( In 1908 Ellen Wilkinson, a fiery adolescent from a work...)
In 1908 Ellen Wilkinson, a fiery adolescent from a working-class family in Manchester, was the only girl who talks in school debates. By midcentury, Wilkinson had helped found Britains Communist Party, earned a seat in Parliament, and become a renowned advocate for the poor and dispossessed at home and abroad. She was one of the first female delegates to the United Nations, and she played a central role in Britains postwar Labour government. In Laura Beerss account of Wilkinsons remarkable life, we have a richly detailed portrait of a time when Left-leaning British men and women from a range of backgrounds sought to reshape domestic, imperial, and international affairs. Wilkinson is best remembered as the leader of the Jarrow Crusade, the 300-mile march of two hundred unemployed shipwrights and steelworkers to petition the British government for assistance. But this was just one small part of Red Ellens larger transnational fight for social justice. She was involved in a range of campaigns, from the quest for official recognition of the Spanish Republican government, to the fight for Indian independence, to the effort to smuggle Jewish refugees out of Germany. During Wilkinsons lifetime, many British radicals viewed themselves as members of an international socialist community, and some, like her, became involved in socialist, feminist, and pacifist movements that spanned the globe. By focusing on the extent to which Wilkinsons activism transcended Britains borders, Red Ellen adjusts our perception of the British Left in the early twentieth century.
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Born in 1891 in working-class Manchester, England, Ellen Wilkinson's devout Methodist father was a cotton operative, but became an insurance clerk while Ellen was growing up. As a teenager she supported women's suffrage, participated in socialist activities, and joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP).
A successful scholarship student, Wilkinson first planned to be an elementary school teacher, but in 1909 she won a national scholarship to attend university. A history student at Manchester University, Wilkinson joined the University Debating Society and the Fabian Society.
After graduating in 1913 Wilkinson was an organizer for the nonmilitant National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies. In 1915 she became the national woman organizer to the Amalgamated Union of Cooperative Employees, a union with a large female membership, particularly in wartime. A 1921 merger made the union part of the National Union of Distributive and Allied Workers (NUDAW). During the 19106 and early 19206 Wilkinson was exposed to various radical groups such as the Guild Socialists, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and the emergent Communist Party, which she belonged to between 1920 and 1924. She also kept up her membership in the Fabian Society, the ILP, and the Labour Party. Elected to the Manchester City Council in 1923, she moved on quickly: in 1924 she entered Parliament, representing Middlesbrough East, Yorkshire. Only 33 years old, Wilkinson was one of four female members of Parliament (MP). In Parliament Wilkinson fought to extend the 1918 act giving women over 30 the vote to include women above the age of 21 (finally passed in 1928) and for other measures to grant women equality and protection; she supported MPs who were critical of the short-lived Labour government of 1924; and in 1926 she supported the general strike and subsequent miners' strike. She was a critic of Ramsay Macdonald's second Labour administration, elected in 1929. With other radical Labourites and even many moderates, Wilkinson urged the government to take more resolute action against unemployment, which was reaching peak levels with the Depression. Her parliamentary experience was enhanced by working as secretary to Susan Lawrence, the parliamentary secretary to the minister of health. Macdonald dissolved the Labour government in 1931, and with that year's Labour defeat, Wilkinson lost her seat. Between 1931 and 1935 she worked for NUDAW, lectured, and wrote. Already a published author-she had written a thinly veiled autobiographical novel, Clash (1929), and a thriller, The Division Bell Mystery (1932)-Wilkinson also contributed to newspapers and magazines. In 1934 she coauthored, with Edward Conze, a work entitled Why Fascism tracing the rise of fascism in Europe. Returning to Parliament in 1935 as representative for Jarrow, a Tyneside shipbuilding town devastated by the Depression, Wilkinson achieved national fame for leading the 1936 Jarrow Crusade, one of the most publicized Depression hunger marches. Becoming more influential in the left wing of the Labour Party, she also began a slow drift to the right. For instance, she agreed to separate the Jarrow march from other marches organized with the help of Communists. Yet the Jarrow march made a strong statement, which was reinforced by Wilkinson's The Town That Was Murdered, a history of Jarrow's economic exploitation published by the Left Book Club in 1939. In the mid-and late 19306 Wilkinson joined other left wing Labourites in groups such as the Socialist League and the journal Tribune to support the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and to fight against fascism. In Parliament she initiated important consumer legislation for a more equitable system of installment purchasing. By the late 19306 Wilkinson was on the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the Labour Party. Her personal relationship with Herbert Morrison, a more conservative and influential Labourite, involved Wilkinson in internal party struggles. She played a balancing act between trying to push the party leftward and staying in its good graces. For instance, in 1939, when Stafford Cripps was expelled from the Labour Party by the NEC for urging unity between Labour, socialists, and Communists in order to fight fascism, Wilkinson voted against the expulsion, but did not oppose it once it was passed; thereafter she did not appear on platforms urging such a unity. In Winston Churchill's wartime coalition government Wilkinson was briefly parliamentary secretary to the ministry of pensions and then a parliamentary secretary for Herbert Morrison, the wartime home secretary and minister of home security; Wilkinson was in charge of air raid shelters. Energetic at this job, she constantly visited sites, urged the conscription of women for home defense, and generally strengthened Britain's civil defense. By 1945 Wilkinson was a key Labour leader. As chair of that year's annual party conference she called for the development of socialist policies. After Labour's landslide victory Wilkinson became minister of education, only the second woman to achieve Cabinet rank in Britain. (The first was Margaret Bondfield, 1929. ) The Labour government had to implement the 1944 Education Act, which called for raising the school leaving age to 15 and providing access to secondary education for all. Labour's left urged the development of "comprehensive" schools which would enroll all classes of students, as an alternative to middle-class academic "grammar" schools and technical and "secondary modern" schools meant for working-class youth. Wilkinson's record as minister of education is disputed. Plagued by ill-health for years, she served less than two years before she died. Committed to raising the school leaving age (accomplished in 1947) and to recruiting more teachers, she did not get far in developing comprehensive schools. Whether this was due to her lack of experience in education, her inability to motivate career civil servants, or a belief that reforming the existing system-which, after all, had served her well enough-would be sufficient is hard to say. What is clear is that just as the Labour government was building the welfare state, a crucial issue in education was not attended to. During this post-war period Wilkinson was also active in the founding of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Wilkinson's legacy lies in the pattern of her political development. She was a feminist; a pioneer politician who never forgot her working-class origins; a fighter against poverty, unemployment, and fascism; a person who never abandoned her socialism yet found that, once in power, she had to compromise some of her more radical beliefs.
( In 1908 Ellen Wilkinson, a fiery adolescent from a work...)
Quotations:
"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. "
"Free milk will be provided in Hoxton and Shoredith, in Eton and Harrow. What more social equality can you have than that?"
"Unemployment is bigger than a political party. It is a national danger and a national scandal. "
"Tell the Government, our people shall not starve. "
"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. "
"I paid for my own education by scholarship until I left university. "
With her bright, fashionable clothes and her forceful manner, she was easily noticeable—an obituarist wrote that "wherever there was a row going on in support of some good or even fairly good cause, that rebellious redhead was sure to be seen bobbing about in the heart of the tumult".
Apart from her early engagement to Walton Newbold, she was close to John Jagger for many years, and in the early 1930s enjoyed a brief romantic attachment with Frank Horrabin. Her long association with Morrison began in her early Fabian days; Morrison was very reticent about this friendship, choosing not to mention Wilkinson in his 1960 autobiography despite their close political association. Vernon says that the relationship almost certainly became "more than platonic", but as Wilkinson's private papers were destroyed after her death, and Morrison maintained silence over the matter, the full nature and extent of their friendship remains unknown.
Quotes from others about the person
Vernon says, "she never lost her resolute independence of thought, and sought power not for self glory but to succour the weak of the world".
In a tribute published when Wilkinson's death was announced, the former Conservative MP Thelma Cazalet-Keir summed up her personality: "Ellen Wilkinson was as far removed from being a bore as it is possible for any human being to be. Whatever she did, wherever she went, she created an atmosphere of excitement and interest . .. and not just because of her red hair and green dress".
Wilkinson never married, although she enjoyed numerous close friendships with men.
