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In My Early Life – A Roving Commission (London, 1930) Winston Churchill looked back on his formative years. As well as the magic lantern and ‘real steam engine’ he had played with as a child, he recalled the fourteen elections he had fought, including five by-elections, which were ‘even worse than ordinary elections because of all the cranks’. [ 1 ]
He elaborated further on his experiences in an article for the Strand Magazine on ‘Humours of Electioneering’ - the typescript for which is in the Churchill Archive - declaring ‘if you wish to know about elections I am the person to tell you’ since he’d fought more than ‘any living member of the House of Commons’. He calculated that he’s spent more than a year, or 1/30 of his ‘whole adult life’ on ‘these strange experiences’ (CHAR8/301/16). In a letter to Andrew Gibb who had stood and lost at Hamilton in Lanarkshire in 1924, Churchill commiserated that ‘fighting an election is, however, a most valuable educational experience’ (CHAR 2/136/11). He ended his article on electioneering with the double-edged reflection: ‘I do not like elections, but it is in my many elections that I have learned to know and honour the people of this old island’ (CHAR8/301/23).
One of the less well-known provisions of the Representation of the People Act 1918 was its institution of one uniform polling day for all constituencies. This was a change Churchill bemoaned, looking back at when ‘our wise and prudent law spread a general election over six weeks’. He claimed that ‘instead of all the electors voting blindly on one day’ there was ‘a rough but earnest and searching national discussion’. His downbeat assessment reflected his response to the altered world of interwar political culture, with a much larger electorate now including women, the growth of and changes in the press and the emergence of the Labour party as a national force. There was a palpable nostalgia in Churchill’s elegy to the days when ‘we had a real political democracy led by a hierarchy of statement, and not a fluid mass distracted by newspapers’. This lament was distinctly gendered, as in his invocation of a time when ‘five or six thousand electors – all men – brimming with interested…crowded into the finest halls’ to hear those statesmen speak. [ 2 ]
As Jon Lawrence has noted, the pre-1918 election meeting was in many ways a highly stylized event that legitimated the authority of the ‘hierarchy of statesmen’, and that was part of what Churchill liked about them. [ 3 ]
They were also, as Lawrence shows, often rambunctious and performative occasions in which dealing with hecklers and standing up to insults was part of the game. Churchill cast them as an ‘ordeal’, but equally ‘a great help’ as you could avoid giving the usual speech and gain friends though a ‘good retort’. His awareness of the theatricality of electioneering was very apparent in his counsel to ‘never lose your temper’: ‘the worse it goes, the more you must treat it as a puppet show’ (CHAR8/301/23).
Elections also made significant organisational demands. One aspect of this was compliance with complex electoral laws. In 1922, Joseph Philip, President of the Dundee Liberal Association, was worrying about the expenses connected to ‘the programme of social arrangements which Mrs [Clementine] Churchill has arranged’, noting ‘I am not myself clear how the law is interpreted’. The scale of planning involved was apparent in his reference to having sanctioned 80,000 envelopes ‘being addressed, in order to have our machinery ready’ (CHAR5/26/5-6). The size of the electorate after the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act of 1928, allied to gendered assumptions about the unpredictability of younger female voters amongst male politicians, increased the premium on organization. Reflecting this emphasis on machinery, Robert Topping, General Director of the Conservative and Unionist Central Office, was recommending a book on Election Organisation (2/6d) in the run up to the 1935 general election (CHAR2/245).
Interwar electioneering was not without its more unruly side. [ 4 ]
Interwar electioneering was not without its more unruly side. Churchill’s correspondence with Andrew Gibb included the reflection that ‘the Conservative Party ought to get some young fellows like you with good war records to settle down as Candidates in some of those seats where there has been so much rowdyism’ in order ‘to break it up’. It was, he conceded, ‘perhaps…a very Spartan course to recommend’ (CHAR 2/136/11). The more physical side of elections was to the fore in his son Randolph’s candidacy in West Toxteth in 1935. A newspaper cutting in the archives reported a ‘crowd attacked’ the loud-speaker van in which the candidate and his contingent were touring the constituency (CHAR 2/235/1). Local press coverage described the crowd as having ‘rushed the van, smashed the microphone, put a loud speaker out of action, and tore away a placard bearing Mr Churchill’s portrait’, along with throwing ‘bananas, orange peel and mud’ at the candidate. [ 5 ]
The demands of public meetings – ‘meetings early in the mornings when the workmen have their lunch, meetings in their dinner hour, meetings in the afternoon’ – figured prominently in Churchill’s recollections of electioneering (CHAR8/301/17). So too did the organisational challenges, not least those of publicity. The morning gathering at campaign headquarters, with ‘all the heads of departments represented’, included those dealing with ‘posters’ and ‘press notices’. The workings of publicity are well represented in the Churchill archive, including a cutting from the Daily Sketch showing a poster portraying Churchill as stirring up ‘class hatred’ by approving an attack poster whilst spending Christmas at Blenheim Palace (CHAR/2/49/20). A bill from the Manchester Billposting Company - ‘the largest firm of billposters in the world’ - has than £700 being spent on posters by the Budget League (CHAR/2/49/62).
As Churchill proclaimed, he fought elections over a very long period, and the archival traces of those ‘strange experiences’ (CHAR8/301/16) offer a compelling way into the history of electioneering across significant changes in British political culture from the late nineteenth through to the mid twentieth century.
There are many sources related to elections in the Churchill Archive in which the prefix CHAR refers to documents produced before the Second World War, and the prefix CHUR refers to documents produced after 1945.
CHAR2/245 has 128 folios on the 1935 general election.
CHAR2/246/15 is a letter to Terence O'Connor, on statements made by Sir Thomas White, about Randolph Churchill in the Wavertee by-election campaign. Asking if the double allusion to ‘Lothario’ and ‘Casanova’ constituted a serious election libel.
CHAR 20/221/25 is a telegram from Sir Edward Grigg [later 1st Lord Altrincham, Minister of State, Middle East] marked ‘Personal’ suggesting how Churchill could respond to the controversy surrounding his [election] comments on ‘a socialist state’ and its need for a ‘Gestapo’.
CHAR2/136/11 is a letter to Andrew Gibb who stood and lost in Hamilton in Lanarkshire in 1924.
CHAR 28/117/2 a letter to Harmsworth [later Lord Northcliffe] thanking him for supporting him in the election campaign for Oldham.
CHAR 5/26 has a letter from Joseph Philip, President, Dundee Liberal Association, about expenses.
CHAR 2/246/161 is a flyer for Randolph Churchill with the doggerel, ‘If you agree as we do /Churchills are good for you / Just give you vote for Randolph / And see what you can do’ includes photos of ‘Stout Fellows’ Randolph and Winston Churchill. ‘With Apologies to Messrs. Guinness’ whose advertising it is based upon.
CHAR 2/235/1 is a newspaper cutting on Randolph Churchill’ss candidacy in West Toxteth in 1935 reporting ‘rowdy scenes’.
CHAR 8/301 contains typescript of ‘Humours of Electioneering’ with Churchill’s corrections, folios 16-24.
CHAR 2/49/62 is a bill from the Manchester Billposting Company (36 Peter Street, Manchester) to Churchill for parcels of Budget League posters from 8 February 1910.
CHAR 2/49/35 is a telegram from [J C] Grime [manager of the Manchester Billposting Company] saying he had nothing to do with the posting of ‘Blenheim’ – the Unionist poster attacking Churchill for approving a poster headed ‘Sympathy’.
CHAR 2/49/20 is a press cutting supplied by Durrant’s Press Cuttings in Holborn, London, dated 10 January 1910. It is from the Daily Sketch. It features a reproduction of a Unionist poster headed ‘Christmas Eve at Blenheim Palace’ showing Churchill approving a poster, ‘Sympathy’, while at Blenheim. It is described the Daily Sketch as a ‘reply to a nettlesome poster’.
CHAR 2/49/66 is a list of early polling provincial boroughs with numbers of posters to be sent to them with the stamps of the Budget League and the Manchester Billposting company.
