24 Langholm Crescent,
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Washington
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Nov 1 33
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I notice this controversy in the newspaper re yourself and the forthcoming election, this to me is most regrettable for I was counting on you as a certainty to help in the administration of the county in these very difficult times.
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P Lee retires next year. I am just three years younger than Peter and my time for retirement cannot be long delayed, naturally one looks around for young men who can man the ship when we let go the helm and I fully expected you would fill the place which Mr Lee is vacating.
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I note how the matter has been arranged. Peg away your time will come.
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Mr Hildreth [?] of Washington wrote you in connection with housing, if you could send him the particulars asked for it would help him in his fight for cheaper housing for the working classes. Maybe it has escaped your attention.
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With kindest regards,
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I remain yours faithfully,
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D Plews.
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The ‘forthcoming election’, due in early 1934, was for the seat on the Durham County Council which Peter Lee was vacating. However, Tunney was also standing in late 1933--with then Wheatley Hill checkweighman Will Lawther as his chief rival--for the Durham Miners’ Association post of Treasurer, following the death of Thomas Trotter.
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It seems obvious from the above that until the long-running and very public disagreement between E F Peart and Hubert Tunney, which is partly detailed in the November 1933 news item on the following page, Tunney was expected by many to follow on from Peter Lee as the Labour candidate for the Thornley area on the Durham County Council.
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Instead, the multiple disagreements and problems stoked up by the muck-raking Peart rumbled on though until the 1937 local elections, by which time Tunney had been expelled from the party he had done so much to promote. A Mr Louis P Martin of Wingate was selected, over the strong objections of the Thornley Miners’ Lodge, as Labour candidate for the Thornley area at the 1934 Durham County Council elections. And Wheatley Hill Miners’ Lodge official Francis Quin, born in 1867 and out of local politics for many years, was the truly bizarre official Labour choice in 1937. Neither of these men had anything like the excellent record of Hubert Tunney in public administration and both seem to have disappeared without trace during their time in office. Both owed their elevation to the highly dubious antics of Mr Peart.
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This is a subject I am still actively researching, but the gist of it is that Tunney won through in the 1934 Parish and ERDC elections on the official Labour ticket, but failed, due to Peart’s blatant vote-fixing, to secure the 1934 County Council candidature. He then stood and lost in March 1937, as an independent Thornley Miners’ Lodge candidate for the Thornley seat on Durham County Council against the Party's official Labour candidate, Francis Quin of Wheatley Hill. The votes were: Francis Quin (Official Labour) 1,845. Hubert Tunney (Trade Union Socialist) 1,019, a majority for Quin of 826.
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Tunney lost his Thornley seat on the Easington Rural District Council at the 1937 elections. He was replaced by E F Peart and Peart’s 23-year-old son T F (Fred) Peart, the future MP for Workington and Leader of both the House of Commons and Lords.. The votes cast were in the ERDC elections were:, E F Peart 1,080, T F Peart, 1,035 J C H Scott (Independent) 612 and H Tunney (Trade Union Socialist) 547. And, as a third heavy blow, standing as one of nine Miners’ Lodge candidates for the Parish Council against 11 official Labour candidates who included E F Peart and his wife, Mrs F M Peart, Tunney was the only one of the Miners’ Lodge candidates to be elected. He subsequently resigned his seat.
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Two electoral defeats and one mediocre scraping through in one month was hardly a ringing endorsement from the Thornley electorate for 18 years of outstanding public service and it’s hardly surprising that this triple blow marked the end of Hubert Tunney’s political career. From now on his efforts would be exclusively in the sphere of mining and miners’ welfare.
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I have written about this in exhaustive detail in my book draft, Animal Colliery, some chapters of which will eventually be posted on this site. Currently the draft can be read via the Wheatley Hill History Club, who have a reference copy.
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Surviving correspondence from 1937, see for instance this letter, details the shock felt by several of Tunney's political and union colleagues at this strange turn of events, which presaged in many many ways the 'de-selection' of moderate Labour MPs by the Militant Tendency of the 1980s’ Labour Party.
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Also interesting in the letter is the reference in the letter to ‘cheaper housing for the working classes’. Hubert Tunney pushed for miners to be allowed to buy their own homes in the early 1920s with the Dunelm Road, Thornley project. The experiment was not repeated due to left wing opposition within both the Miners’ Lodge and the Labour Party, who feared that miners who owned their own homes might no longer vote Labour. Instead, postwar, they insisted on the dismal council house wasteland of Peterlee new town--and, by deliberate neglect, ruined most of the surrounding colliery villages in the process.
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NEXT PAGE: Tunney versus Peart, a November 1933 Newspaper Article.
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