There's a ropey election launch. Then there's Mr Charmbury's
A man dressed in 1920s gangster in a police lineup (Alamy)
3 min read
Neither Rishi Sunak nor Keir Starmer got their election campaigns off to perfect starts. But it could have been worse: they weren’t chased by police and put into an asylum.
We don’t know at exactly what point Mr Charmbury realised his 1929 election campaign was not going entirely to plan – although it may well have been when he was being dragged out from underneath a taxi by a policeman.
Charmbury was what the press sometimes call a “local character”, and had already demonstrated a flair for attracting the attention of the media. The opening of his tobacconist’s shop in Bath had been reported as an event that would see Julius Ceasar returning to the Roman town to mark the occasion “after an absence of 20 centuries”. This turned out to be Councillor Julius Caesar from Weymouth. The new shop was dedicated by a priest using holy water (“with the full concurrence of the Archdeacon of Bath”) and opened by Charmbury’s two-year old son with a small golden key.
Announcing his intention to stand as an Independent Conservative he said he would be “genuinely independent”, with “no agent, no election cars, no canvassers”. If elected he would “not accept a whip from any party, whips may suit slaves, but they did not suit him".
To prove he had the funds required to stand as a candidate, he displayed his election deposit of £150 in gold sovereigns in his shop window – the equivalent of around £12,000 today. Or at least he did until the police said the crowd that gathered to look at it was causing an obstruction.
His next big idea was to auction a painting by Millais in the local park, in aid of a Bath Slum Fund.
It was at this point that the campaign started to go south. Arriving at Bath’s Victoria Park in a taxi, he began to attract a crowd by playing Jerusalem on a gramophone, through a loudspeaker. This brought him into dispute with a park keeper. Words were exchanged. Charmbury argued that he was in a public park and he was going to stay there “until I am removed forcibly”.
He refused to move even after the police arrived – with the gramophone now playing Land of Hope and Glory – and ordered the cab driver to remove the taxi’s spark plugs, presumably to disable it. “This order was not acted upon, the police forbidding it, and the driver essayed back to the vehicle”, according to another press account.
In the words of the Sunday Sun, under the subhead “Melody That Led To Discord” the following then occurred: “More heated words followed the driver’s refusal, and finally Mr. Charmbury crawled under the car between the wheels but was hauled out by the police and bundled into the cab which drove away”.
Less determined campaigners may have seen this as the moment to stop, but not Charmbury – and he was soon to be found driving around Bath, with his loudspeaker blaring.
Alas, he was in the words of the Central Somerset Gazette then “removed in the care of the police to a mental institution” – or as other outlets described it “a rest cure in the country”. Charmbury’s campaign ended before it had even officially begun; his election deposit was never required.
One of the mysteries of this story is how a local tobacconist and sweetshop owner came to own a Millais, assuming he actually did – or indeed to have £150 in gold sovereigns. It’s also not clear for how long Charmbury was locked up, although he was back in Bath within the year and was soon to become a vocal campaigner on the treatment of people in institutions – as well later in life as a speaker for the Anti-Socialist and Anti-Communist Union.
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