Boyle had unsuccessfully contested Hastings at the 1900 general election[2] and had his country seat at Hurst Green in the then Rye constituency.

[7] Hutchinson by contrast described the Education Act as a gross injustice to non-conformists and relied on appeals to religion elsewhere in his campaign calling for the maintenance of the Protestant character of the Church of England.

The letter urged voters to return Liberal candidates such as Hutchinson to Parliament with a view to a speedy reversal of the current education policy.

[8] This focus on religion may have served Hutchinson particularly well at this time as the Weald was said to be one of the few significant pockets of Nonconformity in the rural Home Counties.

It was reported that on Friday 13 March (perhaps inevitably on such a date) that he met with his second motor accident, being left stranded on a country road with the induction coil out of gear.

It seems that Boyle had been right to try and focus on agricultural issues as one commentator has noted that the import duty on corn (which had been introduced as a Boer War revenue measure in the 1902 budget) was a factor in this and other by-election upsets of the day.

However the Tory election agent at least had sensed the danger as he told supporters that a very determined effort was being made by what he called the Radical party to win the seat and he complained that he had had to deal with a mass of misrepresentation and false statements, accusing the Liberals of even circulating untrue statements about Mr Boyle’s religious views.

Complaints were made that they had brought in a number of professional outside agents, paid by other local Liberal associations or by headquarters in Parliament Street, payments to whom were unlikely to be included in the official election expense returns.