When Beatrice Webb writes about her time in east Durham, it’s almost like she’s on another planet, which indeed in many respects she was. In a similar vein, when Hubert Tunney left his pit clothes behind and got on his first train to a TUC or miners’ union conference that would have opened his eyes to a whole new world.
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The early 1930s Durham Miners’ Association was indeed chock full of checkweighmen. Notice how many of the candidates for the 1933 DMA election hold, or have held, that office.
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What Beatrice Webb fails to acknowledge throughout in her diary is how very hard it was for an ‘ordinary miner’, however, intelligent and eager to learn to take his place among the ‘brain-working’ political decision-makers of the world, when he would have left school for a life down the pit when he was only 13 years old.
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The ‘brainworkers’ of the upperclasses meanwhile--and many of the educated middle class activists within the Seaham Division Labour Party, such as Dr W Grant, E F Peart and W Coxon--would have had the huge advantage of continuing in education until perhaps 21 and beyond.
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What unites all eight candidates for the post of DMA treasurer in 1933 are their very humble beginnings, their introduction to literally hard labour at a very early age and their overwhelming desire to educate and improve themselves and their surroundings. However, it’s only Hubert Tunney’s biographical sketch which contains a reference to public speaking.
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Then as now, most working class Labour MPs were and are hopeless public speakers. They get elected to Parliament and then are hardly ever heard from again. Their heads rarely rise above the parapet. They do what the House of Commons whips tell them and they collect their pay and allowances. Meanwhile the middle and upper class ‘brainworkers’ of the party, many privately educated and gifted with safe seats, do the real decision-making.
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In the early 1930s, Hubert Tunney seems to have been actively working towards becoming a better politician than that. He was a keen and prolific public speaker. The 1933 article on the DMA ballot also indicates that he did have serious political ambitions in 1932. He was the ‘next candidate for selection’ when W Coxon was chosen by the Seaham Division Labour Party to oppose Ramsay MacDonald. He was just one step away from running for Parliament. For now, those political ambitions were still promising. By March 1937 they were in ruins.
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At right is a further news item on Hubert Tunney’s public speaking engagements. Undated, this one is almost certainly from the early-1930s.
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The 1934 and 1937 Elections for the ERDC
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HUBERT TUNNEY INDEX PAGE
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