In this series, Mike Houlahan looks back at how the Otago Daily Times reacted to significant events. Today, he looks at the highly contentious 1938 local body election campaign.
Political writers today like to talk about dirty elections, but campaigning does not often get that robust in Dunedin.
That was not always the case though, and it certainly was not in 1938 when Edwin Thoms Cox ran for re-election as the mayor of Dunedin.
Many things irked the good folk of the city, and also the Otago Daily Times, about the mayor, but first and foremost the fact that he was Dunedin’s first Labour Party-backed mayor was enough to stoke the anti-Cox fire.
Labour’s campaign launch was on April 20, and the audience of 50-60 at Mornington School Hall was not an encouraging start. Rev Cox defended his record, and especially the council’s provision of a welfare fund for the city’s unemployed — who were legion, New Zealand still suffering the after-effects of the Great Depression.
Rev Cox called the controversy a "great hullabaloo" and said those who had complained about it were spouting "political flapdoodle."
His opponent Andrew Allen, by contrast, built on a small attendance at an early meeting at Dalmore the following day to "comfortably fill" the Woodhaugh Sunday School Hall that evening.
"Mr Allen said his first aim if elected," the ODT reported, "would be to unite the councillors into a harmonious body and prevent the entrance of party politics into municipal affairs."
Progressing what was to be his main theme throughout the campaign, Mr Allan decried "caucus control" of council as "the most objectionable form of municipal administration that a city could have."
Things deteriorated fast. By the 23rd the ODT was printing letters which protested that Rev Cox had "taken a leaf from Herr Hitler’s copy book on propaganda", and Rev Cox was getting decidedly prickly.
At a council meeting on the 26th, during a debate on a controversial purchase by the council of land in Wakari for a playground, Rev Cox lashed out at Dunedin’s newspapers — "their leading articles are a disgrace to the city, really a disgrace," and darkly suggested that the council should take them all over. (He was later to tell voters in St Clair that "the press in Dunedin is deliberately lying all the time".)
A day later, at what the ODT called a "fiery" meeting, Rev Cox said of the numerous interruptions to his remarks that if he were not a minister that he would like to say "something strong", before going on to disparage the audience: "You nabobs of Anderson’s Bay, you Citizens’ Association representatives, you multimillionaires, get rid once and forever of the men who are throttling the growth of the city and put in a progressive party — Labour."
Rev Cox’s subsequent election meetings, unsurprisingly, were described as "somewhat stormy", and even "hostile".
At a meeting at Woodhaugh Rev Cox said, in obvious reference to Mr Allen "It is a strange commentary on human frailty that men who are reputedly honest should have so little regard for truth and honesty when they aspire to public office."
The next day, at a Tainui meeting, Mr Allen defended his campaign as a "clean fight" before adding "If that remark was addressed to me personally I say merely that it is beneath contempt."
The two men went on trading insults right up until polling day, Rev Cox claiming Mr Allen’s supporters were stacking his meetings and Mr Allen claiming that Labour was ignoring Dunedin’s best interests.
Sadly, the city’s fun had to be brought to a close by it actually voting, and on May 11 Dunedin handed Rev Cox a stunning defeat, Mr Allen winning by 4038 votes.
Rev Cox then, unsuccessfully, stood for the Labour nomination in Dunedin West and lost when contesting the Taranaki seat of Egmont in the 1943 election.
Andrew Allen served as mayor until 1944, and was appointed a member of the Legislative Council in 1950.
