was the home division of the Leader of KCC , John Grugeon. But if, as seemed (to us at least) to be the case, the KCC administration was unpopular, would that stick to the Leader? And Grugeon had got to be leader not by charm but undoubted ability, and had the reputation of being quite a difficult person to get on with, not all that popular even  among his own side. Was there the possibility of what later came to be called decapitation? The SDP had selected a businessman in his 40s, unusual where the average age of candidates verged on the geriatric. He was called Ian Bolt and he was a runner- maybe should have been a sprinter but actually a marathon runner. A man of undoubted energy, anyway. We gathered a   small group  of half a dozen enthusiasts, including Eileen and myself, and we were determined to give it a go- I was firmly of the belief that if you really worked you could gather up votes from the most unlikely places, and we were of course anxious to locate  more supporters in Pluckley. The aim was not to take a lot of support away from Fred Winslade or Jo Hawkes but at very least to make enough noise to keep Conservative workers from all pouring into the Ashford seats.

The final Lib pick was Tenterden, which was the absolutely safest Conservative seat, but the Libs also had a new and charismatic candidate prepared to give it a go without expecting to win. She was Marion LePoidevin, and she also had the possible advantage of being the wife of the Methodist minister in Tenterden and might corner the (small but significant) chapel vote in Tenterden town and some of the Tenterden villages. It was unlikely that the few Tenterden Liberal (or SDP) activists would travel the 14 miles to campaign in Ashford, so as with Rural West her handful of helpers might do what they could for Marion and have some fun.

The last division was Rural East and the decision there was not to field a candidate at all thereby leaving a free run for Andrew Porter the Ecology candidate. I think this was mainly that neither Alliance party had a ready and willing plausible quality  candidate available for Rural East, rather than this being an early case of a Green/Lib pact, but it suited all the opposition parties well enough.  Might have been a good idea to persuade the Ecology Party to pull their candidate in South East, but somehow that didn't happen.

The Labour candidate by the way  was going to be a relatively  unknown young railwayman called Jeremy Adby. He was later to be a Labour councillor and the first out gay councillor on Ashford borough. He suffered awful homophobia from his own  Labour group, and later found a more congenial home in the Liberal Democrats and served a couple of terms as a Lib Dem councillor, until the point where he ran out of fellow members to form a group. He is currently the Conservative member for Willesborough Lees...
edit: I now realise that I was in error when I referred to us winning the Stanhope by-election before the May elections because the Stanhope by- election did not take place until August, by which time Jo Hawkes had resigned from the party (though she did briefly re-join after that before re-resigning!)

[yellowperil]

County Council Elections 1985-the results

Ashford South East
F Winslade (Lib All)          1758   50.2%
R Speight  (Con)                 983    28.1%
D Reynolds (Lab)               666     19.0%
M Collins(Ecol)                    94         2.7%

Ashford South
M Bland (Lab)                    1410      40.6%
J Hawkes  (SDP All)           1390       40.0% 
R Kerly ( Con)                      465        13.4% 
K Roberts (Ind)                   208           6.0%

Ashford North
J Brinton (Con)                    1797      42.4%
CP Burnham ( Lib All)        1554       36.6%
F Smith  (Lab)                        681      16.0%
J Edwards (Ecol)                    178         4.2%
J Plant (BNP)                            33         0.8%

Ashford Rural West
J Grugeon ( Con)                   2244     52.3%
I Bolt (SDP All )                      1546     36.1%
V John (Lab)                             497      11.6%   

Tenterden
C Carr  (Con)                           3276       57.9%
M Le Poidevin  ( Lib All)        1857       32.8%
J Howlett  (Lab)                        525          9.3%           

Ashford Rural East 
G Thompson   (Con)              2645        64.6%     
CA Porter ( Ecol)                      760         18.6%
J Adby (Lab)                              688         16.8%  

and the fall-out... Jo Hawkes was bitterly disappointed and blamed everybody on her own side for her failure to get that extra 20 votes. By hindsight, of course we should have done better than we did and obviously we should have targetted better, but targetting strategy is always so much easier when you have the final votes in front of you. I would be interested to hear where other people think we went wrong. Anyway, soon Jo announced she was leaving the party. She sat in council for the moment as an independent, but by the time we came  to next election we had to get used to the sight of our former parliamentary candidate sporting a big blue rosette.

Of course some cynical people might say that that had been Jo's intention all along, and had we put all our energies into winning South for her, the egg on our faces would have been that much worse...

[yellowperil]

It is evident that my present rate of progress means that it will take a good few months to get to the end of my appointed era in 2003. I think I will now take a natural break in the process while we are some of us more focussed on the events around May 3rd 2018 than on 1985-7, which is where I'm going next. I may continue some research which may lead to some added detail and/or corrections before I proceed further, and then on to the key local and general elections of 1987, and the formation of the Liberal Democrats! See you there, probably in late May/early June.

[Pete Whitehead]

I've added the thematic maps for 1983 on the post at the bottom of page 2

[matureleft]

Apr 12, 2018 8:38:40 GMT yellowperil said:

It is evident that my present rate of progress means that it will take a good few months to get to the end of my appointed era in 2003. I think I will now take a natural break in the process while we are some of us more focussed on the events around May 3rd 2018 than on 1985-7, which is where I'm going next. I may continue some research which may lead to some added detail and/or corrections before I proceed further, and then on to the key local and general elections of 1987, and the formation of the Liberal Democrats! See you there, probably in late May/early June.

I'll look forward to it. This kind of micro study is fascinating (and a great antidote to some of the stuff that occupies this site...). Reflecting on my earlier remark I can see the other side. The SDP had no data and was normally, in the Alliance deal, allocated seats that the Liberals had left with paper candidates in the past, at best. They seldom had experienced political operators from other parties. Those who did join from Labour may have come with rather inflated reputations as local politicians/activists (from the Cambridge experience). The media hype, initial polling and early by-elections did suggest an extremely widespread potential appeal and there must have been an urge to believe that. It's also arguable that spreading the campaigning net wide both recruited (or activated) members and gathered data to allow future target work. And there was certainly a desire then to see the SDP as a distinctive brand, particularly in areas of relative Labour strength where the Liberals were seen as having little appeal.

There were plenty of rather dismissive comments about Labour and its people that suggested we'd all be swept into the gutter of electoral history. To be fair, because of the origins of the national SDP leadership, there was a pretty sharp edge to some Labour personal communication at local level too...! Not a pleasant period in politics. I was in my mid-20s. While I was never tempted by the SDP I did briefly consider packing up and finding something nicer to do with my time.

[yellowperil]

Apr 12, 2018 9:45:14 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

I've added the thematic maps for 1983 on the post at the bottom of page 2

excellent -and I like the difference on the Alliance one particularly

[yellowperil]

Although I do not intend to resume this historical study until this year's May elections are out of the way, Ihave been continuing to try and research the background and as I had already indicated the one significant gap in my records was the results of key local by-elections in the 1980,s. I tried the Borough Council's electoral department and they said they would dig out their old paper records and then came back to me to say sorry they had not kept any record and it was all gone! I may try other sources (local newspaper archives?) but it's proving more difficult than I expected.I took part in some of these historic by-elections (as we thought), and it looks as though they are on the verge of being lost to history. Those of you who are interested in local by-elections and the historical contexts- is this normal for local authorities to junk their electoral records to this extent?

[yellowperil]

Good news on Friday 4th May (among a lot of other good news that day!) is that I had an email from Ashford BC electoral department to say they had continued to search among their filing cabinets for the missing by-election results from the 1980's and had finally found them misfiled, and they attached scans of the little handwritten notes of dates and results! Saves me a long search through local newspaper archives which had otherwise looked the most likely avenue to come up with the results, so I am well pleased. Nice to be able to thank a local authority electoral department for once. Details of the two which relate to the bit of history I have already entered here, the Henwood and Stanhope by-elections, which had led to changes in the composition of the council I will enter shortly, and I will keep the ones which come a bit later until I get to that point in the story!

[yellowperil]

By-elections 1984/5
As promised, details of Henwood and Stanhope, and actually I will also include the Central by election which came chronologically between the two.
Henwood, 4/10/84
David Blain had unfortunately to resign after his work took him away from the area, and the Liberal half of the Alliance had the task of defending a seat where the Liberals had gained it only eighteen months before, never an ideal situation. They drafted in Fred Winslade who had failed to hold Willesborough Lees against John Simpson's defection to the Conservatives- they did like giving Fred difficult jobs, and though he was a very experienced and capable administrator he was still learning the dark arts of electoral politics. The Tories spotted the opportunity and took it.

RJ Shearer (Con)         200
FL Winslade (Lib All)  185
MG Bland (Lab)             96
MW Collins (Eco)            6                  Con gain from Lib All
The green vote this time in that humiliating position of failing to reach the numbers on the nomination form! These numbers may look low, by the way, but this is actually over 40% turnout- the highest turnout in any Ashford by-election of the era.

Central, 2/5/85
This time it was the Tory 's turn to lose a councillor to resignation, this time more from general mutual dissatisfaction. Michael Ryan was a somewhat uncertain Tory - some years later he was to approach the Lib Dems and offer to stand for us but the offer was not taken up- we had fought this by-election on the basis of his poor record as a councillor!  (note edit below)
Leafing through old minute books I discovered an interesting fact I had completely forgotten- Martin Nunn's agent for this by election  was Gordon Turner, the True Liberal, who was much closer at this time to SDP than to the Liberals.
C R Kegos (Con)           391
MR Nunn (SDP All)      313
MJ Hayes (Lab)             208                   Con hold
Rita Kegos was to prove a much more effective candidate and indeed councillor than her predecessor, and this was Martin Nunn 's  best shot at becoming a councillor missed. Mike Hayes was making his presence felt, too - later to be Labour leader and deputy leader of the council.If the Labour vote had remained as soft as it often was at this time we could probably taken  Central, but Mike had other ideas!
Edit  -I had a mental car crash when I wrote some of the above but I leave it in place as a dire warning to check facts before rushing to post in the midst of the current election fever. What I wrote above about Michael Ryan was obvious nonsense., and I was muddling up the two 1980's Ashford Central byelections.  The 1985 by election was caused by the departure of another councillor altogether, and then Michael Ryan was first elected in 1987 and then resigned causing a further  by-election. The rest of what I wrote above was absolutely correct!
Stanhope, 15/8/85
Labour's turn for a resignation in the form of Peter Constable, and Mike Hayes was lined up by Labour as the natural successor, but Stanhope was a difficult ward for any party. And Martin Nunn had found Palma Laughton, a leading light of Stanhope Parish Council, wife of a former Labour council candidate elsewhere, energetic, passionate about Stanhope and very little else politically, a karate instructor....and not very fond of Mike Hayes. We went forward to nomination with quite a plethora of other candidates ( though no Tory which says something about the sort of ward this was). And of course an election in late August.

P Laughton  (SDP All)      221
MJ Hayes (Lab)                179
P Roche (Residents)        129
JI Jones (Ind)                      61
DA Harris ( Eco)                    9
H Gray (BNP)                         1                SDP All gain from Lab
A sensational result in many ways!  Palma was starting a career that would leave her as synonymous with Stanhope for decades and propel her to the mayorality (twice) but she was never too fussed about the party label sitting variously as SDP , Lib Dem, Labour and at least two different shades of independent. Mike Hayes formed an intense dislike of the people who had robbed him of his rightful place on the council on this occasion, which would later colour the negotiations with the Lib Dems to form a coalition administration. Some of us learned a lot about election campaigning in a really tough environment- more than once our canvassing teams came under attack by yobs hurling stones and the like. Palma of course would always leap to the defence of her beloved Stanhope if anyone on her campaign team hinted that the place was just a bit, well,rough. The green candidate again failed to make double figures, but what about the BNP? Presumably the only person voting for him was himself!

[yellowperil]

The Ashford SDP in the Owen Years 1985-7

From 1985 onwards the local SDP had a bit of a different feel to it. For a start it was now a fully fledged Local Party. Before this the Local Party had been East Kent and Ashford had been a mere constituency group. Now the rules were that any constituency party with over 100 members could have the status of local party and be self-governing, and we easily qualified for that, and the party had a new chair, in me. I had started off as a fringe member, far too busy at work to get properly involved, but it sort of sweeps you up.

The whole party nationally from the top down had a much more professional feel to it, and some of that was probably down to David Owen but a lot to the backroom staff like Dick Newby, and some of that was rubbing down to constituency level. This was greatly helped by the time we had a new PPC in place. The Jo Hawkes saga had rumbled on for a while (she sent her initial letter of resignation in June 1985, rejoined in September after the Stanhope by-election victory, but again let her membership lapse during 1986). Meanwhile we had gone ahead with hustings for the new PCC and by December 1985 had selected Neil Macmillan.  Picking an outsider rather than recruiting from our own ranks showed our widening horizons, and Neil was to be the best parliamentary candidate I have ever worked with. A Scottish businessman and originally a Tory ( I think somewhere on his cv was mention of having been chair of the Scottish YCs!) he was energetic  and charismatic and we were soon recruiting a whole new set of members and getting properly organised for the 1987 local elections as well as the general election whenever it would come. Neil really really wanted to win. He lived elsewhere but had always had a holiday home on the seafront in Hythe and increasingly we got used to having long serious and productive campaign meetings beside the seaside!

In this new era our membership was growing fast and the quality was definitely on the up if moving a bit too right-wing for my tastes, probably reflecting the direction of the party nationally under Owen. I will mention just two of the new recruits by name. Campbell Miller,known generally as Bill, had been a leading light in the local Labour party and we had met him at various election counts and on the campaign trail and he was hardworking and clearly of a social democratic rather than socialist persuasion- he came over to us and soon established himself as one of the most reliable party workers we had, enthusiastic and talented in all sorts of ways. The other one was a schoolboy! We did at this stage recruit a number of school students but one sixth former from the local grammar school stood out (he was in the same year as my younger son who was deeply sceptical of his classmate's seriousness!) He was called Roderick Nye (known everywhere as Rick) and rapidly dominated our youth wing! He was characteristic of the new right wing social marketeers in the SDP, and in the national party became a close buddy of Danny Finkelstein.

I might as well list their subsequent careers here. Bill and Rick were to become the most committed Owenites in our local party and when the split came they became the leading figures in the Continuing SDP and were to fight elections under that banner. When that didn't work out, they went off in very different directions. Bill went back to his roots and found a very comfortable home in New Labour - he was really a Blairite ahead of his time.Rick went with Danny into the Tory party and by the Hague era they both had cosy berths in the Tory hierarchy at director level.

[carlton43]

This is very good stuff YP and all the more so for being set around my own youthful political enterprises. It has the bitter sweet aroma of personal nostalgia and so much else as memories are triggered and names dragged out of my past.

As a young bank teller I ran the Charing, the South Ashford and the Wye sub branches quite often. At Chilham H E Bates was a frequently attending customer and not at all like his own homely characters from 'The Darling Buds...'. He was neat, precise and acerbic to the frequent point of outright rudeness. It was quite a surprise to me. He complained about the staff and the service in general fairly often but I got on well enough by being low profile, efficient, knowing and catering to his foibles (supply of crisp envelopes and always new notes!), not commenting on his books and not seeking autographs, etc.

[yellowperil]

May 7, 2018 15:48:49 GMT carlton43 said:

This is very good stuff YP and all the more so for being set around my own youthful political enterprises. It has the bitter sweet aroma of personal nostalgia and so much else as memories are triggered and names dragged out of my past.

As a young bank teller I ran the Charing, the South Ashford and the Wye sub branches quite often. At Chilham H E Bates was a frequently attending customer and not at all like his own homely characters from 'The Darling Buds...'. He was neat, precise and acerbic to the frequent point of outright rudeness. It was quite a surprise to me. He complained about the staff and the service in general fairly often but I got on well enough by being low profile, efficient, knowing and catering to his foibles (supply of crisp envelopes and always new notes!), not commenting on his books and not seeking autographs, etc.

Yes that was very much my impression of Bates. I suspect politically he was quite left wing too, which might be a bit of a surprise when you might read some of his work especially the darling buds series as being a celebration of a very non-socialist world with the taxman as the enemy.

[yellowperil]

Ashford Borough Council Wards by Council Division, 1987 - Ashford North

Both sides of the Alliance would go into the 1987 elections in a much better shape and with a lot of confidence, and would have viewed the North division as a key battleground. But the Conservatives were also getting much better organised and determined than before and one of their strategies, putting pressure on the remaining independents to convert or stand down, had paid off in some quarters- in Queens ward Harry Lavender had joined the Blues, though not without some mutterings in certain quarters. The Alliance problem was holding the line on targeting. in the face of exaggerated optimism and the issue of being a double-headed monster made targeting discipline that much worse (in this division the SDP fielded 3 candidates and the Liberals 5). Labour was in a markedly weaker state but got their targeting much better, not fielding a candidate at all in Bybrook and having paper candidates in all but Bockhanger which they really went for

Bockhanger
J Adby (Lab)       439   38.3%
G Galpin (Con)   431   37.6%
J Blunt( SDP All) 275   24.0%

Bybrook 
P Hare-Scott(Con) 422 53.5%
E Gerrard (Lib All) 367  46.5%

Central(2)
CR Kegos (Con)                    542  52.3%
M Ryan (Con)                       526
G English (SDP All)              348  33.6%
J Sherwood (SDP All)          335
B Bracken (Lab)                   147  14.2%
M Stanyon (Lab)                 136 

Kennington Lees
N Wilson(Con)                            296  44.2%
C Paul Burnham (Lib All)           289  43.1%
A Lawrie (Lab)                              85  12.7%

Queens
HLavender (Con)                        346   59.7%
J Andrews (Lib All)                     143   24.7%
R Allen (Lab)                                 91   15.7%

Spearpoint
H Moorhead (Con)                      360    54.6%
C Town (Lib All)                            238    36.1%
D Murray ( Lab)                             61       9.3%

Warren
 B Moorman (Con)                       428    61.6%
M Deeprose (Lib All )                   228   32.6%
T Stanyon (Lab)                               39      5.6%

So in the end 7 Tories elected and 1 Labour, and the Alliance runners-up almost everywhere- a classic case study of poor targeting strategy. And in the end we had candidates moaning like mad complaining that we hadn't dropped everything and poured all our effort into their ward, as they were confident if we had done that they would have won. The two main offenders (and least justified) were Jenny Blunt in Bockhanger and Julie Andrews(!) in Queens (now 31 years ago so I think I can name names!). On the other hand some candidates who really desperately deserved help (Paul Burnham obviously) were very reluctant to ask for it.  A  couple of other notes:(1) two Alliance candidates were carrying quite severe physical disabilities and helped demonstrate our inclusiveness, but also put up a fight regardless - Julie Andrews and  Maurice Deeprose were both wheelchair users.(2) Yes the lead SDP candidate in Central was your very own Yellow Peril.