'Red Ellen' Wilkinson

Her ideas, movements and world

Matt Perry

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780719097447
• eBook ISBN: 9780719098482
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Unearths new evidence to provide a richer understanding of the life of the Labour minister Ellen Wilkinson

1

Socialist ideas and movements

Wilkinson’s relationship with socialism and Communism has divided contemporary and historical opinion. For Betty Vernon, while not denying her ideas, Wilkinson was largely a pragmatist who passed through apprenticeships in the suffrage movement, in the CPGB (briefly) and in her trade union before maturing as a campaigning, but reformist, socialist. Stressing continuities and gradualism, Vernon’s account fits with Labourist narratives of Wilkinson.¹ Accordingly, Wilkinson quit the CPGB alongside intellectuals such as Frank Horrabin, Jagger, William Mellor and Raymond Postgate as a consequence of the ‘Bolshevisation’ of the party.² Vernon also implies that she followed her one-time fiancé Walton Newbold into the party and both associations were equally superficial, impetuous and ill-considered.³ Influenced by Vernon’s interpretation, attempting to reconstruct Wilkinson as an iconic Christian socialist, Graham Dale stated erroneously that she left within a year.⁴ Conversely, David Reid emphasised Wilkinson’s ideological evolutions from ethical socialism, to guild socialism, to Communism. For him, Wilkinson’s CPGB membership was a formative experience. However, after 1926, she adopted ‘an amalgam of parliamentary socialism and electoral activity’.⁵ While veteran Communists pointed to her lack of principles, Isabel Brown believed that in spirit Wilkinson never really left.⁶ Neither Bolshevisation nor careerism adequately capture her reasons for leaving or her relationship with the CPGB. Consideration of Wilkinson’s membership of the CPGB also intersects with the historiographical efforts of historians like Karen Hunt and Matthew Worley to engender the CPGB’s early history. As with the Social Democratic Federation and the ILP beforehand, women had a distinctly minority status within the CPGB. This research has stressed the ‘reluctance to give significant amounts of energy either to the woman question or to the development of an effective strategy to recruit and retain women as Communists.’⁷

Becoming a socialist

The 1901 census enumerated the occupants of 17 Everton Road in St Stephen’s parish of South Manchester: Richard Wilkinson aged 44 years, an insurance agent for a burial society; Ellen Wilkinson, his wife, three years his senior; Annie E. Wilkinson, aged 20 years; Richard A. Wilkinson, 17 years, an apprentice Cabinet maker; Ellen C. Wilkinson, 9 years; and, finally, the one-year-old infant, Harold Wilkinson. In 1938, Ellen Wilkinson sketched her family background. Her mother struggled with ill health and family hardship when her husband was out of work. The daughter described her mother as ‘advanced’, flouting the codes of domestic feminine convention. Ellen Wilkinson’s paternal grandfather was a hard-drinking Irish Catholic immigrant and her father started his working life in the cotton mills. After intermittent unemployment, he became an insurance agent. She remembered him talking bitterly about tramping from one mill to another to try to find work during his wife’s pregnancy. Religion was central to the household. Church attendance was regular and her father was a non-conformist lay preacher at the Wesleyan chapel in Grosvenor Street. He had begun preaching at the age of 15.⁸ The chapel was his means of education, of self-expression and nurtured his sense of morality. Ellen Wilkinson rationalised a connection between her father’s religious sense of the human brotherhood and her generation’s belief in socialism. Politically, despite being blacklisted for his trade unionism in the mills, her father was a Tory, believing firmly in the Smilesian philosophy of self-improvement. He even campaigned for Conservative Arthur James Balfour in his Manchester East constituency (where Balfour sat as MP between 1885 and 1906; he was also Prime Minister 1902–1905).

She described her first school – Ardwick Elementary School – as a ‘filthy elementary school. . .with five classes in one room’.⁹ She contracted a serious illness during an epidemic that hit such ‘crowded and insanitary’ schools and had to remain at home between the age of six and eight. Thus, it was her ‘devoted and intelligent’ mother who taught Wilkinson to read. Yet she was a very bright pupil, who enjoyed reading and received excellent grades. She was far from a model student, being bored and ill-behaved in class. In the large classes of those days, she completed tasks well before others, and as she later observed herself: ‘What else was there to do but organise mischief, and take the consequences?’ Her experience was of being a ‘little sausage in the vast educational sausage machine’. Receiving little encouragement, she hated and defied school discipline. In later life, she would recall instances of unjust punishment of her peers to confirm the persistence of the odium for the ‘loathed school atmosphere’. This extended to her experience as a pupil teacher where the ‘grey-haired and spinsterish’ assistant head – ‘a vindictive old cat’ – slapped a frightened youngster so hard that Wilkinson wanted to retaliate on his behalf. Indeed, she commented how, as a Manchester councillor and an MP with official duties that might include a school visit, she had to tackle her phobia of returning to an elementary school.¹⁰ At the age of eleven, she won her first scholarship and secured the rest of her education right through to the completion of her university degree on the same basis. Wilkinson endured ‘two horrid unmanageable years’ at Stretford Road Secondary School for Girls. She described its headmistress as a prim Victorian lady. The only point in its favour was the sympathetic glint in the eye of her French teacher ‘Dear Miss Allen.’¹¹

At the age of 16, Wilkinson attended Princess Street Pupil Teacher Centre (PTC), spending half of her week there and half at Mansfield Street School as a pupil teacher. At the school, she despised the headmaster who had a condescending aversion to younger teachers. After they had clashed over her teaching style, she received a visit and reprimand from a school inspector. Wilkinson recalled venting all her ‘surging hate of all the silly punishment I had endured in my own schooldays’. In contrast, the PTC was ‘pure joy’ mainly due to her French teacher, who encouraged reading rather than grammar drills and W.E. Elliot, who prompted her to stand in the school election. Wilkinson narrated her conversion to socialism using this incident.¹² Wilkinson stood as a socialist, though ‘socialism was a word I had barely heard’. Borrowing Robert Blatchford’s books, she learnt the basics, discovering ‘the answer to the chaotic rebellion of my school years’.¹³ Socialism explained her mother’s ill health, the market’s inefficiency and its juxtaposition of waste, wealth and poverty. Blatchford’s ‘sheer simplicity’ convinced her. As her adage ‘what is morally wrong, cannot be politically right’ illustrates, the residue of Blatchford’s ethical socialism lingered in her thought.¹⁴ Desiring to enter ‘the magic sphere of politics’, Wilkinson attended an acronym-ridden Longsight ILP branch meeting. Rescuing her from this uninspiring initiation, a Jewish socialist colleague took Wilkinson to see Katharine Bruce Glasier at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall. Wilkinson pointed to this event as her epiphany and her admiration for ‘this dear saint of the women’s movement’ persisted.¹⁵ Glasier was able to conjure away social injustice and embody Wilkinson’s secret dreams and hopes. She resolved to abandon teaching for politics. For this reason, Wilkinson applied to the nationwide Jones Open History Scholarship, which she won in late May 1910, allowing her to read History at Manchester University.¹⁶ This opened up a new world that Wilkinson had dreamed of: ‘books unlimited, lots of friends, interesting lectures, stimulus of team work’.

The University Socialist Federation (USF) and guild socialism

At university, Wilkinson was active in student politics via the Fabian Society, acquainting her with notable British socialists including the Webbs, the Coles, Mary MacArthur and the Glasiers. The Fabian Society held regular lectures and summer schools, providing a forum for new ideas. Although the Fabian mainstream espoused a gradualist state socialism, there were Fabian lectures, reviews and pamphlets on syndicalism and the industrial unrest.¹⁷ At the 1912 Fabian summer school, Beatrice Webb lectured on syndicalism and trade union leader Mary MacArthur spoke on women’s trade unions.¹⁸ A space also existed within the Fabian Society for women’s groups and activity in favour of the franchise.

Manchester University was a notable centre of Fabian activity. For instance, on 6 May 1911, Manchester hosted the Northern Fabian Conference.¹⁹ In August 1912, Fabian News noted the rapid growth of the Manchester University Fabian Society (MUFS) and its busy programme. It and the Cambridge University Fabian Society were the prime movers in the USF’s formation.²⁰ By December 1912, Wilkinson was the joint MUFS secretary.²¹ She participated in the preliminary USF conference in 1912 as well as the following one in Barrow House, Derwentwater. Through the USF, Wilkinson met Page, J. Walton Newbold (to whom she was briefly engaged), Rajani Palme Dutt, William Mellor and Clifford Allen. She remained involved in the USF until its last important conference in Oxford, in 1921.²²

In the left’s debates between collectivists, syndicalists and guild socialists, Wilkinson advocated the last.²³ Guild socialism mixed William Morris’s ideas, syndicalism and Fabianism. The principal guild socialist thinkers were S.G. Hobson, A.J. Penty, A.R. Orage (editor of the influential New Age) and G.D.H. Cole, who founded the National Guilds League (NGL) in 1915.²⁴ Wilkinson became the Manchester group secretary in 1917 or 1918 until early 1919.²⁵ Wilkinson probably met Cole in 1914, later sitting with him on the Labour Research Department (LRD) and supported his Right Moment Campaign to revise the Fabian Society constitution in 1915.²⁶ Guild socialism proposed industrial democracy through abolition of the wages system, workers’ control and producer associations in a system of national guilds. It thereby challenged the modern worker’s alienating loss of control over production under capitalism and provided an anti-statist model of socialism, with pluralism and democracy at its heart. On 5 December 1915, Wilkinson addressed the Manchester ILP branch on guild socialism, arguing for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Socialist ideas and movements
• 2 Feminism and the women’s movement
• 3 The trade union movement
• 4 Against imperialism and war
• 5 The Commons and the Parliamentary Labour Party
• 6 A journey through the crisis years: the slump, travel and anti-fascism
• 7 ‘The hope of the world’: Spain in revolution and war, 1933-39
• 8 In government, 1940-47
• Select bibliography
• Index