Embedded Files
Documents released under the Official Information Act about the Communist Party in the Southern Bays proved disappointing in their lack of detail about anything that actually happened here during the period the service and its predecessor the Special Branch of the police kept a Cold War eye on the Party and its members.
The Party stood election candidates in safe Labour seats and that was one reason Island Bay was selected to put forward the Communist message. As Ron Smith explained ‘We never at any time expected to get elected. We stood candidates to present the Party as a legal political party in those times of cold war and to take its policy out to the working class and the people’. The Party vote hovered around 1% but immediately after the war in 1946 the vote hit 2.6% in Island Bay, representing 345 people. In 1966, the last year the Party stood, Ron Smith received 139 votes.
The Communist Party’s highest vote in Wellington was recorded by Connie Birchfield who got 9143 votes for the Hospital Board in 1944; she received 6672 for the City Council in 1947. The erosion of support for the Party during the 1951 waterfront lockout and supporting strikes and the following snap election was apparent in her result for the general election in Island Bay that year: the lowest-ever communist vote in the electorate: 99.
Each vote was hard won, as one of the documents in the Security Intelligence Service files shows. In an effort to boost the Communist vote in 1949, at 10am on 9 October, six party members gathered to carry out a canvass of Ōwhiro Bay seeking to interest people in the Party paper the ‘People’s Voice’ and other propaganda. From the file note it is clear one of the people there was a police informer, probably a young and new recruit mentioned in other papers as having found proof of illegal lotteries run by the party. That information was not actionable because to do so would identify the informer.
His information about the canvass in Ōwhiro Bay similarly gave the police little information they could put to use. It seemed that Ōwhiro was not yet ripe for revolution:
“The reception received by [the Comrades] was hostile, and a series of arguments prevailed. On the whole the outcome was highly unsuccessful. At 12.15pm the party returned to Newtown without having accomplished its objective”.
“In the afternoon at 2:30pm, Comrades George Elder and Ted Smith carried the stump [speakers platform – ed] to the Basin Reserve. On their arrival they were met by Comrades Ken Stanton and Ian Mitchell; there were no spectators”.
Ron Smith’s book ‘Working Class Son My Fight Against Capitalism and War’ was published in 1994 with an introduction by Vincent O’Sullivan. It was edited by Harry Orsman, the lexicographer of the Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand English and, as could be expected, is a very fine read. It is dedicated to his wife ‘Carmen, who carried the burden’.
The official results as reported to parliament of the 1949 elections show a total of 51 votes cast for the Communist Party candidate Ron Smith in Houghton, Island and Ōwhiro Bays. He got 184 in all, mostly from Newtown, then part of the Island Bay electorate. The single Ōwhiro Bay (Happy Valley) supporter must have been out on the day of the canvass! Either that or the Party sent someone over the hill to ensure there was no zero vote recorded anywhere, so the Communist Party would be seen as having influence everywhere.
Google Sites
Report abuse