Wilkinson, Ellen (1891–1947)

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Wilkinson, Ellen (1891–1947)

English trade union organizer, feminist agitator, and politician. Name variations: Red Ellen. Born Ellen Cicely Wilkinson on October 8, 1891, in the Ardwick district of the city of Manchester, England; died in London at St. Mary's Hospital on February 6, 1947; daughter of Richard Wilkinson (an insurance agent) and Ellen (Wood) Wilkinson; attended elementary and secondary schools in Manchester; graduated from the University of Manchester, 1913; never married; no children.

Was involved in politics and women's movement in her teens; became Manchester organizer for National Union of Women Suffrage Societies (1913); was a fulltime women's organizer for Amalgamated Union of Co-operative Employees (later National Union of Distributive and Allied Workers [NUDAW], 1915–24); served as a member of Parliament for Middlesbrough East (1924–31); was an official of NUDAW (1931–35); served as a member of Parliament for Jarrow (1935–47); was a leader of the Jarrow Crusade (1936); served as junior minister in the Coalition Government (1940–45); served as minister of education in the Labour Government (1945–47).

Selected writings:

Clash (Harrap, 1929); Peeps at Politicians (P.A. Allen & Co., 1930); The Division Bell Mystery (Harrap, 1932); (with Edward Conze) Why Facism? (Selwyn & Blount, 1934); The Town that was Murdered (Gollancz, 1939).

On Monday, October 5, 1936, 200 men set out on a 300-mile march from Jarrow, a town in northeastern England, to London. All were unemployed, as were four out of five men in the area. They took with them a petition to be presented to the House of Commons. Carried in a box at the head of the march, beneath a banner bearing the words JARROW CRUSADE, the petition "humbly pray[ed] that the necessary active assistance be given by the Government for the provision of work in the town of Jarrow." By the time the marchers arrived in London, in pouring rain on Saturday, October 31, they had gained national attention. In Britain at that time many were unemployed and marches and demonstrations were commonplace; but the men of Jarrow, it has been said, "marched into History" and to the present day they are an abiding image of interwar unemployment. For parts of their journey, the men were led by the tiny figure—she was less than five feet tall—of Ellen Wilkinson, Jarrow's member of Parliament.

Born in Manchester in 1891, Wilkinson was the third of four children (two daughters and two sons) of working-class parents who struggled to improve their position. Her father Richard Wilkinson had worked in a cotton factory before obtaining a post as an insurance agent; he became well known in the district as he visited families to collect their small regular payments to the insurance company. He was also respected locally as a Methodist lay preacher, and the whole family was brought up under the influence of the chapel (one of Ellen's brothers became a Methodist minister). In keeping with the principles of their religious sect, the family consumed no alcohol and opposed the practice of gambling. The terraced house in which they lived provided respectable if rather austere accommodation. Recalling the time in a radio broadcast made when she was a public figure, Wilkinson spoke of "Manchester's acres of narrow streets and brick boxes with slate roofs" where "the weather was a mixture of soot and rain." Her mother's health was poor, but fortunately her father's income was sufficient to employ a woman to do heavy work such as the family's washing.

In politics, Richard Wilkinson was a Conservative, a man with a creed his daughter described as "a perfectly simple one. 'I have pulled myself out of the gutter, why can't they?' was his reply to every demand for sympathy or solidarity with his own class." Yet he did all he could to give his own children a start in life. Unlike many men at that time, he strongly believed that girls should have equal educational opportunities. Ellen was a bright child who stood out in the large classes at the local elementary school. She was regarded as someone who would become a teacher, an expectation that came nearer in 1906 when she won a £25 pupil teaching bursary. This led her, for two years, to spend half of each week at the Manchester Day Training College and the other half as a teacher in a local school, where she was only a little older than many of her pupils. Her next step up the educational ladder came when she successfully applied for a highly competitive scholarship to study history at the University of Manchester. Her course began in 1910.

In spite of long hours of hard work at her studies, she had found time for political activities. After reading the works of writers such as Robert Blatchford, perhaps the most popular socialist author of the period in England, she joined the Independent Labour Party at the age of 16. She was also active in the Manchester area in the campaign to win the parliamentary vote for women. In the city, Emmeline Pankhurst was the leader of the suffragettes, who adopted militant tactics; but Wilkinson was a suffragist—a supporter of peaceful persuasion who employed constitutional methods to campaign for the vote. At university, she was a leading member of the Fabian Society, a socialist organization that advocated gradual reform. Though associated with these less militant groupings, she could take a vehement, and even angry, attitude to those questions on which she felt strongly, yet quarrels with colleagues were soon dissolved away by the warmth of her emotions.

In the summer of 1913, she took a degree in history and decided against a career in teaching. Instead, she accepted a post as the full-time Manchester organizer of the constitutionalist National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies. When, in August 1914, Britain entered what was to become World War I, the agitation to extend votes to women was suspended. Wilkinson was asked to concentrate instead on protecting the interests of those women who were affected by the war. This led in 1915 to a post with the Amalgamated Union of Co-operative Employees as its national women's organizer.

The war allowed large numbers of women to find better-paid employment than had previously been available, and this in turn encouraged many to join trade unions. The work of the women's organizer therefore became increasingly important, and by the end of the war Wilkinson had become a prominent member of her union. An amalgamation with another trade union after the war created, in 1921, the National Union of Distributive and Allied Workers, a trade union that recruited many of its members from the ranks of shop assistants and warehouse workers.

As well as acting as women's organizer of the union, Wilkinson took part in the activities of other bodies. She became well known in the Women's Co-operative Guild, an organization made up of women supporters of the co-operative principle in retailing and manufacturing. Politically radicalized by the war, she was at this stage of her career well to the left and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain on its foundation in 1920. In 1921, she traveled to Moscow to attend a conference of the Red International

of Labour Unions. At that time, it was possible to be a member of both the Communist Party and the Labour Party, but fairly soon relations between the two bodies became hostile. In September 1923, Wilkinson had been added to the list of candidates endorsed by the Labour Party—a step towards becoming a member of Parliament. At about this time, she decided her political future lay with Labour, and she resigned from the Communist Party.

[S]he was as rock-like in her socialist idealism as in her feminism, abounding in mercurial anger yet overflowing with generosity of intent.
—Betty Vernon

The decision was shrewd, as the Communists were never able to secure the election of more than the odd candidate to Parliament and small numbers to office in local government. In November 1923, she was elected as the representative of Gorton ward on Manchester City Council. At the general election of December 1923, she stood as the Labour Party's candidate at Ashton-under-Lyne, a constituency a few miles east of Manchester. She was defeated, but in April 1924 the local Labour Party in Middlesbrough East adopted her as its candidate for the next general election. That contest was not long delayed, as the minority Labour Government fell from office in October 1924.

At the time of the election Wilkinson was 33, but her slight build and youthful appearance led some opponents to claim she was not even old enough to vote (in 1918 the parliamentary franchise had been extended to women aged 30 and above; those over 21 had to wait until 1928 to obtain the vote on the same terms as male adults). The constituency was part of a town that depended on heavy industry, including shipbuilding, chemicals and steel; it had grown rapidly in the 19th century and looked, according to Wilkinson writing in her union's magazine, like "a book of illustrations to Karl Marx."

She won the contest and entered the House of Commons as one of only four women MPs, and the single woman Labour MP (her friend Margaret Bondfield had been defeated). As such, she attracted much press attention, particularly as she dressed in an unusually colorful way—she had fine red hair and liked to set it off by wearing a green velvet dress. She became increasingly known by such terms as the "fiery particle," the "elfin fury," and, most often, "Red Ellen." Though she was a vigorous critic of the Conservative government, the most notable event of those years in which she was involved was the General Strike of May 1926. For nine days, the trade union movement attempted to put pressure on the government to protect the living standards of coalminers, and Wilkinson, as an MP sponsored by her union, was involved in the agitation. However, some labor leaders were reluctant to become embroiled in a lengthy dispute and brought the strike to an end. The coalminers continued the struggle—most were not to return to work until near the end of the year—and Wilkinson was among a group of trade unionists who visited the United States in August 1926, at the invitation of the American Federation of Labor, to raise funds in their support. Much of the passion and debate surrounding the General Strike was captured by Wilkinson in her novel Clash, which was published in 1929.

The general election of 1929 led to a second minority Labour Government. Wilkinson retained her Middlesbrough seat and was made the parliamentary private secretary to Susan Lawrence , a junior minister in the new administration (which also included Margaret Bondfield, the first woman to occupy a post in the Cabinet). In the wake of the Wall Street crash, the British economy, already unsteady, suffered an increasing level of unemployment. Government policies were ineffective and in the summer of 1931 Labour fell from office. At the subsequent general election, the party lost a large proportion of its seats, including Middlesbrough East.

Supported by her union, which paid her a salary, Wilkinson was able to continue as a political activist. In 1932, she visited India where she met Mohandas Gandhi, who was then in prison. She went to Spain in 1934 to investigate the suppression of a workers' revolt (when the Civil War broke out in 1936 she was a passionate supporter of the Republic and worked hard on behalf of refugees from the conflict). Always a prolific writer for newspapers and magazines, she also wrote two books in the early 1930s: Peeks at Politicians (1931) and a detective novel, The Division Bell Mystery (1932). She returned to the House of Commons in the general election of 1935, as MP for Jarrow, a constituency some 30 miles north of Middlesbrough, near Newcastle upon Tyne in northeast of England.

She represented an area suffering heavy unemployment. To draw attention to its plight, members of all political parties on the town council decided to present a petition to the House of Commons. The petition was to be accompanied by 200 marchers; Wilkinson's part in the "Jarrow Crusade" is probably the single most important aspect of her public life. Whenever she could, she joined the march and, though her own small stride broke the men's rhythm, their spirits were always raised when she accompanied them.

In the short term, Jarrow's petition, presented in Parliament by her, made little difference to the town's economic well-being, as she made clear in her account The Town that was Murdered: The Life-Story of Jarrow (1939). Only with rearmament and then war in 1939 did full employment return. After the Labour Party joined the Coalition government of May 1940, Wilkinson was appointed to junior office, first at the Ministry of Pensions (May to October 1940) and then the Ministry of Home Security (October 1940 to May 1945).

Wilkinson was always a hard-working person, but the demands of wartime administration drained much of her energy. In 1940, her flat was destroyed in a bombing attack, and in 1943 she broke an ankle in an aircraft accident. One consequence of this was disturbed sleep which, with asthma attacks, led her to rely on regular medication. Nevertheless, her career received a boost in the summer of 1945 when, following the victory of the Labour Party at the general election, she was appointed to the Cabinet—becoming only the second woman to rise to this position—as minister of education. Like all ministers, she had to balance conflicting demands, in her case a commitment to raise to 15 the school-leaving age and to ensure that schools had sufficient space and qualified teachers to deal with larger numbers of children. In the autumn of 1946, she represented the government on a visit to Prague, to open a film festival, but became seriously ill after the ceremony. For the next few months, her health was always uncertain, though she continued in government. Early in February 1947, she was found ill in her flat suffering from pneumonia and admitted to hospital, where she died. Some speculated that she might have deliberately taken a drug overdose, though others insisted her fighting spirit would never allow such an action and that her frail body had simply become worn out.