A Fortunate Life (31 page)

One of our other problems was finding the money to fund
Counter
Point
. The Constituency party soon made it clear that they could not find the money to keep it going. And the traditional jumble sales and coffee mornings took up a lot of time while yielding very small returns. We had to find a better way to accumulate funds. One idea we hit on was to run 50/50 auctions. We advertised (in
Counter Point
and the local papers) that we would hold an auction on a given date in the Liberal Hall in Yeovil and that we would hand over fifty percent of the price of everything that was sold while keeping fifty percent to pay our expenses and for profit. We were astonished at the amount of goods of all sorts brought to us for sale. We had a team of helpers who provided transport for the heavier items, and another who ‘lotted up’ the items for sale, while Jane and her band of helpers made tea and refreshments. There were often well in excess of 200 lots for sale, filling the Hall to bursting. I would then act as the auctioneer, usually starting at 2.30 and ending well after 5 p.m., after which we would have to transport the heavier items back to their purchasers. I really enjoyed the business of auctioneering (perhaps it was in my blood from my maternal grandfather, the cattle auctioneer of Rathfriland). But it was pretty exhausting and back-breaking. Still the returns were good – we usually made well over
£
1,000 for a single afternoon’s work, enough for three editions of
Counter Point
.

Even so, we needed still more money, and we needed to make it with less effort. A Liberal friend called Clarence Drew hit on a new idea. What about running discos for young people? So were launched the
Norton Discos, which soon became a roaring success. We would hire the local village hall and a disc jockey (who quickly became one of our members) and engage the local pub to run the bar. We opened our doors at 7 in the evening and closed them at 11.30 p.m. The events became so popular with the young throughout the area that we had to turn people away because the numbers exceeded the limit set by fire regulations. We often made up to
£
500 a night. It was not entirely trouble-free, though. It was up to me to keep order in the hall, which was quite a challenge. But things were made easier after I got the support of a number of our regulars who were Hell’s Angels, and they did much of the policing work themselves (I remember one occasion when one of their over-exuberant members drove his motorbike into the hall and straight through the heaving throng). Then there was the clearing up afterwards. Together with a team of helpers Jane and I were often busy until two in the morning clearing sick and other unmentionables out of the lavatories and returning the hall to its proper state.

Counter Point
may have brought us problems, but it brought us benefits as well in the form of a lot of attention and some much-needed new blood. With our small band of helpers, we had to distribute the first issue ourselves to most of Yeovil. In it we appealed for help with distribution and soon had a team of over a hundred volunteers from all corners of the town. They were not members of the Party but they were supporters, and we treated them with great care. I would always do a letter telling them when the next issue was coming out and a thank-you letter afterwards. We also held two annual parties for them at our home, one in the summer and one in the winter. These were to become a reservoir from which we recruited both members and, in due course, activists. Most of the early candidates who stood for Council seats under the Liberal flag, some of whom would eventually lead South Somerset District Council and Somerset County Council, started their political lives as
Counter Point
deliverers in these early days.

Back in 1978 we still had to score our first victory in the polls. In July that year we had our first District Council by-election, in a Tory-held seat in the Preston and West ward of Yeovil. We had not fought this seat in recent memory, having largely conceded that Yeovil town local elections were a Tory/Labour battleground. This was, therefore, my first opportunity to put into practice our new strategy of focusing first on
local elections and challenging Labour in its council-estate heartlands, while at the same time proving the effectiveness of our new leaflet-based campaigning techniques. It was now clear to all that a general election was very close. Most people thought that Prime Minister Jim Callaghan would go to the country after the Labour Conference that autumn. I persuaded the Constituency party that we should treat the July Council by-election as a dress rehearsal for a general election and throw everything into it. They agreed to dip into our very depleted funds to pay for three leaflets over the course of the campaign (unheard of for a local council election in those days), one of which was to be a ‘good morning’ leaflet, delivered to every elector at 5.30 a.m. on the morning of election day (even more unheard of at the time). There was some grumbling at this, but our small band of loyal activists duly turned up on time and, apart from tripping over an occasional milk bottle and rousing a number of sleeping dogs, had no trouble in ensuring that the leaflets were through the letter boxes by the time most people emerged for work. We then mounted our most comprehensive campaign ever for getting out the vote and, when the polls closed, felt well satisfied that we were about to score a famous victory that would justify both the strategy and our new campaigning techniques.

The result, therefore, was a profound shock. Labour, far from coming third, actually beat the Tories, and we came last.
*
I knew that what was at stake now was more than a seat on the District Council; it was also my credibility, my strategy and the new campaigning techniques I had hoped to convince the Constituency party to adopt. I went home that night in despair. Then, from the military history I had studied in the Royal Marines, I remembered a story about the Duke of Wellington. At one stage in the Peninsular War, Parliament was getting restive because the campaign was costing so much, while Wellington (at that time resting his army behind the fortifications of Torres Vedras), appeared to be doing nothing to take on the French. Wellington decided that what he needed was a victory – even a minor one. Unfortunately the next thing which happened was not a victory but a defeat, when one of his generals got badly mauled by his French counterpart. When he
heard the news next day, Wellington instructed the unfortunate General to ignore the defeat and ‘write me a victory’. When the news of this ‘victory’ reached London, the bells rang all over the country, and Parliament gratefully voted more money for Wellington, who then marched on to eventual victory. There are, I presume, even to this day, some British regiments who carry this ‘victory’ as one of the battle honours on their regimental flag. I decided that if the great General could write victories, so could I. So that night I penned a press release which said how pleased the Liberals were with the result, without anywhere mentioning either what it was, or the word ‘Labour’. My headline was ‘Liberals enter the arena – Tories lose’. To my delight, in the following week’s edition of the main local paper, the
Western Gazette
, the only report of the by-election was my press release, which they published, word for word, headline and all! In the folklore of Yeovil Constituency Liberals this defeat is still remembered as a victory.

As it happens this was to be the last local Council by-election we ever lost in my twenty-five years in Yeovil as Candidate and MP. But it could have been the last we ever fought, had we not turned defeat into victory through a press release, or if my tiny band of supporters had given up after this setback.

Instead we pressed our advantage and returned to the Constituency party with the proposal that we should now buy our own photo-offset litho press, with Jane and I putting up
£
400 of the estimated
£
600 cost. Finally, they agreed, and in August we found what we were looking for. She was an old 1930s Rotaprint ‘bedstead’ R30, which for years had been locked up, abandoned and unloved, in a shed near Fordingbridge. We christened her ‘Clarissa’ (I cannot remember why) and transported her proudly back to Yeovil strapped in a dignified upright position to a friend’s diminutive trailer and towed gingerly behind his Morris 1100.

Little did we, or anyone else, know it at the time, but Clarissa was to become a much-loved family friend whose moods and inner workings I would get to know quite as well as (indeed probably rather better than) those of my own children. She also became the primary tool around which we now based all our political activities. Clarissa’s lowkey arrival in the Yeovil Constituency in 1978 may not have had the romance and drama of smuggling Lenin into Russia in a sealed train in 1917, but the political effect was the same. For she became instrumental in the eventual overthrow of the best part of three-quarters of a century of Tory hegemony in the Constituency.

When Clarissa finally arrived at her new home, we discovered there were too few of us to lift her off the trailer, for she was a hefty old lady, clocking in at about three-quarters of a ton. So I walked a couple of hundred yards back to my local pub and asked for volunteers to lift her off. Among those who put down their pints to give us a hand was a young man called Andy Jacobs, who from that moment got drawn into the printing business, becoming in due course a fine printer, one of our most energetic activists and, eventually, the Liberal District Councillor for my own home ward.

Clarissa was first housed in the stable block of a friend who lived in an old Rectory in the village. (He was a Tory, and subsequently Chairman of the local Tory Branch – but I think he regarded our leaflets as a bit of harmless fun which would lead nowhere.) We marked this connection by calling the umbrella organisation set up to manage Clarissa’s operations the Rectory Printing Society.

Now we had Clarissa housed, all that was left for me to do was to learn how to use her. This, with the help of patient friends and the expenditure of many hours, much swearing, gallons of ink and acres of wasted paper, I finally did. For the next seven years I became the Constituency party’s chief printer and, even after becoming an MP, often turned my hand to a couple of hours’ printing. I still think there are few tasks more satisfying than taking some images on a piece of paper and turning them into three thousand leaflets, all nicely stacked and wrapped and ready to go through people’s letter boxes.

Clarissa underwent two further moves before ending up, finally, in 1981 in a specially purchased headquarters in Yeovil, where we held meetings upstairs to the sound of her chattering away on the ground floor below us. She printed all my leaflets in the 1979, 1983 and 1992 elections and literally hundreds of thousands of the regular community leaflets which were, by the early 1980s, springing up across the Constituency. She broke down rather frequently, but by the end I knew her every cog and cam and could strip her down as efficiently as I could a Bren gun in my Royal Marine days. Sometimes her ancient old parts broke and, being so old, could not be replaced. This was where my erstwhile friends in the machine shop in Normalair Garrett came into their own, for there is no part a skilled aircraft machine-tool operator cannot make, given a drawing or the original. I am not sure, however, that my old bosses in Normalair (mostly firm supporters of the local Tory party) knew how much the clandestine operations of their
workers and undeclared times on their lathes were doing to help keep running the machine that was, by now, gradually eating up their vote.

In the days before computers and desk-top publishing, the process of first setting up and then publishing a leaflet was quite laborious and time-consuming. The set-up was usually done on our dining table and, as the number of our activists began to grow, poor Jane had to put up with more and more invasions of her house by groups of eager (and always hungry) Liberals from all corners of the Constituency, whom she, with great patience and often extreme strain on her limited housekeeping budget, would feed and water. We bought an electric typewriter, which enabled us to vary the font size and provide a more professional look. We became experts in the use of Letraset (for headlines) and Cow Gum for sticking the whole thing down. The next step was to photograph the artwork on a special camera in a dark-room and then develop the film (in the early days this was all done in our back shed, which I had light-proofed and fitted with red lighting). After this, the film had to be ‘spotted out’ to remove the stains, spots of dirt and lines you did not want to print, over a light table. This was usually Jane’s task, and she became most expert at it. The film was then fixed with tape to a plate and exposed to ultra-violet light in a special plate-maker. The exposed plate was then washed with a light acid, revealing a positive image of the pages to be printed. I would then change into my printing kit – a pair of very disreputable and irretrievably ink-stained jeans and a T-shirt so stained and threadbare it was known to all as ‘the Turin shroud’ – and strap the newly produced plate to Clarissa’s big plate roller. We then inked her up, making sure that there was enough font liquid in the font bath to ‘wash’ the plate (so preventing it from gumming up with too much ink), loaded the paper, and we were ready to start printing. We could, if really pushed, produce a thousand leaflets from start to finish in an hour-and-a-half – and then continue producing them at a rate of about three-and-a-half thousand an hour.