Why did a crowd of 3,000 working-class Labour supporters gather outside of Eastbourne Town Hall on a cold November evening, eagerly awaiting the results of the 1913 municipal elections? Well, despite much negative campaigning condemning as “LABOUR EXTREMISTS” unfit to hold office, postal worker F.J. Huggett and railway driver A.J. Marshall became the first Labour councillors in the borough’s history.
Local Liberal George Chambers had turned to the Eastbourne Chronicle to express his abhorrence that such an eventuality might occur:
Be it always remembered that a town like Eastbourne depends for its permanent prosperity on capital and capitalists, and, for its local management to fall into the hands of nobodies with nothing to lose would be fatal.
George Chambers, Eastbourne Councillor, Liberal Party
Well, they did not lose. The Labour victory was celebrated by the newly elected working-class councillors driving along in a horse drawn carriage with the campaigners bursting into the campaign song, “March of the Men of Hardnecks” to the tune of “Men of Harlech”.
The EXTREMISTS had won!
Victory was theirs!