I once heard a story about polling day in the Brecon and Radnor by-election of 1985, which saw a gain for the Liberal Alliance candidate Richard Livsey.
A hirsute Young Liberal was telling on the day at a remote rural polling station when an old farmer arrived and challenged him.
"What are you doing? I always take the numbers for the Liberals."
It turned out that he had for years been coming here on polling day for an hour or two, taking voters' numbers and then going home with them.
This was a folk memory of political organisation. All that remained of it was the notion that taking voters' polling-card numbers somehow helped the Liberals.
After a while I began to doubt this story, however much I wanted it to be true. Because the Wikipedia article on Get out the vote says:
The traditional GOTV method used in the UK is the Reading system, developed by the Reading Constituency Labour Party and its MP Ian Mikardo for the 1945 general election. Once canvassing was performed to identify likely Labour voters, these were compiled onto 'Reading pads' or 'Mikardo sheets' featuring the names and addresses of supporters and pasted onto a large table or plank of wood. On election day these lists, with identical copies underneath, were torn off and given to GOTV campaigners.
That was certainly polling day as I knew it in the Liberal Party before personal computers came along. To Liberals, of course, Reading pads were 'Shuttleworths' - the SDP called them 'Cowley pads".
But did party workers sit round and do nothing on polling day before 1945? It sounds very unlikely.
As Michael Steed and Tony Greaves are no longer with us, I asked Mark Pack what he knew about the history of polling day operations. He replied:
The pre-1939 Woodings election manuals have a section on polling day, including 'fetching up voters' with instructions on crossing out names from cards etc. to record which supporters have voted so far. Not sure when 'fetchers-up' became 'knockers-up'.
I now suspect Ian Mikardo's contribution to polling day was harnessing the power of carbon paper to come up with better stationery.
So the moral is you shouldn't believe everything your read on Wikipedia. As for myself, I shall go on believing that story about Brecon and Radnor.
According to Wikipedia:
ReplyDelete"Carbonless copy paper was first produced by the NCR Corporation, applying for a patent on June 30, 1953."
Interesting. Is too soon to talk about "The Mikardo Myth"?
ReplyDeleteJust a few random points...
ReplyDelete1. The NCR Corporation was so called because of their invention.
2. That Brecon & Radnor by election was the best I ever attended, for a variety of reasons, not just the result. Telling in the very rural village to which I was allocated was very difficult, because the voters all congregated in the Polling Station car park and chatted for a couple of hours. It was a social occasion. Surreptitiously, one by one, the voters would then peel away from the herd and pop in to vote, preferably without anyone noticing.
3. When I did my training to be an Agent for the Liberal Party in the 1980s I spent some time with the legendary Albert Ingham. He had been a messenger boy for the Liberal Party in Colne Valley in the 1906 General Election. He told me that his job was to canvass voters when they were coming out of the Polling Stations, AFTER they had voted - if they said that they had done the decent thing for the Liberals, he invited and escorted them back to the Comittee Room where they were given refreshments to help them overcome the ordeal. In particular, this included sandwiches and pork pies, and beer for those not following the party line on temperance.
Brecon and Radnor was my favourite by-election too. I might write something about it.
ReplyDeleteWe have all done it - delivered leaflets in the wrong area. In Brecon & Radnor, an eminent member of the Liberator collective not only delivered his leaflets in the wrong ward, but also in the wrong constituency, the wrong county and the wrong country. He had wandered over the Wye and heroically delivered part of Herefordshire for Richard Livesey. I was given a patch of farmland to canvass, and in the course of a hard day's solid canvassing I was able to make contact with precisely b21 voters, 19 of whom were Uncertain. (And two Probables, but I might have been a bit optimistic with them.)
ReplyDeleteThis prompted me to wonder why Shuttleworths are called Shuttleworths. The answer is here, from the late Tony Greaves: https://www.libdemvoice.org/how-did-shuttleworths-get-their-name-40299.html
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting that link! It looks as though Mikardo was a stationery pioneer but didn't invent the polling day operation. It's almost as if not everything on Wikipedia is true.
ReplyDelete