In retrospect, it seems certain that Hubert Tunney’s big mistake was to leave the big tent of the Labour Party, rather than fighting his corner from within it. But maybe he had no other option? [2023 update: he didn’t.]

Perhaps Hubert Tunney had overestimated both his popularity and the intelligence of his electorate? Whatever, by the spring of 1937, his 18-year political career was over and E F Peart, even if he had just been publicly castigated by a Judge for his muck-raking antics, had added another to his long list of public offices, replacing Tunney as the Chairman of Thornley Parish Council. And, by 1949, Peart would be sitting in Peter Lee’s old Thornley seat on the Durham County Council....with comically terrible consequences.........

For much more on this, see my very long book draft, Animal Colliery, which has been deposited with the Wheatley Hill History Club and which is available to read at the Heritage Centre in pdf form.

In due course salient long extracts from the book will also be placed on this site.

Note::Peter Lee has announced that he would not be standing for the Thornley seat on the Durham County Council as early as October 1931. Hubert Tunney was generally expected to be the official Labour candidate. My contention is that, with the probably collusion of Will Lawther, E F Peart fixed the vote by creating several instant new affliated voting sections in Wingate and Wheatley Hill. in early 1933, Thornley Labour Party Women’s Section showed their loyalty to Tunney (he had just steered through the new Thornley pithead baths) by nominating Lawther as their preferred candidate, while Wingate, which was then part of the seat’s area, nominated Railway Tavern landlord Louis Martin, previously of Pelton Fell. Martin won the election for the seat and the seat proper in 1934.

There was a boundary change before the 1937 Durham County Council election, and Wingate was no longer part of the seat. Tunney was denied selection again due to the machinations of Mr Peart and, and standing as a ’Trade Union Socialist’ lost the seat to the superannuated Francis Quin, who was born in 1867 and was of a similiar vintage to Peter Lee. Quin was replaced as the Labour candidate (without a selection contest) by Edward ‘Teddy’ Cain of Wheatley Hill. In 1949. Cain, in turn, was replaced (again without a selection contest) by E F Peart. All of this is covered in exhaustive and incontrovertible detail in my book.

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