Here's a video of the Liberal leader Jo Grimond voting in the 1964 general election. It's unused footage shot by British Pathé, so there's no commentary, and the little boy with Grimond is his son Magnus (not Michael, as YouTube says).
Magnus Grimond recently wrote an article about his memories of Orkney elections in the Sixties and Seventies for Frontiers:
My father would ... go around all the islands to hold meetings, which were mostly in rather draughty parish halls, with the odd Calor Gas heater if you were lucky. A few committed souls would generally show up, but I know on one occasion in Hoy my father faced an empty hall.
He had primed Gerry Meyer, editor of The Orcadian and stringer in Orkney for the Press Association, with a copy of the speech to be distributed to the national papers. He must have rung Gerry to say that he couldn’t give the speech but it could still be sent out, to which he was told that if the words hadn’t been spoken he couldn’t possibly give it out.
My father claimed that he therefore had to deliver his speech to an empty hall – or possibly to a few Blackface sheep.
When I was a Liberal Candidate in the 1980s, I once addressed a hall in which (apart from my agent) there was only one member of the audience. He stood upright at the back, leaning on his stick and staring me in the face. I delivered my stump speech with customary conviction. Afterwards I said to my agent 'I think I got through to him there'. The next time I saw him was at the count. He turned out to be the agent for the (successful) Tory candidate.
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