Ellen
Wilkinson, the daughter of a worker in a textile
factory, was born in Manchester on
8th October, 1891. Ellen's parents, Richard Wilkinson and Ellen Wood,
were both Methodists. After a period
out of work, Ellen Wilkinson's father became a an insurance clerk.
Ellen was educated at Ardwick School and at the age of eleven won
the first of several scholarships. She later recalled that from this
date "I paid for my own education by scholarship until I left
university." In 1906 Ellen won a teaching bursary that meant
she could enter the Manchester Day Training College for half a week
and she spent the rest of the week teaching at Oswald Road Elementary
School.
Although her father was a supporter of the Conservative
Party, Ellen developed an interested in socialism after reading
Merrie England by Robert Blatchford.
At the age of sixteen Ellen Wilkinson joined both the Independent
Labour Party after hearing a speech made by Kathleen
Glasier.
In 1910 Wilkinson became a student at Manchester
University where she studied history under Professor George Unwin.
Wilkinson was active in the University Socialist Federation where
she met Clifford Allen and G.D.H.
Cole. Wilkinson became disillusioned with her studies at Manchester
and later, when she became involved with the National Council of Labour
Colleges, she realised "how little real history" she had
been taught at university.
In 1912 became a member of the National Union
of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and the following year was
recruited as a district organizer. Wilkinson also ran the local branch
of the Fabian Society where she arranged
for people such as Charlotte Despard, Katharine
Glasier and Beatrice Webb to speak in
Manchester. A pacifist, Wilkinson supported
the Non-Conscription Fellowship during the
First World War.
There were very few women trade union officials at this time but in
July 1915 she was employed by the National Union of Distributive &
Allied Workers (AUCE). Wilkinson, the first woman organizer of the
AUCE, was also active in local politics and in 1923 was elected to
serve on the Manchester City Council.
In the 1924 General Election she was elected
to represent Middlesbrough East.
In the House of Commons
Wilkinson became known as Red Ellen (both for the colour of her hair
and her politics). Active in the 1926 General
Strike, afterwards she was co-author with Frank Horrabin and Raymond
Postgate of The Workers History of
the Great Strike (1927).
Following the 1929 General Election the Prime
Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, appointed
Wilkinson as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health. Wilkinson
opposed the National Government formed by MacDonald and as a result
lost her seat in the 1931 General Election.
While out of the House of Commons Wilkinson
wrote two books on politics, Peeps at Politicians
(1931) and The Terror in Germany
(1933) and a novel, The Division Bell Mystery
(1932) and contributed articles to the left-wing feminist journal,
Time and Tide.
In the 1935 General Election Wilkinson re-entered
Parliament as MP for Jarrow. The town had one of the worst unemployment
records in Britain. In 1935 nearly 80% of the insured population was
out of work. Of the 8,000 skilled manual workers in Jarrow, only 100
were working. In 1936 Wilkinson organised a march of 200 unemployed
workers from Jarrow to London where she
presented a petition to parliament calling for government action.
Wilkinson later wrote an account of the Jarrow Crusade and its outcome
called The Town That Was Murdered
(1939).
In 1936 Wilkinson joined with Stafford Cripps,
Victor Gollancz, Aneurin
Bevan, and George Strauss to start
a left-wing weekly journal called Tribune.
Wilkinson became associated with the left-wing group of Labour
Party MPs that campaigned for the formation of a Popular Front
with other left-wing groups in Europe to prevent the spread of fascism.
In the 1936 Labour Party Conference, several party members, including
Wilkinson, Stafford Cripps, Aneurin
Bevan and Charles Trevelyan, argued
that military help should be given to the Spanish
Popular Front government, fighting for survival against General
Francisco Franco and his right-wing Nationalist
Army.
Despite a passionate appeal from Senora Isobel de Palencia, the Labour
Party supported the Conservative
Government's policy of non-intervention.
In December 1936, Wilkinson and Clement Attlee
travelled to Spain where they documented the German bombing of Valencia
and
Madrid
and
gave support to the International Brigades fighting against General
Francisco Franco.
In
May 1937 Wilkinson
joined with Charlotte
Haldane,
Duchess
of Atholl, Eleanor
Rathbone
and J.
B. Priestley to
establish the Dependents Aid Committee, an organization which raised
money for the families of men who were members of the International
Brigades.
Wilkinson
was a strong advocate of Hire Purchase reform. She was concerned about
the large number of working-class people who fell into arrears and
then lost the goods that they had partly paid for. In 1937 an average
of 600 people a day were having high purchase goods seized. These
were then sold to the public, providing companies with extra profits.
Wilkinson also objected to the high rates of interest being charged
on the goods. In 1938 Wilkinson's High Purchase
Act became law. The act required traders to display on the goods
the actual cash price plus the sum added for interest, and protected
hirers who had paid at least one third of the sum contracted.
In the coalition government formed by Winston
Churchill in 1940, Wilkinson was appointed parliamentary secretary
to the Minister of Pensions. Later she joined the team led by Herbert
Morrison at the Home Office. Wilkinson was made responsible for
air raid shelters and was instrumental in the introduction of the
Morrison Shelters in 1941.
Following the 1945 General Election, the
new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, appointed
Wilkinson as Minister of Education, the first woman in British history
to hold the post. Wilkinson's plans to increase the school-leaving
age to sixteen had to be abandoned when the government decided that
the measure would be too expensive. However, she did managed to persuade
Parliament to pass the 1946 School Milk Act
that gave free milk to all British schoolchildren. Ellen Wilkinson,
depressed by her failure to bring in all the reforms she believed
necessary, took an overdose of barbiturates and died on 6th February,
1947.
(1) Ellen Wilkinson described
her childhood in a radio interview on 27th October, 1945.
My mother had operation after operation. Father had been out of work
a long time when I was coming. There was no unemployment benefit or
maternity or child welfare schemes. Mother kept going by dressmaking.
She couldn't afford proper attendance at my birth and was badly handled.
The result was a life of agonizing suffering. But she had the most
marvellous recuperative power and would not be an invalid. Once the
awful pain was still, she was up and around.
I remember my father speaking bitterly of the life of undernourished
idle men, wanting to work, but who were caught up in the realities
of the over specialized, under organised cotton trade of pre-war days
and of the days when he trampled from one mill to another trying to
get a job.
(2) In
1906 Ellen Wilkinson became a teacher at the Oswald Road Elementary
School. She recorded her experiences in the classroom in her book
Myself When Young (1936)
The boys were filling in time, bored stiff under they reached 14 years
and could leave. I was an undersized girl. They all towered above
me. My only hope was to interest them sufficiently to keep them reasonably
quiet. One day the Headmaster came in and demanded to know why the
boys were not sitting upright with their arms folded. "They are
sitting that way because I am interesting them" I replied. To
which the Headmaster responded by caning almost everyone. We had a
grand row, and I was sent home to be reprimanded by an Inspector.
But my temper had not calmed. The surging hate of all the silly punishment
I had endured in my school days prevented any awe of the Inspector.
I whirled all this out at the unfortunate man, who listened quietly
and advised: "Don't do any more teaching when you have finished
your two years here. Take my advice. Go and be a missionary in China."
(3) At
sixteen Ellen Wilkinson was converted to Socialism by reading Merrie
England by Robert Blatchford.
It was all very elementary but Blatchford made socialists in those
days by the sheer simplicity of his argument. Here was the answer
to the chaotic rebellion of my school years. My mother's illness fitted
into this protest against the treatment of the sick who could not
pay, the inefficiency of commercialism, the waste, the extravagance,
and the poverty.
(4)
In her book Myself When Young, Wilkinson described hearing
Kathleen Glasier speak at an Independent
Labour Party meeting in Manchester.
It
was a memorable meeting. I got a seat in the front row of the gallery.
It seemed noisy to me, whose sole experience of meetings was of religious
services. Rows of men filled the platform. But my eyes were riveted
on a small slim woman her hair simply coiled into her neck, Katherine
Glasier. She was speaking on 'Socialism as a Religion'. To stand on
a platform of the Free Trade Hall, to be able to sway a great crowd,
to be able to make people work to make life better, to remove slums
and underfeeding and misery just because one came and spoke to them
about it - that seemed the highest destiny any women could ever hope
for.
(5)
In her book North Country Born, Sarah Davies described working
with Ellen Wilkinson as teenagers in the Independent
Labour Party.
For
a day's propaganda cycling, we were furnished with sandwiches, a primus
stove, stacks of leaflets and The Clarion. We held open-air
meetings to catch people as they came out of church or chapel. We
scrawled slogans in chalk and we sang England Arise outside
pubs and on village greens.
(6)
Margery Corbett Ashby commented on the work
of Helen Wilkinson in the NUWSS in a letter
written on 9th September 1978.
Helen
Wilkinson was a first rate organizer who in addition to the necessary
virtues of good organizing and eloquent speaking, possessed deep convictions
and enthusiasm. To her delightfully warm personality and great charm
she added courage in facing hostile audience and wit to deter hecklers.
(7) The
Daily Telegraph (12th February, 1925)
Helen Wilkinson, the member for Middlesbrough East has hair of a stunning
hue. And this shone like an aureole above the light Botticelli green
of her dress. It was a complete breakaway from the sober black and
white which earlier lady members adopted. And why not. Is not the
Labour Party the party for colour and vivacity.
(8) Ellen Wilkinson, speech
in the House of Commons after the passing of the 1928
Equal Franchise Act.
Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and
lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the
legislating of this country.
(9)
William
Gallacher,
The Chosen Few (1940).
Around Easter, 1937, I paid a visit to Spain to see
the lads of the British Battalion of the International Brigade. Going
up the hillside towards the trenches with Fred Copeman, we could occasionally
hear the dull boom of a trench mortar, but more often the eerie whistle
of a rifle bullet overhead. Always I felt inclined to get my head
down in my shoulders. "I don't like that sound," I said
by way of an apology.
"It's all right, Willie,
as long as you can hear them,"
I was told. "It's
the ones you can't hear that do the damage."
We got into the trenches
and I passed along chatting to
the boys in the line. From the British we passed into the Spanish
trenches and gave the lads there the peoples' front salute. Then,
after visiting the American section, we came back to our own lads.
All of them came outside and formed a semicircle, and there, with
as my background the graves of the boys who had fallen, I made a short
speech. It was good to speak under such circumstances, but it was
the hardest task
I have ever undertaken. When I finished we sang the Internationale
with a spirit that all the murderous savagery of fascism can never
kill.
The following morning
I went into the breakfast room of the Hotel in Madrid to see Herbert
Gline, an American working in the Madrid radio station, about a broadcast
to America from the Lincoln Battalion. When I got in who should be
sitting there but Ellen Wilkinson, Eleanor Rathbone and the Duchess
of Atholl. We had a very friendly chat, and I was fortunate in getting
their company part of the way home. But whether in Madrid while the
shells were falling or in face of the many difficulties that were
inseparable from travelling in a country racked with invasion and
war, those three women gave an example of courage and endurance that
was beyond all praise.
(10)
Fred Copeman, was a member of the International
Brigades fighting in the Spanish
Civil War. He wrote about meeting
Clement Attlee in his autobiography, Reason in Revolt (1948)
We withdrew to Mondijar, a small village to
the east of Madrid. Comfortable quarters in a beautiful countryside
soon improved morale. New recruits brought our figure back to the
six hundred mark. Field training and manoeuv-
ring took up all our time. During this period Major Attlee, the leader
of the British Labour Party, with Ellen Wilkinson
and Noel Baker, came out to Spain. Ellen was a great favourite with
the lads. Her fiery enthusiasm and kind interest in the smallest things
made her the central figure of this group.
At about nine o'clock
at night, as darkness was falling, the square at Mondijal was lined
by the members of the British 16th and 50th, and the American Washington
and Lincoln battalions—some twelve to fifteen hundred men. Those
in the rear were holding lighted torches. Clem Attlee and Ellen spoke
from a cart, in simple, kind language, of the
things that the British Labour Party were trying to do. The response
was terriffic. Carried away by the enthusiasm
of the speeches, I asked Clem whether he would allow the battalion
to be called after him, and he immediately agreed, declaring himself
more than honoured. He was to meet considerable opposition on his
return to England from the Tory Government over this incident.
(11)
Ellen Wilkinson, Sunday Referee (18th October 1936)
Attlee has two fatal handicaps, honesty and modesty, but he is a subtle
strategist, understands people and plays with his team. Herbert Morrison
is an able administrator and a bit of a brute - the rudest man I know
- he will invite you to his table and then read a detective novel
but he is giving London almost exclusively gifts needed by the nation.
(12)
Emanuel Shinwell was surprised when he heard Clement
Attlee had appointed Ellen Wilkinson as Minister of Education.
I mentioned to Attlee that a number of plotters had been given jobs.
He laughed, perfectly well aware of what had been going on. It is
not bad tactics to make one's enemies one's servants.
(13)
Hugh
Dalton,
diary entry (28th October, 1942)
Ellen Wilkinson to dine with me. This has been on the cards for some
time, but always
put off. She is still a most devoted worshipper of Herbert
Morrison, and puts me second. What she would like would be
Morrison to lead the Party and me to be his deputy. She would like
us two to go into
the War Cabinet, putting out Attlee and Cripps. The difficulty
about all such plans is that the right moment never arrives to
put them into execution! She says that Morrison, having been deeply
absorbed with his job until recently, is now feeling that he has got
it into running order, and is taking much more interest in wider questions,
including post-war problems and the future of the Labour Party.
Bevin, she says - though I think she puts him third in order of merit
among Labour leaders - is quite grotesque in his garrulity.
(14)
Times Educational Supplement (8th February 1947)
Had Helen Wilkinson lived longer, there is little doubt that the children
of England and Wales would have had reason to bless her name. She
would have made mistakes; she would have provoked bitter antagonism;
but she would have seen to it in fact, as well as promise, no child
would be denied the opportunity that was his due.
Available from Amazon Books
(order below)
