When all eyes were on Chorlton, the local elections of 1928

Now I know that local elections do not fascinate everyone, but the 1928 election here in Chorlton had got the lot. 

It was fought out against a backdrop of worsening unemployment figures and an expectation that 1928 might be the year that the Labour Party became the largest group on the City Council.

Across the city the Manchester Guardian did not rate the chances of the Conservatives too highly and speculated that of the sixteen seats they were defending they might only hold eight.

The Liberals who were defending just five were reckoned to be safe in four of the five but it was Labour “with fewer seats to defend and a greater number of more vunerable positions [to] attack,” who were making an “audacious bid to secure a clear majority .... and although the attempt is hardly likely to succeed on the present occasion it is by no means a forlorn one.  The Labour representation has been steadily increasing and the at the moment only requires nine additional seats to give it the preponderance it desires”*

So attention focused here, where the Guardian told its readers the Conservatives were defending a slim majority and one that looked all the more under threat because the year before the Liberals had won the seat with a huge majority of nearly 2,500 votes, but as the Guardian went on to warn “it must be borne in mind that at the present occasion Mr Wicks, the Liberal candidate, is opposed by a serious Labour candidate in addition to the retiring Conservative.”

Sadly any campaign literature is unobtainable at present and we are forced back on the newspapers.  The Labour candidate was Alice McIlwrick who had stood the year before in Didsbury and gained  10% of the vote.

I wish I knew more about her.  She lived in various parts of south Manchester, had married at the age of 20 and was confident enough to issue a challenge to her Liberal candidate to “speak for a quarter of an hour in response to a challenge.”  

Moreover she was indeed seen by the Labour Party as a serious Labour candidate as they sent the Labour M.P., R J Davies and the Councillor Wright Robinson to speak on the same platform.

The result was not I suspect what many had expected.  The Conservatives retained the seat with 4, 788 votes to 3, 955 for the Liberals and a very creditable vote of 1,457 for Labour and 14% of the vote.  It was the first time the Labour Party had contested the seat and it would be another four years before they improved on that share of the vote.

What makes the election even more interesting was that it was rerun a month later.  The Tory councillor had died suddenly and the election was held just five days before Christmas.  Again the Manchester Guardian weighed in with the observation that “there are few wards in which Conservative and Liberal opinion is so nicely balanced.  Of the eight elections that have been fought in Chorlton since 1920 four have been won by the Conservatives and four by the Liberals.”

And in an echo of a more recent Lib Dem assertion that the “Conservatives can’t win here” the Liberals pointed out that the Tory candidate‘s majority the month before was just 253 above what he had polled in 1925 while the Liberals had won the year before with a “record majority of 2,329 votes.”

None the less they were equally quick to point out that Labour “cannot possibly hope to win the seat and  suggest that a number of moderate Labour votes go to Mrs Pilling [the Liberal] who is a strong candidate.”

But in the event the Labour vote held with Alice McIlwrick obtaining 12% of the vote, the Liberals dropping three per cent and the Tories gaining an extra six per cent.

Now this may well have been simply because of the lower turn out by the electorate.  In the November election this had been 52% but a month later it had fallen to 28%.

And in part it may also have had something to do with the intervention of the Salford Diocesan Catholic Federation who had reported that “the questions addressed to the candidates on the education question have been answered satisfactorily by Mr Somervile the Conservative candidate; unsatisfactorily by Mrs Pilling the Liberal candidate, and that Mrs McIlwrick, the Labour candidate, has not replied to them.”**

The right of Roman Catholics to establish parochial day schools for children up to fourteen had become an important issue.  The Salford Diocesan Catholic Federation had held five meetings where candidates in the election were "invited to outline their attitude towards this educational problem.  In addition five test questions have been sent to each municipal candidate, and the answers to these will be published during the weekend. The views of each candidate will determine whether he shall have the support of local Catholics."***
The issue had arisen after a dispute in Levenshulme when the Education Committee had refused to approve plans for a parochial school.

Well I suspect the jury will be out until we can find some more first hand accounts of the election but like all these things I am confident they will turn up.

Picture; The Conservative Club and party headquarters, and the result of the election in November 1928.

* Manchester Guardian October 1st 1928
** Manchester Guardian December 18th 1928
***Manchester Guardian October 27th 1928

Who now remembers Dennis and Elaine?

I haven’t always lived in Chorlton.  

I did a year on Butterworth Street by Grey Mare Lane, another few in Ashton Under Lyne and three years as a student in Withington.

And in those first three years of the 70s you couldn’t pass a wall without seeing the names “Dennis and Elaine.”

They were there at bus stops, beside advertising hoardings and of course street walls.
They began in 1970 and ceased as abruptly two years later.

I never got to know who they were and only once saw the names on an office building in town.  So when Dennis or Elaine professed their love for each other it was almost entirely around Withington.

Of course the idea of taking a picture of a piece of graffiti back then would never have occurred to most of us.  You saw it, chuckled if it was amusing, became enraged if it was politically incorrect and mostly instantly forgot it.

But Dennis and Elaine have stayed with me, and their memory was stirred yesterday when I came across the man, the cat and Karl who were caught in the late 1970s in Salford.  I suppose it might be possible to track Karl as he or his friend left his surname, but maybe not.  Perhaps Karl like Dennis and Elaine are best left in the past.

But as we are parading past memories I remember a short story I read back when I was in 5.1 at Samuel Pepys Secondary Modern School for Boys.  Our English teacher was of the firm belief that it didn’t matter what we read as long as we read.

So there on the beaten up bookcases were tons of paperbacks from pulp science fiction to the classics, and it was up to us what we read after the O level lesson.  It was pretty much pot luck, and so I devoured some James Bond, a bit of Graham Green, along with the odd horror novel and lots of rockets to the moon.

One of the books featured  the engaging story of the man who tracked down a joke.  Set in some small mid western town where not much happened, he became obsessed with the source of jokes.  It led him to follow the latest he had been told, via the barber’s shop, the local bar and the caretaker at the Double D motel to a shabby shop in a rundown part of the town.

And there inside in the back room were a gang of men working on writing jokes.  Each was tested on the assembled jokesters and at the end of the morning each member of the team set off for different parts of the town to pass them on.  I seem to recall that their pay was directly linked to the speed that the joke past around the town and its longevity.

Now I fully accept it loses something in the retelling but perhaps it has a bearing on Dennis and Elaine.  I cannot think how they could have covered so much of Withington in such a short time or really the reason why they wanted to be so publicly linked together.  True love I doubt ever stretched to a two year campaign especially given that this was the age of the paint brush not aerosol.

So maybe out there, there was a dedicated team who set about immortalizing the couple.  And in the same way perhaps Karl escaped Salford and left his name elsewhere.

To be continued .......... with how Elaine and l became friends and the discovery she later worked in Tommy Ducks ....

Picture; Denis and Elaine, 1970s from Elaine

Another side of Eltham Palace …….. the Courtauld rooms

Now, I grew up with Eltham Palace, and delighted in that walk over the bridge and into the grounds.

Virginia Courtauld's bedroom

And for me, steeped in medieval and Tudor history, the attraction was always the Great Hall, which my imagination filled with the good and the great doing what the good and great always do.

Later I wondered about the more important people who toiled in the kitchens, washed the huge amounts of bed linen and attended to all the needs of the powerful.

But the buildings where all the work was done have long gone, and history did not see fit to record the lives of the servants and agricultural workers.

In the same way I chose to ignore the later years of the Palace when the monarchs and their advisors and friends had moved on, and the building was reduced to near ruin, fit only for storing hay and livestock.

Virginia Courtauld's bathroom

Nor did I really take much interest in the Courtauld’s who acquired the lease of the Palace in 1933, restoring the Great Hall and adding a new building which became their home for eleven years.

And that was my loss, because the Art Deco interior is stunning.

So, I am indebted to Jeremy Harrison who sent me a selection of photographs of some of the rooms, including Virginia Courtauld’s bedroom and bathroom.

There will be many who like me left Eltham a long time ago and may have missed the Courtauld contribution to our Palace, and so with that in mind I intend to return to the 1930s Art Deco building, courtesy of Jeremy.

Location; Eltham

Pictures; the Courtauld Rooms of Eltham Palace, 2018, from the collection of Jeremy Harrison