|
Ellen Wilkinson From Red Suffragist to Government Minister Paula Bartley
Revolutionary Lives
Series London: Pluto Press,
2014 Paperback. xiv+153
pages. ISBN 978-0745332376. £12.99
Reviewed by
Deborah Mutch De Montfort
University, Leicester
In the Preface to her
biography of Ellen Wilkinson Paula Bartley recounts two examples of the
disappearance of Wilkinson from history: a taxi driver who only knows her name
because his children went to a school named after her [xi] and a female Labour
Party member who had not heard of Wilkinson [xii]. And I am afraid that, apart
from Wilkinson’s 1929 novel Clash,
this reviewer was in the same sorry state of ignorance. Fortunately for all
three of us, as well as the legions out there who are still waiting to be
introduced to this immensely interesting and influential woman, Paula Bartley
and Pluto Press have come to our aid with this short but engaging biography. Suffragist, socialist,
communist, Labour Party MP and cabinet minister, Ellen Wilkinson was born in
crowded, industrial Chorlton-on-Medlock in Manchester in 1891. Despite the
‘sausage factory’ [3] educational process for working-class children, Ellen
displayed considerable intelligence and at the age of sixteen she began a
pupil-teacher training course. It was during this training that she was asked
to stand as a socialist candidate in mock elections and in her preparation for
the debate she read Robert Blatchford’s socialist treatises, Merrie England and Britain for the British. Thus, Ellen Wilkinson became one of the
many converts to socialism through Blatchford’s persuasion and was drawn into
the movement by Katherine Bruce Glasier’s ‘great soul’ [5]. Not one to cheer
from the sidelines, Wilkinson was instrumental in founding the University
Socialist Federation during her scholarship at Manchester University, joined
the Manchester Society for Women’s Suffrage (MSWS) and ran the local branch of
the Fabian Society. After graduation she was employed by MSWS as an assistant
organiser and stayed with the society after it transferred to the Women’s
International League for Peace and Freedom during the First World War. Her
fight for the female vote continued after she became the national organiser for
the Amalgamated Union of Co-operative Employees (AUCE) but now she was able to
promote her socialist ideals as well. She worked for the AUCE, which
amalgamated with the Warehouse Workers Union to form the National Union of
Distributive and Allied Workers (NUDAW) in 1923, between 1915 and 1924 – when
she was elected to Parliament – and again during her time out of
Parliament after losing her seat in the 1931 election. From 1935 to her death
in 1947 she remained a Labour MP, was voted vice-chair and then chair of the
party’s National Executive Committee, given the Ministerial brief for education
in the 1945 Labour government and was instrumental in the foundation of UNESCO,
only missing the first official conference in 1947 because of illness. Such a long and busy career
in politics gave Wilkinson the opportunity to do immense amounts of good for
those she cared passionately about: women, the poor and working class. She worked
to alleviate the suffering of many by bringing issues to the attention of those
in power of the circumstances borne by the poor. For instance, she showed
Parliament a harness worn by young boys in the mines to pull coal wagons to
demonstrate the inhumanity of mine work and mine owners as MPs debated the Coal
Mines Bill in 1926; as the MP for Jarrow she was instrumental in organising the
1936 Jarrow Crusade when the unemployed steel workers marched to London to
petition the government; she introduced the Hire Purchase Act of 1939 that made
the hire purchase system, used by many working-class people to furnish houses,
fairer. She campaigned passionately and tirelessly for equality in both class
and gender and against the harsh economic and political decisions of the
Conservative Party. She was a vocal critic even within her own party when she
thought it was failing the working class. Ramsay MacDonald’s continuation of
Conservative austerity in the 1931 National Coalition government and the
introduction of the Means Test, for instance, were subject to Wilkinson’s
vociferous criticism. Nevertheless, Ellen
Wilkinson was clearly a divisive character and the author does not allow her
admiration to blind her to Wilkinson’s faults. Indeed, in the Preface the
author states: ‘I have no desire to write a hagiography’ [xiv] and so the
reader is also shown Wilkinson’s actions and decisions based on political
self-preservation: for instance, her treatment of Stafford Cripps. Wilkinson
and Cripps had co-authored a memo calling for the uniting of the Labour Party
with left-of-centre groups to enhance their chances of success in the 1939
general election. Cripps circulated the memo to party members despite it being
rejected by the NEC – a breach of party procedure – and was subsequently expelled
from the Labour Party. Despite being part of the call for unity and co-author
of the memo she refused to support Cripps’s campaign for reinstatement because
she ‘did not want to risk her political career for Cripps’s seemingly hopeless
cause’ [96]. There was also a good deal of what appears to be political
opportunism in order to keep her position within the Labour government/s. Although
the author argues that Wilkinson was motivated by political expediency,
particularly in her role as government minister in the Wartime Coalition
government, Wilkinson made decisions to support rather than challenge
government policy and action that went directly against her earlier stances. For
instance, Wilkinson supported Herbert Morrison’s ban of the Communist Party
paper, Daily Worker, despite her past
passionate support for free speech: ‘she retracted her views, justified the ban
and accused the Daily Worker of
undermining the war effort’ [112]. Similarly, she worked to uphold the ban on
strikes in the Second World War under the Emergency Powers Act and Defence
Regulations when she had fiercely opposed similar measures during the First
World War. The author’s attempt to
give a clear, unbiased account rather than a hagiography is admirable but there
are many reversals and contradictions in Wilkinson’s working life that could
have been pressed further to either dispel or to prove political opportunism. The
list is fairly long and includes Wilkinson’s apparently sudden shift from a
critic of the Labour Party to party member, her close working relationship with
Nancy Astor when it meant getting feminist Bills placed before the House of
Commons, her support for Winston Churchill during and after the Second World
War, her vacillation over the availability of birth control arguing against it
in 1938 and advocating it in 1945. The author makes clear in the Preface that
‘In this short book I cannot make an exhaustive study of her life’ [xiv] and
that there will inevitably be omissions. The focus on Wilkinson’s political
life is rightly chosen as the subject for this biography even though it leaves
the reader curious about the ill-health which is periodically mentioned, the
car crash that left her with a fractured skull and, more salaciously, her
assumed affair with Herbert Morrison. While these tantalising glimpses of
personal life are understood to be simply indications of life outside of her
work there are areas of that work that could have benefited from further
examination. An early example is that of Wright Robinson’s accusation that
Wilkinson and John Jagger lied during the campaign to protect Co-operative
workers’ wages. This reader would have welcomed some discussion of the basis
for this accusation, consideration of whether the accusation may have been true
and some justification for the claim that this was based on Wright Robinson’s
jealousy. Similarly, some discussion of why Wilkinson chose to perpetuate the
divisive and tri-partite system of education set out by the Conservative Party
in the post-war Labour government would have been useful. A book of this length can
only be introductory and cannot cover everything therefore it would also have
been useful to have had some further and clearer information on the sources. Information
in the endnotes as to where sources are located would help the future
researcher as, although there is a comprehensive list of archives in the
Acknowledgements and an offer of an additional bibliography if the author is
contacted through a provided email address, more information on where the
sources are located would also have been useful. Some of this is already
provided in the endnotes for the letters between Wilkinson and Holtby,
Wilkinson’s correspondence and the Foreign Office documents but, for instance,
where would the interested researcher find the Wright Robinson diary, the source
of the quotation on page 101 on Wilkinson driving around bomb-torn London
cheering those in shelters or a later quotation on the same page from the Daily Herald which gives no indication
of the specific issue? These are minor issues,
though, in a publication that is both engaging and timely. The author notes
that ‘Ellen’s life carries deep resonance for our times’ [xii] and so, for
instance, the similarities between the aftermaths of the Wall Street Crash of
1929 and the banking crisis of 2008 are made (depressingly) clear. Wilkinson’s
criticism of the Labour government’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip
Snowden’s response to the financial crisis echoes down the decades: ‘We are
told … that the Budget doesn’t balance, that there are going to be terrible
things happen unless you are prepared to accept cuts – cuts everywhere except
in the dividend of the Bankers’ [51]. I would urge readers interested in
left-wing British politics to read this biography not only for the information
on Wilkinson’s life but also for potential insight into today’s political
attitudes towards austerity and, perhaps, a way out.
Cercles © 2015 All rights are reserved and no reproduction from this site for whatever purpose is permitted without the permission of the copyright owner. Please contact us before using any material on this website.
|
|
|
