THE FIRST VICTORY.

New Zealand Graphic, 27 June 1906, Page 29

THE FIRST VICTORY.

“ The contest was quiet but severe. Mr. Seddon had probably never worked harder in his life than he did on that eventful polling day in September, 1879. All day long he drove a trap between Kumara and Hokitika, the principal centres of the electorate. Some of his old constituents maintain that he did not simply drive, but ‘drove furiously.’ At any rate, he must have taken large numbers of voters to the poll by his own efforts. His friends were in good force also, and gave him the valuable assistance he needed on that very important occasion. Wherever there was a vote to be obtained, he was there, and he accepted absolutely no excuse for any supporter of his not recording a vote.”

The efforts that Mr. Seddon and his friends put forth were successful. Mr. Reid headed the list—over 100 votes ahead of Mr. Seddon; but “Digger Dick” was 240 votes in front of Mr. Dungan, and 340 ahead of Mr. Barff. The 800 electors who polled for Mr. Seddon were immensely proud of their achievement, and when Mr. Seddon went up and down the Coast on his jubilee trip in 1904, the air was full of reminiscences of that fierce and never-to-be-forgotten struggle. “ Dillmanstown, close to Kumara,” says the “ New Zealand Times,” is the nursery of Mr. Seddon’s greatness in the arena of national politics. It was here, in the election of 1879, that the 287 votes polled for him sealed his election. These were some of the eight hundred referred to earlier. There is a halo of glory about them yet, and an old miner on the Coast feels it as great an honour to be of the eight hundred as Garibaldi’s Italians to be of The Thousand. Ou the verandah of the old accommodation-house at Taipo, in the jaws of the Otira, three old identities stood waiting for Mr. Seddon to appear from Canterbury on his jubilee trip. They had been miners in the early days, their trousers were still tied round the knees in token, and their faces spoke of many years of roughing it. They addressed the Premier as ‘Dick,’ just as if they had never been separated by the great chasms that divide brilliant success from unmarked toil, and plenty of it. Did the old chaps remember the first election of 1876, he asked, when Seddon and Reid polled only two votes each at Taipo? Did they not? was the remorseful reply, as well as if it were only yesterday. And did they remember the second election, when he got every vote at Taipo but one? Yes, of course, they did, and had they not been looking for that one man for all these years, intending to obliterate him? They all laughed together. ‘We thought it was the returning officer,’ said one, ‘and we had a down on him for a long time, but he gave me his word he never voted at all.’ ” It was with the help and encouragement of loyal and stouthearted friends such as these that “Our Dick” left the Coast in 1879 to make his way in the House at Wellington.

This may be taken as a convenient point to emphasise the fact that Mr. Seddon sat continuously in the House of Representatives from 1879 to the day of his death. In 1882, when the Hokitika electorate was divided, Mr. Seddon stood for the new district of Kumara, and defeated Mr. E. Blake, once member for the Avon district, in Canterbury. In 1884, Mr. Seddon stood for Kumara again, and was returned by a substantial majority over his old opponent. At the next general election he was returned unopposed. Then Kumara was merged into Westland, and Mr. Seddon, standing for the big district, was returned at the head of the poll by a majority of nearly 400 votes over Mr. J. Grimmond, who had sat for Hokitika. From that time up to his death, he has been returned for Westland continuously and unopposed, except for the occasion when the Prohibition Party nominated a candidate in order to secure an effective local option poll. This record of 27 years’ continuous tenure of a Parliamentary seat is unique in our annals. There is only one member now in the House who sat prior to that date, viz., Sir William Steward. The Premier was therefore the father as well as the leader of the House, as Sir William Steward has been for intervals out of Parliar ment.