Let's ask voters to write poems about our leaders
4 min read
At the 1950 general election Schweppes invited voters to submit poems about the politicians of the day. It was a triumph for democracy and PR.
With less than a week until polling day, one way in which this General Election has been somewhat lacking is the quality of the commercial tie-ins, as companies look for easy PR opportunities.
In 1992 Thornton’s sold 170,000 party leader jelly heads; blackcurrent-flavoured John Major narrowly outsold strawberry Neil Kinnock. In 1997 Tesco’s had “electoral roll” sandwiches, each containing a different cheese (red leicester for Labour, stilton for the Tories, double gloucester for the Lib Dems).
For the most part these sort of gimmicks are quite cheap. In 2001, however, Fox’s Biscuits of Batley offered £100 to any voter who could provide photographic evidence that they had detained a canvasser for long enough to share a biscuit with them. This strikes us as a potentially ruinously expensive bit of PR (“hello Mr/Ms Canvasser, would you like a biscuit and fifty quid?”), one of those promotional campaigns that could easily have ended up in Business Studies textbooks for years after as an example of how not to do it.
And in 1929 a company called Bridgen and Green offered you the chance to buy small statuettes of famous politicians. Each was based on drawings by Straube – once the highest paid cartoonist on Fleet Street. The company offered a miniature Baldwin, Lloyd George, Churchill, Macdonald, or the then Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks. The price was 10 shillings (postage free). Allowing for inflation, that’s about £40 today. We reckon the market for people who would spend £40 on a small James Cleverly to have in their house is niche. We doubt it even includes James Cleverly.
But our main text for today is a competition that Schweppes ran over 70 years ago. Newspaper readers in 1950 were invited to send in “Schweppigrams” – poems of not more than four lines in length (“the crisper the better”). Any published verses won their authors a fiver – around £210 in today’s money. There were around 20,000 entries.
Poetry and politics rarely mix well, often tending towards the doggerel and few of the 34 winning verses would have stood much chance of entering the Oxford Book of English Verse. Our purpose in discussing them here is not for their lyrical qualities, but for what this tells us about politics and elections at the time. This was an election in which the two main party leaders were Churchill and Attlee, now widely considered to be two of the greatest politicians of the twentieth century. At 84 per cent electoral turnout was at its post-war peak, and the two main parties enjoyed the support of more than nine out of every ten voters.
Were the voters of the 1950s therefore enjoying their participation in the electoral process? Did the poems reveal a population enthused about the election, confident in the sagacity and wisdom of those who governed them?
Short answer: no.
Despite the instructions requesting “wit without malice” – and prohibiting party bias – the Schweppigrams did in fact demonstrate a fair bit of malice towards politicians, mostly of a sort that would be very familiar today.
For one thing, politicians did not fulfil their promises:
Politicians
Are sort of delayed-action magicians;
They wait until they’re elected
Before not doing what you expected.
Or this one, which offered ever-green advice for incoming governments:
Let us condole
With those that head the poll:
It is not easy to implement your prophecies
From Government offices.
And whoever got elected, nothing much would change:
Vote left or right or middle way
Monday will still be washing day.
It’s worth remembering that this was after what is now considered to have been one of the most reforming administrations Britain has ever seen. Complaints about never seeing politicians except at election time also did not begin recently:
Canvassers, canvassers knock on my door.
Never knew where I lived before.
So perhaps the election would be more enjoyable if we dispensed with argument and they just fought?
For candidates to come to blows
Isn’t done
But it would be fun.
Parliamentary party discipline also got it in the neck:
Your prospective MP
Will say that he’s free
But the Party Whips
Soon put an end to those quips.
This one perhaps had more validity to it. Party discipline at the time was significantly higher than it is today, and the 1950s were to be marked by particularly cohesive parliamentary parties. Out of all the 34 winners there were almost none that expressed any real positivity about the process, although one did compare the British election favourably to those in other nations:
Every voter in this land,
Puts his cross just where he’s planned.
In other lands you just vote Red
Or they put the next cross at your head!
Reading it all you are left with two observations. First, there really is not much new about most complaints about elections. And second, if those were the winners, then what on earth must the losing entries have been like?
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