INTRODUCTION ‘A penny-farthing machine in a jet age’. This was ’s description of the state of Labour party organisation in the mid 1950s and it has been repeated on countless pages ever since without question. The ‘spin’ Wilson placed on the report may have led to a misinterpretation of the competency of Labour’s local organisation. An alternative reading suggests that Wilson conceived the report to play a game of intra-party politics and that significant grassroots innovations in local organisation went unheeded. The first chapter is an examination of the politics of the Wilson report.1 Attention is given to Wilson’s rationale to engage with the topic and the assumptions that historians have made about Labour’s local organisation which, in turn, closed further enquiry on the subject. The Wilson report presented damming evidence that party organisation was in poor shape at the time of the 1955 General Election. Although the report was an accurate assessment of party organisation at that moment in time, and some evidence is given to substantiate the claim. However, it is not true to say that little was done at a local level to ameliorate the ‘problem’ or that party organisation continued to regress and membership continued to decline until the late 1980s. The second chapter will reveal fresh research on new innovative fundraising schemes that took advantage of a change in Britain’s gambling laws. The new ‘Tote’ schemes propelled some Constituency Labour parties (CLPs) into tenfold increases in their income within a two-year period and provided the resources for a programme of modernisation. The third chapter will demonstrate the application of a professional organisation to systems for membership recruitment and retention and, unique for the Labour party, reliable statistics. The Wilson report referred to the experiment in an electoral system developed by the enterprising Reading Labour party. The chapter will show how the ‘Reading’ system was tested and refined without the endorsement of Transport House by party organisers and modernising CLPs who introduced it for the 1959 election. The historiography of the Labour party does little to expand upon the cursory ‘penny- farthing’ quotation frequently cited to describe Labour’s organisation. The general histories tend to include one paragraph with the famous quotation or paraphrase it, to illustrate the parlous state of Labour’s organisation.2 This tendency is not confined to historians; political scientists such as Robert McKenzie did the same.3 Marxist commentators disregard the Wilson report completely, Labour’s failure in the 1950s, argue Coates or Miliband, was its reluctance to fight for a bold socialist programme.4 Party finance has received little attention and the contemporaneous study on trade unions by Martin Harrison includes a valuable section on this subject.5 The evaluation of the influence of sponsorship on local parties and those parties who opted to pursue independent fundraising as shown in chapter two suggest an interesting area of further research. After Labour’s defeat in 1959, it was fashionable amongst sociologists to argue that Labour’s decline was commensurate with changes in society and affluence factors that the party ignored until after the electoral catastrophe of 1983.6 The most influential work of the period was that of the Labour revisionist Mark Abrams who demonstrated that increased prosperity led to a weakening of working class consciousness that would even threaten the future survival of the party.7 The period studied here was not chosen arbitrarily. In 1955, a new ‘revisionist’ parliamentary leadership came to the fore and the party embarked on a modernisation of its policies and a redefinition of Socialism.8 Party organisation in the aftermath of

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 1 Wilson, was overshadowed by ’s ascent to the leadership and the battles that ensued over Clause Four and nuclear disarmament. Modernisers believed that CLPs became an irrelevance to the ‘modern’ election campaign. By 1959, the battleground was no longer the doorstep, it was advertising and television.9 The CLPs are a ‘microcosm of the national Labour Party’ suggested Tom Forester and lamented about the dearth of local studies.10 The published work on grassroots activities is limited primarily to a few political scientists working in the 1950s and 1960s.11 One of the first was Jean Blondel’s structural analysis of the Conservative and Labour parties in Reading that also took a historical perspective.12 A comprehensive examination of the Newcastle-under-Lyne constituency by Bealey, Blondel and McCann included an extensive study of party members.13 Finally, a multi-party study of a metropolitan area in 1964 can be found in The Battle for Barons Court by Holt and Turner.14 Specific academic local Labour party studies are rare and John Turner’s comparative account of three CLPs during one year in the early 1960s is itself a unique record for the historian.15 However, all these studies have a central weakness, they observe the object of their study through the lens of national politics and focus on the procedure of the party while often appearing hostile to the subject they studied, the party activist.16 Of interest to the political scientist was the activists’ attitude to nationalisation or nuclear disarmament but provincial parties often had other pressing issues, the Norwich party discussed Suez alongside a debate protesting about ‘cows fouling the highway on Bluebell Road.’17 In the last few years, Lawrence Black and Steven Fielding have breathed new life into the grassroots study of Labour’s recent past. The single study by Black began from the basic premise that the Wilson report was accurate, local parties were in a ‘dilapidated’ condition and thus interprets the material accordingly for the whole 1950s. For example, he cites that the £3,500 mortgage obtained by the Chichester CLP in 1955 to purchase their property only left an annual residual surplus of only £30.18 In chapter two, it is shown that 1955 was one of the worst years for local parties, to afford such a mortgage was a sign of strength not weakness.19 Steven Fielding, who uses a veritable potpourri of local and regional party sources, argues that Labour’s activists enveloped themselves in a cultural and political cocoon that resisted change and modernisation.20 Although this author respects the very wide research Fielding cites and accepts that many activists shared a reluctance to change, nevertheless the argument that they opposed change is inaccurate. For example, Fielding cites Labour’s agents as a motivating force for modernisation, with which the author agrees. However, to claim that ‘by definition…an effective agent would meet local opposition’ because the agent would drive party efficiency and therefore antagonise activists, is untenable.21 It is true that Labour’s agents were often a force for modernisation, as chapters two and three demonstrate, but as employees of the local party they could only have done so by consent. One explanation for the alternative interpretations may be the differentiation in source material between CLPs in London and industrial England chosen by Fielding and those used for this research.22 Psephologists traditionally say in the Nuffield Studies that the activist and the local campaign made little difference to the electoral performance of the party.23 The argument was contested in two minor studies but academic argument supported Butler et.al.24 Only in the 1970s did evidence emerge to challenge the Nuffield position albeit only in relation to local elections.25 Transport House decision makers may have believed that to fully fund the recommendations of the Wilson report would not have been a productive

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 2 use of resources. Labour did little to alter its centralised strategy and divert resources into local organisation until the early 1990s when two studies made a significant impact on party election strategists which convinced them that investment in local effort would produce a net gain in the number of seats that it could win.26 Seyd and Wheatley, looking at the 1987 and 1992 elections were able to show that membership levels in CLPs had a statistically significant impact on the vote.27 Although far more influential was Denver and Hands examination, again of the 1992 election, that showed that there was a positive relationship between the intensity of the constituency campaign and the result.28 Recent historiography by Steven Fielding and others has set in motion new investigation into Labour’s recent past and in part this dissertation aspires to contribute to the invitation issued by Fielding to generate detailed work from local Labour records.29 Contemporary psephological studies and local archive sources offer a nexus to a wholly different interpretation of events as this dissertation will seek to do with the Wilson report. This author will offer an alternative reading of the Wilson report and contends that it was ostensibly written to further the ambition of Harold Wilson. It was all ‘spin’ and no substance, once complete Wilson dropped the subject and Transport House was able to blur the implementation of the recommendations contained in the report. Transport House in the 1950s and 1960s operated to control the party not to encourage innovation and the projects and experiments conducted by CLPs, some of which, outlined in chapters two and three, were never universally adopted.

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 3 CHAPTER ONE POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY: HAROLD WILSON AND PARTY ORGANISATION The Labour party approached the 1955 election with considerable complacency.1 The Conservatives had several advantages over Labour and defeat was something of a disappointment but expected.2 The campaign was uninspiring, David Butler described the election as the quietest and ‘least memorable of all post-war contests,’ and local campaigns were equally uneventful.3 After defeat came recrimination. Sydney Jacobson the influential Daily Mirror political editor blamed Labour’s defeat on three factors, the ageing leadership, the disunity of ‘Bevanism’ and ‘pathetically inferior’ organisation.4 The first two criticisms were particularly controversial. was a revered figure but was now seventy-two years old and his deputy and expected successor, was sixty-seven. Re-opening the second debate could quickly lead to public reprobation, the left already ascribed defeat to the lacklustre policies of the party and the right believed that Bevan’s pre-election show of disunity had cost the election.5 The third criticism about party organisation was seemingly less controversial and offered a scapegoat for both left and right.6 The agents union believed that the result had ‘shaken some (NEC) members and pressed the opportunity for an ‘examination of party organisation’.7 The danger was that attributing fault to party organisation was akin to criticism of the General Secretary, Morgan Phillips and by implication, Herbert Morrison.8 It would therefore be wrong to suggest, as Tom Forester argues that Transport House initiated the enquiry into party organisation.9 In defence of Phillips, the editorial of Labour Organiser declared ‘Defeat not Disaster’ and argued that the principle cause of defeat was the low turnout.10 Morgan Phillips prepared a somewhat circumspect report to the NEC. The primary factors responsible for defeat according to Phillips, were party splits that effected ‘doubtful’ voters, the wave of strikes prior to the election, policies that lacked clarity and a Tory scare campaign. On party organisation, Phillips believed that the major problem was the question of morale that caused a large proportion of election workers to remain at home. The tone of Phillips report was business as usual and he offered no proposals for immediate action.11 The South West Regional Organiser, Ted Rees speaking to the North Somerset CLP confidently listed four reasons for defeat and organisation was the least important.12 The political dynamic of party organisation may not have been a scapegoat that was entirely neutral. Left-wing local parties tended to combine blame for weak presentation of the ‘Socialist alternative’ with organisational failings and thus Wilson may have caught the mood of the party activist.13 The revisionist right-wing of the party, now firmly in the ascendancy, were not in a strong position to criticise the party machine. First, the right tended to be dismissive of the role of CLPs in the winning of elections.14 Second, the subject lacked the political appeal for social democrats and its negotiation of a middle way between capitalism and socialism in the name of egalitarianism.15 Finally, they were beholden and politically dependent upon many party organisers thus preventing criticism of electoral and party organisation other than in an esoteric form.16 Harold Wilson was free to criticise; his career was now at a crossroads. In 1954, by assuming Bevan’s place in the Shadow Cabinet, he had publicly distanced himself from the left.17 thought that ‘his goal was to become Leader of the Party…every thought and action, every word he said or wrote, every contact he made was all directed single-mindedly to that end.’18 In the aftermath of the election, Dick

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 4 Crossman believed that Wilson had calculated that Gaitskell would succeed Attlee and had therefore forged a plan to win the post of Deputy Leader as a springboard for the leadership should Gaitskell falter.19 Is it possible that Wilson conceived a plan for self-promotion by spearheading the critics of party organisation? Wilson had no past record of interest in the subject.20 As a member of the NEC Organisation Committee he had not made an impression and did not even attend the immediate post-election meeting.21 If Wilson had ambition for the leadership, his support base within the party would require strengthening, the influential group of party organisers would need courting. However, there were three problems. The General Secretary, Morgan Phillips was a former agent, respected by his colleagues, he also had a ‘pestilential hatred’ of Wilson.22 Second, the agents were pessimistic about the outcome of any enquiry that did not have a remit to enquire into party finances.23 The third impediment, and known to Wilson, was that Phillips and Gaitskell, the Party Treasurer, were at the time close, if not allies.24 The two had been holding a series of meetings with trade union leaders at the St.Ermin’s Hotel to ostensibly reform party finances, improve the pay and conditions of agents and increase the resources available to organisation.25 The primary concern of the NEC after the election was news coverage in the Daily Herald. Morgan Phillips’ election report was barely discussed, the meeting could only extricate itself from an argument on policy by the creation of the time-honoured device, a sub-committee.26 An alternative version suggests that Wilson lobbied NEC members in advance of the meeting to propose an enquiry with power to report to Conference.27 If Wilson had a plan, Phillips was able to counter it, he may have suspected that it was part of a more oblique scheme rather than a sudden interest in electoral organisation.28 The NEC remit was therefore anodyne and very different to the interpretation that Wilson was later to use as his terms of reference and for this reason is worth citing in full. Resolved: ‘That a Fact Finding Committee consisting of Miss Herbison, Messrs. Cooper, Skeffington and Wilson be set up to make preliminary enquiries into Party organisation with power to visit constituencies; the Committee to produce an interim report for consideration by the NEC early in September.29 The intention of the NEC was very clear, this was only a sufficient timeframe for a minor enquiry and reflected in its second tier membership with the exception of Harold Wilson.30 The NEC did not name a Chairman nor did it ask the enquiry to report to Conference. It is also plausible to argue that this interpretation is true when the only member of the NEC to take a keen interest in organisation, Ian Mikardo, was denied a place on the enquiry team.31 Nevertheless, Wilson must have exerted a strong influence, the enquiry team began work on 5 July 1955 and the other three members acquiesced to Wilson’s determination to cast his own interpretation on the remit for the Committee. One version of events suggests that Gaitskell encouraged Wilson to press for an enquiry to cement an alliance with the centre left and enhance his own leadership bid, although he was uneasy that it might undermine Morgan Phillips.32 If Gaitskell was devious enough, he could have pandered to Wilson’s ambition and encouraged him, knowing that any criticism of organisation would outflank his rival on the right, Morrison. One shred of evidence suggests that Gaitskell possibly co-operated with Wilson during the early stage of the enquiry.33 Another less likely reading by David Butler argues that the object of the

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 5 report was to remove the top management at Transport House, presumably Phillips, which would allow a new party leader the freedom to pick his own team.34 If Gaitskell and Wilson informally reached a political reconciliation, as two biographers suggest, any agreement came after the report was published and had possibly more to do with post-conference realpolitik and Wilson’s acceptance that Gaitskell would win the leadership.35 While the Labour Party spent the summer ‘painfully and publicly resolving its leadership problems’36 Harold Wilson occupied it in a frenetic tour of the country. Sometimes alone, Wilson met and listened to almost half of his parliamentary party colleagues and virtually every party organiser and agent.37 Where other members of the enquiry team accompanied him, only Jack Cooper appeared to make a memorable impact.38 Transport House and the Regional Offices facilitated arrangements for the meetings but unusually were involved neither in the collection of evidence nor in the administration of the enquiry.39 The evidence is fragmentary, Jack Campbell an agent, was present at one of the meetings and could not recall the presence of an official from Transport House, even Regional Organisers were excluded.40 It is also strange that Phillips asked Ted Rees the South West Regional Organiser to submit a private report on Wilson’s evidence gathering visit to the region.41 The NEC had commissioned the enquiry to prepare an ‘interim’ report for September and through Wilson’s exertion it was now a rather more substantial document. To get these terms amended at the NEC on 28 September would display Wilson as a supremely adept politician. Wilson must have written the report before the committee finished its work. On 20 September the committee had a further nine evidence gathering meetings including one with the National Agent although the Times were able to accurately comment on the length of the report and the number of recommendations.42 Dick Crossman recalled in his diary that Wilson had shown him a copy of the report on 22 September that he believed to be ‘an annihilating destruction of Morgan Phillips and, to a lesser extent, of Len Williams.’43 In the week before the NEC, Wilson leaked the report to the Daily Mirror who reported its contents in detail a few days before the meeting.44 The ‘penny-farthing’ phrase was widely used and the press stories added to the public image of Wilson but antagonised the right-wing members of the NEC subject to Phillips influence who organised a ‘deliberate putsch’ against him.45 The NEC mauled Wilson’s primary proposals rejecting them all except his bid to present the report to conference even refusing to offer the usual NEC recommendation.46 Gaitskell’s reaction to the report was lukewarm, ‘we will be making a mistake if we jump to the conclusion that faults of organisation were the sole reason why we lost.’47 At the Conference any aspiration that Wilson may have had that the report would enhance his standing were dealt a blow. Party organisation was the last thing on the minds of the delegates in Margate. The conversation in the meeting rooms and bars was about who would be the next party leader.48 In the conference hall the debate on the report was largely ‘perfunctory and irrelevant’.49 Bevan upstaged Harold Wilson and argued that it was not the machinery that was wrong ‘but failure to put over a socialist policy,’50 his powerful speech brought the delegates to their feet, Bevan was mobbed and Wilson forgotten.51 Other evidence also suggests that party activists were less than impressed, for them the hot topic of debate was the Mikardo Report. The columns of Labour Organiser were filled with discussion about the merits of the ‘Reading’ system and its methodology.52

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 6 Reading even struck a chord with the non-marginal Woking CLP who ordered extra copies for each Branch and set up a committee to discuss implementation.53 In contrast, the North Somerset Constituency, a marginal seat with ostensibly an interest in the Wilson report, constantly postponed its discussion for business such as the Divisional Whist Tournament, and it gradually disappeared from the agenda.54 The report contributed to increased managerial control by the National Agents Department (NAD). Seemingly following up the Wilson report, Wilf Young, the Eastern Regional Organiser told the Ipswich CLP that they qualified for a marginal seat grant providing they agreed to his six conditions.55 Young offered £150 per annum, half the figure recommended by Wilson and demanded that the agent, who was sixty-five years old, should retire.56 The offer made to Ipswich was less generous than an offer he made to Yarmouth in 1954 of £240 per annum to reappoint an agent. Young had invoked the Wilson report in November 1955 with the Yarmouth CLP when he hinted that if they took certain measures and appointed an agent, a grant of between £300 to £400 would be made available.57 The contemporaneous analysis by Robert McKenzie, on one of the essential recommendations of the report, the creation of an organisational sub-committee could offer another explanation for the attraction of organisation to Harold Wilson. In McKenzie’s view, the Chairman of the new committee would exert a powerful influence over party organisation with some similarity to the position occupied by the Chairman of the Conservative party.58 If this was Wilson’s aim, then his proposition rapidly disappeared. The NEC rejected it on 28 September, at the next meeting on 13 October they agreed to permit Transport House officials the opportunity to reply to the report and emasculated his plans for a high powered standing committee.59 Detailed organisation work was delegated to a new Regional and Field Sub-Committee but without the power Wilson envisaged and the right-wing even blocked Wilson from becoming Chairman of the new organisation committee until December.60 The New Statesman commented that the battle was one between modernisers and ‘those who wished to wreck the managerial revolution’ supporters of Morgan Phillips.’61 Harold Wilson used the opportunity created by the search for a scapegoat for the 1955 election defeat and sought to turn it into a vehicle for his own self promotion. The attempt to become head of the party machine or deputy leader to Gaitskell failed but his standing within the party was higher, the report had therefore served its purpose. In an effort to contain the Wilson report, the party machine offered the politics of fudge while attempting to expand its managerial control. Within a few months, Len Williams reported that all but three of the recommendations were ‘in hand’ and after the April 1956 committee meeting, Wilson abrogated responsibility for further implementation and a ‘final’ report never appeared.62 Appendix I shows that few of the recommendations were ever fully implemented, if they had been, in the opinion of Robert McKenzie, the proposals would have improved the efficiency of party organisation.63 The 1955 election did however mark a turning point for a number of local parties. The next two chapters will demonstrate that some CLPs deployed a zest for innovation and modernisation despite the circumvention of Transport House.

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 7 CHAPTER TWO FUNDING CRISIS AND THE TOTE PHENOMENON The Wilson Report outlined many failings of the party, suggested remedies and criticised agents for spending too much time fundraising for their salaries but, paradoxically, ignored the question of how constituency Labour parties could pay for modernisation. The tradition was to let CLPs fend for themselves on financial matters. Those in safe Labour seats could ignore the Wilson report, they heavily relied upon trade union sponsorship and donations to manage affairs. Marginal seats received some national support but generally had to work hard to find their own resources and the unwinnable seats had to fend as best they could. A CLP without the burden of property and staff could survive on very modest incomes derived from membership fees, whist drives, jumble sales and raffles. To meet the costs of the largest item, election expenses, it was common for a party to select either a sponsored candidate or one with sufficient personal affluence who could afford to contribute to funds.1

For an ambitious party, fundraising was imperative but by 1955 local fundraising was in crisis because of police action around the country to close down the small gambling schemes run by Labour Supporters Associations for minor illegalities.2 These small lotteries, such as that promoted by the Daily Herald or the ‘Useless Eustace’ gaming ticket were the primary method of financing many full-time agents.3 The effect of police action was to deplete the number of agents, disrupt preparations for the 1955 election and demoralise those agents remaining in jobs who were forced to work for low wages.4 The National Union of Labour Organisers (NULO) had engaged their own barrister but it was clear that under the existing law local parties could not operate a legal lottery.5 NULO tried to prevent the haemorrhage of agents by calling for an immediate response by the NEC to increase trade union financial support by revising the Hastings Agreement that regulated the amount unions paid to individual constituency parties.6 The NULO General Secretary, Les Hilliard, argued in the spring of 1954 that the NEC had done nothing to halt the decline in the number of organisers, despite warnings for the previous three years. He said that it was evident that the NEC were ‘ignorant of the practical realities and difficulties of organisation in the constituencies, it is more than alarming it’s positively dangerous.’7

Twelve months before the Wilson committee began work NULO had finally exhausted their pleas to Transport House on the necessity for reforming local financing and began their own Football Pool.8 Local parties were asked to subscribe to Clarion Services and the scheme began with the commencement of the 1954 football season, evidence suggests that it was a great success.9 In Ipswich, coupons were sold by a variety of sympathetic organisations and individuals that collected the weekly stakes from ‘punters’; these ranged from shop stewards amongst foundry workers to the Jolly Sailors Darts Club.10 Clarion Pools however was quickly assailed by the Methodist puritanical tradition within the party who were against the evils of drink and gambling.11 Methodist influence was strong enough to cause Morgan Phillips to publicly distance the NEC from Clarion and in certain parts of the country, particularly Wales, no such fundraising schemes ever took hold.12 Clarion Services was also soon thwarted by new legislation to tighten up on betting and confidence in the scheme gradually ebbed.13

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 8 Many thousands of local charities and good causes were affected by police suppression of lotteries so that all-party pressure was swiftly applied to change the law. The Small Lotteries and Gaming Act came into force in August 1956 with regulation passed to local authorities. Labour’s agents were prepared for the easing of the legislative burden that had extinguished local fundraising and launched ‘Tote’ competitions. The Tote was a lottery, Labour supporters paid a fixed amount, usually sixpence per week, for chances in a draw with cash prizes. The Norwich Labour party was one of the first to launch a competition; it was an instant success and income doubled within six months and consequently ‘our financial state has been dramatically transformed’ reported a delighted Treasurer.14 For those constituency parties which wholeheartedly adopted the enforced modernisation of local fundraising and started a Tote, the growth in income was extraordinary. In Norwich, Labour’s annual income increased eightfold from £1,618 in 1954 to £13,144 by 1960.15 In nearby Yarmouth, the agent Arthur Clare reported that in the first fifty weeks the Tote had produced a profit of £4,647 on sales of £11,084 compared to total annual income of £766 in 1954.16 By the time of the 1964 General Election the Norwich party employed in addition to the agent, an assistant agent plus several ancillary staff, and owned two motor vehicles and a scooter. It had accumulated £10,000 invested in Norwich Corporation 6% Stock and had purchased the freehold of the party headquarters at 59 Bethel Street. (See Appendix IV, Survey of CLP Staff, 1961). The Tote phenomenon created a massive turnaround in the fortunes of the Yarmouth party. In 1960 the agent, Arthur Clare reported that party income was £14,924 of which £13,595 was profit from the lottery.17 There had been no full-time agent in Yarmouth in 1955 and Clare had only been appointed under pressure from the Regional Organiser. Within four years, Clare had built a widely admired substantial party machine that was independent from outside pressure.18 The new found fortune for CLPs possibly reached a zenith at Faversham in North Kent where an income of £25,000 was recorded that enabled the party to maintain eight Labour Halls.19 News of the Tote phenomenon spread sporadically as the ‘secrets’ of the Tote were transferred verbally amongst NULO members and not widely advertised.20 However, not all members were keen on the party association with gambling particularly religious non-conformists such as Methodists. The North Somerset CLP debated the question for three months before the party would agree to start a Tote that although was tolerated never flourished.21 It was not only non-conformists who had reservations about the Tote; the left were equally concerned about the ethics of gambling. The Norwich agent, W.G.‘Knocker’ White had to forcibly argue and remind activists of the true purpose for the Tote competition. The party was ‘not in existence solely for…raising money. We raise money…to educate, propagate and organise to gain power.’22 Few constituencies in Labour’s heartlands ran successful Tote schemes although a decade later the Bassetlaw constituency in Nottinghamshire began a Tote and were able to reap the financial rewards and thus repulse Labour’s unpopularity of the late 1960s.23 The apparent wealth of local parties with a Tote allowed CLPs to increase the range of political, cultural and social activities. Party expenditure quickly kept pace with the new flow of funds as they purchased and furnished new headquarters, opened social clubs, employed staff and heavily invested in political education and training.24 The Norwich party began an annual political education weekend at a Yarmouth hotel and paid the fees of any member who enrolled on a National Council of Labour Colleges (NCLC)

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 9 course. The Norwich Annual Report for 1959 declared ‘Democratic Socialism can be effective only when a substantial proportion of the electorate understand the basic aims as well as the current policies of the Labour party. We must start by educating ourselves.’25 A fleet of mini buses was purchased, the Yarmouth party used their twelve- seat Bedford to ferry members to support election campaigns and CND for the Aldermaston marches.26 The former ‘begging bowl’ mentality was reversed, wealth impinged on members political consciences and a new item appeared on monthly meeting agendas ‘donations’. A wide variety of political and charitable causes was covered in the donations given to the chagrin of many agents.27 Electoral politics was not forgotten, the weekly or fortnightly Tote result sheets that were delivered to the thousands who played the new gambling schemes were discreetly given the Labour message. The Norwich party prepared ‘stereos’ or pre-prepared duplicator stencils containing copies of national newspaper advertisements for use around the country.28 Many party activists were largely ignorant of the mechanics and methodology of the operation of the new Tote schemes and referred to their newfound wealth as ‘the swindle’.29 The comments of the Chichester parliamentary candidate, Mervyn Jones comments were probably typical, They ran a Tote, and that’s how the income of the party came in really, with some objections from older non-conformist elements of the party who thought running a Tote was gambling, it was immoral and a socialist movement shouldn’t do it. However we did, and brought in lots of money from the Tote so we had a headquarters, we had staff of three and we had 2,500 members and it really was quite a flourishing Labour party.30 However, not all of the new Tote schemes were a success. A Tote required the maintenance of constant management and marketing or the scheme could swiftly decline. The most productive schemes were those where the CLP employed an agent with additional support staff. In cases where the agent was not directly involved and was operated by volunteers the Tote either failed or remained at a relatively low level. In a few instances, the party suffered from the dishonesty of the agent or Tote promoter.31 Transport House largely ignored the success of the Tote and remained antagonistic to attempts to encourage participation by other local parties. In the Eastern Counties, a mutual aid scheme was formed by the agents to promote Tote schemes in specific constituencies if the CLP agreed to appoint an organiser once it was in operation.32 When Bryan Barnard was appointed agent to the Buckingham Constituency he quickly introduced a Tote to help overcome the poor organisation within the party, it was successful enough for the delegate to the 1960 Conference to proudly declare that it now ‘brings in an income of some £10,000 a year’.33 With adequate resources, Barnard built a ‘highly tuned election machine’ that impressed the parliamentary candidate, Robert Maxwell, who won the seat in 1964.34 Maxwell founded and may have financed the Labour National Fund Raising Foundation that suggested ‘from experience we know that - to maintain a consistent income sufficiently large to produce an effective, useful, fighting fund - nothing does the job better than a Tote competition’.35 The Foundation financed the creation of Tote schemes in many parts of the country, evidence is lacking of anything other than some minor success although this subject requires further research.36

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 10 The venture into popular culture with gambling to raise funds for the party did not stop at the collection of one shilling a week. Many local parties reached out into their communities to present popular recreational events that were attended by tens of thousands of people or rather more modestly opened a coffee bar to attract the emerging youth culture of the period. New opportunities opened up for adventurous parties and there must be some scepticism about the argument held by Steven Fielding that local parties avoided ‘sponsoring all but the most modest of leisure-time activities’.37 There is evidence that many local parties organised a summer gala or fete. From 1958 until the mid 1960s the North Somerset CLP held an annual gala with attractions ranging from clay pigeon shooting and a cage-bird show to a performance of the ‘Australian Air Aces’ aerobatics team. To appeal to the new youth culture the finale was an evening ‘Pop Dance’ in the grand marquee.38 In Ipswich, almost 40,000 paid to gain entry to the 1955 annual Labour and Co-operative fete held in Christchurch Park,39 and 16,000 attended the 1957 Faversham fete featured in a whole page of Reynolds News.40 Meanwhile, in Taunton, it was a little more sedate where the Flower Show was the great Labour attraction.41 The major event at the South Norfolk fete was the annual bathing beauty pageant and the crowning of ‘Miss South Norfolk’ an attraction that was copied by many CLPs and won by some women who later went on to make a political career.42 One of the most ambitious events was the Great Yarmouth Labour and Trade Union Festival held on the Wellington Pier. The all day event in 1963 consisted of two performances of a variety show hosted by the early television celebrity Norman Vaughan, a beauty contest and a fashion show, political input came from an afternoon rally on the skating rink addressed by .43 In Yarmouth, the basement of the new party headquarters, a large former nursing home off the seafront, was converted into a coffee bar for the Young Socialists whose ranks quickly swelled to over 400 when it became the meeting place for the Yarmouth beat generation.44 Lawrence Black has described the ‘associational aspect of the socialist community’ that probably led local parties to spend some of their new wealth on creating a wide appeal to the local working class community.45 Pensioners were invited to join the ‘Sunshine Club’ for afternoon bingo or join the annual coach outing and the very young were not forgotten with £150 raised by the Sheerwater Branch for the annual children’s Christmas party.46 Far from being ‘little Englanders’ as Stephen Howe has suggested, Labour activists fortified with financial resources could practice their enthusiasm for internationalism.47 The Yarmouth party, in 1960, donated to Christian Action for work in South Africa and collected to help the victims of a disastrous flood in France.48 In the late 1950s, Europe was high on the agenda and the Norfolk parties established links with the French Socialist party in Rouen sending an exploratory mission from Norwich in 1959. One year later, Yarmouth hosted a dinner for a visiting delegation from Rouen, agreeing to meet the costs of all the wine although the greatest expense was the decision to pay for five members to attend the centenary celebration of the in Brussels.49 The bounteous cashflow generated by the Tote also had a longer lasting impact on some CLPs. Many local parties had enthusiastically purchased property in the boom following the establishment of individual membership organisations in 1918 and once more attachment for bricks and mortar became a high priority for the diversion of the Tote cash-cow. Some parties, like Norwich, renovated and repaired existing property paying off debts and mortgages while Chichester and others purchased property for the first time. A few went as far as to create modern purpose built headquarters as did the Maldon constituency which opened the Witham Labour Hall in 1960.50 Evidence of

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 11 the positive impact that the Tote made can be found as late as 1973, when it was able to provide the funds for the Bassetlaw party to open a new headquarters in Worksop.51 For less auspicious parties like North Somerset, property had to be rented, hesitantly taking out a three-year lease in 1957 on offices and flat for the Agent.52 A few parties opened drinking clubs within their new premises although, overall, these remained as a social benefit for party members not a source of funds and, on the contrary, frequently a major expense.53 In the Midlands and North of England Labour Clubs experienced a massive surge in popularity during the 1950s and early 1960s with some constituencies opening several.54 However, because of licensed club membership rules and the lack of interest from party activists to administer the clubs they gradually began to distance themselves from the party.55 The Tote phenomenon probably reached its zenith around 1964-66 before it began a slow decline. However, a small number of constituency parties still operate schemes to this day. The Tote was supplemented by a weekly bingo game that began in London in the early 1960s where the Tote, which depended on a relatively static membership, had difficulty operating.56 This professional level of fundraising primarily depended on full- time agents to supervise the schemes, often doing it for their own self preservation to safeguard their employment. The enthusiasm of the agent was certainly one major factor contributing to its success. Another must lie in cultural factors. The Tote and bingo grew explosively in the Eastern Counties, Kent and in many other Southern English constituencies. Although many were in marginal constituencies some of the most successful were in parts of rural East Anglia such as the Eye constituency that had a gross annual income of over £40,000 in 1962.57 The Tote did not take hold in the South West and Wales, in the Midlands it had a mixed reception. Very few parties in the North and Scotland ran major fundraising schemes; the Labour heartlands could perhaps rely upon the trade unions.58 However, this is not a wholly satisfactory explanation, Norwich and South West Norfolk had sponsored parliamentarians but ran substantial gambling schemes. The financing of local Labour parties by gambling has been neglected by researchers possibly due to the schizophrenic attitude of Labour, on the one hand quietly exhilarated by local success but on the other condescension for its plebeian connotations.59

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 12 CHAPTER THREE MEMBERS, ACTIVISTS AND THE ELECTORAL MACHINE Political Parties need members especially at election times. Parties do not have the financial resources to buy every form of electioneering, even if they did, the Representation of the Peoples Act restricts the amount of money that can be spent on a constituency campaign. For the Labour Party this is particularly true, there is no substitute for grass roots voluntary effort, and in the 1950s and 1960s, it was the only method to even the electoral battle with the Conservatives.1 What worried Wilson was not a decline in overall membership but the failure of activists to turn out and support the party campaign.2 Activists were useful where there were marginal seats to be won and it did not matter if the average membership in Scotland was one-third that of East Anglia.3 Leading party modernisers believed that the nature of political campaigning had changed with the advent of television. The national campaign was now to the forefront, Tony Crosland believed that members were more of a nuisance than a benefit, ‘the rank-and-file is less and less essential to the winning of elections. With the growing penetration of the mass media, political campaigning has become increasingly centralised; and the traditional local activities…are now largely a ritual.’4 National appeals exhorting activists and organisers to increase membership proved relatively fruitless exercises.5 The NEC did from time to time endorse a membership campaign without providing additional resources to the National Agents Department (NAD).6 The NAD issued directives to the overburdened Regional Organisers who, without consultation with the CLPs set another membership target.7 The appointment of Organising Assistants proposed by Wilson proved a boon to Regional Offices who were thus able to delegate the task.8 Identification of the poor rate of subscription collection and a decline in total membership occurred before the Wilson report.9 The charge is long-standing ‘it was always a hard job’ to motivate volunteers for a purely administrative task.10 Optimists believed that the reported decline was only temporary, the Billericay organiser announced that 3,000 members had been recruited with sights set on a target of 5,000.11 However, recorded membership in many seats peaked in 1952 and was now in a slow spiral of decline.12 The Wilson report did recognise the efforts of some CLPs to deal with the problem of subscription collection by employing paid collectors. The question had been a matter of some debate in Labour Organiser and the Wilson Committee only highlighted this question without offering any solution.13 The low party subscription exacerbated the problem, fixed at six shillings a year often paid at the rate of six pence a month, the collector had many calls to make for a small sum of money. North Somerset CLP introduced a commission scheme for collectors, ten per cent of the gross membership subscription, the fee was so minuscule in comparison with the amount of work involved that the scheme soon failed.14 One Surrey party attempted to tackle the issue by offering twenty-five per cent to collectors but found few willing to undertake the work.15 The collection problem became so acute in the marginal seat of Brecon that party organisation became so ‘fragile’ that it led to loss of NEC funding.16 For a variety of reasons national membership figures are notoriously inaccurate.17 The report pointed to the widely known belief that ‘the recorded membership of many CLPs is considerably in excess of the actual contributing membership paying a full subscription

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 13 all the year round’.18 The system was founded upon the notion of affiliation of members to the national party on the payment of a fee for the number of the cards issued. A party could ‘buy’ more cards to inflate its figures or under-report to profit from the proportion to be returned to the national party.19 Often it was a combination of the two as the Great Yarmouth Treasurer reported to the 1955 Annual Meeting (AGM).20 Social attitudes, particularly in rural constituencies, meant that an unknown number of Labour supporters preferred to make a donation without holding a membership card.21 The Yarmouth CLP never had a spectacularly high membership, in comparison with other parties in the Eastern Region.22 However, it has one unique factor that makes it stand out from most other parties, evidence of the accuracy of its membership figures. Arthur Clare, the agent, believed in a strong centralised party machine that he was able to construct on the immense financial resources available to him (see chapter two). In the first three years after his appointment, recruitment efforts theoretically doubled the membership, except that branches reported that it had only increased by one third. From January 1959, Clare centralised the Yarmouth membership system, cards were issued by the office on receipt of the first instalment of the subscription and the assistant agent directly managed subscription collection.23 As Table I demonstrates, membership declined as ‘imaginary’ members were weeded from the system.24 After one year membership was reduced by one third but now most except the most recent recruits had paid the full subscription.25

Table 1: Yarmouth Constituency Labour Party Membership, 1952-1964 Card Fully-Paid Collection Enrolled during Membership Members Rate the year 1952 1107 1953 1241 1954 1239 784 63% 191 1955 1206 751 62% 1956 1616 464 1957 1644 421 1958 1676 218 1959 1120 1015 91% 323 1960 1488 1155 78% 288 1962 2349 1769 75% 794 1963 2016 1685 84% 247 1964 2040 1534 75% 214 Source: Great Yarmouth Labour Party, Annual Reports. (N.B. Figures for 1961 not available) The Yarmouth case study reveals that it was not difficult to recruit members if an effort was made. The 1956 recruitment campaign averaged seventy-four new members per month.26 The next year, assisted by during the Easter vacation, 340 new members were enrolled in the villages.27 Arthur Clare as a new agent diverted party resources to membership to impress his superiors and fulfil the target set by the regional

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 14 office.28 To his dismay the target increased by twenty-five per cent the following year and Clare never again committed the same level of resources to recruitment. Clare identified the principal problem in Yarmouth, as elsewhere, was not recruitment but retention of membership. He found that activists were reluctant to undertake monthly household collections for small sums of money and noted the lessening dedication caused by the alternative appeal of television that began broadcasting in the area from 1957.29 Using the financial resources of the Yarmouth party rather than its reluctant asset, the activists, Arthur Clare convinced the party to employ an assistant agent with particular responsibility for managing the membership collection system. John Roper the assistant agent in Yarmouth until 1968, ensured that every member holding a card had paid a minimum subscription of one month and collected a large proportion of the monthly payments himself. Nevertheless, as Table I shows, the problem of a monthly contributory system could not be overcome despite the presence of a full-time worker that boosted the maximum collection rate from sixty-three per cent to ninety-one per cent in 1959.30 If Roper was diverted to other duties the level of subscription collection would vary, the routine of a regular collection was therefore beyond the scope for most CLPs that did not have the resources of Yarmouth. High membership bore no relationship to the level of support for Labour or the character of the area, the usual reason was an adequately resourced full-time agent.31 As the above case study reveals, no matter how much the national party may exhort its workers to increase membership, the problem was not recruitment but retention. The system was inoperable for all but the zealot prepared to overcome the inadequacy of the collecting card methodology copied from the trade union movement that proved inappropriate for a political party. Six months before the election Ian Mikardo had argued in Tribune that party organisation required attention, the marginal CLPs felt neglected by Transport House, and he called for an immediate study to address the issue.32 Almost one year later the party published a report and Mikardo was able to read the words of Harold Wilson to describe his general impression of the state of the party in 1955. But the fact remains that compared with our opponents, we are still at the penny- farthing stage in a jet-propelled era, and our machine, at that, is getting rusty and deteriorating with age.33 The mid 1950s were a particularly low period for local party organisation as one study of Newcastle-under-Lyne revealed.34 At the moment when many marginal seats should have been gearing up to contest the election, the agent they employed was fearful of their job and husbanding resources because of the crisis closing fundraising schemes as shown in chapter two. One marginal seat, North Somerset reported that canvassing was less than the 1951 election which itself was pitifully low and polling day organisation had been dependent upon ‘local knowledge’ of known Labour voters.35 Some CLPs were in no position to fight an election; the newly appointed agent for South Norfolk, George Stubbert found the constituency in total disarray. Only fifteen of the theoretical twenty-eight branches were ‘barely alive’, members were ‘disheartened’ and there was ‘no record of any canvassing having been done anywhere.’36 Wilson said that he was ‘shocked’ by what he found but to assume that organisation was continuing to deteriorate was unfounded. The report acknowledged some emerging from below, such as in Reading, yet failed to acknowledge other modernising trends. The Reading MP and NEC member Ian Mikardo was a persistent critic of party organisation offering a host of suggestions in Tribune, some of which found there way

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 15 into the Wilson report.37 Mikardo pioneered a comprehensive electioneering scheme in collaboration with a union official, Clive Jenkins, and a local councillor, David Stoddart. The objective was ‘not to convert Conservative voters but to identify Labour voters and get them to the polling station.’38 Immediately following the election Mikardo had provided Morgan Phillips with a report and ‘blue-print of a system of election organisation’ and urged that it be sent to CLPs.39 Phillips eventually circulated ‘Electioneering in Labour Marginal Constituencies’ or the Mikardo report, in September 1955 to eclipse the Wilson report.40 Mikardo publicised his report in the Labour movement press and questioned the fundamental methodology and management of the local electioneering effort. ‘You can’t build up an effective organisation until you have defined clearly…the purposes which the organisation is to serve.’41 Mikardo argued that the party was transfixed by an assumption that a pool of voters existed requiring persuasion to win an election. The ‘overwhelming…effort and expenditure is directed at the task of conversion’ to no significant effect. Mikardo proposed targeting resources on identification of Labour voters in marginal seats and, using the ‘Reading’ polling day system, maximise the turnout of those voters.42 A good case study of the operation of this classic mobilising campaign can be found in Holt and Turner, The Battle for Barons Court.43 Slowly, the Reading system disseminated through the party, its progress is recorded in the columns of Labour Organiser. Bob Chamberlain’s decision to use the system in the parliamentary by-election of February 1956 was a deciding factor in influencing agents drafted into the campaign. Chamberlain was euphoric about the new technique, ‘the key workers agreed that this system is the best they have ever tried’ we have now ‘sold the penny-farthing.’44 Transport House were less than enthusiastic, the National Agent, Williams even questioned if a uniform system was desirable.45 The disdain exhibited by the NAD towards Reading continued until the 1980s, a factor that did little to discourage some local parties from applying the system at the spring municipal elections.46 Reading operated ‘satisfactorily’ according to Arthur Clare who introduced it to replace the absurdity of each ward and local branch using a method of its own devising.47 However, the greatest boost came from the endorsement of Reg Underhill, the West Midlands Regional Organiser and later a National Agent. Underhill refined the system and persuaded his Regional Council to financially back the commercial printing of specific stationery to carryout a widespread experiment covering 275,000 Labour ‘promise’ voters during the local elections.48 It is to his credit that this revised form of stationery became the model for the Reading system to the extent that a party activist from the late 1950s would still be familiar with a modern Labour committee room.49 By the spring of 1957, news of Reading reached Fraser Wilde the parliamentary candidate for the marginal North Somerset constituency. Wilde ‘volunteered’ his wife to assist but had to ask for detailed instructions as neither had seen it in operation.50 Reading, however did have its critics and cautious party members, like Isa Paton in Glasgow, assimilated in a traditional approach to electioneering bedevilled its adoption.51 Ray Perry, the agent for North Somerset was still trying to persuade all parts of the constituency to use Reading or even the older Stym system in 1959.52 In contrast, the cosmopolitan Cambridge CLP, then without an agent told Labour Organiser in the summer of 1957 that they had decided to introduce it across the whole constituency.53 From a comparative study of the election preparations of the Great Yarmouth CLP for 1955 and 1959, it is possible to distinguish the advances made in electioneering

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 16 technique in a short period of time. The constituency had no full-time agent in 1955 and, on the day Eden announced the election, a sub-committee of eleven activists was hurriedly formed to direct a chaotic campaign.54 The committee extensively debated everything from press releases to the local newspaper to the quintessential issue, the election address and the layout position of the candidates’ photograph.55 Needless to say, management by committee led to a series of mistakes, insufficient quantities of envelopes were ordered for the ‘freepost’ and in the absence of instructions from the party the printer only ordered paper for the same quantity and size as the 1951 election address.56 At the 1959 election, the party had a honed machine with a substantial war chest built up from the success of the Tote. The party now had an agent and an assistant agent who directed the campaign, there was no committee. Arthur Clare, the agent, issued an eight-page memorandum to all the main activists detailing their responsibilities during the campaign, instructions on the operation of the Reading system and even included the daily schedule of the candidate.57 Finally, this chapter has demonstrated that with the application of a professional organisation and the financial resources that the Tote brought to bear, two issues; membership and electioneering were addressed with imagination. Some local Labour parties were not only able to confront the problem of membership recruitment and retention but also record the depth of the problem. If the statistics produced by Yarmouth CLP are accurate and were to apply to the whole party, the total national membership claimed would be substantially reduced. One has to ask, did a mass membership Labour party ever exist? The evidence from Yarmouth and Norwich reveals that although membership was not as high as previously thought, CLPs were able to recruit and increase total membership contrary to the national trend. The other issue addressed by the Wilson report that referred to the experiment in an electoral system developed by the Reading Labour Party, another left-wing CLP that was the nemesis of the party establishment has already been explained above. The chapter has shown that the ‘Reading’ system was tested and refined by party organisers after 1955 and, together with other new techniques, was put into practice by CLPs at the 1959 election. The ‘Reading’ system subsequently became Labour’s standard method of local electioneering although it struggled to overcome Transport House malaise. The modernising changes described above generally occurred in marginal constituencies who had most to gain by improved organisation. The fruition of this local revolution came too late for the 1959 election but may have had a significant outcome on the 1964 and 1966 elections when Labour gained seats in constituencies that operated the modernised systems. Although it is clear that this claim would benefit from further research, the Holt and Turner study of the Baron’s Court constituency in 1964 suggested that good organisation was an important influence on the result.58

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 17 CONCLUSION Political parties ignore the work of their local members at their peril. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Labour party did ignore its grass roots. The significance of this should not be underestimated by researchers whose attention has been drawn to the centre and not the periphery as this dissertation has shown. This study began with a general exploration of the discussion associated with the Labour party, and the fragmentary literature available on Labour’s local organisation from the 1950s combined with the cursory analysis of the Wilson report. Chapter one explored the motive of Harold Wilson to engage with the subject of party organisation which must be seen in the context of the intra-party politics of the period and the leadership question. The successor to Clement Attlee was the dominant issue in 1955, not the election defeat, nor party organisation. Wilson needed to nurture his future ambitions for leadership and one way to do so was to make organisation his special subject. He placed great personal effort into producing his report but once the party machine thwarted his ambition, he failed to pursue his claim. This study substantiates the impression Wilson had of the state of party organisation at that moment in time with the use of archive material from CLPs located in East Anglia and Somerset together with oral evidence from the agents and other observers. The party General Secretary, Morgan Phillips believed that Wilson used the report to criticise his management of the party machine. The self-interested motives of the participants in this affair suggest that Robert Edwards, a former editor of Tribune, was correct when he placed the blame for poor organisation firmly on the National Executive Committee (NEC). ‘How can you have an effective army that neither respects or believes in you’ he wrote in September 1955.1 A number of factors have been identified that the author would consider significant enough to suggest that further study would be of value. One in particular stands out, Labour and gambling. As a major local fundraising initiative the Tote had a dramatic impact and, in some cases, survives to this day.2 For a number of constituencies, it was undoubtedly a primary cause of the revitalisation of the party when its fortunes were all but written off under the influence of the ‘affluent society’.3 In the introduction recent psephological work, particularly Denver and Hands, was discussed. This work has given new importance to the role of the local campaign in winning or loosing elections. In the 1950s and 1960s, academic opinion stressed the overriding importance of the national campaigns in winning elections. Party strategists took note of these findings and it influenced the way that local parties were regarded. Transport House, because of benign neglect, failed to encourage innovation or welcome experimentation at the grassroots. Some of the schemes that were tried have been described in this study such as the Reading electioneering system. Reading was only slowly and reluctantly accepted by the party machine, after its adoption by the grassroots, its success forced the party to accept it as the standard electioneering system, even serving as the core local strategy for ’s victories in 1997 and 2001. It has been argued that the party generally may have lacked ambition4 but some of the CLPs studied in this dissertation reveal a process of renewal not decline, contrary to all existing interpretations. The scope of innovation and change amongst CLPs has still to be examined comprehensively and existing studies suggest that it may have been limited. Nevertheless, many of the constituencies such as Great Yarmouth and Buckingham in Southern England gained by Labour in 1964 and 1966 had adopted a modern professional

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 18 organisation based on funds raised from gambling. It may have been true, in 1955, to say that the CLPs suffered from a malaise, but by 1957 as the agent for Yarmouth, Arthur Clare wrote ‘we offer an assurance…in this jet-age, the penny-farthing will not be seen again.’5

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 19 Notes Introduction

1 Eponym for the ‘Interim Report of the Sub-Committee on Party Organisation’. In Labour Party, Report of the Fifty- fourth Annual Conference, (Labour Party, 1955), pp.63-105. Referred to hereafter as LPACR, (1955).

2 The one-paragraph histories include the two semi-official chronicles, Henry Pelling, A short history of the Labour Party, (London: Macmillan, 8th Edition, 1985), pp.115-116. and Tony Wright and , The People’s Party: The History of the Labour Party, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), p.92. The general histories in this category include Kevin Jefferys, The Labour Party since 1945, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), p.43 and Carl Brand, The British Labour Party: A short History, (Stanford University Press, 1964), p.281. There are some that completely ignore the subject such as Keith Laybourn, The Rise of Labour: The British Labour Party, 1890-1979, (London: Edward Arnold, 1988).

3 Two examples are; R.T.McKenzie, British Political Parties: The distribution of power within the Conservative and Labour Parties, (London: Heinemann, 2nd Edition, 1964), p.606. and Alan R.Ball, British Political Parties: The emergence of a modern party system, (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981), p.174. One author incorrectly assigned the wrong election to the Wilson report was Geoffrey K.Roberts, Political Parties and Pressure Groups in Britain, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), p.46.

4 Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism: A study in the Politics of Labour, (London: Merlin, 2nd edition, 1972), p.331. For other examples see; David Coates, The Labour Party and the Struggle for Socialism, (Cambridge University Press, 1975)

5 Martin Harrison, Trade Unions and the Labour Party since 1945, (London: Allen and Unwin, 1960), pp.69-99.

6 Steven Fielding, Labour: Decline and Renewal, (Tisbury: Baseline, 2nd Edition, 1999), pp.17-18. Kevin Jefferys suggests that contemporaneous opinion put the defeat down to rising prosperity and Labour’s disunity. See, Kevin Jefferys, ‘The Attlee years, 1935-55,’ in Brian Brivati and Richard Heffernan (eds.), The Labour Party: A Centenary History, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p.82.

7 Mark Abrams, Richard Rose and Rita Hinden, Must Labour Lose?, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p.59.

8 Ball, British Political Parties, (1981), pp.168-169.

9 Steven Fielding, ‘The “penny farthing machine” revisited: Labour Party members and participation in the 1950s and 1960s’, in Chris Pierson and Simon Tormey (eds.), Politics at the Edge, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p.174.

10 Tom Forester, The Labour Party and the Working Class, (London: Heinemann, 1976), p.71.

11 Most of the literature is by a variety of authors written for an intra party debate in ‘house’ journals such as Fabian Journal, New Statesman, Socialist Commentary and Tribune.

12 Jean Blondel, ‘The Conservative Association and the Labour Party in Reading’, Political Studies, Vol.6, No.2 (1958), pp.101-119.

13 Frank Bealey, J.Blondel and W.P.McCann, Constituency Politics: A study of Newcastle-under-Lyne, (London: Faber and Faber, 1965).

14 R.Holt and J.Turner, Political Parties in Action: The Battle for Barons Court, (New York: Free Press, 1968).

15 John E.Turner, Labour’s Doorstep Politics in London, (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978).

16 Steven Fielding, ‘Activists against “Affluence”: Labour Party Culture during the “Golden Age”, circa 1950-1970', Journal of British Studies, Vol. 40, No.2, (2001), p.247.

17 Norfolk County Record Office, Norwich Labour Party, GC Political Section Minutes, 22 August 1956.

18 Lawrence Black, ‘Still at the penny farthing stage in a jet propelled era: Branch life in 1950s Socialism’, Labour History Review, Vol.65, No.2, (2000), p.215.

19 See chapter two for the fundraising phenomenon that also included Chichester CLP.

20 See, Fielding, ‘The “penny farthing machine” revisited,’ pp.172-185 and Fielding, ‘Activists against “Affluence”’ pp.241-267.

21 Fielding, ‘The “penny farthing machine” revisited,’ p.177.

22 Fielding, ‘Activists against “Affluence”’ p.248.

23 D.E.Butler, The British General Election of 1955, (London: Macmillan,1955), p.205. See also, D.E.Butler and Richard Rose, The British General Election of 1959, (Macmillan, 1960), p.195. and Martin Rosenbaum, From Soapbox to Soundbite: Party Political Campaigning in Britain since 1945, (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1997), pp.252-253.

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 20 24 The Nuffield ‘school’ was joined by Dennis Kavanagh, Constituency Electioneering in Britain, (London: Longman, 1970), p.87. The 1950s study by John Cotton Brown used data collected by the Conservative agent for Harrow East. John Cotton Brown, ‘Local Party Efficiency as a factor in the outcome of British Election,’ in Political Studies, Vol.6, No.2, (1958), pp.174-178. The second was a conclusion of the local study by R.Holt and J.Turner, Political Parties in Action: The Battle for Barons Court, (New York: Free Press, 1968). 25 J.M. Bochel and David Denver, ‘The Impact of the Campaign on the Results of Local Government Elections,’ British Journal of Political Science, 2, (1972), pp.239-260. and J.M. Bochel and David Denver, ‘Canvassing, Turnout and Party Support: An Experiment,’ British Journal of Political Science, 1, (1971), pp.257-269. and Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein, The Labour Party - a Marxist History, (London: Bookmarks, 1988). 26 David Denver was consulted by senior party officials and explained its significance to a conference of party organisers leading to a review of strategy and greater concentration of effort on marginal ‘target’ constituencies after the 1987 election. The party diverted resources to target seats for the 1992 and 1997 elections and spent a greater proportion of its national budget on local organisation. The author. 27 Patrick Seyd and Paul Whiteley, Labour’s Grass Roots: The Politics of Party Membership, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), Ch.8. and Patrick Seyd and Paul Whiteley, ‘Labour’s Vote and Local Activism: The Impact of Local Constituency Campaigns’, Parliamentary Affairs, Vol.45, No.4, (1992), pp.582-595. 28 David Denver and Gordon Hands, ‘Constituency Campaigning’, Parliamentary Affairs, Vol.45, No.4 (1992), p.543 Chapter One

1 Steven Fielding (ed.), The Labour Party: ‘Socialism’ and society since 1951, (Manchester University Press, 1997), p.27. 2 The Conservatives were able to exploit the wave of industrial unrest immediately before the election including a national newspaper strike. They also faced the nation with a new leader Anthony Eden who surprised Labour by calling an immediate election, Eden was also a contrast to Labour’s ageing Clement Attlee. was optimistic but thought, ‘my guess, …the Tories will have a small majority.’ Janet Morgan (ed), The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981), p.420. In one of the first British General Election opinion polls conducted by Gallup and published in the News Chronicle in April 1955 the Conservatives were given only a one per cent lead over Labour. 3 David Butler, British General Elections since 1945, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd Edition, 1995), p.14. There was less coverage of the election in the Workshop Guardian than in previous elections according to John Shephard, For the Common Good: A History of the Bassetlaw Labour Party, 1918-1998, (Bassetlaw Constituency Labour Party, 2000), p.50. Hugh Dalton described the campaign as the ‘most tedious and apathetic’ he had been involved in. See, (ed.), The Political Diary of Hugh Dalton, 1918-40, 1945-60, (London: Cape in association with the London School of Economics and Political Science, 1986), p.671. Anthony Eden became Prime Minister on 6 April 1955 and swiftly called the election on 15 April. The poll was held on 26 May. The Conservative share of the vote rose slightly but the two main parties both polled fewer votes than in 1951 the problem for Labour was a sharp reduction in its popular vote. 4 Daily Mirror, 28 May 1955. Cited in Kevin Jefferys, Retreat from New Jerusalem: British Politics 1951-64, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p.39 and Morgan, Diaries of Richard Crossman, p.422. 5 Brian Brivati, Hugh Gaitskell, (London: Richard Cohen, 1997), p.218 and p.220. See also Jennie Lee, My Life with Nye, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p.254. Only weeks before the poll , a leadership contender, had come within one vote of expulsion by the National Executive Committee (NEC), see John Campbell, Nye Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), pp.295-300. 6 Marcia Williams, Inside Number 10, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972), p.102.

7 Suffolk County Record Office, GG410/1/1, NULO Eastern Counties Branch, Minutes 19 July 1955.

8 Sydney Jacobson was thus critical of Attlee for not retiring, and of the two rivals for the leadership Aneurin Bevan and Herbert Morrison. Morrison was linked to an involvement in party organisation throughout his career. At the 1955 Conference he was the NEC speaker on the Wilson Report, see LPACR, (1955), pp.149-151. 9 Forester, Working Class, p.73.

10 Labour Organiser, Vol.34, Issue 398, June/July, (1955), p.103.

11 Labour Party Archive (LPA), ‘Report on the General Election’, National Executive Committee, 22 June 1955.

12 Somerset County Record Office, A/AAW4 Minutes, North Somerset CLP, EC Minutes 14 July 1955. The four reasons listed by Ted Rees were; 1. Party division and a hostile press, 2. Similarity of Party programmes, 3. Social contentment and 4. Poor Organisation.

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 21 13 For Norwich LP see, Norfolk County Record Office, Norwich Labour Party, ‘Executive Committee Report for 1955’. For Coventry LP see, Nick Tiratsoo, Reconstruction, Affluence and Labour Politics: Coventry 1945-60, (London: Routledge, 1990), p.94. 14 Ball, British Political Parties, p.174. For the low opinion of local parties held by social democrat ‘militants’ see, Lawrence Black, ‘Social Democracy as a Way of Life: Fellowship and the Socialist Union, 1951-9’, Twentieth Century British History, Vol.10, No.4, (1999), p.523. 15 See the leading revisionist text, , The Future of Socialism, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956).

16 Before the 1955 election, the London Regional Organiser had forced the readopt ion of Arthur Skeffington MP, as the parliamentary candidate against the wishes of his CLP. See, Turner, Doorstep Politics, p.73. Regional Organisers also forced several other MPs on to their reluctant CLPs prior to the 1955 election, see Eric Shaw, Discipline and Discord in the Labour Party, (Manchester University, 1988), pp.94-95. For details of the influence of party organisers, particularly in respect of parliamentary selection and Gaitskellite sympathies see, David J. Wilson, Power and Party Bureaucracy in Britain: Regional organisation in the Conservative and Labour parties, (Farnborough: Saxon House, 1975), pp.57-58. Pimlott (ed.), Diary of Hugh Dalton, p.667. Dalton advised Tony Crosland to speak to the South West Regional Organiser about arranging to be selected for a safer seat. 17 Ben Pimlott, Harold Wilson, (London: Harper Collins, 1992), pp.186-192. Crossman records in his diary that Wilson still regularly attended the Tuesday ‘Bevanite’ lunches and other gatherings of the left held at the Crossman’s home. See, Morgan, Diaries of Richard Crossman, p.444. 18 Ian Mikardo, Backbencher, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), p.152.

19 Morgan, Diaries of Richard Crossman, p.423. Many newspapers were certain that Morrison was the ‘favourite’ to succeed Attlee e.g. Manchester Guardian, 10 October 1955. 20 MP, interview, 7 September 2001 and Phil Robinson, interview 3 September 2001. This was not unusual, few MPs came through the ranks and most had little experience of life as a Constituency activist. Philip Gould, ‘New Labour’s’ campaign advisor admitted that he was mystified by the Labour Party’s election ‘Reading’ system. Philip Gould, The Unfinished Revolution: How the Modernisers saved the Labour Party, (London: Abacus, 1998), p.2 21 .LPA, National Executive Committee, Joint Organisation, Finance and General Purposes Committees meeting, 15 June 1955. The meeting was held at the House of Commons. 22 Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘Morgan Phillips’ in Labour People: Leaders and Lieutenants, Hardie to Kinnock, (Oxford University Press, 1987), p.236 and Gwyneth Dunwoody MP, interview, 7 September 2001. 23 Suffolk County Record Office, GG410/1/1, NULO Eastern Counties Branch, Minutes 19 July 1955.

24 Williams, Inside Number 10, pp.103-104. Harold Wilson received privileged information from Marcia Williams who worked for Morgan Phillips. 25 Morgan, Diaries of Richard Crossman, p.409. See also Philip M. Williams, Hugh Gaitskell: A political biography, (London: Jonathon Cape, 1979), p.349. Gaitskell appeared to have kept the agents union, NULO informed of the negotiations and his plans. Suffolk County Record Office, NULO GG410/1/1, NULO Eastern Counties Branch, Minutes 19 July 1955. 26 LPA, National Executive Committee, Meeting 22 June 1955, Minute 223.

27 Morgan, Diaries of Richard Crossman, p.431.

28 Gwyneth Dunwoody MP, interview, 7 September 2001.

29 LPA, National Executive Committee, Meeting 22 June 1955, Minute 224.

30 Arthur Skeffington MP was the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society (RACS) nominee to the NEC. Margaret (Peggy) Herbison MP was the nominee of the trade unions to the NEC Women’s Section. Jack Cooper was Chairman of the General and Municipal Workers’ Union (GMW), the highest voluntary post in his union. All three were on the right- wing of the Party and had voted for the expulsion of Bevan in March. 31 Crossman says that he proposed Mikardo for the Committee, see Morgan, Diaries of Richard Crossman, p.423. See Chapter Three for a detailed discussion of Ian Mikardo. 32 Williams, Gaitskell: A Political Biography, p.350 and a vague reference in Philip M. Williams (ed.), The Diary of Hugh Gaitskell, 1945-1956, (London: Jonathon Cape, 1983), p.426. See also Austen Morgan, Harold Wilson: a life, (London: Pluto Press, 1991), p.195. 33 LPA, Morgan Phillips Papers, Box 17, copy of letter from Harold Wilson to Hugh Gaitskell, 28 July 1955. The letter indicates that the two discussed the enquiry on 26 July in the House of Commons. 34 D.E.Butler and Richard Rose, The British General Election of 1959, (London: Macmillan, 1960), pp.120-121.

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 22 35 Williams suggests the meeting took place on 14 October 1955, see, Williams, Hugh Gaitskell, p.363 and Leslie Smith, Harold Wilson: The Authentic Portrait, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964), p.174. 36 Bernard Donoughue and G.W. Jones, Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), p.537. 37 For the meetings held by the Wilson Committee see LPACR, (1955), Appendix I, p.93.

38 Interview with Jack Campbell, 18 April 2001. Campbell was present at the Ipswich meeting of the enquiry team held on 12 September 1955. 39 The normal procedure decrees that a Party official will act as the Secretary to any NEC Committee. Unusually, no record exists of the secondment of a Party official to the Committee. Wilson may have arranged to conduct his own administration 40 Interview with Jack Campbell, 18 April 2001.

41 LPA, Morgan Phillips Papers, Box 17, Letter from E.V.Rees to Morgan Phillips, 15 August 1955.

42 The Times, 20 September 1955.

43 Morgan, Diaries of Richard Crossman, p.441.

44 Morgan, Diaries of Richard Crossman, p.441 and Morgan, Wilson: a life, p.196.

45 Williams, Inside Number 10, p.103.

46 Morgan, Diaries of Richard Crossman, pp.445-446. 47 The Times, 10 October 1955.

48 Kenneth Harris, Attlee, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), p.538.

49 R.T.McKenzie, ‘The Wilson Report and the future of the Labour Party Organization,’ in Political Studies, Vol.4, No.1, (1956), p.93. 50 Leslie Hunter, The Road to Brighton Pier, (London: Barker, 1959), p.140.

51 Morgan, Diaries of Richard Crossman, p.448.

52 The Mikardo report is discussed in almost every issue for the next two years commencing with Labour Organiser, Vol.34, Issue 401, October (1955). 53 Surrey County Council, Surrey History Centre, 6575/2/2, Woking Constituency Labour Party, Minutes GC 19 September 1955. 54 Somerset County Record Office, A/AAW4 Minutes, North Somerset CLP, EC Minutes 29 September 1955, 27 October 1955 and 24 November 1955. 55 Suffolk County Record Office, GK400/1/1/8, Ipswich CLP, GC Minutes 11 April 1956. The six conditions were; 1) agent to undertake more field-work, 2) agent not to take part in fundraising, 3) agent to devote more time to organisation, 4) classes for training ward secretaries and chairman, 5) marked register to be completed by September 1957, 6) build the membership and machinery for membership collection. 56 The Wilson report suggested that the marginal seat grant should be £300 per annum with no preconditions. LPACR, (1955), p.77. 57 Great Yarmouth CLP, Minutes EC 11 November 1954 and GC 20 October 1955.

58 McKenzie, ‘The Wilson Report,’ p.94.

59 LPA, National Executive Committee Minutes 28 September 1955, minute 297. and, National Executive Committee Minutes 13 October 1955, minute 9. See also ‘Progress is Made on Wilson Report’ in Labour Organiser, Vol.34, Issue 403, December, (1955), p.227. 60 George Brown was one who did not wish Wilson to have charge of party organisation. Pimlott, Diary of Hugh Dalton, p.675. See also, LPA, Organisation Sub-Committee Meeting minutes 17 November 1955 and Organisation Sub-Committee Meeting minutes 8 December 1955. Alice Bacon was the nominee of the right for the position and tied with Wilson in a ballot. 61 New Statesman, 3 December 1955.

62 LPA, Organisation Sub-Committee minutes 14 March 1956 and 18 April 1956. There is no record of his attendance after this meeting. The report presented to the Annual Conference in 1955 was titled the ‘interim’ report of the committee. 63 McKenzie, ‘The Wilson Report,’ p.93.

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 23 Chapter Two 1 This practice was criticised by the Wilson Committee but was widespread and still continues, LPACR, (1955), p.74; Interview with Jack Campbell, 18 April 2001; and confidential discussions with Labour MPs. One of the reasons given for the proposed deselection of Dick Stokes in Ipswich was his refusal to pay an annual donation to the CLP. See, Suffolk County Record Office, GK400/1/1/8, Ipswich CLP, EC Minutes, 4 June 1957. See also; Great Yarmouth CLP, Special EC, 22 May 1956 and Duncan Tanner, ‘Labour and its membership’, in Duncan Tanner, Pat Thane and Nick Tiratsoo (eds.), Labour’s First Century, (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.253. 2 Suffolk County Record Office, GG 410/3/2, NULO Eastern Counties, ‘Hilliard letter to NULO members’ dated 27 April 1954.

3 ‘In the Eastern Counties the main fundraiser was the ‘Useless Eustice’ tickets at 6d a go. ‘Useless Eustace’ was a cartoon in the Daily Mirror , the competition was based on the first letter of the first two words of the caption. It was a weekly, street based collection, competition and it was easy to change over to the Tote system.’ Interview and correspondence with George Catchpole, 7 October 2001. 4 Suffolk County Record Office, GG410/1/1, NULO Eastern Counties Branch, Minutes 14 July 1954 and 11 March 1954. Interview with Jack Campbell, 18 April 2001 and interview and correspondence with George Catchpole, 7 October 2001.

5 Suffolk County Record Office, GG 410/3/2, NULO Eastern Counties, ‘Notes on the Organisation and Rules of Supporters Associations prepared by Peter Benenson, Barrister at Law, May 1954.’ The existing law, the Betting and Lotteries Act 1934 legalised private lotteries and small public lotteries incidental to an entertainment, such as a bazaar or sale of work. 6 The Hastings Agreement, 1933 and modified 1948 regulated the amount individual trade unions could donate to Constituency parties theoretically to prevent undue influence. See Martin Harrison, Trade Unions and the Labour Party since 1945, (London: Allen and Unwin, 1960), pp.85-86. 7 Suffolk County Record Office, GG 410/3/2, NULO Eastern Counties Branch, ‘NULO Newsletter, April 1954.’

8 Great Yarmouth CLP, Minutes of Special EC 3 August 1954.

9 Somerset County Record Office, DD/TLP 5/597, Taunton CLP - Priory Ward, ‘Report of Bob Chamberlain (Agent), 6 August 1955, 11 October 1955 and 8 November 1955.’ Great Yarmouth CLP, GC Minutes, 21 September 1954. See also, Black, ‘Still at the penny farthing stage’, p.218. 10 Suffolk County Record Office, GK400/1/1/7, Ipswich CLP, AGM Minutes, 9 February 1955.

11 Tanner, ‘Labour and its membership’, p.260.

12 Labour Party Archive (LPA), Morgan Phillips papers GS/CLAR/1-12. Morgan Phillips interview Methodist Recorder, 16 December 1954. See also Daniel Weinbren, Generating Socialism: Recollections of Life in the Labour Party, (Sutton: Stroud, 1997), p.69. 13 Great Yarmouth CLP, EC Minutes 13 January 1955. Len Simms warned that the new law would throw a shadow over weekly football schemes‘ in Labour Organiser, Vol.35, Issue 408, May 1956, p.87. 14 Norfolk County Record Office (NRO), Norwich Labour Party, ‘Statement of Accounts 1956, for AGM, 13 February 1957’. 15 NRO, Norwich Labour Party, ‘Statement of Accounts 1955 to 1966’.

16 Great Yarmouth CLP, EC 15 November 1957 and AGM 15 February 1955.

17 Great Yarmouth CLP, Annual Report 1960. There is no standardised accounting practice within the Labour Party and true comparisons are not possible. The author. 18 Great Yarmouth CLP, special EC 14 January 1956. Interview with Jack Campbell, 18 April 2001. Interview and correspondence with George Catchpole, 7 October 2001. 19 Black, ‘Still at the penny farthing stage,’ p.217. George Catchpole believed that the Tote commenced in Kent. Interview and correspondence with George Catchpole, 7 October 2001. 20 Suffolk County Record Office, GK400/1/1/8, Ipswich CLP, ‘special EC 19 September 1956’. The Yarmouth Party decided to start a Tote, see, Great Yarmouth CLP, special EC, 7 November 1956. Interview with Jack Campbell, 18 April 2001. Huntingdon CLP sent a delegation to Norwich to investigate the success of Tote, see; Suffolk County Record Office, GK400/1/1/6., Huntingdon Labour Party, ‘Minutes 29 June 1957’. Also, Interview with Jack Campbell, 18 April 2001.

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 24 21 Somerset County Record Office, A/AAW4 Minutes, North Somerset CLP, EC Minutes, 13 December 1956 and Somerset County Record Office, A/AAW15 Campaign Correspondence, North Somerset CLP, AGM Agenda Minute Number 9/23/57. The North Somerset Tote was wound up in 1964 and the CLP transferred to the Bath CLP fundraising scheme the remaining 1,250 supporters. Somerset County Record Office, A/AAW4 Minutes, North Somerset CLP, AGM minutes 27 February 1965. 22 NRO, Norwich Labour Party, Annual Report 1957.

23 John Shephard, For the Common Good: A History of the Bassetlaw Labour Party, 1918-1998, (Bassetlaw Constituency Labour Party, 2000), pp.69-70.

24 NRO, Norwich Labour Party, ‘Annual Report 1959’.

25 NRO, Norwich Labour Party, ‘Annual Report 1959’.

26 Great Yarmouth CLP, EC 17 March 1958. The van was also sent to the CND demonstration at Mepal, Cambridgeshire, Great Yarmouth CLP, EC 18 August 1958. See also, NRO, Norwich Labour Party, ‘Annual Report 1958.’ 27 Black, ‘Still at the penny farthing stage’, p.218. Interview with Jack Campbell, 18 April 2001.

28 Somerset County Record Office, A/AAW15 Campaign Correspondence, North Somerset CLP, ‘undated copy of Norwich LP flyer for “stereo”.’ 29 Somerset County Record Office, A/AAW14 nsclp/Misc/, North Somerset CLP, ‘Letter from Fraser Wilde (PPC) to Vic Marshall (Agent) 22 April 1957’.

30 Weinbren, Generating Socialism, p.69.

31 The North Somerset CLP unfortunately had to deal with both. Somerset County Record Office, A/AAW5 Minutes, North Somerset CLP, AGM (part 2), 19 April 1958 and GC 31 May 1958; and interview with Jack Campbell, 18 April 2001.

32 Suffolk County Record Office, NULO GG410/1/2, NULO Eastern Counties Branch, Minutes 9 July 1963 and 10 September 1963. Expansion of Tote to Harwich, Isle of Ely and Cambridgeshire CLPs. 33 LPACR, (1960), p.234.

34 Tom Bower, Maxwell: The Outsider (Mandarin: London, 1991), p.121 and 136.

35 Clive Bradley, Ideas from Scandinavia, (Labour Party National Fund Raising Foundation, circa.1967), p.32. This may be the first and only publication of the Foundation which operated from a expensive central London office at 4 Fitzroy Square, W1. Bryan Barnard was Secretary and Robert Maxwell was Chairman. 36 Suffolk County Record Office, NULO GG410/3/1, NULO Eastern Counties Branch, ‘Letter dated 23 September 1963 from Huntingdon CLP to Arthur Clare,’; Liverpool, Dennis Merry, correspondence with the author 14 September 2001. There is some unsubstantiated evidence that Maxwell formed the ‘Foundation’ to solicit favour with agents to promote his own political career. George Catchpole, interview and correspondence, 7 October 2001, The author.

37 Steven Fielding, ‘Activists against “affluence”: Labour party culture during the “Golden Age”, c. 1950-70', Journal of British Studies, (2001), p.244. 38 Somerset County Record Office, A/AAW34 Tote miscellaneous, North Somerset CLP, North Somerset Tote miscellaneous papers and flyers.

39 Suffolk County Record Office, GK400/1/1/7, Ipswich CLP, Minutes 14 December 1955.

40 Black, ‘Still at the penny farthing stage in a jet propelled era: Branch life in 1950s Socialism’, p.217.

41 Somerset County Record Office, DD/TLP 5/597, Taunton CLP - Priory Ward, Minutes 16 August 1955 and 20 September 1955.

42 Weinbren, Generating Socialism, p.160. Carol Tongue, Miss Havering Socialists was MEP for London East 1984-99. South Norfolk Constituency Labour Party, records including photographs of the Miss South Norfolk contestants. Labour Weekly, 19 November 1971, contained a photograph of Miss Socialist of Sudbury and Woodbridge with an invitation to other parties to hold a national competition.

43 Great Yarmouth Labour Party, Annual Report 1963 and the Festival Programme. A copy of the Festival of Labour programme is in the procession of the author. 44 Great Yarmouth CLP, Minutes GC 18 October 1960 and Annual Report 1962.

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 25 45 Black, ‘Still at the penny farthing stage’, p.218.

46 Great Yarmouth CLP, Annual Report 1966; Surrey County Council, Surrey History Centre, 6575/2/2, Woking Constituency Labour Party, minutes GC 21 October 1957.

47 Stephen Howe, ‘Labour and international affairs’, in Duncan Tanner, Pat Thane and Nick Tiratsoo (eds.), Labour’s First Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (2000), p.142. 48 Great Yarmouth CLP, Minutes GC 15 March 1960 and GC 19 January 1960.

49 NRO, Norwich Labour Party, ‘Annual Report 1959,’; Great Yarmouth Labour Party, Minutes GC 20 September 1960 and Annual Report 1964. 50 George Catchpole, interview and correspondence 7 October 2001; and the author. Properties renovated included those owned by Cambridge, Kings Lynn, Luton, Norwich and Worcester. The following CLPs purchased properties and renovated them, Bury St Edmunds, Chichester, Eye, Great Yarmouth and Southend.

51 John Shephard, For the Common Good: A History of the Bassetlaw Labour Party, 1918-1998, Bassetlaw Constituency Labour Party, (2000), p.70

52 Somerset County Record Office, A/AAW13, nsclp/Misc/1, North Somerset CLP, ‘Correspondence June 1957.’

53 By 1966, Norwich Labour Party had ‘lent’ its Club £22,601. By 1998 the ‘loan’ had reach £68,000. NRO, Norwich Labour Party, ‘Annual Report 1966,’ and the author.

54 One of the largest Labour Clubs was Huyton, the constituency of Harold Wilson.

55 The history of the National Union of Labour and Socialist Clubs (NULSC) and its affiliates currently remains an under researched area. The author.

56 Interview with George Catchpole 7 October 2001. The Association of Labour Party Supporters (ALPS) was formed by Les Hilliard and Bill Jones of the Party. It not only promoted the London wide sale of bingo tickets but organised early package tours to Rimini.

57 Interview with Jack Campbell, 18 April 2001. After payment of prizes, administrative costs the profit would have been more than £10,000 p.a. Some CLPs added many additional items to costs or had a prize structure that benefited the punter. The law did not allow for payment of more than 50% in prizes.

58 Alex Kitson in Weinbren, Generating Socialism, p.176.

59 Christopher Rowland, ‘Labour publicity’, Political Quarterly , Vol.31, (1960), p.355.

Chapter Three 1 Patrick Seyd and Paul Whiteley, Labour’s Grass Roots: The Politics of Party Membership, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), p.196 and p.206.

2 LPACR, (1955), paragraph 15, p.64.

3 Labour Organiser, Vol.35, Issue 408, May, 1956.

4 Cited in Duncan Tanner, ‘Labour and its membership’, in Duncan Tanner, Pat Thane and Nick Tiratsoo (eds.), Labour’s First Century, (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.257.

5 LPACR, (1960), p.24.

6 Labour Organiser, Vol.35, Issue 408, May 1956.

7 Wilson, Power and Party Bureaucracy, p.45.

8 Somerset County Record Office, A/AAW14 nsclp/Misc/2, North Somerset CLP. Letter of 2 September 1958 from Reg Wallis North West Regional Organiser to R.Carter. The letter contained a reference for J.Cowin an Organising Assistant who had ‘substantially increased membership of party in CLPs employed… Organising Assistants have been appointed in this Region for specific purposes which are mainly concerned with the building of membership, ward organisation, and carrying out election preparations.’

9 Labour Organiser, Vol.34, Issue 396, April 1955.

10 Weinbren, Generating Socialism, p.66 and Fred Neuner of Hornsey p.175. The recollections of the author substantiate the difficulties in motivating volunteers to engage in membership recruitment and administration.

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 26 11 Labour Organiser, Vol.34, Issue 400, September 1955, and interview with Jack Campbell, 18/4/2001. See also, J.Emrys-Jones of Swindon CLP in Labour Organiser, Vol.34, Issue 403, December 1955. 12 Tiratsoo, Reconstruction, (1990), p.92. Figures were based upon cards ‘purchased’ from the national party. For an account of Brighton Kemptown CLP see, Tom Forester, The Labour Party and the Working Class, (London: Heinemann, 1976), Ch.5.

13 LPACR, (1955), paragraph 122, p.84.

14 Somerset County Record Office, A/AAW5 Minutes, North Somerset CLP, GC minutes 2 January 1960. The party subscription of six shillings (25p) would result in a commission of 2.5p but could involve twelve monthly visits to the member! 15 Surrey County Council, Surrey History Centre, 6575/2/2, Woking Constituency Labour Party, minutes EC 17 March 1958. 16 Andrew Walling, ‘The Structure of Power in Labour Wales’, in Duncan Tanner, Chris Williams and Deian Hopkin (eds.), The Labour Party in Wales, 1900-2000, (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), pp.207-208. 17 Duncan Tanner, ‘Labour and its membership’, in Duncan Tanner, Pat Thane and Nick Tiratsoo (eds.), Labour’s First Century, (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.250.

18 LPACR, (1955), paragraph 122, p.84.

19 See; Appendix III.

20 Great Yarmouth CLP, Annual Meeting 15 February 1955. The Treasurer reported 191 new members during the year and ‘the official membership as recorded by Head Office would be 1,239. Contributions had been received from 784 members, 928 cards issued for 1955.’ 21 Weinbren, Generating Socialism, p.24 and interview with Jack Campbell, 18 April 2001.

22 Eastern Regional Council of the Labour Party, Report and agenda to the Thirteenth Annual Meeting, (Ipswich: Eastern Regional Council, 1960), Appendix I, pp.30-31. 23 Great Yarmouth CLP, Annual Report for the year ending, 31 December 1958.

24 There is one other example of membership weeding cited by Steven Fielding, see Fielding, ‘Activists against “Affluence,”’ p.249. 25 The party membership subscription was for a period of twelve months, 1 January to 31 December. Theoretically, a member joining on 31 December still had to pay the full year subscription. For existing members the subscription renewal was due on the 1 January, which could be paid in instalments until 31 December. This system was not changed until the late 1980s. 26 Great Yarmouth CLP, GC minutes, 17 April 1956, 78 applications. GC minutes, 15 May 1956, 80 applications. GC minutes, 19 June 1956, 118 applications. GC minutes, 19 July 1956, 79 applications. GC minutes, 21 August 1956, 14 applications. 27 Great Yarmouth CLP, GC Minutes, 16 April 1957.

28 Great Yarmouth CLP, Annual Report for the year ending, 31 December 1956.

29 Great Yarmouth CLP, Annual Report for the year ending, 31 December 1957.

30 Great Yarmouth CLP, Annual Report s 1955-68.

31 T.E.M.McKitterick, ‘The membership of the Party’, Political Quarterly, Vol.31, No.3, (1960), pp.315-316.

32 Tribune, 22 October 1954.

33 LPACR, (1955), paragraph 20, p.65.

34 Frank Bealey, J.Blondel and W.P.McCann, Constituency Politics: A study of Newcastle-under-Lyne, Faber and Faber, (London, 1965), pp.97-100. 35 North Somerset CLP, Somerset County Record Office, A/AAW4 Minutes, Report of Sub-Committee on 1955 General Election, GC 24 September 1955. 36 South Norfolk CLP, Agent’s Report for the half year ending 30 June 1954.

37 See ‘Mikardo’s Straight Talk’ weekly column in Tribune. October 1954 to May 1955.

38 Ian Mikardo, Backbencher, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,1988), p.113. Jenkins later became the General

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 27 39 See, LPA, Morgan Phillips Papers, Box 17, GS/MIK/39, Letter from Ian Mikardo to Morgan Phillips, 20 June 1955.

40 LPA, Morgan Phillips Papers, Box 17, GS/MIK/39, Letter from Ian Mikardo to Morgan Phillips, 20 June 1955. And letter from Morgan Phillips to all CLPs, September 1955, Morgan Phillips Papers, GS/MIK/45.

41 Labour Organiser, Vol.34, Issue 402, November 1955. See also Tribune, 7 October 1955.

42 Labour Organiser, Vol.34, Issue 402, November 1955.

43 R.Holt and J.Turner, Political Parties in Action: The Battle for Barons Court, (New York: Free Press, 1968).

44 Labour Organiser, Vol.35, Issue 406, March 1956.

45 Editorial in Labour Organiser, Vol.35, Issue 407, April 1956.

46 The Labour Party, How to Organise for Victory, (London: Labour Party, 1984), p.60.

47 Labour Organiser, Vol.36, Issue 423, August 1957.

48 Labour Organiser, Vol.35, Issue 410, July 1956.

49 New Labour has renamed ‘Reading’ to ‘Get out the vote’ or ‘GOTV.’

50 Somerset County Record Office, A/AAW14 nsclp/Misc/2, Letter from Fraser Wilde (PPC) to Vic Marshall (Agent), 2 April 1957.

51 Weinbren, Generating Socialism, pp.184-185. Although the Reading system became the standard Labour Party electioneering system some local parties resisted its implementation particularly in parts of central Scotland. The author.

52 Somerset County Record Office, A/AAW5 Minutes, North Somerset CLP, GC minutes 3 January 1959. The Stym system, named after W.J.Stimpson agent for Deptford developed his system in 1930s, ‘it consisted of the canvass cards set out on boards in cut down envelopes. The canvass card was marked off and sent out with the knock up leaving a sheet of paper in the envelope to record polling numbers while the card was absent. It was still in widespread use in the mid 1960s.’ Interview and correspondence with George Catchpole, 7 October 2001.

53 Labour Organiser, Vol.36, Issue 423, August 1957.

54 Great Yarmouth CLP, GC Minutes, 19 April 1955.

55 Great Yarmouth CLP, Election Sub-Committee minutes, 28 April 1955.

57 Great Yarmouth CLP. Untitled document marked ‘Personal and Confidential’, undated, 1959 election. A similar document was produced for the 1964 election; a copy is in the procession of the author.

58 Holt and Turner, Battle for Barons Court, p.298. Conclusion 1 Tribune, 30 September 1955.

2 Tote schemes still exist in Ipswich, Norwich, South Norfolk and Yarmouth.

3 The notion that Labour was fated to degenerate with a shrinking working class was first expounded by the Labour revisionist Mark Abrams, see Mark Abrams, Richard Rose and Rita Hinden, Must Labour Lose?, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960). Contested by Fielding, ‘Activists against “Affluence,”’ pp.242-243.

4 Fielding, ‘The “penny farthing machine” revisited,’ pp.172-185.

5 Labour Organiser, Vol. 36 423 August 1957 p.147.

© Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 28