Gloucester By-election

The three candidates in the 1957 Gloucester by-election out and about on the campaign trail.

The first television coverage of a by-election was by Granada at Rochdale in 1958. Here's ATV the previous year, dipping a toe in the water, by introducing the three candidates taking part in the Gloucester by-election. Patrick Lort-Phillips for the Liberals talks of class war; the Conservative's Francis Dashwood is on the doorstep with talk of pensions and coal; and Labour's Jack Diamond resorts to the classic mode of political communication: speaking from a soap box.

Jack Diamond won the seat for Labour and held it until the 1970 General Election. The Conservative's candidate, Francis Dashwood, was an ancestor of an earlier Francis Dashwood who was a high priest of the notorious Hellfire Club in the eighteenth century.