By the time of the the local council elections of March 1937 the relationship between Hubert Tunney and the Seaham Division Labour Party Secretary E F Peart had reached breaking point. I have now (2023) fully researched the exact details of how this situation arose and this is set out in my book draft, Animal Colliery, extracts of which will be placed on this site in due course.
|
|
The article below was written at the very start of my research. I’ve made a few minor revisions, but have generally left it as written, in circa 2013. Every bold assertion made below has since been backed up since with firm evidence, for which see my book.
|
|
The bare outline of this truly bizarre sequence of events first came to my attention via this August 8th 1941 Durham County Advertiser news item, which mentions the 1937 elections of that year in the course of detailing Hubert Tunney’s new job with the Ministry of Labour. The full item is reproduced at right.
|
|
‘Mr Tunney has done considerable public work at Thornley. For a long period he was a member of the Easington Rural District Council, attaining the office of chairman. On the death of Mr Peter Lee, he contested the Thornley seat of Durham County Council as an unofficial Labour candidate, but was defeated by the official nominee, Councillor Francis Quin....’
|
|
Peter Lee died in 1935 and the elections were two years later, so there is a major gap of detail still to be filled there. Also, just why should Hubert Tunney, a committed member of the Labour Party since its formation in 1917, be standing as an unofficial candidate’ in 1937?
|
|
As recounted in earlier pages of this project, Hubert Tunney’s problems with the Seaham Division Labour Party went back to several years before 1935, but intensified with the council vacancy thrown up by Peter Lee’s retirement. Hubert Tunney, to say the least, was not the choice of E F Peart’s Thornley area party machine to replace him on Durham County Council.
|
|
In his Ph.d thesis The United Front and the Popular Front in North East England 1936-1939, Lewis Mates sums up the matter thus:
|
|
‘The County Council, RDC and UDC elections of Spring 1937 saw a marked proliferation of internal conflicts. At Thornley, a disagreement arose in February 1937 between the Easington RDC Labour group under councillor E F Peart, secretary of Seaham district Labour Party and councillor Hubert Tunney over allegations of ‘irregularities’ in housing administration. Thornley Miners’ Lodge of which Tunney was chairperson [sic] appointed 11 of their candidates in opposition to official Labour for Thornley Parish Council. The executive of Seaham District Labour Labour Party then expelled Tunney who, defiant, then stood unsuccessfully as a trade union candidate against official Labour candidates in the Durham County Council and Easington RDC elections...’
|
|
Apart from gettting the dynamic of the power struggle the wrong way around---Peart was not in charge of the ERDC Labour Group, he had just been expelled from it!--that is a reasonably accurate account of what happened in the spring 1937 elections. However, as I have shown in earlier pages of this site, the time frame of the feud with Peart was a lot longer than the mere month of February 1937.
|
|
See this news item on tensions between Tunney’s Miners’ Lodge and Peart’s Labour Party from November 1933. And it doesn’t explain why it happened. Who were the 11 rebels who stood against the 11 official Labour candidates for the Parish Council? And who were these official 11 candidates? At the very least It looks as if the Labour movement in Thornley was in a kind of civil war at this time.
|
|
Now (2023) researched in detail, the ‘building irregularities’ issue seems to have been a persistent gossip and whispering campaign from the Peart camp. This continued even after two official inquiries and a Government audit found nothing amiss. The unrepentant Peart then countered by saying that the enquiry had failed to ask the right people the right questions. The gist of the accusation was that cement had been stolen by a builder working for the council and that houses had been built with substandard materials.
|
|
Whatever the truth of this, it was obviously an expedient pretext for Peart to attack the integrity of Hubert Tunney and the ERDC. The issue even rumbled on into a slander case later in 1937, in which Hubert Tunney was a prosecution witness and the presiding judge publicly reprimanded E F Peart, who was financing the defendant--who lost the case.
|
|
To see that news item, click here.
|
|
NEXT PAGE
|
|
