1959 general election coverage

[Deleted]

Yet more treasure. Apparently this has been on YouTube for about six weeks, only just discovered it...

[Deleted]

It took the experts quite a long time to realise who was going to win, and that this would be a Tory landslide. Many of the early results were showing pro-Labour swings.

The first Con gain was for Geoffrey Johnson Smith in Holborn & St. Pancras, South at about 18:35 on the second video. Only 14 minutes earlier Robert Mackenzie pointed out that 10 results had been declared and no-one had been prepared to predict who had won.

[Andrew_S]

Thanks for drawing attention to this, swanarcadian.

I wonder who recorded this originally: FWS Craig maybe?

[Davıd Boothroyd]

This comes from the 'Never Had it so Good' season on BBC Parliament in 2009.

It is a stored field telerecording on 35mm film, made by the BBC on original transmission. There was no way of recording television domestically until the late 1960s when the Sony CV-2000 came on the market, and that was a very much inferior quality recording. For an example of a cleaned-up CV-2000 recording try this:

.

[Crimson King]

that was fun. Did David Butler get any swing right first time? Did Bob McKenzie ever put down his fag? Was that Gerald Kaufman losing in Gillingham? I note Stewart Hall doing an ob.

[johnloony]

Over the last few months and weeks, I have been transferring lots of my collection of videotapes (which I have collected since I had my first video-recorder in 1987) onto DVD. Apart from anything else, this reminds me that I haven't got round to copying onto DVD most of the general election results programmes I've got. It may be because they get repeated on BBC Parliament every now and then, or because some of them are on Youtube anyway

According to my videotape index, I have got 1959, 1964, 1970, 1974F, 1979, 1983, 1992, 1997, 2001, 2010.

[Deleted]

From what I can gather, only the 1964 and 1966 BBC general election programmes have yet to be posted onto YouTube now, bits of morning after coverage aside (1983 in particular). The vast bulk of the 1970 programme is there, although not all of it.
For some bizarre reason, Channel 4 blocked the 2005 segment which featured the famous Paxman-Galloway row.

[The Bishop]

Jun 17, 2013 23:59:36 GMT Crimson King said:

that was fun. Did David Butler get any swing right first time? Did Bob McKenzie ever put down his fag? Was that Gerald Kaufman losing in Gillingham? I note Stewart Hall doing an ob.

The one just in the news for the wrong reasons, I assume (as opposed to the W Indies born academic)? And its Stuart, btw

That was indeed the one and only G B Kaufman in Gillingham - he had also stood in Bromley in 1955, and is the only person who fought that GE still in the HoC.

[Crimson King]

Cheers - in my defence (wrt Hall) it was 1 am by the time I finished watching it.

I note there was some surprise about an unusually large swing to Con in Gillingham (always accepting that Butler may have been wrong again) I did wonder if there could have been some antisemitism involved.

But bizzarly enough I would find that less shocking (because expected) than McKenzie taking a drag after every sentence

[The Bishop]

Jun 18, 2013 5:05:34 GMT swanarcadian said:

From what I can gather, only the 1964 and 1966 BBC general election programmes have yet to be posted onto YouTube now, bits of morning after coverage aside (1983 in particular). The vast bulk of the 1970 programme is there, although not all of it.
For some bizarre reason, Channel 4 blocked the 2005 segment which featured the famous Paxman-Galloway row

Has the BBC "morning after" coverage in 1992 been posted now then??

Pretty sure BBC Parliament showed the 1959 GE programme (or at any rate what remains of it) a few years ago. As already said, it took a bit of time for the experts to work out what was going on (as in 1979)

(as opposed to occasions like 1970 and 1997, when the very first result made things pretty obvious)

[Davıd Boothroyd]

As I said above, this Youtube file comes from the 'Never Had it so Good' season on BBC Parliament in 2009. On that occasion it was asserted that overnight programme is all that exists, although I am not sure this is the case as an extract of the morning programme has been shown (the reporter in Leeds trying and failing to to interview people who refuse to stop and talk).

[Andrew_S]

Jun 18, 2013 12:23:39 GMT The Bishop said:

Jun 18, 2013 5:05:34 GMT swanarcadian said:

From what I can gather, only the 1964 and 1966 BBC general election programmes have yet to be posted onto YouTube now, bits of morning after coverage aside (1983 in particular). The vast bulk of the 1970 programme is there, although not all of it.
For some bizarre reason, Channel 4 blocked the 2005 segment which featured the famous Paxman-Galloway row

Has the BBC "morning after" coverage in 1992 been posted now then??

Pretty sure BBC Parliament showed the 1959 GE programme (or at any rate what remains of it) a few years ago. As already said, it took a bit of time for the experts to work out what was going on (as in 1979)

(as opposed to occasions like 1970 and 1997, when the very first result made things pretty obvious)

Someone posted the whole of the 1992 second day coverage in one clip about a year ago. The same person has posted the whole of the night-time coverage in one clip as well. (Of course when I was uploading the election there was a limit of 10 mins 59 secs and then 15 mins):

[Deleted]

What accounted for the swings to Labour in some parts of the country in 1959? Was it mostly the intervention of Liberal candidates? Maybe incoming immigrants from the West Indies and the Indian subcontinent were also a factor, but surely not in Scotland.

[The Bishop]

IIRC some parts of the country (eg industrial areas in the NW and Scotland) had rather missed out on the general late 50s economic boom.

[Andrew_S]

I'm going to be interested to see whether there were any swings to the Tories in the West Midlands because the official figures show that in 1961 that region had the highest incomes in the country, ahead even of London and the south-east.

[Sibboleth]

Jun 18, 2013 18:12:58 GMT The Bishop said:

IIRC some parts of the country (eg industrial areas in the NW and Scotland) had rather missed out on the general late 50s economic boom.

Not exactly; its more that structural local economic problems lessened the impact of the general post-war boom. A big factor in Lancashire for instance was the death of the cotton industry (and with it, eventually, the extremely strong working class Tory vote seen in certain mill towns around Manchester).

[Sibboleth]

Jun 18, 2013 19:03:56 GMT Andrew_S said:

I'm going to be interested to see whether there were any swings to the Tories in the West Midlands because the official figures show that in 1961 that region had the highest incomes in the country, ahead even of London and the south-east.

Tories gained three seats in Birmingham and narrowly missed out on two others; also gained a seat in Coventry and only narrowly missed out on another. Labour majorities were also well down in much of the Black Country.

[greenchristian]

Jun 18, 2013 13:25:47 GMT Davıd Boothroyd said:

As I said above, this Youtube file comes from the 'Never Had it so Good' season on BBC Parliament in 2009. On that occasion it was asserted that overnight programme is all that exists, although I am not sure this is the case as an extract of the morning programme has been shown (the reporter in Leeds trying and failing to to interview people who refuse to stop and talk).

It's perfectly possible for that one clip to have survived without the rest of the morning program, as long as it was used somewhere else.

[Andrew_S]

I was hoping to catch a glimpse of the 29 year old Shirley Williams at the Southampton Test declaration (at 10 mins on part 2) but unfortunately she didn't seem to be there. Maybe she was particularly disappointed at seeing the Tory majority increase from 3,842 to 6,766. (Anthony Crosland was the Labour candidate in 1955 according to the Keele elections database, which is contradicted by Wikipedia which says he was defeated at South Gloucestershire that year):

www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/ge55/i18.htm

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Crosland

I think Keele must be right:

www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/ge55/i09.htm

[Andrew_S]

At 24 mins on part 2 David Butler mentions Graham Pyatt as "helping out with a chart on my right."

I'm a bit surprised because Pyatt must have been very young at that time or maybe he was older than he looked on the 1970 and 1974 election shows.