Martin Kyrle's history of Eastleigh elections from 1965

[yellowperil]

May 12, 2020 7:35:38 GMT tonyhill said:

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 sort after by political obsessives like ourselves in future decades!

- uncharacteristic proofreading slip there , Tony
All good stuff, of course and fascinating- my only regret is that in this pared-down version at least there isn't a bit more on the actual campaigning techniques. I'm sure Margaret didn't get from a couple of hundred votes to seventeen hundred simply by standing over and over again. Can you tell more or is that the point where  I have to buy the book?!

[tonyhill]

Thanks yellowperil! Now corrected. Strangely, that was what Martin wrote - I thought it was odd as well. There are great chunks of description of campaigning and reproductions of leaflets, but I didn't want to try people's patience too much. Maybe I'll rectify that in the next part.

[tonyhill]

The Liberals in Hampshire Part 3: Eastleigh 1972 - 81. The thorn in the flesh bursts into flower.

This book is 120pp long and is again profusely illustrated. Many of the illustrations are of leaflets that I printed: I became active in Winchester in 1971 and soon took charge of the Gestetner duplicator that our PPC housed. At that time no one locally had even heard of an electronic stencil. I bought my first litho press in about 1975, and so began my domination of Liberal printing throughout Hampshire, coinciding with Martin being a very pro-active Chairman of the Hampshire Area Liberal Group, and me being his Secretary. There are some stories in this book about HALG, but I'll see how it goes as to whether I include them in this thread.

Introduction:

Margaret had finally been elected as the first Liberal councillor on Eastleigh Borough. After a few months someone asked her what it was like.
"Well," she said, "at the end of a debate when the motion is put they all look at me to see which way I am going to vote, and when I vote with the Conservatives I put my right hand up, and when I vote with Labour I put my left hand up. I look on it as the Liberals being even-handed!"

A problem which confronted us almost immediately was that local government faced wholesale shake-up the following year with the abolition of Rural District Councils. Eastleigh's area and population would be doubled by the addition of West End, Hedge End, Botley, Bursledon, Hound and Hamble, hitherto part of Winchester RDC. In 1973 there would be all out elections to the new authority which meant that we had to find candidates to fight as many seats as possible to capitalise on our first ever victory. Chandler's Ford was allocated nine seats, four for Chandler's Ford itself and five for Hiltingbury. We took three of the four Chandler's Ford seats, missing out on the last one by two votes. The Conservatives easily won the five Hiltingbury seats, but we also won one of the three seats in Eastleigh East (only to lose it in a by-election the following year when our councillor resigned in circumstances that led to the de-frocking of a Catholic priest and headlines in the News of the World), and Fair Oak where local campaigner John Kennedy took one of the two seats. So the new Council, which shadowed the old authority for a year, consisted on 20 Labour, 13 Conservative, 5 Liberal, and 4 Independent councillors.

The existing Town Hall dated from 1899 when much of Eastleigh town had not yet been built, and Chandler's Ford was but a scattered rural area a mile or so away on the other side of a stream. It could not accommodate all the new councillors, let alone the increased numbers of staff necessary to operate the much enlarged Borough. It was obvious that the new authority would have to build new offices. Labour proposed to do exactly that, and the Liberals agreed that it made sense. The Tories, fully aware that it was the right thing to do and that had they been in office they would have been doing precisely the same thing, came out strongly against the idea, lambasted the Labour Party for wasting public money, and attacked them as spendthrifts. The public fell for it. In 1976 the Tories took control of the Borough (now with two additional seats) with 36 councillors to Labour's 6. John Kennedy was defeated in Fair Oak, and in Chandler's Ford, now with three seats instead of four, only Margaret was re-elected, and was back to being the only Liberal on the Council. The Tories inserted a plaque in the entrance to the new council offices recording that they had been inaugurated by the Leader of the Council, Godfrey Olson.

[Pete Whitehead]

I suspect that as in most places, the national situation in 1976 drove the strong Conservative performance here rather than any arguments about the town hall

[yellowperil]

May 13, 2020 7:41:16 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

I suspect that as in most places, the national situation in 1976 drove the strong Conservative performance here rather than any arguments about the town hall

I would say a bit of both. Of course when one party is on the up nationally it is always likely to be reflected locally to some degree, and if there is a local issue of the moment it then lands on receptive ears. Generally, if you look across the country in such a year one sees a lot of places where the national situation seems to make no difference, and others where it makes a huge difference, because in some places there is a local issue to latch on to, or because in one locality the party on the up is geared up to take advantage, while the party that is struggling nationally has no answer locally.  I   could illustrate with specific examples of each, but am trying to resist the temptation in order not to drive the thread off tack.

[tonyhill]

I don't think that any party is above trying to make political capital out of major public spending decisions, including the Liberal Democrats. I have always deplored it even when it is my party doing it because shouting about 'Councils wasting taxpayers' money' is very often (not always) cheap populism. I believe in local government and most of the people who work in it are there because they want to serve the public to the best of their ability - (again, not everyone, and sometimes they don't do as good a job as they should; but I want to see more respect for local government rather than less, and a council spending money on decent accommodation for the workers who provide the services we depend on should be supported for doing the right thing rather than being used as a political football.

[yellowperil]

May 13, 2020 9:56:01 GMT tonyhill said:

I don't think that any party is above trying to make political capital out of major public spending decisions, including the Liberal Democrats. I have always deplored it even when it is my party doing it because shouting about 'Councils wasting taxpayers' money' is very often (not always) cheap populism. I believe in local government and most of the people who work in it are there because they want to serve the public to the best of their ability - (again, not everyone, and sometimes they don't do as good a job as they should; but I want to see more respect for local government rather than less, and a council spending money on decent accommodation for the workers who provide the services we depend on should be supported for doing the right thing rather than being used as a political football.

Absolutely. Not least because that sort of cheap populism always comes back to bite you in the bum next time round. As I hope you are going to tell us it did for the Tories in due course in this instance.

[tonyhill]

1976 - the Aftermath:

I think the lowest point in my political life was after this particular count when we found that, despite our Herculean efforts over two whole years, we'd lost all our seats with the sole exception of Margaret. She was angry, and told me she felt like refusing to sign the register of acceptance of office, i.e. not to take up her seat and tell the Tories to get stuffed and leave the stupid electors to live with what they'd voted for. We told her that nearly 1200 people had shown by voting for her that they wanted her to represent them and that her first obligation was to them. We prevailed.

When we finally got home from the count at about three in the morning (Eastleigh is lucky - Winchester's counts are proverbially slow - Tony), as I turned into the drive the headlights picked our our cat, laid out. She didn't move. I picked up her body and took her indoors, and on the mat was a note from a neighbour explaining that he's found the cat in his garden, apparently poisoned, and thought that I'd want her back so that I knew she hadn't just gone missing.

Following their landslide victory the Tories then sacked practically every school governor who wasn't one of them. This included Margaret, a school teacher by profession, and a parent of a child at a Special School.

Another digression - the February 1974 General Election: Christchurch & Lymington

I always saw standing for parliament as something of a rite of passage, the sort of thing every activist ought to do at least once in their life. There was little chance of being elected, then or now, but if you believe in the party you stand anyway, and hope to improve on the result from last time and lay some groundwork which will allow your successor to do even better. We spent most of our time in town and village centres handing out leaflets to shoppers and passers-by as we had no local government base and no areas which had been worked by Liberals in recent times. I took the opportunity to go canvassing in obscure hamlets where no Liberal had ever been before, and remember particularly working a settlement right on the constituency boundary where the locals were so surpsied and delighted a parliamentary candidate had taken the trouble to visit them that almost all of them promised me their vote and put up window bills for me.

[yellowperil]

May 14, 2020 7:03:56 GMT tonyhill said:

1976 - the Aftermath:

I think the lowest point in my political life was after this particular count when we found that, despite our Herculean efforts over two whole years, we'd lost all our seats with the sole exception of Margaret. She was angry, and told me she felt like refusing to sign the register of acceptance of office, i.e. not to take up her seat and tell the Tories to get stuffed and leave the stupid electors to live with what they'd voted for. We told her that nearly 1200 people had shown by voting for her that they wanted her to represent them and that her first obligation was to them. We prevailed.

When we finally got home from the count at about three in the morning (Eastleigh is lucky - Winchester's counts are proverbially slow - Tony), as I turned into the drive the headlights picked our our cat, laid out. She didn't move. I picked up her body and took her indoors, and on the mat was a note from a neighbour explaining that he's found the cat in his garden, apparently poisoned, and thought that I'd want her back so that I knew she hadn't just gone missing.

Following their landslide victory the Tories then sacked practically every school governor who wasn't one of them. This included Margaret, a school teacher by profession, and a parent of a child at a Special School.

Another digression - the February 1974 General Election: Christchurch & Lymington

I always saw standing for parliament as something of a rite of passage, the sort of thing every activist ought to do at least once in their life. There was little chance of being elected, then or now, but if you believe in the party you stand anyway, and hope to improve on the result from last time and lay some groundwork which will allow your successor to do even better. We spent most of our time in town and village centres handing out leaflets to shoppers and passers-by as we had no local government base and no areas which had been worked by Liberals in recent times. I took the opportunity to go canvassing in obscure hamlets where no Liberal had ever been before, and remember particularly working a settlement right on the constituency boundary where the locals were so surpsied and delighted a parliamentary candidate had taken the trouble to visit them that almost all of them promised me their vote and put up window bills for me.

On that last point, I recognise that phenomenon exactly. It probably in the short term at least makes little difference in the overall scheme of things at Westminster level, but it feels great all round, and I think there were examples in my old thread about Ashford. Hamlet sized settlements  (say less than 200 voters in a self-contained community)are particularly prone to this- you get a few converts and suddenly  the rest can all follow! Love the word surpsied, btw -spot on!

[Pete Whitehead]

May 14, 2020 7:03:56 GMT tonyhill said:

1976 - the Aftermath:

I think the lowest point in my political life was after this particular count when we found that, despite our Herculean efforts over two whole years, we'd lost all our seats with the sole exception of Margaret. She was angry, and told me she felt like refusing to sign the register of acceptance of office, i.e. not to take up her seat and tell the Tories to get stuffed and leave the stupid electors to live with what they'd voted for. We told her that nearly 1200 people had shown by voting for her that they wanted her to represent them and that her first obligation was to them. We prevailed.

When we finally got home from the count at about three in the morning (Eastleigh is lucky - Winchester's counts are proverbially slow - Tony), as I turned into the drive the headlights picked our our cat, laid out. She didn't move. I picked up her body and took her indoors, and on the mat was a note from a neighbour explaining that he's found the cat in his garden, apparently poisoned, and thought that I'd want her back so that I knew she hadn't just gone missing.

Following their landslide victory the Tories then sacked practically every school governor who wasn't one of them. This included Margaret, a school teacher by profession, and a parent of a child at a Special School.

Another digression - the February 1974 General Election: Christchurch & Lymington

I always saw standing for parliament as something of a rite of passage, the sort of thing every activist ought to do at least once in their life. There was little chance of being elected, then or now, but if you believe in the party you stand anyway, and hope to improve on the result from last time and lay some groundwork which will allow your successor to do even better. We spent most of our time in town and village centres handing out leaflets to shoppers and passers-by as we had no local government base and no areas which had been worked by Liberals in recent times. I took the opportunity to go canvassing in obscure hamlets where no Liberal had ever been before, and remember particularly working a settlement right on the constituency boundary where the locals were so surpsied and delighted a parliamentary candidate had taken the trouble to visit them that almost all of them promised me their vote and put up window bills for me.

If Margaret Kyrle was alive today she'd have #FBPE in her Twitter bio

[hullenedge]

Been in touch with Martin Kyrle. Book 4 would have been released in March but delayed to October because of the virus. He's currently writing Book 5.

[tonyhill]

I won't edit that mistake then yellowperil! Sorry about the short post - my partner woke up early. Pete Whitehead's comment goes over my head I'm afraid. Book 4 in the series is for serious enthusiasts for Eastleigh politics - I'm not going to put extracts up here because although it's political there's not much electoral politics. It's a style of politics that has had its day, and one of the problems that the Liberal Democrats have got now, in my view, is that there are a lot of people who don't realise that. I'm not an enthusiast for on-line campaigning, but the social and political environment has completely changed over the past 10 - 15 years and people just don't engage with politics in the same ways any more. I don't have the answer, but David Penhaligon's mantra of "Stick it on a piece of paper and push it through the door" doesn't cut it any more.

[tonyhill]

Feb 1974 General Election - continued:

The election was also memorable due to the following event, which ended up by the Tories paying our election expenses! One of our members lived with a Tory activist who came home one day with a letter that she showed our member. She asked if she could show it to me, and brought it along to our committee room. It was from the Tory agent who said he had important information which the public had the right to know. The Liberal candidate, Mr Kyrle, was a card carrying member of the Communist Party and a frequent visitor to the Soviet Union. Making this public would discredit the Liberals and our campaign in particular. My agent asked if it was true.

"No," I said, "of course not. For one thing, if I was a card carrying member of the Communist Party, how would they know? The Communists keep their party membership list secret. As for being a frequent visitor to the Soviet Union, a chance would be a fine thing! I only wish it were true because it would do wonders for my Russian. In fact, I've been once - to the World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow back in 1957. We've all heard of entryism. If I was a commie, what would I be doing in the Liberals who haven't a hope in hell of winning?"

We consulted a local solicitor who confirmed that this was libel and that if we took the Tories to court we would almost certainly win. They wrote to the Tory agent demanding a public retraction, damages and our legal expenses, and this was duly received. After deductions we received a cheque from the Tories for £75, which sounds a piffling amount (about £832 at 2017 values - when this book was written), but it in fact covered the cost of my election campaign - and I came second with 25% of the vote!

Eastleigh - the Tory years:

In the local elections of 1976 the Tories had polled 40,000 votes across the Borough and won 36 seats; Labour had 20,000 votes and 6 seats; and the Liberals 13,000 votes and 1 seat. This ushered in a period one one-party rule which lasted for ten years. With such an overwhelming majority the Tory leader, Cllr Olson, saw no reason to bother with the opposition, or even consult them. For example, it was the custom in many local authorities that each year the choice of mayor was, as a matter of courtesy, discussed between the various parties, regardless of the fact that the majority party had the voting strength to make the final decision. Under Cllr Olson the announcement of the next Tory mayor of Eastleigh appeared in the press a fortnight or so before the Annual Meeting of the Council and the mayor making. The next local elections were in 1978: Grahame Smith failed to win Chandler's Ford for us by 210 votes, and John Kennedy lost again in Fair Oak, this time by 19 votes. The Tories took a seat off Labour giving them 37 seats, their highest ever total in Eastleigh. From that point on it was downhill, mostly, for them.

[tonyhill]

This has been a difficult book to summarise here because it largely consists of 6 Appendices rather than a linear narrative, which is what I have been trying to provide. I should have pointed out at the beginning that it has an Introduction by Tony Greaves!

1979 Local Election

I have hunted around the book for any analysis of this year but if it's there then I've missed it. Suffice to say that Margaret Kyrle was re-elected in Chandler's Ford with almost 60% of the vote, and John Kennedy regained the Fair Oak seat with a majority of 699. Writing at the time Philip Spearey, a fellow Fair Oak activist, said, "The general election saw an unpopular Labour Government get trounced, but optimistic forecasts of Liberal gains proved unfounded despite a good TV performance by our party leader, David Steel. We lost John Pardoe, Emlyn Hooson, and Jeremy Thorpe, the last perhaps with a small sigh of relief. In Winchester our candidate John Morgan didn't do very well, as we failed to generate enough enthusiasm. He liked to do things his own way, which didn't always go down well with Liberals!" (John was a wealthy local businessman with strong Welsh roots - he'd fought Newport previously - and provided Winchester with its first Liberal Party premises which had been a branch of the Co-Op in a residential backstreet. We ran it, not very successfully, as a charity shop to raise money for the local party. One evening for reasons I forget I took Martin Kyrle along there to get something out of the basement, which had quite a low ceiling. As remarked earlier in this thread, Martin is quite tall and smashed his head into an RSJ, cutting it open quite badly. Fortunately a friend of his lived around the corner and we went and knocked on her door and she staunched the blood flowing freely from his head - she was a party member and the mother of soon to be Tory Councillor Ian Tait. Digression by Tony.) "In Fair Oak it's a fairy tale. John Kennedy trounced the opposition with 54% of the vote. Three weeks later our five candidates for the Parish Council all get elected. These moments must be savoured. We don't get too many!"

Tony Greaves says in his introduction to this book, "Reading this account - and the two previous books in the series - is an enjoyable and head-shaking dip into a time that seems like yesterday; yet in its politics and campaigning it is from a different world." When I first joined the Winchester Constituency Executive Committee in the autumn of 1971 it was chaired by John Kennedy, and the secretary was Phil Spearey, who told me that he didn't really think he ought to be doing the job because he had been to a secondary modern school. He is one of the most decent, steadfast people I have ever met, and fortunately overcame that diffidence to be elected to Fair Oak Parish Council in 1974, and then to Eastleigh Borough in 1980, serving for 30 years including a year as Mayor.

[tonyhill]

1980 Local Election - Eastleigh West

Reckoning that Chandler's Ford was now a Liberal seat and it was safe to start the ball rolling in the next target ward, I decided to stand myself in Eastleigh West which was contiguous with Chandler's Ford. It included two council estates accustomed to voting Labour and the older part of Chandler's Ford. The Labour candidate took it for granted that neither I nor the Tory would canvass the council house areas because neither of us were 'working class'. While her opponents fought each other to the dath in the middle class part of the ward she'd carry the council estates by miles.

The Conservative candidate, a local GP, did indeed conform to her preconceptions and concentrated on the Chandler's Ford area, which prior to boundary changes had been part of the ward that first elected Margaret and so had a fairly well-established Liberal vote. Not expecting to win and being more interested in laying the foundations for future campaigns, my strategy was the opposite of what the Labour candidate had expected. We had no known supporters in the council estates so my first priority was to build a delivery network. I went knocking on doors and found plenty of unexpected Liberal voters who were prepared to become deliverers of our Focus leaflets. As part of my campaign, I distributed a housing leaflet inviting council tenants needing housing repairs to complete the form. Labour had always taken council tenants for granted and done little or nothing to retain their votes. This initiative was extremely well received. The Tory,, in the meantime, took Liberal votes off me in the Chandler's Ford area where we were not concentrating.

Dr B. Brough     Con   1060   39.3%
Mrs M.Neal       Lab      892   33.1%
M. Kyrle            Lib       741   27.6%

Turnout 52.8%

The Labour candidate was incandescent and went for me like a pickpocket, as my grandmother used to say. I just laughed, which made things worse. To add insult to injury, Eastleigh West was the only Conservative gain from Labour that night.

Grahame Smith took the Chandler's Ford seat from the Tories with 52.8% of the vote, so the Council was now Con 31, Lab 9, Lib 4.

[tonyhill]

West End South by-election - October 1980

In the autumn of 1980 the Tory Councillor for West End South, Andy Turnbull, who was Chairman of the Rescreation and Amenities Committee, resigned, allegedly because h got fed up with Godfrey Olson interfering in his portfolio. There could hardly have been a less promising ward for us to have to fight a by-election in: there had never been a Liberal candidate there, and at the 1979 election the Tory had received 75% of the vote, and prior to that had been unopposed. We had five members in the ward, none of whom for very sound reasons was able to be the candidate, so our constituency executive had to cast around for an alternative and came up with me because I was President of the constituency at the time. Having just done rather well in Eastleigh West, and being busy there recruiting and improving our delivery network, I was less than pleased to be set up as the sacrificial goat in a hopeless seat. With great reluctance I agreed to be the candidate, but only on condition that we fought a proper campaign. We would divide the ward between our existing branches according to their strength, and each branch would deliver, canvass, get window bills up, and get the vote out on polling day. We expected to come out in third place, but at least we would have a marked register and some new supporters, amongst whom might be future locally based candidates.

My next move was to appoint an agent. I knew Peter Chegwyn well as he had been agent for the Isle of Wight and had got Stephen Ross elected in 1974. I'd spent a week there campaigning with him in October 1974 because I didn't stand again in Christchurch (reasons set out in the book). I asked him to be my agent, knowing that he knew all there was to know about campaigning, and then some, and moreover that he had a reputation for not taking prisoners. He agreed.

I lived five miles away (ten from the far end of the ward) on the other side of Eastleigh, and had set foot in it once in my life, twenty years previously. None of the branches knew anything about the area, and we had not even campaigned there during parliamentary elections, writing it off as a Tory heartland. Our branches kept their promises and delivered my two election addresses and did some canvassing. I would accompany the canvassing teams (which might only amount to one or two people) so that I could speak to people they found who wanted to meet me as the candidate. I wanted votes, of course, but more than that I wanted to identify potential deliverers and people who might serve on a committee if we were able to set up a branch after the election. Part of Peter's strategy was to identify people who would put up a window bill - but not until the final weekend because he wanted them all to go up at once. To facilitate this I concentrated at first on the main roads. The A27 ran the entire length of the ward, so I started off at one end and worked my away steadily to the other. To my surprise there was a lot of Liberal support, and many people who were prepared to put up a window bill or stakeboard. My friend Bernard Brown, a prominent Liberal In Fareham who drove along the A27 to work in Southampton every morning, told me that on the Monday before the election he drove down the road and became so distracted by counting the posters that he almost drove into a ditch.

I also put out street letters, discovering a number of localised problems particularly when I went canvassing in obscure parts of the ward that were so far from West End village centre that they regarded themselves as part of Southampton. I was frequently the first political canvasser they had ever seen.

[tonyhill]

West End South by-election continued:

As our posters went up all over the ward that weekend the Tories suddenly realised that they were facing a serious challenge from the Liberals, but it was too late for them to do much about it. Nonetheless, I was sanguine about the probable result. We hoped we might beat the Labour candidate into third place, and Peter even congratulated the Conservative candidate on his victory as we went into the count. I had my (brief) speech congratulating him ready in my back pocket. When the votes were counted we all had an almighty shock.

M. Kyrle       Lib    452  49.0%
G. Heard     Con  349  37.8%
G. Poulton   Lab   122  13.2%

Turnout 39.0%

The Tories couldn't believe it, any more than we could. The expressions on their faces were of total amazement. They'd put up the parish council vice-chairman in a seat where they normally got three-quarters of the vote and he'd been beaten by this foreigner who lived miles away in Chandler's Ford? But we'd all watched the votes being counted, and the margin was too great to justify a re-count. In a daze I shook hands with my opponents, and Peter apologised to the Tory candidate for having jumped the gun earlier. We went back to the committee room, but I was still in a state of shock at this life-changing event, thinking to myself, "A month ago I didn't know West End from the other side of the moon. Now they've elected me as their councillor I'd better find out where the rest of West End is, and I'd better do the job." That weekend we put out an A5 Thank You leaflet in both West End wards telling the electors that an earthquake had hit the Tories.

In due course I received an invitation along with the area's other councillors to attend the monthly Parish Council meeting. As every other councillor for West End at every level was a Tory I expected a pretty frosty reception, and the Chairman welcomed me with studied emphasis, thanking me for "coming all the way from Chandler's Ford to be with us." I thought to myself, "Right mate. You think that my being here is an aberration and that I'll be gone at the next election, but you've got another think coming. We'll start with the County Council election next year!"

One of our objectives for the by-election had been to set up a local branch, so I went to see the most likely people I'd met while canvassing. By Christmas we had a committee in waiting, and in the spring of 1981 called a meeting of supporters and invited those who were not members of the party to join, and elected a committee. The two principal recruits were Don Horne and Pam Bennett, who had both previously served on the Parish Council as Independents. Don in due course became our second Borough Councillor for West End, and Pam, who worked in the local newsagents in the High Street, was well known to all and sundry and fed me lots of useful casework. The first electoral test for the new committee was only a few weeks away - the County Council election of 1981.

[belvoir]

I'm sorry, I suppose it's poor form, but I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything so nauseatingly narcissistic as these extracts. On three grounds:

1) The very fact of five volumes in prospect about “the rise of the Liberals in Eastleigh 1954-1988”. Talk about niche. Fine, there are a dozen or so people on this niche forum who quite like these stories, but really.

2) The petulance of the Liberal councillor who finds her colleagues defeated in 1976 and she the sole Liberal on a Tory council. “She was angry, and told me she felt like refusing to sign the register of acceptance of office, i.e. not to take up her seat and tell the Tories to get stuffed and leave the stupid electors to live with what they'd voted for.” How very dare the public not vote as I want!

3) All of these extracts are about dodges and wheezes to win by-elections, or gain individual wards at the all-outs, and amaze the Tories. I suppose it was printed by ALDC. At no point do we get any idea of why anybody in Eastleigh joined the Liberals in the first place rather than any other party (or rather than just sticking to the WI or the residents association), what they hoped to achieve in standing for the council, or what if anything they did achieve once elected. You all snatched seats by the skins of various teeth, but why did you do it and what was it all for? Just "because it was there", like Mallory? I don't know, but I fear none of the Eastleigh Liberals know either.

[tonyhill]

Hi belvoir - I'll answer your points directly. I'm only doing extracts from two of these five volumes, and these two amount to 240 pages (published by Martin rather than ALDC). I could have extracted the campaigns and policy statements, but this is principally an election website, and this section is about Historical Results, so during a period when there are no elections I thought that concentrating on those would be more relevant than, for example, discussing the closure of the Eastleigh to Romsey line to passenger traffic, which was one of the issues that got Margaret Kyrle elected in the first place, and the subsequent achievement of Eastleigh LibDems in getting the line re-opened to passenger traffic. (Actually, come to think of it, that would probably have been more interesting to a lot of people on this site!) People who wan the policy and campaigning background as well can always buy the books, and look at reproductions of some of the leaflets (many of them printed by me in the first place!)

Had there only been about a dozen people who were interested in my summary of Martin's books I probably wouldn't have bothered to continue, but in fact this thread has been visited over 800 times now, so I hope some people have found it more worthwhile than you have. Yes, Martin's style is not to everyone's taste (and I've cut out most of the discursive elements and the laboured jokes. Someone else made the same point about Margaret's response to the 1976 election - I don't know if you have ever stood for election, or campaigned in one, but in the bitter aftermath of defeat it was, I think, forgivable if not necessarily admirable. Your final point is to suggest that Eastleigh Liberals don't know why they did it: hmm - Eastleigh has now been LibDem controlled for 30 odd years, even at times like the present when the parliamentary seat has had massive Tory majorities. That is probably because the LibDem Council group are ruthlessly focussed on providing the best possible service to the electors of Eastleigh while at the same time not losing sight of the necessity to be innovative and flexible. There are not many other council groups, LibDem or otherwise, who have as good a record of delivery over that period of time.

[tonyhill]

1981 County Council election:

We'd lost all our County seats at the previous election in 1977, but currently had one councillor because Gary Aplin, who had been elected for the Conservatives in Woolston (Southampton, which was then part of Hampshire County Council) had fallen out with his party and decided to join us. There was no chance of him holding his seat as a Liberal, and as luck would have it, although he lived in Bitterne it was very close to the boundary with West End, so I invited him to meet our branch committee, and they were delighted to have him as their candidate. The County Division consisted of West End North, West End South, and Fair Oak, so we now had councillors in two of the three wards. The campaign focussed on the cuts that the County was making to education and social services (plus ca change), and the Thatcher government's pre-Falklands unpopularity combined with the impetus my victory in the by-election had given us led to our first ever County Council seat in Eastleigh.

G. Aplin Lib 2167 51.7%
M. Robinson Con 1551 36.5%
J. Davis Lab 525 12.4%

Turnout 45.1%

We also took the Chandler's Ford seat:

G. Smith Lib 1983 50.7%
Mrs E. Greenwood Con 1668 42.6%
G. Blatchford Lab 258 6.6%

Turnout 47.9%

Seven Liberals were elected in Hampshire, and as the only one with experience at County level Gary became group leader. He did not contest his seat in 1985 and dropped out of politics. Grahame Smith served as a County Councillor for twenty years and was Chairman in 1995-96. He also sent twenty-four years as an Eastleigh Borough councillor.