The Portent

"Everybody knows," said a grizzled party worker at Labor headquarters, "that Ebbw Vale will vote Labor and that Torquay will vote Tory. It's the doubtfuls like Hammersmith that'll decide the general election." The Tories felt much the same. "Labor got nearly 12 million votes in 1945," said one of them. "We got nearly 10 million. A million of the 'floating' vote in the next election could turn the tide in our favor . . . That's why Hammersmith is important."

The general election was not due until next year, but last week in London's factory and residential district of South Hammersmith, both parties had a chance to test their strength in a preview of greater things to come. Each contestant put everything he had into the battle.

Labor entered the fray with a proud record: not a single parliamentary seat lost in 46 by-elections since it came to power in 1945. To fill the seat left vacant when Hammersmith's Laborite W. T. Adams died last January, Labor had picked a 33-year-old ex-R.A.F. chaplain and Oxford don named Tom Williams. Tom's father was a Welsh miner who came home permanently crippled from World War I. His mother died when he was three. By scholarships and hard work, Tom fought his way through the Universities of Wales and Oxford, picking up honors as he went. He became a Baptist minister.

"Woof-Woof." Ranged against Williams' side was a vigorous young (34) campaigner of the Tom Dewey stripe, typical of the rising generation in Tory Chairman Lord Woolton's "revivified" party. Anthony Fell's grandfather Sir Anthony had been a Tory M.P. in Britain, but he himself had grown up in New Zealand, scraped an education in state schools and taken his first job on an up-country sheep farm at 12/6 ($2.50) a week. He married a registered nurse who now helps raise their two children in a basement flat.

For 16 hours a day, often accompanied by his wife, the Tory candidate stumped his district, tramping streets, ringing doorbells, holding press conferences and speaking at one rally after another (100 in the last ten days of the campaign). To back his cause and secure Hammersmith, Lord Woolton ("Lord Woof-Woof" to the Laborites) put the whole machinery of the national party into high gear. Money, pamphlets and speakers poured into the district. From almost every street corner Tory sound trucks and mobile movie units blared out statistics compiled at the Conservative Political Education Center. Telephone boxes, butcher shops, dance halls, pubs and public lavatories blossomed with posters asking a vote for Fell.

In planning their strategy, the Tory chieftains had decided to abandon all constructive suggestion and concentrate on criticism. In Hammersmith, all the fine new Tory "charters" painstakingly formulated over the last year and a half were tacitly shelved while Tory spokesmen heaped invective on Labor's extravagance, the food shortage, the housing shortage and the high cost of living. At Labor rallies, Tory hecklers shouted "onions, snoek and eggs"--all painful items in rationed Britain. But many a Hammersmith voter could recall days when there was food aplenty and no money to buy it.

Love Thy Neighbor. While the Tories vituperated, Labor's candidate pointed quietly at his party's record. Labor, he told the voters, had housed 3 1/2 million people, had spent nearly three times as much educating children as the Tory government, had substituted for the poor laws a social security plan which provided 26 s, ($5.20) weekly to 3,250,000 old-age pensioners. It had reduced strikes to one-fifteenth the post-World War I figure and provided everybody with health insurance. "You must choose," the Baptist parson said, "between the Tory's idea of 'every man for himself and ours [which] seems to fulfill the second commandment of my faith--that I shall love my neighbor as myself." To underline his points Labor's neighborly bigwigs obligingly lifted the rations from woolens and candy.

In the chilly small hours of Friday the voters of Hammersmith, wearing the huge party favors, gathered before the floodlit Town Hall to hear the returns. The election recorder led both candidates on to the balcony. Then at his right side (the traditional spot for winners) he placed Labor's Tom Williams. Labor's majority (15,223 to 13,610) had been cut by more than half but its record of no seats lost was still secure. If the South Hammersmith Tory gain over 1945 were applied statistically to all Britain, the national Tory vote would rise 4 1/2%--not enough to win a general election.

In London next day the pro-Tory Daily Telegraph had a word of stern advice to offer on that subject: "The Conservative Party can never hope to ride to power on the errors of its opponents ... It will win on its own merits or not at all . . . South Hammersmith should be a portent."

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