Martin Kyrle's history of Eastleigh elections from 1965

[tonyhill]

I hope I'm not going to regret taking this on, but I suggested it as an idea quite a while ago after yellowperil had finished his history of Ashford.  Martin Kyrle has written three books (so far) on Eastleigh elections, very much from his own vantage point, and centred around his late wife Margaret.  I am only going to post extracts from them:  I don't know what the policy of the site is regarding advertising the availability of the actual books so I will await advice about that.  There is also a previous book in the series about his early days in the Liberal Party in Southampton, but I will start with:

"The Liberals in Hampshire - a Part(ly) History.  Eastleigh 1965-72:  out in the suburbs, something stirred!"


"Chandler's Ford lies mid-way between Southampton and Winchester, in the Borough of Eastleigh but nowadays completely separated from the town itself and the rest of the borough by the M3 motorway.  The population is now in excess of 23,000, but when I first moved here 50 years ago it was much smaller.  Back then Chandler's Ford was one ward represented by two councillors on a council consisting of 28 members - the vast majority of them Labour, who had controlled the Borough continuously since its creation in 1936.

Eastleigh had only come into existence as a separate parliamentary constituency in 1955, when it was won for the Conservatives by David Price, who went on to represent it for the next 37 years.  No Liberal contested it then, nor in 1959,  but this changed in 1964 when John Foster Rice, a local architect and surveyor in private practice stood.  The result in that election was:

                                               D.E.C. Price                                 Con       23,429     45.4%
                                               J.S.F.  Boswell                                Lab        21,341     41.5%
                                               J.F. Rice                                        Lib          6,685      13.0%

In 1966 it reverted to the marginal it had been in 1955.

                                              D.E.C. Price                                  Con       24,337      45.4%
                                              J.A.A. Evans                                   Lab        23,636      44.1%
                                              J.F. Rice                                         Lib           5,617      10.5%

I knew John Foster Rice in my capacity as County Organiser (1962-65).  It was only natural, therefore, that as soon as I'd moved into his constituency I phoned him and asked him to find me a candidate to fight the next local elections, and I'd be the Agent.  The Eastleigh Constituency Liberal Association had a number of branches, one of which operated in Chandler's Ford.  The Chairman, Ray Quinlan, had stood in 1961but didn't want to do it again and suggested Stella Sparrow.




                                                             

[hullenedge]

May 4, 2020 7:14:08 GMT tonyhill said:

I hope I'm not going to regret taking this on, but I suggested it as an idea quite a while ago after yellowperil had finished his history of Ashford.  Martin Kyrle has written three books (so far) on Eastleigh elections, very much from his own vantage point, and centred around his late wife Margaret.  I am only going to post extracts from them:  I don't know what the policy of the site is regarding advertising the availability of the actual books so I will await advice about that.  There is also a previous book in the series about his early days in the Liberal Party in Southampton, but I will start with:

"The Liberals in Hampshire - a Part(ly) History.  Eastleigh 1965-72:  out in the suburbs, something stirred!"


"Chandler's Ford lies mid-way between Southampton and Winchester, in the Borough of Eastleigh but nowadays completely separated from the town itself and the rest of the borough by the M3 motorway.  The population is now in excess of 23,000, but when I first moved here 50 years ago it was much smaller.  Back then Chandler's Ford was one ward represented by two councillors on a council consisting of 28 members - the vast majority of them Labour, who had controlled the Borough continuously since its creation in 1936.

Eastleigh had only come into existence as a separate parliamentary constituency in 1955, when it was won for the Conservatives by David Price, who went on to represent it for the next 37 years.  No Liberal contested it then, nor in 1959,  but this changed in 1964 when John Foster Rice, a local architect and surveyor in private practice stood.  The result in that election was:

                                               D.E.C. Price                                 Con       23,429     45.4%
                                               J.S.F.  Boswell                                Lab        21,341     41.5%
                                               J.F. Rice                                        Lib          6,685      13.0%

In 1966 it reverted to the marginal it had been in 1955.

                                              D.E.C. Price                                  Con       24,337      45.4%
                                              J.A.A. Evans                                   Lab        23,636      44.1%
                                              J.F. Rice                                         Lib           5,617      10.5%

I knew John Foster Rice in my capacity as County Organiser (1962-65).  It was only natural, therefore, that as soon as I'd moved into his constituency I phoned him and asked him to find me a candidate to fight the next local elections, and I'd be the Agent.  The Eastleigh Constituency Liberal Association had a number of branches, one of which operated in Chandler's Ford.  The Chairman, Ray Quinlan, had stood in 1961but didn't want to do it again and suggested Stella Sparrow.




                                                             

Thanks for posting. Just purchased on eBay!

[Georg Ebner]

Kyrle doesn't sound very Britisch, does it?
My university had a Kyrle in its ranks.

[finsobruce]

May 4, 2020 9:20:08 GMT Georg Ebner said:

Kyrle doesn't sound very Britisch, does it?
My university had a Kyrle in its ranks.

It is though - a development of the Norman surname De Criel , recorded early on as they were given lots of land by William the Conqueror. Lots of spelling variations.

[tonyhill]

I believe that the Kyrles came from the English/Welsh border - Shropshire, Herefordshire.

[Devil Wincarnate]

It is quite incredible to think how much Chandlers' Ford has grown since then.  There are large parts of it that you'd consider to be part of it, but strictly speaking (i.e. on ward/borough boundaries), they are not at all.

[tonyhill]

1966 Local Election

We went to the count to see how we'd done, and it was quite an experience! It was apparently the custom from time immemorial that as each result was declared by the returning officer the successful candidate in that ward stepped forward and thanked his wonderful far-sighted supporters and then made triumphalist or downright insulting remarks about the other candidate's party. The losing candidate then came forward and returned the compliment, while the partisans of each persuasion cheered or booed as appropriate. The staff doing the counting meanwhile just looked at their fingers in embarrassment and waited for it all to stop.

The appearance of a Liberal on the scene provoked both Tories and Labour to new extremes of sarcasm, assuring everyone that we had no business putting up a candidate at all as we had no hope of winning and no policies. When it came to Stella's turn she merely thanked her supporters for their efforts and made no mention of the other parties. As we had only fought the one ward, Stella was the sole Liberal candidate.

Chandler's Ford

Mrs P.M. Inge Con 935 56.0%
D.T. Murchie Lab 431 25.8%
Mrs S.A.L. Sparrow Lib 303 18.2%

Turnout 49.5%

We were reasonably satisfied with the result as the previous year there had been no Liberal candidate so we were in effect starting again from scratch. We also noted that the Labour candidate had not campaigned at all but had still managed to beat us into third place.

1967 Local Elections

In 1967 Stella stood a second time in Chandler's Ford, and we put up a candidate in Hiltingbury. Labour put up candidates but this time didn't even bother to put out an election address. They still managed to beat us into third place in Chandler's Ford! I was mightily pissed off, I can tell you.

Chandler's Ford

J.R. Ford Con 991 65.3%
T.C. Bisson Lab 266 17.8%
Mrs S.A.L. Sparrow Lib 261 17.2%


Turnout 41.1%

[tonyhill]

A Diversion - Jumble Sales

Just before I set down some of what Martin writes about Jumble Sales I'll add my own comments. Saturdays in the 1970s were planned around jumble sales: as a book dealer I would go to as many as I could, frequently three or more, often in the company of one of my record collecting friends who had a car, or later in the 80s with Jenny when she bought one. Mostly they were useless for books, though we still have an attic full of clothes that Jenny bought at the time, and which she sometimes raids to find something 'new' to wear, but there was always the chance of finding something exciting, and from time to time I did. They were also one of the main ways political parties raised funds at that time. Liberal Jumble Sales were a regular feature of Saturdays during the year. When I joined the local party in 1971 I started off selling the shoes, and 2p a pair, because I had worked in a shoe factory, but I soon graduated to the books because they were more interesting. Our jumble sales were presided over by Jessie, a seemingly cantankerous old lady who had the art of running them down to a tee, and woe betide anyone who had ideas that didn't accord with hers. On a good day we would make £40. At that time there was a famous annual jumble sale held in someone's garden by Oliver's Battery Conservatives which used to raise £700! It is unbelievable now that a political party which took over 30% of the vote in our constituency (i.e. the Liberal Party) had such a flimsy financial base. I think I have mentioned before that at the first parliamentary by-election I attended (Warwick and Leamington) we scavenged cardboard from behind the supermarket to paste up our canvass sheets onto. Now at a parliamentary by-election the spend is probably somewhere around six figures. Anyway, to to Martin.

"The biggest source of money was jumble sales. Modern readers may have difficulty in understanding the term as they have all but died out. People who want to dispose of unwanted posessions by letting another organisation sell them and keep the proceeds now either take them to a charity shop or fill one of the plastic bags charities put through letterboxes. What happened in those days was that everyone collected together all their and their friends' old clothes, assorted junk from the attic, garden shed, or kitchen cupboards. We then put an advert in the local paper and put up notices stuck on trees, garden gates etc giving the time and date, hired a hall, laid everything for sale out on trestle tables, invited the public in at threepence a head and sold off as much of it as possible.

It was usually the women who manned the tables selling the clothes, and Margaret (Kyrle) was notorious for inveigling ladies who an item would never fit to buy it. To boost the profits we would also sell teas and hold a raffle. The men usually manned the bric a brac stall, and I myself took charge of admission on the door as I'm 6'1" so not many people were likely to risk trying to shove their way past me. It was absolutely essential not to open the doors until the published time, and people would get very irate if you opened them too early and they turned up at the right time and found that people had been let in a couple of minutes early. About 10 minutes before opening time I'd go down the queue and collect everyone's admission money so that they could all rush in when the doors opened. It was amazing how many subterfuges people would come up with just to save themselves threepence. A favourite trick was to try to send a child in 'just to look around', thinking we would only charge adults and children could get in free. Not with me on the door they wouldn't! I had plenty of stand-offs with irate parents who didn't like the fact that their dishonesty had been thwarted. There were even occasional threats of violence. But only threats. Maybe they looked at my size and demeanour and realised I might possible retaliate in kind. Our committee members all turned up on the day to help out, usually with their spouses. In addition we had a number of mainly elderly ladies who came along to help man the stalls but who took no part in any other Liberal activities. They were known affectionately as 'jumblies'!

To understand the chronic shortage of money in those days you have to remember that the national subscription to become a party member was half a crown (2s6d), though allowing for inflation maybe about £1.20p. But still an insignificant sum to fund a national party. No wonder we had almost no full time staff at a national level, let alone local.

[yellowperil]

Is it me , but I didn't think jumble sales had so completely vanished into the ether as this implies- I still see occasional ones advertised, though whether political parties try to fund their election expenses through them is another matter. Boot sales,up to a point,replaced them, and were larger scale, more profitable and more entertaining. In my most active political days, slightly later than Martin is talking about here , say the eighties and nineties, we still ran the occasional jumble but had mostly moved on to car boots or to auctions. The latter were the most successful for us and we could make a good few hundred pounds at least from a public auction (I stepped in as auctioneer for some of them), and the best thing was getting quite substantial sums for party funds out of known local Tories out for a bargain, and as auctioneer it was fun to try and make them pay over the odds for them. All of these worked best if they became a regular feature and people knew to look out for them. We tried running our own boot sales but found it more profitable to enter a few boots at ones run by somebody else,rather than to carry the overheads, the risk of bad weather,etc when running the whole thing. We tried it on our own a few times, not enough to really get the venue into all the booties'diaries.

[The Bishop]

Certainly still see boot sales occasionally, despite the growth in charity shops and so on.

[tonyhill]

There must be quite a bit of local variation in the way people raise (used to raise) money. There is no tradition of auctions in the bits of Hampshire I know, but Jenny tells me that in the late 60s in Cornwall most of the jumble was auctioned rather than piled onto tables: places like Penryn were very poor. In the last twenty years or so I think people, round here at least, would rather stump up a tenner than spend their Saturday selling tat for a pittance.

[tonyhill]

1968 Local Elections

By 1968 Margaret felt sufficiently free of domestic burdens (babies) to consider being a candidate again. I devised a long-term plan - for the forseeable future she would be the candidate and I would be the agent. We knew perfectly well that she wasn't going to get elected the first time she stood so our plan was that she should keep fighting the Borough elections in Chandler's Ford until she did.

The custom at the time was to fight an election campaign over a period of about three weeks, attend the count, pay the election expenses within the time limit allowed by law and then spend the rest of the year raising the money to pay for it and start putting some money by for next year. There was no concept of 'political campaigning'. It was difficult enough to persuade the committee members to even collect party subs. Most of them refused to ask anyone for money and memberships often lapsed because people were to embarrassed to knock on members' doors to ask them to renew. It was about this time too that the national party decided to double the annual subscription to 5/- (25p). When this instruction came down to our branch there was consternation, and predictions that all the members would resign. I didn't think they would and went off on my rounds and collected five bob from everyone (bar one) thus doubling our membership income at a stroke (less the 10% commission that I had told them I would charge for my trouble - did they want 90% of something or 100% of nothing?)

All my life I've lived with the fact that when people see my surname they can't pronounce it, and when they see it they can't spell it. If Margaret was going to become known in Chandler's Ford we'd have to make sure that everyone at least knew how to pronounce her name, so our intro leaflet carried a pleasant picture of Margaret and the catchphrase "Kyrle's the Girl!" - corny but effective. Our canvassing team consisted of the two of us plus a young man who lived round the corner, and for six weeks we canvassed most evenings, and Margaret went out during the afternoon as well. For the first time since our arrival Labour failed to put up candidates in either of the wards which meant that we could promote ourselves as the real opposition to the Tories. 1968 marked the end of Labour as a serious political force in Chandler's Ford.

[tonyhill]

Our hope was that we would get the vote we got last year plus the Labour vote, plus a bonus of about 50 votes for the canvassing we'd done. In addition, I was well aware that Margaret went down well on the doorstep because she was lively and chatty, and people warmed to her. She also had the right sort of credentials for a local election: lived locally, had a couple of kids and belonged to several local voluntary organisations. Had a degree in English and played the piano too, which added flesh to the bone - she was a real person, not just a party robot with a rosette on.

We weren't going to win, but given the circumstances we should get the biggest Liberal vote ever, and I would use that in the campaign in the following year.

J.S.H. Plummer     Con   1096    65.5%
Mrs M.R. Kyrle     Lib      577    34.5%

Turnout 44.7%

We achieved our target, and my prediction of a bonus was spot on - exactly 50 votes!

To push us on the way from second place to first, Margaret adopted a strategy when canvassing of making a note of people who she thought might in due course become workers or members. After the election she systematically went off two or three times a week and paid them a visit. In the six weeks up to the end of June she'd exhausted the list of people to call back on, but by then she'd signed up a number of new members and workers. Another strategy we worked on was building up a list of deliverers. I canvassed a road until I found someone who was willing to deliver it (or part of it, if it was a long road), and then stopped and went on to a different road where we had no deliverers and did the same. In the course of one campaign I had a delivery list covering most of the ward. My maxim is "Give someone 30 leaflets to deliver and they'll do it for 30 years; give them 300 and they'll do it once!".

I was determined to keep the Liberals in the public eye throughout the year. This meant looking out for local issues no matter how small and taking them up in order to show people that we meant business and were always around. (Potholes, street lighting, play equipment, parking - all too familiar now, but this was 1968!)

[yellowperil]

May 8, 2020 7:35:19 GMT tonyhill said:

Our hope was that we would get the vote we got last year plus the Labour vote, plus a bonus of about 50 votes for the canvassing we'd done. In addition, I was well aware that Margaret went down well on the doorstep because she was lively and chatty, and people warmed to her. She also had the right sort of credentials for a local election: lived locally, had a couple of kids and belonged to several local voluntary organisations. Had a degree in English and played the piano too, which added flesh to the bone - she was a real person, not just a party robot with a rosette on.

We weren't going to win, but given the circumstances we should get the biggest Liberal vote ever, and I would use that in the campaign in the following year.

J.S.H. Plummer Con 1096 65.5%
Mrs M.R. Kyrle Lib 577 34.5%

Turnout 44/7%

We achieved our target, and my prediction of a bonus was spot on - exactly 50 votes!

To push us on the way from second place to first, Margaret adopted a strategy when canvassing of making a note of people who she thought might in due course become workers or members. After the election she systematically went off two or three times a week and paid them a visit. In the six weeks up to the end of June she'd exhausted the list of people to call back on, but by then she'd signed up a number of new members and workers. Another strategy we worked on was building up a list of deliverers. I canvassed a road until I found someone who was willing to deliver it (or part of it, if it was a long road), and then stopped and went on to a different road where we had no deliverers and did the same. In the course of one campaign I had a delivery list covering most of the ward. My maxim is "Give someone 30 leaflets to deliver and they'll do it for 30 years; give them 300 and they'll do it once!".

I was determined to keep the Liberals in the public eye throughout the year. This meant looking out for local issues no matter how small and taking them up in order to show people that we meant business and were always around. (Potholes, street lighting, play equipment, parking - all too familiar now, but this was 1968!)

One thing I noticed from those results was that you were also pushing up the Conservative vote a bit ,significantly breaking through the 1k barrier, and maybe in part that was the Tories responding to a new sort of challenge and therefore working a bit harder. I noticed the same thing happening in my campaigns, and took the philosophical view that if we were making the Tories take elections a bit more seriously that was all to the good for democracy. Of course it does mean the Tories might have been converting some previous Labour voters rather than getting more previous non-voters to vote, in which case the canvassing bonus was a bit more than the 50 votes claimed

On the " give someone 30 leaflets"etc maxim, I agree that's right, but then I was always on the lookout for people happy to convert 30 to 60 next time , then 120....

[tonyhill]

1969 Local Election

It had been a difficult time for me personally because I'd been away during the week at Sussex University doing an MA in Russian Studies, and then had to spend the summer writing my dissertation, only to find that while I'd been on secondment from HCC to do the degree my headmistress had given my job to someone else, so I also had to find a new job. The elephant in the room as far as the 1969 local election was whether Labour would stand a candidate. They did. Margaret nearly had kittens when she found out that it was Sue Bartlet, a formidable opponent. "She'll get all the Labour votes back, and take some off me as well!". I didn't share this gloomy prediction, and my assessment proved to be correct.

Mrs P.M. Inge Con 1319 52.3%
Mrs M.R. Kyrle Lib 1064 42.2%
Mrs S.M. Bartlet Lab 138 5.5%

Though still losing, getting into four figures was hugely important for us. Sue Bartlet became a County Councillor and served a term as Chairman. She rang me up one day and asked if I was interested in serving as a school governor, something I had never considered. The outcome was that I ended up as a governor of Tankerville, our school in the town centre for severely sub-normal children (as they were called in those days), a position I went on to hold for eighteen years, twelve of them as Chairman of Governors.

[tonyhill]

A Diversion; the birth of "Ad Lib".

It was early spring in 1970, and I was having my hair cut. John, the barber, was an old friend from my Southampton days, and by chance he'd recently moved his shop to Chandler's Ford so I renewed my patronage. "You do a lot of printing Martin. I need to get some leaflets out to advertise my business. Can you do them for me?" I explained that I didn't do the printing myself, but if he roughed something out I would take it to the printer, which I did, and John got his leaflets. The next time I went in he said, "There's a lot of bloody long roads in Chandler's Ford, Martin. I'm knackered after standing all day cutting hair, and then I have to go out and push bits of paper through doors as well!" As I sat there I suddenly had an idea: what if our Liberal leaflets also had an advert from John on the back. That way he would pay for the printing of the leaflet, we would get our message out for free, and he wouldn't have to spend the evening plodding around the mean streets of Chandler's Ford. I took the idea to the next meeting of our Committee. They turned it down flat. "No one's going to want their business connected to the Liberal Party" was the gist of their argument. I disagreed: I knew several other local shopkeepers who were sympathisers or even party members so I approached them, and then other shops where I was a customer. I found that there were sixteen businesses that were willing to buy advertising space and they didn't much care who did the publicity for them. Some of them said that if their Conservative customers objected they would point out that if the Conservatives were do do the same thing then they would advertise with them as well. I put a booklet together which combined items of general interest with details of current Liberal campaigns, plus of course the adverts. I called it "Ad Lib" - ad for adverts and Lib for....

I printed enough for the whole ward and took them along to the next Committee meeting. "You said it couldn't be done, well I've done it. They are all paid for so you can go and deliver them, I've done my bit". I wasn't universally popular, but they were all delivered. No one has ever challenged my claim that this was the first ever Liberal leaflet entirely funded by advertising. Because it made a profit, or came near enough, it meant that we were no longer constrained financially from putting out campaigning material between elections. Initially it came out twice a year, and it enabled us to raise our profile immeasurably.

[tonyhill]

1970 Local Election:

J.R. Wood Con 1374 51.0%
Mrs M.R. Kyrle Lib 1321 49.0%

Turnout 58.2%

For the first time in Eastleigh's history Labour lost control of the Borough, and when members of the Council then elected J.R. Wood as an Alderman this weakened their position further, and meant an Aldermanic by-election in Chandler's Ford. So in June:

R.J. Perry Con 1423 51.9%
Mrs M.R. Kyrle Lib 1321 48.1%

Turnout 59.2%

No, that is not a misprint, we did get exactly the same number of votes as we had in May! Roy Perry went on to become an MEP, but at the subsequent election he was placed too far down the Conservative list to get re-elected, maybe because he was too sensible and pro-EU. He became a County Councillor and Leader of Hampshire County Council.

The 1970 General Election:

D.E.C. Price Con 30300 51.0%
R.T.F. Flach Lab 22248 37.5%
C.J. Clayton Lib 6825 11.5%

Turnout 78.6%

The Liberals lost half their seats at the election, going from 12 to 6, and the overall results were so dire that some Liberal activists were tempted to give up. Unfortunately at a small meeting of senior activists after the meeting Chris Clayton announced that in his view the Liberal Party was finished and that he was joining Labour as the only way to challenge the Tories, and would we all like to join him? I asked John Kennedy, the leading Liberal in Fair Oak (an Eastleigh ward that was actually in the Winchester Constituency at the time, and the only one apart from Chandler's Ford where there was sustained Liberal activity) to come and see me at home. We sat around the table with Margaret and discussed what to do. John and I agreed that we were Liberals, not socialists, and had joined the Liberal Party when it had even fewer seats than it had now, so why should we regard it as finished?  (Martin was right about this:  he had joined the Liberal Party in 1958 when it had 5 MPs, Lady Megan Lloyd George having taken the Liberal seat of Carmarthen for Labour at a by-election in 1957 following the death of the Liberal MP elected in 1955.  Mark Bonham-Carter's victory at the Torrington by-election in 1958 put the Party back to 6 MPs, and although he lost his seat the following year Jeremy Thorpe took North Devon to keep the figure at 6).

[Devil Wincarnate]

Maybe this is a stupid question- but is that Roy Perry?  I know he was a Test Valley councillor later rather than an Eastleigh one, but he was around the area.

[tonyhill]

Yes, that is the Roy Perry. There is a very slightly scurrilous story about him in the book which I thought it best not to include on here, but Martin has forgiven him anyway!

[tonyhill]

1971 Local Election

J.S.H. Plummer Con 1372 45.4%
Mrs M.R. Kyrle Lib 1310 43.4%
D. McQuail Lab 339 11.2%

Turnout 60.9%


1972 Local Election

Mrs M.R. Kyrle Lib 1733 50.7%
Mrs P.M. Inge Con 1406 41.1%
L.S. Jones Lab 278 8.1%

Turnout 64.1%

Finally, after five attempts, Margaret had won! And on a turnout which was probably one of the highest in the country, and against a Tory who had lived in the area for 30 years and had been on the Council for six years. It is a lesson to us all to never give up trying. (I would point out, though, that Edward Heath's government was experiencing the start of mid-term blues - Tony).

On the Saturday morning after the election the phone rang and Margaret answered. Her face froze, and I watched while she said, "No thank you Mr Olson, I don't think so", and put the phone down. Still with her head bent forward and looking down at the phone - apparently in disbelief - she then said, very, very slowly, with a long pause between each word, "Who - the - f****ing - hell does he think he is? That was Olson inviting me to attend his Group meeting on Monday. I've been fighting those bastards for the past five years, and he thinks that now that I've got on the Council I'm going to join them?"

She was entirely on her own as the first ever Liberal member of Eastleigh Council and now had to make her mark and demonstrate that she was not allied to any other party. She became the Council Leader in 1986, and held her seat for 30 years. She died in 2011 at the age of 73.

That is the end of this book, but I will do the same for the next one because it looks as though this thread has been reasonably well read. The actual book is 116pp long and contains often acerbic biographies of some of the main players, reproductions of election literature, and a chapter on turnout by myself! Martin's style is fairly discursive to I have drastically pruned as I have gone along, and have changed the order of paragraphs from time to time. Martin's books, although written from a very partisan point of view, are a record of political history that would not normally have survived. I can see them being highly sought after by political obsessives like ourselves in future decades!