In those days it was customary, at election time, for candidates to travel down to their constituency and address the electors by word of mouth. This was indeed necessary, for the cinemaphone was not yet properly perfected. The speech of the evening was, of course, delivered by the leader of the Party by this means, but it had the disadvantage that any loud interruption from the audience could prevent a part, sometimes a large part, of the cinemaphone record from being heard: and at that time (it seems hard to believe!) it was impossible to reverse the cinemaphone without starting the record all over again! I confess that, to my mind, the personal presence of the candidate has always seemed an advantage; it stimulated a local interest in politics such as you rarely see nowadays; nor was it possible for the electresses to complain that they had chosen their representative without ever really knowing what he looked like, having only seen what a cinema director could make him look like at a pinch. And there is something, after all, in the personal touch, in the direct intercourse between the member and her constituents: the wax dummies of to-day can indeed chuck babies under the chin with as much precision as we used to, but they cannot win the heart.
Anyhow, I travelled down in person to Manchester N.W. (3). I had never been in Manchester before, and admired the city from the first moment I set foot in it. The municipal buildings, noble examples of that Waterhouse Gothic which we vainly try to imitate nowadays; the moving platforms in Market Street, said to be the fastest in the world: the wireless installation on the Cathedral, which records all the movements of German theology several hours ahead of any other English centre: the marble cupolas of the Synagogue in the Bury New Road: the “super-landing-stages” on Kersal Moor—all spoke of a city full of vitality and unceasingly awake. I had been fortunate enough (owing to my early candidature) to secure the Midland Hotel as my Head-quarters. This enabled my supporters to refresh themselves, between business hours, with unlimited games of tennis, water-polo in the large swimming bath, a continuous day-and-night cinema in the theatre, continuous concerts in the Winter Garden, and continuous cocktails at the American Bar. An enormous sky-sign over the roof invited the public to elect “a Lancashire lass for a Lancashire Borough”—this was a bright thought which occurred to my head agent as soon as he realized that the Linthorpes had property in Westmorland.