Elections in 1859 were very different from today: it was dubbed the time of the ‘rotten borough’ and Dartmouth was the site of an election as rotten as a very rotten thing.
At the time, Dartmouth already had a reputation for corruption. Only 250 people had the vote in Dartmouth – even though the population was more than 5,000 – and this meant it was relatively easy to bribe enough people to win, and gain the prestige and influence offered by a seat in the House of Commons.
Charles Seal Hayne, Dartmouth
To get the vote you had to be a man and you had to either be a property owner, or pay a rent of £10 or more a year. The ballot was also not secret – so everyone could find out how you had voted which meant all candidates knew exactly who supported them and where to spend the money to get the votes they needed.
In 1837, just five years after the Parliamentary Reform act which was supposed to stop this kind of behaviour, Joseph Somes, one of the country’s richest ship owners, was accused of ‘buying’ an election in Dartmouth with payments of £5 - £50 per vote. He won by just seven votes, and was reported to the House of Commons by his Liberal opponent, George Moffat.
Moffat said that not only had Somes bought voters off, he was also a Government contractor buying himself into a position of influence, essentially trying to give himself contracts through the halls of power. The Commons Committee in charge of these decisions decided that Somes had not bribed people (because none of those who had received a payment would come forward to testify that they had, in fact, broken the law) and that Somes was not, strictly, a contractor when he was elected. Although he did become one immediately after being elected.
When Somes suddenly died, not long after, Moffat won the subsequent by-election, by 14 votes. He was then promptly accused of bribing voters himself by his opponent. It seems the question was not if you were corrupt when you stood for election, just how much you could afford to pay.
In 1859 Dartmouth was in the grip of a political and ideological struggle between the traditionalist Conservatives and the modernising Liberals.
Charles Seale-Hayne, nephew of 16-times Mayor Sir Henry Paul Seale, was an enthusiastic Liberal.
Sir Henry, on the other hand, was a staunch Conservative who had supported the election of Sir Thomas Herbert, a colourful military man, in 1852.
Charles then sued his own uncle – he said that Sir Henry, who had been mayor at the time of the election, had discounted the votes of 42 residents of Townstal on a technicality.
The election was won by only 11 votes and this meant Charles’ action caused a new election the next year. Charles stood against his uncle’s candidate, a man named Caird.
Sir Henry convinced the largest ship owner who used the port to state loudly and often that if Caird failed to win he would stop all his ships visiting Dartmouth and would use his influence to stop others doing so too. Charles lost by 30 votes.
This caused a rift with his uncle that was never to heal.
When Charles started energetically pursuing the dream of bringing the railway to Dartmouth, he was fighting, he believed, for the very future of Dartmouth. Ahead of its arrival he worked hard to improve the facilities in the port and personally campaigned for funding and political support for the project with an almost religious zeal.
Despite some remarkable successes, such as securing the services of IK Brunel as chief engineer on the project, it quickly became clear that it was going to be much more expensive than Charles had promised.
Bringing the train to Kingswear (they tried to have it cross the river at Dittisham and into Sandquay, but were stopped by the Raleigh estate) proved a massive undertaking: projected costs of £90,000 in 1858 eventually ballooned to £260,000 on its completion in 1864.
Charles needed money and this influenced his decision to step aside as parliamentary candidate for the town in 1859 in favour of Edward Wyndham Harrington Schenley just two weeks before the election. Schenley, a veteran of the Battle of Waterloo, was a very rich man who had been a senior government official in British Guiana in South America. He had married a rich American heiress causing a national scandal when they eloped and was one of the main investors in the Submarine Telegraph Company which was in the process of transforming world communications.
To say this raised eyebrows is an understatement: it was common practice for businessmen to ‘buy’ influence by election in boroughs to which they had no connection (Schenley was said to live ‘on the right side of Hyde Park’) but this was so close to the election it seemed very strange indeed.
The mystery was easily solved: Schenley had offered Seale Hayne £3,000 of funding for the railway company if he stood aside. Charles was desperate for cash and accepted without hesitation.
At the election hustings, the two candidates, Schenley and SirThomas Herbert were rather respectful of each other. The mayor, Sir Henry, did raise a smile when he asked for a show of hands for each candidate (a common practice at hustings at the time, though it did not affect the final result at all).
Although Schenley had twice as many people raise their hands in his favour, Sir Henry declared Sir Thomas the winner.
In the end, Schenley won by 123 votes to 116. He left the town the same day to have some fun in Paris with friends and didn’t return to the borough again before he returned to the country to take his seat in the House of Commons at the opening of Parliament.
He was in for a shock.
If he had thought Sir Thomas would go without a fight he was wrong. As a soldier Herbert had fought battles from China to Africa and had sailed around the world at least once. He was a respected member of the Admiralty and did not take losing well. He petitioned Parliament, accusing Schenley of bribing voters.
It was a sensation: in a time when bribery was commonplace this case shocked the nation: Schenley was said to have come to the town with £1,400 in £20 notes in his pocket to bribe both voters and the returning officer. The officer was found to have discounted the votes of a number of legitimate voters and counted many who were not even registered to vote.
The Commons Committee took less than an hour to declare the election null and void and Schenley a crook. However, they didn’t award Herbert costs, seen by many at the time as a subtle hint they felt he had also been trying to bribe his way to the seat.
The Conservative candidate James Dunn won the re-election. He stood unopposed. The liberal candidate withdrew, stating to the national press he didn’t have the money to bribe enough people to win.
The national Illustrated Times gave a telling bit of advice in its editorial piece on the saga: if you wanted to win an election in Dartmouth, it stated: “Put money in your purse.”
By Phil Scoble
First Published in By The Dart October 2015 Issue