THE next morning amazement fluttered over a million breakfast tables and throbbed in a million railway carriages.

For all the fierceness of political passions, parliamentary elections are but sombre occurrences to the general public.

Rarely are they attended by the picturesque, the dramatic, the tragic.

But already the dramatic had touched the election of Hickney Heath, stimulating interest in the result.

Thousands, usually apathetic as to political matters, opened their newspapers to see how the ex-convict candidate had fared.