THEY were true blue but ended up black and blue.

An angry mob of Liberal supporters so detested their Tory rivals they attacked two voters, smashed up the local party’s meeting room, and hurled brickbats into several homes, injuring one woman in the chest.

The gang ironically championed the ideals of William Wilberforce, the peaceful English politician who in Parliament became the reasoned voice for the abolition of slavery.

However, they resorted to extraordinary violence when local election fever climaxed on polling day in Botley, part of the Fareham constituency, shortly before Christmas in 1886.

Officials at the booth were so fearful they had to run across fields to reach the railway station with the ballot boxes to be taken to the count.

Extraordinarily the fracas was never reported by the Press at the time and only came to the public’s attention at the Hampshire Epiphany Quarter Sessions in Winchester the following month when the dock was overflowing with prisoners.

Twelve defendants, all labourers, stood charged with riot and tumult and violent assault.

In his opening address, the formidable EU Bullen – later to become Recorder of Southampton – said of their actions: “They thought themselves justified in using this violence to show their aversion to all Conservatives or Tories or anything of that kind.

“They thought it was their best to show their Liberalism by insulting their neighbours and destroying their property. The prisoners and their friends were not only political partisans but cowards also for they threw into apartments where children and women were present. One, Mrs Beaumont, was seriously hurt in the chest by a brickbat as to be unable unable to go before the magistrates to give evidence.”

The court principally heard evidence from a man called Harding who was introduced to the court as being one of “the most agreeable, amiable and most presentable of old gentlemen.”

He described how he was attacked virtually on his doorstep, identifying one defendant as having thrown stones and mud at him and three others who preventing him shutting his gate.

“It was forced and damaged. I was driven to take shelter under a cedar tree and I was followed by a volley of stones and brickbats which were thrown at me. They smashed my windows with bats and other radical arguments.”

Harding told jurors how he fled to the party’s committee room where the mob again hustled him, pushed him and tried to knock him over.

“I tried to induce the mob to behave more like men than beasts but stones were thrown at the house and windows were broken.

“The mob went away but returned. The shower of brickbats was awful, the damage great, and the howls and hoots of of the mob tremendous. Next morning, whole windows in Botley were exceptional, which for two hours that night was in the hands of a Liberal or a radical mob.

“I escaped across the field homeward and was happily uninjured.”

The second witness was equally scathing of the attack at the polling station and at his house.

Mr Beaumont, who described himself as the personation agent at the poll, told the court: “They came to the former and demanded to have old ....... T Warner. I found my home a complete wreck as to glass, my wife ill and my children frightened by the use of brickbats and other things, one of which struck my wife and she has been unwell ever since.”

Each defendant produced an alibi, claiming they were elsewhere at the time, which readers of the Hampshire Advertiser were informed were at best weak and in several cases a failure.

The jury only deliberated for a few minutes before finding all 12 guilty.

The chairman, Melville Portal, was damning in his criticism of their behaviour.

“It is intolerable such riots and outrages should take place. The essence of the law is that everyone is free to exercise his right and duty and because people differ from you, you have no right to molest them.

“If I thought this offence might occur again, the punishment would be more severe but in the hope that is not the case and with a caution to you as to your future conduct, I sentence you each to one month’s imprisonment with hard labour.”