Want a free car? Guess the election result correctly!
5 min read
Westminster reporters will almost certainly be competing among themselves to accurately predict Thursday's election result. But it wasn't long ago when newspapers invited readers to do so — and awarded big cash prizes, or even cars, to the winners.
In October 1924 the Daily Mirror, in conjunction with the Sunday Pictorial, asked its readers to forecast the forthcoming general election. Entrants had to predict the correct number of MPs for each of the three main parties, along with a figure for the others (“representing any independent parties, such as self-described Communists and Prohibitionists”). The rules were precise: entries had to be “written in ink” on a coupon from the paper (which should be “neatly cut out’”. The article launching the competition ran next to one on young people and “purity”, with the sub-head: “Young People Hardly Know What Is Meant, Says Woman”. Some things don’t change.
The winner – the only entry to get it spot on – was what the paper called a “twenty-four-year-old village girl”. Kathleen Cotton, of Gnosall, Staffordshire, was the daughter of the local plumber and decorator, and it was, apparently, the first competition she had ever participated in. Or: “Village Maid Only Reader to Forecast Exact Result” as the Mirror put it.
Such competitions largely vanished after the war, but they were widespread a century ago, in both national and local papers. As well as the Mirror there were similar competitions in the Mail, the Express and the Daily Graphic. The earliest national one we have found is in the Mail in 1900 – when a Mrs Nye of Wallington, Surrey won a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britanica – but they were running in local papers at the end of the nineteenth century.
Private firms got in on the act too. In 1900, anyone ordering one dozen Condal Water (“nature’s remedy for constipation”) could also win £10 if they could correctly predict the size of the Unionist majority. In 1929, anyone buying White Seal Soap (presumably useful once the Condal Water had kicked in) could win £50 if their predictions proved accurate.
Over time, the prizes increased in value (the Mail offered £50 in 1906, £100 by 1910), and by the 1920s had become substantial. Kathleen Cotton’s winnings from the Mirror amounted to a whopping £1,000, around £76,000 in today’s money. After some shopping in London she intended to use her winnings “to purchase a motor-car”.
One of the winners of the Mirror’s 1922 competition (a Mrs Harradon, “a pretty dark-haired young woman”) intended to do the same. The competition in the Bystander magazine in 1910 cut out the middleman entirely and just offered a car – a “Handsome Bedford Motor-Car (5-cyl, 18 h.p, value £265) – to anyone getting the government’s majority correct.
Prizes in the Mail’s competitions were even more generous. In 1923, they were offering £2 a week for life – that’s just shy of £8,000 today per year for the rest of your life – or £2,000 in total to be split if there was a tie; which is just what happened, with Miss A. W. Graham and Mr E. J. Harper (“an athletic-looking bachelor of about 40”) taking home a cool grand apiece. At the next General Election they announced they were increasing the prize to £5 per week or £5,000. “Such a sum spells a future with no anxieties”. In 1929 the total prize pot reached £6,000 (closing in on half a million at today’s value). At one point the Daily Graphic even offered £50 to the newsagent who sold the winning coupon.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given the cash involved, these competitions received millions of entries; one of the Mail’s generated 18 ½ tonnes of post. In part, this was because the rules usually permitted multiple entries – indeed, the papers wanted people to, because each entry had to be on an official form. Kathleen Cotton had sent in a total of 15 separate coupons, clipped out of different copies of the paper, each with a different estimate. “Judging by my own experience”, she said, “I should say that the best way to forecast anything is to go, by degrees, from one extreme to the other”. Her predictions for the Conservatives had ranged from 119 seats up to 415. Eat your heart out, Philip Tetlock. Whilst the Mirror reported receiving “many millions of entries”, they also referred to her beating “hundreds of thousands of readers”, which implies that lots of people were doing this.
Yet even with millions of entries, it was fairly rare for people to get the result spot on; many of the winners were those with the closest entries. Turns out predicting elections is harder than some people think. Asked how they did it, lots of winners had clever explanations, although when it came to Mrs Lovelace of London, one of the winners of the Mirror’s 1924 competition, it was felt important to point out that she had won with “no help from her husband”.
Yet we are drawn to a Mr George Henry Duffin, of Redbridge Lane, Ilford, one of the lucky winners of a competition in 1929 who admitted: “I had no particular plan, but I was lucky enough to hit on the right combination”.
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