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Home , Ellen Wilkinson

BAILGATE U3A January 2021

Chair’s Letter!

Dear Bailgate U3A

As we start a New Year in Tier 4 and the virus raging it is quite challenging to be positive. However we have vaccines starting to be available and indeed some of you may have already had your first dose. I am a strong believer in the notion that the development of vaccinations along with the provision of a clean water supply were the 2 most important public health measures in history. That being the case I feel we should have every reason to be optimistic.

With regard to our U3A, we sit at a bit of a crossroads. As chair I am hoping the next month or so gives us a bit of clarity regarding how we move forward. There may be some uncertainty as to how and when we choose to renew subscriptions etc. Please be patient with us as we work our way through the issue.

I am not trying to thrust my political views this month. Although I am a lifelong socialist and member of the Labour Party. However, I have spent

the Christmas holidays reading a biography of the Labour MP and cabinet member Ellen Wilkinson. I started the book with little knowledge of her other than associating her with leading the Crusade in 1936. Having spent hours reading about her, I have discovered so much more. Certainly she was very Left Wing, a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, a lifelong trade unionist and known as Red Ellen. However she was admired by Churchill and a key member of his war time Government.

She was born in 1891 in working-class . Ellen Wilkinson's devout Methodist father was a cotton operative, but became an insurance clerk whilst Ellen was growing up. As a teenager she supported women's suffrage, participated in socialist activities, and joined the (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 . After graduating in 1913 Wilkinson was an organiser for the nonmilitant National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies. In 1915 she became the national woman organiser 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 1910s and early 1920s 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 in 1923, she moved on quickly: in 1924 she entered Parliament representing Middlesbrough East. 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

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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 , 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, and a thriller, The Division Bell Mystery.

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 publicised 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 organised 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 in 1939.

In 's wartime coalition government Wilkinson was briefly parliamentary secretary to the ministry of pensions and then a parliamentary secretary for , the wartime home secretary and minister of home security. Wilkinson was in charge of air raid shelters. The fact that the country was well provided with public air raid shelters, both Anderson and Morrison Shelters, is largely due to the passion of Ellen.

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Following the Labour Party landslide election, Ellen became minister of education, only the second woman to achieve Cabinet rank in Britain. Her major challenge was to implement the 1944 Education Act which required the raising of the school leaving age to 15. The country had a shortage of school buildings and more importantly teachers. Her response was to create over 50 temporary emergency teacher training colleges across the U.K.allowing men and women with aptitude, without formal qualifications to train as teachers in a year. Many of the students were working class who previously would have found it very hard to qualify as a teacher. This is of family interest as my mother in law was one of these students. From a family of mill workers in Bradford, having left school at 14, her prospects of a profession were slim. This innovative approach allowed her to attend Wimborne college in 1948 and qualify as a primary school teacher.

Sadly Ellen was only to serve as a cabinet minister for 18 months. A lifelong smoker who suffered from asthma, she died in February 1947 of a chest infection aged 55. Women in politics remain a minority, women in cabinet positions are even more of a minority. For Ellen Wilkinson’s achievements to be so little known has made me quite sad.

Ellen in 1926

Leading the Jarrow Crusade October

1936

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