A post-war election of monumental significance

According to that printed evidence, election campaigns were much more lively affairs in these days, built around public meetings from the Butt to Barra in which the audiences played as big a part as the speakers and invective mingled with humour. This was politics in the raw and all the better for it.

The 1945 General Election was arguably the most important of the 20th century and shaped the life prospects of the generation that followed. At stake was the establishment of a National Health Service, the development of a humane welfare state and an all out assault on the scourge of slum housing, both urban and rural.

It was the first time the country had gone to the polls since 1935 when the Western Isles made the radical, collective decision to elect a brilliant 21 year-old, Malcolm Kenneth Macmillan, who was at that time a student in Edinburgh University, as the first Labour MP in a Highlands and Islands seat.

The fact that the islands voted Labour reflected not only the harsh circumstances of the time with poverty, unemployment and emigration the dominant themes. The history of land struggle, familiarity with trade unions through fishing and Harris Tweed industries as well as the world wide experiences of merchant seamen all played their part in giving the islands a more radical political complexion than the rest of the Highlands and Islands.

A decade on, however, with Winston Churchill basking in the adulation of the nation for having delivered victory in Europe, was there any force that could stop him remaining as Prime Minister? Would the devastating impact of the Second World War push the country and the Western Isles towards the “Churchill effect” which the Tories were banking on? Or was the mood for social change far, far too strong?

There was really no way of making even an informed guess. Opinion polling was in its infancy and although it had been pointing in the direction of a Labour victory, this had not taken account of the Churchill factor which reached a crescendo on VE Day and largely transcended party politics. Wherever he went during the campaign, including Glasgow, Churchill received a hero’s welcome – from people who, as it proved, had no intention of voting for him.

There was still a war in the Far East and droves of service-men and women in Europe were wending their ways home, too late to register to vote. The Tories were anxious to maximise the Churchill effect while claiming that it was Clement Attlee, his war-time deputy and Labour leader, who had forced a July election. When this was raised, Macmillan asked “if anyone is stupid enough to believe that Labour wanted an election in July, when perhaps millions of their own supporters, the manual workers, were away from their homes”.

When nominations closed, there were three candidates in the field: Macmillan for Labour; Major Iain Macleod under the label National Liberal and Unionist – which really meant Tory - while Wing Commander Huntly Sinclair represented the Liberals. The claims of Macmillan’s two opponents to be the real “Churchill” candidate was to figure prominently in the campaign.

Macleod – later to become a leading figure in British politics – was described in his Gazette introduction as “the eldest son of Dr Norman Macleod, Scaliscro, Uig, and a grandson of Dr Rhoderick Ross JP of Borve”. There had been no Tory organisation in the constituency and the only two people who turned up to a selection meeting were Macleod and his father, a GP in Skipton, Yorkshire, where Iain grew up. He was duly selected!

Wing-Commander Sinclair, with whom the Gazette was greatly enamoured, was a native of Rideau Ferry, Ontario. According to his biographical notes, “his father’s people had emigrated from Argyllshire in 1818 after dispossession by the Duke’s factor” and “some of his books on economics have been used as text-books at Harvard and Yale”.

These somewhat tenuous connections were reinforced by the fact that, during the war, he had married “the daughter of the late Sir Hugh Fraser and Lady Fraser, Stromeferry”. The new Mrs Sinclair was also the widow of a member of the Wills tobacco family who were, then as now, big landowners in Wester Ross.

The Wing Commander himself backed this up with an explanation for his candidacy: “As a Canadian, it was natural that I should come to the part from which most had come out to Canada. And, as a Canadian, it was natural that I should come to the part which is closest to Canada …I am a Canadian but I will, in a certain sense, be a human bridge between this country and my native Canada”.

All these somewhat tenuous connections were grist to Macmillan’s acerbic mill. His opponents “were desperately anxious to prove they had Scottish and Lewis connections, even working-class and crofting connections. Well, he countered, he, the Labour man, was grandson and son of a crofter, Lewis-born, without a year in life which was not spent in the Isles. He was the only Gaelic-speaking candidate in the constituency and one of only two in Parliament”.

Of his opponents, he said: “This sudden seeming desire to come across to Lewis to mend a wee broken bridge in the village of Bayble does not completely convince me”.

The Gazette abandoned neutrality and came out from the start in support of the Liberal candidate. Its editor, James Shaw Grant, never saw eye-to-eye with Macmillan or his politics and the feelings were seemingly reciprocated.

The Gazette editorialised: “Our support for Wing Commander Sinclair is based on personal and political grounds. He is a man of mature years and wide experience who has already proved his ability in the fields of scholarship and politics. As a Scotch-Canadian, he is sufficiently near to us to understand our outlook on life but at the same time he is able to bring a fresh, alert and informed mind to bear on our problems”.

Macmillan, in what the Gazette described as “his most vigorous speech ever”, responded: “The Stornoway Gazette has openly and frankly come out in support of the Liberal candidate. I expected that and, of course, we have no answer. We have no answer nationally to Lord Beaverbrook, that great friend of the small man, who owns a colossally large newspaper chain.

“The Stornoway Gazette has presented Wing Commander Sinclair to us as experienced. I maintain that he is not experienced as far as the Western Isles are concerned. He is presented to us as mature. That is the judgment of the Editor who is, after all, not so very much older than myself … He is presented to us as the friend of the common man. Then he must be a friend of mine because you will not find a more common man anywhere, so I don’t see where the competition arises”.

Iain Macleod, in his later political life, would be associated with “one nation” Conservatism. In his Western Isles campaign, however, he set out to attack the sitting MP, Macmillan, in very personal terms, effectively accusing him of draft-dodging. “For his five years’ war-time service – occupation – as a Member of Parliament, and as one of the youngest men in the House, I leave you to form your own opinion. I myself and our sons and brothers, who are not here today, have ours”.

The following week’s Gazette reported Macmillan’s riposte. “He has asked where was Macmillan during the war, one of the youngest Members of the House of Commons. I was the first Member of the House of Commons as far as I know, who joined the Army in September 1939. What is more, I was exempt if I wanted to exercise that. What is more, I joined as a private and I joined the infantry. I scrubbed floors and did my route marches just like anyone else.

“I suggest that Major Macleod should thank the Labour Party for the fight they made for men in the ranks to get commissions in the Army. Not so many years ago, Major Macleod would still be a private as many thousands of just as gallant soldiers from the Western Isles still are. I cast no aspersions…” while regretting that Macleod “has to fight his election with scurrilities”.

Macleod’s caustic disdain was not just reserved for the sitting Labour MP but extended to Clement Attlee, the Labour leader who had served as Churchill’s deputy. “Picture for a moment”, he invited his Town Hall audience, “if you can picture anything so ludicrous, a meeting of the Big Three, with Stalin, Truman and Attlee. If Churchill represents the British bulldog, Attlee, to me represents a rather melancholy, loppy-eared Pekinese”.

Macleod had his own “scurrilities” to deal with. The Gazette solemnly reported: “In a personal statement at his meeting in the Town Hall on Saturday, Major Macleod contradicted a rumour said to be circulating in the community that his wife is a Catholic.

“Mrs Macleod is the daughter the Rev. J. Blois, a Protestant Rector, in Worcestershire. Every fair-minded elector will share Major Macleod’s regret that he has had to draw his wife’s name into a political matter in order to rebut the rumour”.

There were no such unpleasantries to contend with at the Liberal meetings, according to the Gazette which reported: “A feature of Wing Commander Sinclair’s meetings has been the very pleasant atmosphere which has been created, and the frank and open way in which questions have been discussed”.

As a diversion which must have delighted the Labour camp, Sinclair and Macleod clashed in what the Gazette described as “a sensational development” when “Wing Commander Sinclair called in question the authenticity of statements attributed to Mr Churchill in a leaflet circulated by Major Macleod (who) replied to the charge at a meeting in Stornoway Town Hall”.

Macmillan mocked the spat: “Wing Commander Sinclair wants a wee bit of Winston Churchill. He is not going to let Major Macleod away with the whole body. They are becoming like a pair of political cannibals. The difference is that Major Macleod wants to swallow Churchill whole, while Wing Commander Sinclair is not quite so sure of his digestion.

“No people have given greater loyalty to Mr Winston Churchill than the Labour Party in this country. It was the Labour Party that took the initiative in putting out Chamberlain.

“The people who are making greatest noise about Churchill now, who are making greatest use of his reflected glory, were in many cases his bitterest enemies in the House of Commons and the country, and who used to howl him down when he attacked Chamberlain and the appeasers”.

The candidates went off to tour the islands, holding two or three village meetings each evening. Finally, the Gazette reported: “For the eve of poll meeting, the Town Hall was packed. Every aisle and doorway was crowded right up to the front of the platform and there were folk sitting even on the grand piano”. To add to the theatre of the event, the candidates made entries at different stages of proceedings, to the acclaim of their own supporters.

These occasions were Macmillan’s forte and by this time he must have felt confident that he was leading on the home straight. The country went to the polls on July 5th, 1945 but there was still a long wait while votes were transported from overseas. It was not until July 26th that the results were declared and it became apparent that Attlee and Labour had won a landslide victory in the country.

The result was no less decisive in the Western Isles and no part of the country was in more urgent need of the great social reforms that followed.