A full working day starting with a 5am Little Chef breakfast meeting and ending up beyond 3am the following morning which resulted in a Polling Day Triumph with both Michael Pope and Derek Giles elected and all nine St Neots Town Council candidates giving us control and the Mayoralty - We had win a handsome landslide victory!
I was awake early again at about 5.00am and got dressed and ready to assist in any problems that might occur on the morning delivery of the "Please Vote Today leaflet". In the end, my colleagues managed this and so I just made telephone calls to both organising centres to make sure that this was the case before dropping off further information at each Committee Room and making my way to the Southoe Little Chef for breakfast. I had arranged a rendezvous with the other early morning staff and had my cellular telephone along with me keep in touch. I gave Keith Seiler a last-minute briefing about the Eaton Socon committee room and then welcomed a host of colleagues who were coming hungrily to the table. Just about broke away in time to get to the Eaton Socon Polling Station where I found a problem in telling before we had even started.
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The first teller, Chris James, had her own clipboard and telling pad and had declined the official version that included an electoral register and was then still walking towards the station as the polling booth was opening! There was no sign of Derek and so I organised the telling positions to include chairs and a desk for them to use and only left them once I was sure. To School Gardens where I made calls to make sure that the Priory Park telling was in order and then started to set up the computer there ready to receive the first numbers. We were telling all right by now and I was trying to get the numbers brought back regularly from the booths to keep the information up to date regularly. Eaton was first to use the pre-printed knock-up list for pensioners and this proved very successful. The morning started fine but was soon to become very stormy with rain in showers.
I got both centres to keep running totals on the turnout (ours and theirs) but Priory took some time to get going. By lunchtime things were going all right but I was having to keep stopping up gaps in the organisation as the two Eaton’s Committee room organisers were letting matters fall between them and the numbers were not coming back from the Polling station regularly enough. I was thus prevented from leaving Eaton Socon for Priory Park but did stay in contact with them by telephone. To save the house telephone and provide an available second line, I brought my portable phone and was prepared to use it all day by keeping it with me. Trouble was the battery charger gave out and I could thereafter only use it from the mains and, even then, by use of a temporary power-supply that John Roscoe had commissioned for me. John Matthewman had arrived and I was now seeking advice and help with dividing the electors into walks to see if the computer could effectively track the turnout and provide the information to knock them up even more effectively.
John arrived and advised we split the register into about twenty parts and then left for lunch whilst we planned this process. We were ready for him on his return and then had the files changed and the computer up and running by mid-afternoon. We then tried it out for a while before cutting in live, using the printed output for knocking up rather than the crossing off of names on the Shuttleworths. I sent John off to Priory Park to do the same thing and then settled down to implement the system to its ultimate and develop administrative systems around this new use of the computer. I then trained David Giles to become an operator and, once I was confident he could manage, I took a walk out to the Polling Station to see what was going on. The roads were jam-packed, there were queues at the desk and, with people thronging around, we seemed to have a very big turnout. I spotted several more problems occurring with the telling and called up more support.
I ran into trouble with the Priory Park committee room who, under weight of work and lack of task priorities, were now failing to come up with the numbers I needed and eventually flagged the desperate message "do want statistics or do you want us to knock people up?". I decided for the first time that my efforts were needed more there and so gathered up most of my belongings and went over. I stopped by the polling booth first to see the level of activity and then went on to find the Priory committee room bottle-necked on the computer. John Matthewman was intent on inputting the results of knocking up each time (people not voting, voting later etc) and so getting behind and he was also managing the knocking up from the screen instead of printing out summary reports and letting the committee room manager call for the detail. He also had a worry about printing out the sprocket-fed paper reports so that they always ended up top of form. I got a couple of general reports out and then, trying to get a better system going, upset John so that he stormed off and invited me to do it myself.
My protests not succeeding, I took over the helm and soon had the reports spewing out and the numbers cascading in and managed to get a couple more series of knock-ups going after 8.00pm before we called it a day and prepared to leave for the committee room. I had made my peace with John by this time - he is a great guy but not the most organised - and made arrangements for him to attend the count. I then raced home to have a shower, shave and change into my best suite before rushing back to be at Longsands Community College Hall in time for the count. My first chore there was to provide all of the active members with further copies of the Counting Agent instructions and a pad so that they could sample and then check the count. This was a little difficult to organise, but I got them all dispersed around the Priory Park and Eaton Socon tables and then had trouble getting them to actually do the sampling as they simply sat there quite mesmerised by the experience. Both District and Town Council election ballot papers were poured onto the table and the counting agents were thrust into immediate difficulty as the two had to be sampled at the same time. The District was counted first and soon Michael Pope had moved into a big lead in the Priory Ward. Our attention then moved on to Eaton Socon where Derek edged in front and then sailed away. The counting agents were beginning to function more effectively now, and we could get proper sampling going and, with respect to Derek, the results were very reassuring.
Then the Town Council counts started, and the procedure was to lay out a large white summary sheet and to mark on each vote identified for each person so that we could see the ticks building up. It was soon apparent again that our Priory Town Council candidates were well ahead of Ruth Clapham, the existing Tory Mayor, and with that she swept out of the count with her husband and was not to be seen again. It was interesting to see that there was more support for Ruth Clapham in DH1 (the home-based older part of Priory) than DH2 (the hill estates of Birds and Longsands) which may have been a reflection on how we had concentrated our canvassing in what we thought was our worst area. The long-drawn our count for Eaton Socon where at first Ross McKay was heading the weaker of our candidates and then we pulled ahead with all five as the "1,2,3,8 9" programming began to show through.
In the end, we had quite a pattern of team voting, and we had won the day but the clock had advanced to 3.00am. John Matthewman had brought his headphones and radio and was relaying the results in Cambridge City where the Liberal Democrats were doing well and so this took the pressure off of reporting the St Neots Town Council vote to the newspapers. We had won all four Priory Park Town seats and all five Eaton Socon ones so as to give us nine, the Tories eight with the other the lone Labour Daisy Seager. We went back to The Hayling View and drank refreshments whilst I printed out the ‘We won’ results which we went out to paste up on all of the flagboards throughout the Town. There was the need to report the result to the daily press and local radio stations which we did before turning in at 4.00am.