COUNTESS AND LABOUR

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18758, 11 January 1923, Page 8

COUNTESS AND LABOUR

BILL-POSTING DISPUTE. AN ELECTION INCIDENT. The final stages of the election at Bath have been enlivened by a hot encounter between Countess Temple and the supporters of the Labour candidate, wrote the Bath correspondent of the Manchester Guardian prior to the poll. Lord and Lady Temple live at Newton Park, on the western outskirts of the city, and the Countess motored to Twerton-on-Avon, a working class district of the constituency, and personally superintended the removal of election posters from a house owned by the earl which is being used .as a committee room for Mr Elvin, the Labour candidate, and a keen advocate of the capital levy. The Labour supporters are boiling with indignation, and at a subsequent meeting Mr Elvin said he had been informed that Lady Temple intended to repeat her action. The Labour Party did not want to make an example of the Countess, so he suggested that her friends should restrain her. Otherwise they would be compelled to take action. Lady Temple, in an interview, said she received an anonymous letter asking her whether she know that a house belonging to the Earl was plastered over with bills and disfigured with chalk marks. She at once wont down with her husband’s sub-agent and found the house in the condition described. The house was neither a public bill-posting station nor a derelict building. She told the occupier he could put os many bilie in the window as he pleased, but she could not allow Lord Temple’s property to be disfigured in this way, and asked him to remove the bills. He answered that he could not, as he had no one to help him. “Then,” said Lady Temple, “I will do so myself.”

"The bills were then removed,” continued the Countess, “by the aub-agent and my chauffeur. That is all there is in the incident, end the Labour man who dares to sav anything else will be prosecuted. I shall do it myself." The Countess agreed that the occupier had said he was a poor man. and wanted to earn a few shillings by displaying bills, but she expressed the opinion that he was not as poor ns he said ho was.