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Eleanor Rathbone: MP for Refugees Susan Cohen Eleanor Rathbone: MP for Refugees Susan Cohen This article is concerned with the political and humanitarian activism of Eleanor Rathbone (1872-1946) the British Member of Parliament whose campaigning on behalf of refugees earned her the soubriquet, MP for Refugees. Following a brief overview of Eleanor’s background and career until 1933, the article considers the events which led up to the establishment of the Parliamentary Committee on Refugees in late 1938. Following this, it examines the work undertaken by Eleanor and the committee on behalf of refugees, mostly Jewish, fleeing Nazi persecution, and the opposition that her activism attracted from government officials. Following Hitler’s accession to power as chancellor of the German Republic on 30 January 1933, Miss Eleanor Rathbone (1872-1946), Independent MP for the Combined English Universities, stood up in the House of Commons, on 13 April 1933, and denounced the new leader and his regime. She warned, prophetically, of the threat posed to world peace, saying that: A spirit has come over Germany. One speaker called it a new spirit, but I would rather call it a re-emergence of an evil spirit which bodes very ill for the peace and freedom of the world […] There is one dreadful fact beyond doubt, that is that the party, which was guilty of those excesses is now in uncontrolled power in Germany and is inflicting cruelties and crushing disabilities on large numbers of law-abiding peaceful citizens, whose only offence is that they belong to a particular race or religion or profess certain political beliefs […] Herr Hitler and his colleagues have let the world see plainly their feelings which they cherish about questions of blood and race.1 So began her political and humanitarian commitment to the ‘refugee question’ and the politics of exile, an involvement that was to con- sume most of her time and energy from the mid 1930s.2 Eleanor had already gained a considerable reputation as an activist, and from the outset of her career, in 1897, had made a conscious decision to devote herself to championing on behalf of the underprivileged and underrepresented in society. Her family and educational background had laid the foundations for this path, for she had been raised and nurtured within a strong tradition of philanthropy. Equally significant was her education as an undergraduate at Somer- ville College Oxford, for she was introduced to, and came under the 2 Susan Cohen influence of the Idealist school of philosophy, with its emphasis on practical philanthropy combined with humanitarian acts and deeds. She never planned which issue she would devote her energies to, but instead responded to the needs of society, or to unsuspected obliga- tions, as and when they arose. This is not to say that she did not prioritise her work, for she always gave great thought and careful consideration to competing claims before deciding which was the most important of them. Nor did she restrict herself to gender related issues, although many of her early campaigns did reflect the primacy of the feminist movement of the time. There was her involvement in social and welfare reform, especially her long running battle for a Family Endowment paid to mothers and her role as a feminist and suffragist. She was also a local councillor, a Justice of the Peace and a pacificist.3 Her success at the polls in 1929, with her election as an Independent MP, gave her an important new platform from which to campaign, and enabled her to extend the boundaries of her activism from national issues to foreign concerns, amongst them the age-of- marriage debate in India and the women’s franchise issue in Palestine. During the 1930s, international affairs, including the crisis in Abys- sinia, the looming civil war in Spain and, most particularly, the mounting threat to Czechoslovakia, consumed much of her time and energy. Allied to this was her involvement in the campaign for collective security through the League of Nations Union (LNU). But nowhere was her political status of greater significance than where refugees in and from Nazi and Fascist Europe were concerned. Desperate people from Germany had been seeking a safe haven in Britain and elsewhere since Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, but the refugee crisis grew rapidly after the Anschluss in March 1938, with Austrian Jews trying to flee their homeland. The Munich Settlement, signed on 29 September 1938, heralded an even greater human tragedy, as Czech refugees, including Sudeten Germans, Communists and Jews, sought salvation from foreign governments. Britain’s response was complicated: as a part of their responsibility for implementing the Munich settlement, they offered the Czechs financial help with their refugees to ease the economic and monetary difficulties which they faced. Eleanor was far from satisfied in both financial and moral terms with the Prime Minister, Neville Cham- berlain’s announcement on 3 October 1938, of the so-called Czech loan of £ 10 million. In anticipation of this declaration, she, and scores of others, had put their names to a statement on the international .
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