Ellen Wilkinson

From Red Suffragist to Government Minister

Paula Bartley

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781783710171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Ellen Wilkinson was a key radical figure in the 20th century British socialist and feminist movement, a woman of passionate energy who was involved in most of the major struggles of her time. Born in October 1891 into a working-class textile family, Wilkinson was involved in women's suffrage, helped found the British Communist Party, led the Labour Party's anti-fascist campaign, headed the iconic Jarrow Crusade and was the first female Minister of Education. In this lively and engaging biography, Paula Bartley charts the political life of this extraordinary campaigner who went from street agitator to government minister whilst keeping her principles intact.

1

The Making of ‘Red Ellen’, 1891–1914

Ellen Wilkinson was born on 8 October 1891, in a two-up, two-down terraced house with a little back yard and an outside lavatory, at 41 Coral Street, Chorlton-on-Medlock. Until the nineteenth century, Chorlton was a small country village but industrialisation changed the area into a dirty and smoky adjunct of Manchester notorious for its back-to-back slum houses, its textile factories and its exploited workers. Only two classes mattered in Chorlton: the industrialists and the workers. Ellen was born into what she called the ‘proletarian purple’.

She had two brothers and one sister: Annie, born in 1881, Richard in 1883, and Harold in 1899. Life was tough for the young family. When Ellen was born, her father was an insurance agent,¹ working as collector for a burial society. He was possibly under-employed at the time of her birth because her parents were unable to afford a competent midwife or doctor. Her mother had a difficult labour. At the time, there were no unemployment benefits, no free maternity care and certainly no child-welfare schemes to help the family. Ellen, who was a sickly child, must have strained the family finances: her mother endured a life of ‘agonising suffering’ and was usually too ill to work. In later life, Ellen commented that there was ‘nothing in the least romantic about my youth’.²

The family lived in a grimy, overcrowded district of industrial Manchester but on her way to school Ellen walked past backstreet slums that were even worse. Engels had famously written earlier about this area as ‘the most horrible spot, surrounded on all sides by tall factories, two hundred cottages, built chiefly back to back, in which live about four thousand human beings.’³ Life had improved since Engels’ time but this working-class area remained sharply separated from the middle-class districts. At school, Ellen sat next to children who were hungry, badly clothed and ill-shod. She later criticised ‘the inefficiency of commercialism, the waste, the extravagance, the poverty’⁴ that she had seen in Manchester.

Her father, Richard, was a ‘staunch trade-unionist’ and Liberal Unionist. He had a simple political creed: ‘I have pulled myself out of the gutter, why can’t they?’ was his unsympathetic reply to those who demanded his solidarity with the working class.⁵ Ellen’s indefatigable work ethic came straight from her father but she differed in one major respect: rather than condemn the poor for laziness she resolved to help them climb out of poverty.

Religion, in the form of Methodism, was a formative influence on the young Ellen. Her father and uncle were both local Methodist ministers and her brother Richard became one too. Her training in public speaking began early: she recalled repeating sermons to a grandmother too ill to attend chapel, reciting poems at the Band of Hope, making speeches dressed as a Chinese or an Indian girl at the missionary meetings and talking in school debates. It was an early training for complete unselfconsciousness on a public platform and a safe place to practise and refine her gifts as an orator. More importantly, in the opinion of Ellen and others, the ‘Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man’ was an assertion of equality which the next generation found in socialism. These basic Christian principles of social justice and egalitarianism undoubtedly shaped her later socialist compassion. Some years on, Ellen recalled that her Methodism was not ‘narrowly religious’ but had a political edge. It was here that she first learned of the Congo atrocities, the colonisation of Ireland and India and sweated labour at home.⁶ Sermons about such topics influenced a young impressionable girl, and maybe taught Ellen to fight for international justice. Certainly, she belonged to the old tradition of Christian Socialism, and appropriated the millenarian, emotional, sentimental rhetoric of Methodism and, some might argue, its tendency towards fanaticism. Ellen’s later speeches at street meetings, on upturned package cases and other hastily constructed platforms, were as fervent and passionate as a Methodist revivalist meeting. Moreover, like all good religious evangelists her beliefs usually tended to be definite.

Ellen’s education deepened her sense of injustice. In 1902, aged eleven, she attended the Ardwick Higher Elementary School near her home in Coral Street. Here she became impatient with the ‘vast educational sausage factory’ of education: she was bored and loathed the often sadistic behaviour of her teachers. ‘What remains with me’, she stated in an autobiographical sketch, ‘is a vivid hatred of those schools’. She swore that if appointed to the Board of Education, her first job would be to ‘tackle the problem of the type of teaching in elementary schools’. After this school, she put up with ‘two horrid unmanageable years’ at Stretford Road Secondary school for girls. Fortunately, her father Richard who had had no formal education was an autodidact who encouraged Ellen to be the same. He took his young daughter to lectures and gave her books by authors such as Aldous Huxley and Charles Darwin, all the while encouraging Ellen in an unshakeable self-confidence.

Ellen was clever but at the time there were few educational and professional opportunities for women, especially from working-class backgrounds. Teaching, the most obvious career choice for intelligent girls, involved either a degree course at a university, a two-year course at a teacher training college or, for those less financially secure, a combination of pupil teaching and training college. At the age of 16, Ellen enrolled at the Manchester Pupil Teacher’s Centre. Her keen intelligence and outgoing personality made her stand out. Two teachers in particular recognised her potential and encouraged her to write stories and articles for the school magazine and to speak in public on the political issues of the day. In Ellen’s opinion, her real education began when she was asked to stand as a socialist candidate in mock elections. During her research she read Robert Blatchford and later recalled that his Britain for the British and Merrie England made her a convinced socialist. She defended her new beliefs to an audience of about 500 16- to 18-year-olds – and dealt effectively with her first group of hecklers.

After her experiences in the mock election Ellen wanted to enter that ‘magic sphere of politics’. She dressed up in her Sunday best and went along to her first Independent Labour Party branch meeting at Longsight. This 16-year-old, tiny, unaccompanied young woman was the first to arrive at the meeting and witnessed a few men strolling in. She was completely baffled by the shorthand used by those at the meeting: acronyms such as the ASRS, the ASLE, and the SDF which were meaningless to a young and still politically naïve teenager. Ellen slipped away from the meeting ‘feeling that if this were politics there seemed to be little room for me’. Fortunately she overcame her nerves and was persuaded to go to another, bigger meeting, at the Free Trade Hall.

This meeting was decisive. Once again, the very excited Ellen was one of the first to arrive and walked straight to the front row. A number of men spoke but her attention centred on a ‘small slim woman, in a plain woollen frock of a soft blue, her hair simply coiled into her neck’: Katherine Bruce Glasier, a prominent figure in the labour movement. Glasier, who was not much taller than Wilkinson, was the embodiment of her dream for a political life. Ellen later wrote that ‘to stand on the platform of the Free Trade Hall, to be able to sway a great crowd as she swayed it, to be able to make people work to make life better, to remove slums and underfeeding and misery … that seemed the highest destiny any woman could ever hope for.’

Katherine Glasier’s speeches, considered to be highly emotional, with an ethically Christian ‘Come-unto-Jesus’ style of socialism, no doubt appealed to young Ellen Wilkinson’s Methodist spirit.⁷ She wanted to be like her heroine. At the end of the meeting, she met Glasier who urged her to ‘come out and speak at our meetings. We need young women for Socialism.’ But Ellen felt both inspired and depressed: on the one hand she had found a cause in which she believed, on the other hand she was deeply conscious that, as a young woman, she could not advance socialism herself. ‘Only you fellows’ she said bitterly, ‘will be able to go to Parliament and do the job, and they won’t even let me vote for it.’ She knew at the time, she later said, that the Labour Party existed to get men into an all-male Parliament for which only men could vote. Nevertheless, in 1907, in spite of her reservations Ellen joined the Longsight Independent Labour Party and remained a member until it disaffiliated from the Labour Party. Many years later, she sent Glasier a copy of Myself When Young, in which she had written an autobiographical sketch. It included a warm tribute to her idol. Ellen always insisted that it was Katherine Glasier who ‘brought me into the Socialist movement. What a very great soul she is. It always made me humble to think of her indomitable courage.’⁸

Meanwhile, Ellen had to study and learn to teach. She loved the education offered at the college but hated her weekly two-and-a-half days teaching experience, largely because of the way in which teachers treated their young charges. She recalled her first day at school assembly when a ‘vindictive old cat, grey-haired and spinsterish’ slapped one pupil who was not praying and insisted that he ‘Say Gentle Jesus, you little nuisance, say Gentle Jesus’. In later years, she admitted that she was psychologically unable to visit an elementary school when she was on the Education Committee of the Manchester City Council because of these earlier experiences.

In 1910, aged 19, Ellen won the Jones Open History Scholarship to Manchester University. Now she began to ‘live life to the full, as I had always dreamed of living it … books unlimited, lots of friends, interesting lectures, stimulus of team work’. It was here that she learned the research skills and the clear analytical, factually accurate writing she was to use in Committees and other official forums. Yet even so, Ellen thought the History syllabus, dominated by high politics, war and diplomacy, dull: she wanted to learn how ordinary women and men had lived.

It was here that she developed her political voice. Ellen worked hard on a range of projects, all the time testing and refining her emerging beliefs: she helped found the University Socialist Federation and later became vice-chair;⁹ she organised meetings such as those addressed by the radical trade unionist and feminist Mary McArthur; in 1912 she joined the Manchester Society for Women’s Suffrage (MSWS), and ran the local branch of the Fabian Society; in 1913 she joined the Tyldesley branch of the Women’s Labour League; and she graduated. Ellen was thought capable of gaining a first class degree but she had concentrated more on her politics than her studies and was awarded a second. She couldn’t wait to put her ideas into practice. The period just before the First World War is often seen as a revolutionary time when socialists, feminists, trade unionists and other rebels fought to change a system deemed to disadvantage the many. Ellen Wilkinson, along with a number of her more radical contemporaries, was ready to overturn the status quo.

Figure 1.1 Ellen in her graduation gown. (People’s History Museum, Manchester)

Her time at Manchester University made it possible for Ellen to abandon the teaching she disliked and train for her much-desired political career. In July 1913, now aged 21, she began to achieve her ambition when the MSWS,¹⁰ a branch of the suffragist National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), appointed her ‘assistant organiser in training’ at a salary of two guineas a week, a decent wage for a young woman just out of university. She joined the staff of the MSWS just in time to help organise the July Suffrage Pilgrimage where women from all over the country walked to Hyde Park, London, to publicise women’s suffrage. Ellen spoke at open-air meetings in Manchester and nearby towns advertising the Pilgrimage, all the time learning how to capture the attention of sometimes reluctant audiences. On 6 July 1913, as a send-off to the pilgrims, a procession of over 600 supporters marched from Albert Square, Manchester to Stockport, with women university students and graduates like Ellen encouraged to wear their caps and gowns.¹¹

It may seem surprising that the fiery and rebellious Ellen joined the peaceful, constitutional suffragists rather than the window-breaking, arsonist and militant suffragettes. Temperamentally she seemed more suited to suffragette methods yet it was highly unlikely that a young working-class woman from a respectable Methodist family would take part in violent action. Perhaps more importantly, in 1912 the Labour Party promised to support votes for women and suffragists pledged to help them get elected; in contrast suffragettes eschewed any affiliation to any political party. Her MSWS job allowed Ellen to combine her emerging feminism and socialism when she was given the job of liaising with the Labour Party.¹² Ellen, a strong Labour supporter, had not only found her natural home but was learning fund-raising tactics, organisational skills, campaign tactics and about the inner workings of a constituency. She helped set up a Suffrage and Labour Club in Ancoats which in the first three months of its life recruited 70 members, raising funds by organising jumble sales and whist drives.¹³ The MSWS believed that ‘the organisation of these clubs is one of the distinctive features of the work of the Manchester Society and they have done much to popularise the question of women’s suffrage.’¹⁴ The Labour Party, impressed by Miss Wilkinson’s political acumen, asked her to sit on a Committee set up to get Labour candidates into Parliament.¹⁵

Ellen spoke at countless meetings, organised the heckling of MPs opposed to votes for women and distributed bucket-loads of leaflets. Oratory, debate and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. The Making of ‘Red Ellen’, 1891–1914
• 2. The First World War and its Aftermath, 1914–24
• 3. On the Opposition Benches, 1924–29
• 4. In and Out of Power, 1929–35
• 5. Fighting Fascism and Imperialism in the 1930s
• 6. In Parliament Again, 1935–39
• 7. The Second World War, 1939–45
• 8. Post-war, 1945–47
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index