Sailors, soldiers, spies and a full-back: Eastbourne’s previous MPs
Eastbourne will elect a new (or possibly the same) Member of Parliament. On whose shoulders will they be standing? Soldiers, sailors, spies, and even a first-division footballer — these are the colourful characters who have represented Eastbourne.
The first modern MP was Conservative Edward Field. Field, from Chesham in Buckinghamshire, joined the Royal Navy in 1851 and rose to the rank of Admiral. He lived in Hampshire throughout his time as an MP for Eastbourne at a time when the link between MPs and their constituency was tenuous at best. He served for 15 years before retiring in 1900, and he died two years later.
In 1900 Sir Lindsay Lindsay-Hogg was elected. He was a horse-breeder and president of Crufts. He was appointed as a baronet, a title which has passed down the generations to Michael Lindsay-Hogg (who has renounced the title). This Lindsay-Hogg is the US filmmaker who made the Beatles Let It Be movie with the famous rooftop concert. The family seat is Rotherfield Hall in Rotherfield, East Sussex.
1906 brought the worst-ever defeat for the Conservatives (or second-worst, depending when you read this), and a landslide for the Liberal Party. In Eastbourne, the Liberal candidate Hubert Beaumont was elected (not to be confused with the Labour MP of the same name). He was an Eton and Balliol man, but a ‘radical’ Liberal. He was a classic carpet-bagger, standing in King’s Lynn, Buckingham, and the by-election in Barnard Castle which saw Labour leader Arthur Henderson elected, before winning in Eastbourne.
Eastbourne went Tory again 1910, with the election of Robert Sackville Gwynne, and would stay blue for the next 80 years. The Gwynnes made their money in engineering and iron founding. Robert lived in Wooton Manor in Folkington, near Polegate, where he died suddenly aged 51 in 1924. He is the first of our MPs to serve as a minister, in the War Office. Gwynne was the father of cookery writer Elizabeth David who grew up in the Manor House before bringing pasta to the masses. There’s a whole business to do with his brother, his sexuality, blackmail, and suspected mass murderer and Eastbourne GP Bodkin Adams, but you’ll have to google it.
In 1924 Sir George Lloyd was elected. He was a Tory ‘die hard’ right-winger who had an astonishing military, colonial, and political career of which being briefly MP for Eastbourne was the least interesting part. He opposed Indian independence, but saw the dangers of Nazi Germany even before Churchill. He captained Cambridge’s boat race crew, fought at Gallipoli, opposed votes for women, supported the creation of the central Mosque in Hyde Park, travelled across the Empire, and served as Eastbourne’s MP for just over a year before being elevated to the House of Lords to serve as High Commissioner in Egypt and the Sudan.
In the 1924 election, a Labour candidate appears for the first time. DJ Davis for Labour won 16% of the vote, narrowly behind JJ Davies the Liberal candidate who won 16.1%. Since 1924, Labour has stood a candidate for Eastbourne, but none has yet been elected, at least not in Eastbourne.
In 1925, Eastbourne held the first of four by-elections we’ve had so far. Unusually each party fielded a former MP. Vice-Admiral Sir Reginald Hall stood for the Tories. He was a former director of Naval Intelligence during the First World War, and MP for Liverpool West Derby until his defeat by the Liberals in 1923. The Liberals chose former Willesden East MP Harcourt ‘Crinks’ Johnstone, then aged just 30. The Labour candidate was Lieutenant-Colonel Beauchamp Williams, briefly MP for Kennington, London. He was an army doctor and early advocate for a national health service.
Reginald Hall was elected, and served until 1929. He was a founder of the Economic League, which held blacklists of alleged Communists and was said to be involved in the fake Zinoviev Letter which falsely suggested a Labour Government would invite the Bolsheviks into Britain. He was a cold-blooded spook, known by the nick-name ‘Blinker’ because of his twitch, but I doubt anyone said it to his face.
At the 1929 general election, a tragic figure was elected. Edward Marjoribanks was Eton, Oxford, and the Bar, but deeply troubled. After being unlucky in love he shot himself at the home of his uncle Lord Hailsham, and triggered another by-election.
In the 1931 by-election the Conservative candidate John Slater was elected unopposed. Slater was an unlikely Conservative MP for a Sussex seat. He was born in the Lancashire coalfield, and played football as a full-back for Bolton Wanderers between 1905 and 1914. He made a mint at business, and was dubbed the first footballer millionaire. As MP, he sought out cross-party consensus and spoke often in Parliament and across the country. Following a speech given at his annual constituency dinner in Eastbourne on Friday 15 February 1935, he suffered a fatal heart attack and died aged just 46.
A second unopposed Eastbourne by-election was held, and Tory Charles Taylor was elected aged just 25. He served as Eastbourne’s MP for the next 39 years. Despite being an MP, Taylor served in the Second World War, and later as managing director of Unigate. There was little controversy over MPs’ ‘second jobs’ in those far-off days. By the time of the first 1974 general elections, Taylor had fallen out with the local Conservatives who deselected him as their candidate. It is fair to say, he was not happy about it. He lived with his family in Ratton Wood, Willingdon, and died in 1989.
In the 1974 general elections (there were two) the Conservatives chose Ian Gow. Gow brings us into the realms of living memory. He was an early backer of Margaret Thatcher in the 1975 leadership contest, and became her parliamentary private secretary (PPS) in 1979, and a housing and treasury minister. Ian Gow was assassinated in 1990 by the IRA at his home in Hankham, aged just 53. The by-election assumed national significance and the Liberals delivered an upset by defeating the Conservatives. Thatcher was gone within months.
No offence to those who came next — a Liberal, then a Tory, then a Liberal, then a Tory, then a Liberal, then a Tory — the yellow-blue ping-pong over the next 30 years delivered none of the fascinating characters who represented Eastbourne before 1990. As a postscript, perhaps the most significant Eastbourne-adjacent politician never served as its MP. Spencer Compton Cavendish, 8th Duke of Devonshire, has a statue on Whitehall and the Western Lawns, Eastbourne, and served as a minister in the Commons and Lords. He holds the rare distinction as having led three different political parties: the Liberal Party, the Liberal Unionist Party, and the Conservative Party in either the House of Commons or the House of Lords. I doubt we will see such a thing again.
Paul Richards is the Labour & Co-operative candidate for Eastbourne at the 2024 General Election.
