(This item first appeared in my ‘Brighton and Beyond’ column in the Brighton Argus on 12th October 2022)
Over the summer, as a fair weather cyclist, I regularly rode along the seafront and along the Undercliff Walk to Saltdean. The only part of that route that I don’t enjoy is the stretch alongside the Marina mainly because of the proliferation of disappointing architecture.
More worryingly, there have been proposals in recent years to build tower blocks, including a forty story ‘Roaring Forties’ block. That proposal was condemned by Councillor Nick Childs as a ‘Poundland Dubai’. I couldn’t agree more, as did the then Secretary of State, Michael Gove, who rejected the appeal against the City Council’s sensible decision to turn down the application.
All this reminds me of the late Dennis Hobden who was the first-ever Labour Member of Parliament in Sussex and who steered the Brighton Marina Act 1968 through Parliament. This Act paved the way for the construction of the Marina.
Dennis was a fascinating man, full of contradictions, who I had the pleasure of knowing for a decade or so. I shared with him the same birthday (although not the year!) along with Baby Spice, the golfer Jack Nicklaus, and Benny Hill!
Dennis was the first Labour Member of Parliament for any seat in Sussex having been elected to represent Brighton Kemptown in 1964 with a majority of just seven votes. This victory came after seven recounts. The person responsible for insisting on recount after recount was William ‘Nobby’ Clarke, a veteran councillor of 50 years, election agent, a railway porter, and the guest of honour at my wedding. William Clarke Park (known also as ‘The Patch’) was named in Nobby’s honour.
Dennis Hobden was a most interesting character. He was a spiritualist and a Freemason, both very unusual then and now within the Labour Party.
I first met him in 1983 when I became a Labour Party delegate to the Labour Group on the old Brighton Borough Council. I arrived early for my first meeting and Dennis was the only other person in the room. His opening words to me were: “So what are you studying at the University?” He had a view that the drift to the left in the local party was all down to middle-class students who didn’t understand the working class base of Labour in Brighton.
When I told him that I wasn’t a student and mentioned my background as a conscientious objector from apartheid South Africa, any frostiness completely disappeared and he could not have been more friendly. When I was unexpectedly elected to Brighton Borough Council in a by-election in 1985, Dennis sent me the loveliest note which I still treasure: “I pray that we will see the back of this Thatcher lot before I die, but I think I will be content with Labour winning Regency Ward”.
And, no, he didn’t invite me to become a Freemason!
What was commendable about Dennis was that he carried no airs and graces, nor a sense of superiority about having been a Member of Parliament, a quality shared with another former MP, David Lepper.
After he lost his seat in Parliament in 1970, Dennis continued to serve as a councillor and was the Mayor of Brighton for a year.
He was a trade unionist, an officer in the Union of Post Office Workers. He served in Parliament for six years before losing his seat to the Conservative, Andrew Bowden, who held it for the next 27 years before the seat was won by Labour’s Des Turner.
Dennis wrote a column for the Argus under the pseudonym, Robert Street, the name of an actual road that runs alongside the old Argus building off North Road in Brighton. It was the road in which Dennis was born.
Dennis was a man with a strong sense of fair play. When the Labour Group was rushed into a decision by its leadership to ask the then Chief Executive of the Borough Council to stand down, Dennis felt that it was an unacceptable way to treat a long-serving public official whose only crime was to be a slightly boring, non-partisan and not very dynamic. He was, nevertheless, a highly competent, local government officer. Dennis resigned from the Labour Group in protest, not wanting to be associated with this action.
Dennis died far too young, in 1995, aged just 75, having had a heart attack a few years earlier. He would have loved to have seen the election of the 1997 Labour government, but I suspect he would have despaired at the number of former student politicians elected. What he would think about today’s political class would be unprintable.
I remember Dennis with great fondness. He was a dedicated public servant, thoughtful, complicated, a one-of-a-kind politician, with a wicked sense of humour. They don’t make them like that anymore.
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