In spite of the difficulties noted above Pelling typifies the ‘marine population of the little coastal ports’ of Essex as mainly Conservative, thus going against the grain of the Liberal tendency in the area. This was true also of the Suffolk and Norfolk inshoremen. He states that the deepsea fishermen of Lowestoft and Yarmouth were split, with the trawlermen being Conservative and the driftermen Liberal over the issue of Free Trade. The aggregated interview data largely supports this description. Pelling's complaint about the difficulties created by the 1872 Ballot Act was made before the widespread collection of oral history interviews. These now provide a potential source of correlations which are known to exist because income, occupation and so forth are united, not by statistical inference, but through the coherence of personal experience. As the informants were resident in eight different constituencies it would require many more of them, even if space permitted, to contribute to understanding the political history of the region. Our main interest is not which party held power but how the political values of individuals are related to their industrial and social position.

The interviews contain a substantial amount of information on the politics of farm workers as well as of fishermen.