Nelson, Lancashire, 31 March 1966, 11pm on election night. The whole world was waiting to see whether the uncle of a victim of the Moors murderers could unseat the MP who had just abolished the death penalty in Britain.
Four months before the night of the count, Sydney Silverman, a principled lawyer of humble beginnings, had piloted his murder (abolition of death penalty) bill 1965 into law at Westminster.
The bill received royal assent on 8 November 1965, barely four weeks after the arrest of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley for the torture and murder of five Manchester children.
Paris Match was hailing Joe Mounsey, the Lancashire DCI who cracked the case, as “the greatest detective of the twentieth century”.
Nelson and Colne: a bellwether election
Patrick Downey, the uncle of a ten-year-old girl kidnapped at a funfair, raped, murdered and buried on Saddleworth Moor, had moved to lodgings in the town centre of Nelson to campaign as an independent candidate for weeks among the weavers and former weavers of Nelson and Colne, demanding the return of the death penalty.
The Labour government’s majority had shrunk to three, so time would not wait for Silverman. Soon after prime minister Harold Wilson announced a snap general election for 31 March, Silverman, 70, learned that he would have to fight a ‘bring back hanging’ candidate at a time when Brady and Hindley were in custody awaiting trial at Chester on 19 April.
He had been the town’s MP since 1935 but being a Fabian, a regular party rebel and a founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, was not very popular in some parts of Nelson and Colne. Folk were unaware of his now famous 1942 secret transatlantic telegram, alerting the World Jewish Congress in New York of German plans for the extermination of four million Jews. When Churchill’s government received inside information on the death camps through Gerhart Riegner in Switzerland they chose Silverman to alert the Americans by telegram.
The world’s media descends
Nelson had been known pre-war as ‘Little Moscow’, but by 1966, when I was working there as a reporter for the Burnley Evening Star, the left-wing radical pacifist MP looked doomed to shipwreck by a perfect Moors murders storm. The outriders of the storm were the TV crews from Manchester, London, Paris and New York.
Silverman’s full-time political agent had also been a conscientious objector but you would never have guessed it. Len Dole wore tweeds like an English gentleman and drove around town in an immaculate tobacco-coloured Rover 2000. He was very clever and told me about the tricks “the TV boys are playing on Sydney”.
“They tried to film him stumbling across a rough field but I stopped it. I took them up to a lovely old people’s home in the sunshine.”
Late one afternoon, Dole walked into our office with some news. “Andy. Take a photographer up Leeds Road in the morning and take a look at my campaign billboard. It won’t be in Labour Party colours.”
The enormous slogan was splashed in purple on the entire gable end of a terrace of stone houses. I’ll never forget the words.
PRINCIPLED AND INCORRUPTIBLE
OUR MAN IN PARLIAMENT
SYDNEY SILVERMAN
I realised at once that Dole had hit on the best way to defend a man with progressive and humanitarian views not shared by many voters.
Driven by conscience
Samuel Sydney Silverman, 1895 – 1968, came from a very hard school, by open scholarships to the Liverpool Institute and Liverpool University, by watching the charismatic dockers’ leader Jim Larkin, by serving three jail sentences as a wartime conscientious objector and by years as a solicitor in the law courts of Liverpool, defending the poor on dock briefs and fighting for compensation for injured workmen.
Dole had expressed on his hoarding in Leeds Road the message delivered by Edmund Burke in 1774 to the voters of Bristol, many of whom had profited from the slave trade, opposed by Burke.
“Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement, and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”
A timely intervention
When the press gathered on election night in Nelson, after weeks on the story, I was very briefly a key man, the lad from the evening paper who knew everyone.
At Granada TV studios in Manchester, Bill Grundy might very well be using a new-fangled computer to mastermind on-the-spot reporters like Mike Scott in Salford and Chris Kelly in Liverpool. But the man from the Evening Star was leading the pack as the reporters wormed their way into the counting hall at Nelson.
“No press” ordered the doorman.
I suspected that entry might actually be forbidden under electoral law but tried to trick the doorman with an awkward question.
“What about those cameras in there?”
“Them’s television. You’re press.”
I was thinking hard about what to say next when a tall chap that I recognised as Granada’s reporter from Leeds leaned over my shoulder.
With more authority than me and with much chutzpah, Michael Parkinson told the doorman, “If he doesn’t go through this door now. Those cameras are coming out”.
It was a thrilling moment of solidarity and I’ve never forgotten it. We were inside in no time at all, ready to stand next to Dole as “the little crooks’ lawyer from Liverpool” stepped forward for the reading of the result.
Turnout was 80.9%.
Silverman, Samuel, Labour, 18,406.
Davies, Peter, Conservative 13,829.
Downey, Patrick, Independent 5,117.
It was an increased majority for Silverman, despite a huge vote for the Independent. It was a personal triumph for Dole and a singular act of great generosity by the young Michael Parkinson.
