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Orpington 1962 ReLIVING ERIC LUBBOCK’s VICTORY AGAINST THE ODDS
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Orpington’s local man Eric Lubbock’s 1962 shock by-election win was much more than a vote against Tory complacency and economic strife, writes Matt Withers
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RPINGTON in 1962 should not have been a happy hunting ground for the Liberal Party. The seat had been held by the Conservatives since its creation and the circumstances which sparked that year’s by-election showed the party’s confidence in holding on to it; The incumbent was appointed a county court judge in order to allow Peter Goldman, a young economist and favourite of then Chancellor Selwyn Lloyd, a safe and quick route into parliament. And if the Tories were to lose it would surely not be to the Liberals. Third in the 1959 general election with 21% of the vote, their initial plans were rocked when candidate Jack Galloway announced he had remarried while technically still hitched to his first wife (“My former wife is threatening to 26 02.13 | FACEBOOK.COM/AdLibMAG
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come down to the constituency and denounce me as a bigamist every time I get up to speak,” he told a party meeting). They needed a new candidate, and quickly. That man was Eric Lubbock, now Lord Avebury; a 33-year-old engineering consultant, councillor and member of two years’ standing. At such short notice, he went to tell his employer he may need some time off. He recalls: “I marched in the following day to talk to the managing director, who was called Warnock, explained the situation and he 28 02.13 | FACEBOOK.COM/AdLibMAG
said, ‘Well, what were the figures last time?’ I told him, ‘Tories got 25,500, Labour got 9,500, we got 9,000.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘take three weeks off at the company’s expense and we’ll see you at the end of it’.” As the campaign got under way it became clear that Goldman, not from the constituency, was not a great one for local issues. “He was seen as an outsider,” says Avebury. “He didn’t want to come and live in the constituency or say that he was going to. And we made a lot of capital out of that because we had
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Clockwise from top left Lubbock at Westminster; taking calls in his office; with first wife Kina-Maria and their children; on the steps of Westminster after his win; surrounded by helpers; a nurse - hit by public sector pay freezes – offers her support Previous spread Campaigning for local nurses
posters saying that I was the only local candidate.” In addition, the national picture was against the Conservatives. The Government had just announced a pay freeze for public sector workers, which was seen as particularly hitting nurses. Avebury says: “It happened to hit the nurses because they were at the front of the queue. People thought it was very unfair, if you’re going to stop people applying for pay rises, that it should hit some of the people who were worse off than the average in the sector. That was a big issue during the campaign.
“But there was general economic malaise. People felt that Macmillan had lost his way, which indeed he had, and the economic situation was not as marvellous as he portrayed it at the 1959 election. That was the principle issue, I think.” As the “strenuous” campaign went on, it started to become clear that the Liberals were serious challengers. Traditional Labour voters “realised what side their bread was buttered,” says Avebury. It sounds like what would now be known as tactical voting. “Absolutely,” he says. “It was.” He adds: “Everybody could see from the FACEBOOK.COM/AdLibMAG | 02.13 29
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canvassing returns that we were doing extremely well on the doorsteps.” The campaign even survived its headquarters burning down, apparently caused by a wayward cigarette butt flung into a bin by an activist. All their paperwork was destroyed and the HQ was relocated to a disused cinema on the town’s high street. “It was a huge blow to the campaign and as I surveyed the ruins of the village hall somebody came up to me and said ‘I never thought the Tories would stoop so low as this’,” jokes Avebury. On the night of 15 March, just how well the campaign had gone became clear. There was a 31% swing from the Conservatives to the Liberals. Lubbock, as he was, took 52.9% of the vote. It was, as he now says, “by far the biggest shock in British political history at the time.” He adds: “My first reaction when the result
was declared was ‘We’re going into Bromley, we’re going to sack Mac’ – Macmillan, who was my neighbour in the next-door constituency of Bromley. We did think that the sky was the limit and that, if Orpington could be translated to a national scale, we would be in government.” Very quickly, in just a year, he was the party’s chief whip in the Commons. “I always say I joined the party in 1960, became a councillor in ’61, was elected MP in ’62, chief whip in ’63 and since then it’s been downhill all the way,” he says. For all the articles about the start of the Liberal Party revival, it did not come. There were constituencies in which the party did well, but not well enough. And as the decade went on people started looking at seats won, not at the figures. “That was really the point,” says Avebury. “Orpington raised credibility at that particular moment, but it was not sustained.”
Lord Avebury speaking at the 50th anniversary of the Orpington by-election
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In 1970 Avebury himself succumbed and narrowly lost Orpington to the Conservatives. He was widely quoted as saying: “In 1962 the wise, far-seeing people of Orpington elected me as their member; in 1970 the fools threw me out”.
We thought that if Orpington could be translated to a national scale then we’d be in government He was quoting Frank Owen, a Liberal MP who lost Hereford in 1931. “If you drew a straight line through the figures, ’62, ’64, ’66, you would have been able to predict by extrapolating the trend that we were going to lose in 1970,” he says now. A year later, by an “extraordinary coincidence”, Avebury’s cousin died and he succeeded to the
peerage. A lifelong opponent of hereditary peers, he considered carefully whether to accept. “And I’ve still got a letter from my daughter, then aged nine, saying ‘Don’t do it, you can’t compromise your principles and go into the upper house’,” he says. “I didn’t feel that I could be as purist as all that to sacrifice an opportunity to continue to play some role in politics by taking the purist attitude that because the House of Lords is based on hereditary principle I wouldn’t belong to it.” More than 42 years on, and at the age of 84, he remains an active and energetic member of the Lib Dem group of peers. But what did happen on 16 March, 1961, when he had to tell his employer he’d created the biggest by-election shock in British history? “When I went in to see the managing director the following day he said, ‘Well, we’ll keep you on half-time until the next general election. And keep the car, by the way’.”
Spring Conference 8-10 March 2013, Hilton Brighton Metropole
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