THE boisterous banter and insults that marked the Commons' debate on the Queen Speech last week suggest that modern politics resembles a bear-garden at times.

But we must be grateful that the rough stuff that embroiled our ancestors in Blackburn in the last century no longer prevails - even if it is said in a new book out this week to be mild in contrast to the ructions elsewhere in the period.

For we find that before 1832 - when the new cottonopolis had no MPs or even a town council despite its 30,000 population growing with industry's boom by 10,000 each decade - that public opinion was at times expressed through direct action. As history teacher Matthew Cole relates in the new Aspects of Blackburn anthology edited by Alan Duckworth, local studies assistant at Blackburn and Darwen's public libraries, the town saw farmers and provision dealers attacked in 1800 and 1808 in protest at high food prices; in 1818, 4,000 weavers waving the revolutionary French tricolour marched to the Mellor mansion of cotton magnate Henry Sudell to demand a pay rise and 1826 brought the Power Loom Riots that saw a 10,000-strong Luddite mob smash the machinery in town-centre mills before being fired on by troops.

But if the people being given a voice with arrival of parliamentary representation was deemed to have encouraged more peaceful means of expression, Mr Cole's examination of elections and politics in the town's history reveals that the opposite was the case.

To begin with, the new set-up was hardly democracy. Only two out of every 100 adults could vote in those early elections and the upshot was they were represented by their bosses - of the town's first 15 MPs, 14 were textile magnates - who sought political power through a blend of enticement and threat.

It was a system that for quite some time resisted the emergence of candidates from out of town and produced some hectic and violent election scenes.

Says Mr Cole: "The most notorious features of Victorian elections, however, were patronage and corruption between and within parties. "With no secret ballot, candidates were able to offer inducements (ranging from hospitality to bonus payments to employees or even simple bribes) to Blackburn's 627 voters and, if unsuccessful by generosity, used menace - as did the 98 per cent of Blackburnians who had no vote. Elections were thus turbulent, murky affairs."

He relates how in first election of 1832, cotton boss and Whig candidate William Turner, one of the four contenders for the two new Blackburn seats at Westminster, opened his campaign at the Old Bull in front of the Parish Church - today, the Cathedral - by rolling beer-barrels into the churchyard "for the inglorious satisfaction of his supporters who supped amid the gravestones" and how the 13-vote defeat of his opponent, Liberal scholar, John Bowring caused riots in Ainsworth Street and around the Old Bull.

At the election three years later, a mob of Bowring supporters threw his opponent, mill owner WH Hornby, over Salford Bridge and gangs pelted his mansion in King Street with stones at the polls in 1841 and 1853. Turner's defeat by just one vote in the 1841 election sparked riots that led to the Tory rooms in the Old Bull being ransacked and parts of the building gutted before troops restored order. In 1868, a battle broke out at the hustings between 50,000 rival supporters and, like the result of the poll 16 years earlier, that year's outcome was declared void after allegations of bribery and intimidation, with the Tories accused of threatening to sack workers who dared vote Liberal. Indeed, some were sacked and a few months later marched to Preston to meet Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone and tell him their grievances, leading him to drop his opposition to the secret ballot, which he introduced in 1872 - a factor which perhaps lay behind Blackburn being the first place in Britain to erect a statue to him after his death, despite the town not having a Liberal tradition.

The arrival of the secret ballot helped to remove the murk and menace from parliamentary campaigns, but also deprived them of the hurley-burly and excitement that is seldom found today's politics.

Aspects of Blackburn , which also features Darwen and topics ranging from canal-boat building and the experiences of one of the town's first Asian immigrants to the history of the Roman Catholic Church in Blackburn and the early history of Calderstones Hospital, Whalley, includes many old photographs. (Wharncliffe Publishing, £9.95).

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.