GREAT BRITAIN: On the Hustings

• Share

(See Cover) Here was Nottingham, where 300 years before, Charles I broke with Parliament and challenged Cromwell's Roundheads.

"I hear you like photo finishes," cried Anthony Eden to the horse-betting Nottingham crowd. "All right, but just get the right man ahead this time." Women craned and gawked to get a good look at the handsome, well-tailored Prime Minister of Great Britain, up there on the crude wooden platform. It began to drizzle. Eden patted his grey hair. "My word, it's rain. Well, never mind, I'm sure the sun will shine again." There were chuckles from the crowd. "The cost of living has gone up much less under us than under the Socialists . . ." Eden went on. "But the most important thing is peace. Peace.

Send us back! That is the last thing I want to ask you."

Then there was Buckinghamshire and a home named Cherry Cottage—or at least the best reproduction of it a London TV studio could manage. Inside a modest, chintzy living room, a camera settled on the figure of former Prime Minister Clement Attlee, slightly hunched over like a shiny-domed parenthesis. "We want only those restrictions which make life freer for the majority," explained the leader of Labor. ". . . The tiger in his cage is very fed up, but the rest of us are pleased he is behind bars. That is the only kind of restrictions we want." As for peace, of course the Tories are for it too. "But we believe in these things more dynamically and with a greater sense of urgency."

Wasted Years? And then there was Lancashire—a crucial place, Lancashire, with 10% of the seats in Commons and most of them closely held. Behind his Frigidaire exterior, Chancellor of the Exchequer "Rab" Butler was warmly familiar with the Lancashiremen's chief concern—with textile mills down, they are not sharing in the prosperity that bathes most of Britain. The Laborites were crying that the Tories had wasted their 3½ years in power. "Wasted years!" snorted Butler. "Do they think the years were wasted which produced 1,000,000 houses?

Which ended the wars in Korea and Indo-China? Which solved the economic crisis they left behind? Ended the rationing?

Abolished the controls?"

Around dour Glasgow, there were seats to be won or lost by the hair of a sporran. Stubby Scotsmen in sack suits, caps pulled down and pipes jutting from the crags of their faces, listened to the rough organ music of Aneurin Bevan. "In the Labor Party, it's true we've been having an argument about the hydrogen bomb, and I've been in the middle of it to a certain extent." The crowd laughed appreciatively at his understatement. "We argue . . . over our policy . . . We don't reach our policy in quiet country houses.

Because we have been brought up pretty rough, we are usually quite loud about it.

Amongst the Tawies [Bevan's habitual pronunciation of Tories] there is peace and harmony—as there is in a graveyard.

The Tawies have no searching human perplexity. We want the House of Commons filled with men and women who share the perplexity of ordinary men and women."