From looking at surviving newspaper reports, it appears that Peart was engaged in a sustained personal vendetta against Tunney over the entire period from circa early 1933 through to Tunney’s expulsion from the Labour Party in February 1937.

Even after over 80 years, it’s quite shocking to see in stark black and white the bitterness between two politicians who are supposed to be in the same party. Also shocking in these old news reports is Peart’s bare-faced lack of respect for Tunney.

His somewhat theatrical ploy is always to refuse to take him seriously The latter usually has the wit, wisdom and civilised grace to face down his accuser, but after four years of rampantly rabid agitation, it must have been almost a relief to see the back of Peart--and latterly also his equally manic young agitator son Fred, the future MP and leader of the House of Lords, no less!

Peart could hardly criticise Hubert Tunney for what he had done in public office. After all, Tunney had pushed though modern sanitation for east Durham, the Dunelm Road housing project in Thornley, the Thornley pit head baths and much more. But what he could and was doing was to question his motives and his personality. And that, from the surviving evidence, is exactly what he did. In his many public meetings in Thornley, Peart, typically speaks from the floor rather than the platform, playing to the gallery while presenting himself as the people’s champion.

His target is always Tunney’s supposed cosy, privileged and secretive life as a public servant. It’s muck-raking in it’s purest form: genial humour laced with envy and spite.

But why all of this malice? Why not just let Tunney get on with the business of making the village and the Seaham Division at better place? Perhaps, above all, because Tunney was a huge barrier to Peart’s own ambitions for himself and his son.

Peart conjures up a fantastical image of Tunney as a secretive, scheming freeloader, an arrogant man with ideas above his station. If Tunney said he had to got to London to help push new the Crimdon Dene project or new water mains for east Durham, then this, according to Peart’s logic, this was just a ploy to have another of his many free holidays at the village’s expense. That’s the usual tone of his argument.

Peart attacked Tunney as a jumped-up self-important figure with ideas above his station. To paraphrase his line: everyone had seen Tunney coming home from work every afternoon in his shabby pit clothes And yet now there he was lording it over everyone on the Council, taking every free trip away he could get and acting like he was better than everyone else. Of course, on one level he was right. Tunney was now much more than just another miner. He had developed a political consciousness. He was using his mind to its fullest potential with every speech he wrote and idea he put forward in Council and Miners’ Lodge meetings.

Most of his fellow miners’ had stayed the same since 1910. He’d changed. He was on their side but in so many respects, the books, the drive to self-improvement, the abandonment of ‘pitmatic’ speech, the very articulate public speaking, he was so different now. That made him an easy target. But he couldn’t go back to being the ignorant, passive, accepting pitman he was in 1910 when he attended his first Lodge. Meetings. He had become a different man to his fellow miners and villagers. They accepted the world they were given. They drank, gambled raised their families on far too little money. They got by, but didn’t know much about anything. He now knew enough to know that, given the chance, he could change both their and his lives for the better.

Peart’s appeal was to the most base aspects of human nature: envy and resentment. And there was plenty of that about in the village of 1937. Again, Peart couldn’t attack Tunney’s record, though he tried his best with the endless allegations of private building contractors profiting at public expense, so he had to attack his personality.

My mother can remember Mr and Mrs Peart as a friendly, easy-going couple fond of a social drink and good company. They fitted in well with everyone, but on their own terms of having well paid white collar jobs and being the social superior of most of their fellow villagers. They were treated with respect. Tunney, by contrast to many vulgar village eyes was a jumped up pretender to middle class respectability.

It’s an old cliche that no one likes a prophet in his own country, and there’s certainly a quasi-religous tone to both surviving letters of support for Tunney after his 1937 election defeats.

By 1937 Hubert Tunney had proved himself to be an able administrator, with a fine analytical mind and proven communication and public speaking skills. He had dealt with government at the highest level, including giving evidence at several Parliamentary committees. He was a man with the drive, ambition and idealism to get things done for Thornley and for Durham. In 18 years of public service he already accomplished a great deal.

So, with mass unemployment, the pit on short time and the county crying out for such a promising home-grown leader, what does Mr E F Peart’s Thornley Area Labour Party do with this talented public servant? They decide to pass him over as a candidate for the Durham County Council in favour of the wholly undistinguished Francis Quin. And what do the Thornley voters do? By a wide margin, they decided to side with Quin, too.

I know very little about the winner of the 1937 election, Francis Quin, other than that he was from Wheatley Hill, born in 1867, and was involved with the Wheatley Hill Miners’ Lodge and Labour Party in the 1920s. What I do know is that he is conspicuous by his absence in the surviving local newspaper reports of Council plans and activities after 1932--when he lost the election for Wheatley Hill checkweighman to Will Lawther.. Whereas, Tunney is always confronting key issues, making speeches and announcing initiatives for the area during his years in public office, Quin seems to have content to keep his mouth shut and follow the party line. Thornley had elected a Labour Party ‘nodding donkey.’ The first of many!

NEXT PAGE, continued.