Edith Summerskill: The Life and Times of a Pioneering Feminist Labour MP 9781350252424, 9781350252455, 9781350252448

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Edith Summerskill

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Frontispiece Edith, aged thirty-three, standing as the Labour candidate for the Putney parliamentary by-election in November 1934. Edith Summerskill papers, LSE Library.

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Edith Summerskill The Life and Times of a Pioneering Feminist Labour MP Mary Honeyball

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Mary Honeyball, 2022 Mary Honeyball has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. xii–xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Catherine Wood Cover image © Dave Bagnall Collection / Alamy Stock Photo All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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For Inigo

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Contents List of Plates List of Abbreviations Acknowledgements

viii x xii

Introduction

1

1

Early Life

9

2

Apprenticeship

27

3

The House of Commons

53

4

The Second World War

77

5

Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Food

107

6

Promotion

131

7

Labour in Opposition

149

8

An Unstable World

179

9

The House of Lords

201

Notes Bibliography Index

225 241 245

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Plates Frontispiece Edith, aged thirty-three, standing as the Labour candidate for the Putney parliamentary by-election in November 1934. Edith Summerskill papers, LSE Library. 1

Edith canvassing workers in the Fulham Road when she was Labour candidate in the Fulham West by-election in April 1938.

2

Edith at a shooting range campaigning for women to join the Home Guard on the same terms as men during the Second World War.

3

Six of the twenty-one Labour Party women MPs elected on 5 July 1945 meeting in London later that month.

4

Edith and Noel Mason-MacFarlane MP for Paddington North arrive at Beaver Hall in London for a Labour MP rally on 28 July 1945.

5

The new Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food, Dr Edith Summerskill, in her office at the Ministry, 15 August 1945.

6

Edith leaving her house for the Ministry of Food in 1949.

7

Edith meets a voter in Fulham West during the general election in 1950.

8

Edith outside the Ministry of National Insurance where she served as minister from February 1950 to October 1951.

9

Edith fighting the 1951 general election in her West Fulham constituency, electioneering from a caravan.

10

Edith on the left with MPs Patricia Ford, Barbara Castle and Irene Ward on their way to the House of Commons with a petition demanding equal pay for women in March 1954.

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Plates

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11

The Labour Party delegation to China via Moscow leaving London Airport on 9 August 1954.

12

Edith with her husband Dr Jeffrey Samuel and former Cabinet Minister Herbert Morrison on 9 September 1954 at the Labour Party annual conference in Scarborough.

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Cartoon in the Daily Mirror on the eve of the National Executive Committee meeting in March 1955 to decide whether to expel Aneurin Bevan. Edith was Labour Party Chairman.

14

Edith, the Labour Party Conference Chairman, addresses delegates on 10 October 1955.

15

Baroness Edith Summerskill of Kenwood, on the left, takes her seat in the House of Lords along with Elaine Burton and Barbara Wootton in 1962.

16

Edith chats to striking woman machinists from the Ford Plant in Dagenham during an equal rights conference at Friends Meeting House, Euston Road, London on 28 June 1968.

Abbreviations ATS

Auxiliary Territorial Service. A unit active during the Second World War.

BHL

British Housewives League. An anti-rationing organization in the 1950s.

CH

The Order of the Companions of Honour. A reward for outstanding achievements conferred on a select number of people.

EPCC

Equal Pay Campaign Committee (1954).

HG

The Home Guard. Served during the Second World War.

KBE

Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

LDV

Local Defence Volunteers. The forerunner to the Home Guard in the Second World War.

MoI

The Ministry of Information. Operated during the Second World War.

MVO

Member of the Royal Victorian Order. A British Order of Knighthood.

MWA

Married Women’s Association. Founded by Edith and Juanita Francis to improve the financial and other prospects for women, particularly in marriage.

NCCL

National Council for Civil Liberties.

NEC

The National Executive Committee of the Labour Party.

OUIDA

Oxford University Inter-Collegiate Debating Association.

OULC

Oxford University Labour Club.

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Abbreviations

PC

Member of the Privy Council. The body which advises the sovereign.

SEATO

South East Asia Treaty Organization.

SMA

Socialist Medical Association. Now the Socialist Health Association.

TB

Tuberculosis. Bacterial and viral infection which may cause severe disability and sometimes death.

UDC

Urban District Council. This layer of local government no longer exists.

VE

Victory in Europe. VE Day was 8 May 1945.

WBCG

Workers’ Birth Control Group. Campaigned for contraception for all women during the 1930s.

WCC

Women’s Consultative Committee. Established during the Second World War to consider women’s role in the war effort.

WHD

Women’s Home Defence.

WPC

Women Power Committee. Cross-party committee to consider women’s work during the Second World War.

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Acknowledgements High on the list of those I wish to thank for helping me with Edith Summerskill is Jo Godfrey, former senior editor at I.B. Tauris who commissioned the book. Jo, who has now moved to Yale University Press, showed faith in me and supported the endeavour from the beginning. Without her encouragement, this biography would never have happened. Jo also kindly read my final draft, making valuable suggestions for improvement. Many people supported me on the way. The staff at the LSE Women’s Library were always helpful, making me welcome in the library and accessing the Edith Summerskill files without which I would not have been able to write this book. My thanks also goes to the People’s History Museum in Manchester, with a special mention for the Archive Officer Darren Treadwell who enabled me to find my way around often complex material. In addition to Jo Godfrey, my completed draft was read by Dr Alice Prochaska, former Principal of Somerville College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and my friend and colleague Patricia Erskine-Hill. Sincere thanks to both of them. Two people in particular who agreed to be interviewed for the biography provided insights I would not otherwise have had. Ben Summerskill, Edith’s grandson, was especially helpful and talked freely to me about his grandmother and grandfather, Jeffrey Samuel. I am also indebted to Barbara Hosking who worked at Transport House, the headquarters of the Labour Party, when Edith was on the National Executive Committee. It would be remiss of me not to mention Professor Jane Ridley of Buckingham University. I attended some of Jane’s biography MA course which gave me a strong basis from which to proceed with my own venture. Special thanks are also due to Tomasz Hoskins and Nayiri Kendir from Bloomsbury Publishers who took over the I.B. Tauris list when the companies merged. Tomasz and Nayiri prepared the book for publication and ironed out the last-minute details. I must also thank Olivia Dellow from I.B. Tauris for her support. xii

Acknowledgements

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Martin Redfern, Executive Director at Northbank Talent Management, became my literary agent part way through my Edith Summerskill journey. He deserves thanks and acknowledgement for his work on the final stages of the publication process. And last, but by no means least, my wonderful, loving husband Inigo Bing. Inigo has not only put up with Edith Summerskill for a very long time, but he has also read every word and made many valuable comments and suggestions for improvement. Mary Honeyball

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Introduction

Pathé News, in a beautifully staged short feature film, followed Edith during the course of one day in 1945. The bulletin, entitled Close-Up of Dr Edith Summerskill, described her in admiring terms as ‘one of the busiest women in England’. Edith, up early and immaculately dressed, walked Happy, her small white dog. She then set about her doctor’s rounds, and soon, according to the bulletin, ‘one of the sick and suffering will be feeling better for her quiet sympathy and skill in the art of healing’. Once her patients had been attended to, Edith became a housewife and mother, buying food with rations and coupons uppermost in her mind, while talking to others in a similar situation. As Pathé tells us, Edith was ‘never too busy to speak to ordinary folk in the street’. The afternoon saw her catching a train from Camberley, where the family had been evacuated, to London to sit in the House of Commons. Edith then took her turn in the questions of the day, particularly those that concerned women. Edith Summerskill, the ‘flaming feminist’ of the British press, championed the cause of women all her life from the time she qualified as a doctor in 1925 until the late 1970s. As a young GP in a poor area of north London, Edith ran a birth control clinic and sat on the maternity and child welfare committee of Wood Green Urban District Council. Having been elected to Parliament in 1938, Edith was one of only two women, the other being the Independent MP Eleanor Rathbone, who pursued rights for women as their top priority. Summerskill, along with Rathbone, can and should be recognized as the first feminist MPs. Such firm and unwavering commitment to improving women’s lives was not to be seen for another fifty years, when Harriet Harman again took up the mantle. Edith was successful in introducing legislation for women to have an equal share in the matrimonial finances and to remain in the home if the marriage broke down. She also ensured women had the same rights as 1

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men to compensation for war injuries. Throughout her life, Edith campaigned for women to have a choice over their fertility, for day nurseries, for better education for girls, for analgesia in childbirth, for equal pay, for an end to boxing – which she considered a cruel male-dominated sport as well as a major health hazard – and for much more. During the Second World War, Edith was instrumental in allowing women to take up paid employment and contribute to the war effort. Having come across Edith while researching my first book, Parliamentary Pioneers, Labour Women MPs 1918–1945, I soon realized that she was a woman MP worthy of far greater recognition than has so far been the case. Despite serving as a government minister, Labour Party Chairman [sic] and being headline news from the Second World War until the beginning of the 1960s, Edith is almost unknown today. Once I had done some research, I felt both astonished and sad that Edith has been virtually airbrushed from history. This book is her first full-length biography. Other women politicians of the time who were similar in stature to Edith such as Ellen Wilkinson and Jennie Lee have had many thousands of words devoted to their lives and political achievements. Margaret Bondfield, who had left the House of Commons before Edith arrived, was the subject of a biography written during her lifetime and has since received serious study. Barbara Castle, first elected in 1945, has had many hundreds of thousands of words devoted to her life, times and successes. Edith, one of the senior Labour women who were in the House of Commons during the Attlee Government and held office at the time, is all but anonymous. This biography aims to put that right. During the course of writing this book, as I got to know Edith better, I began to recognize her as a kindred spirit. I have been a woman in politics, serving as a Labour MEP for nearly twenty years from 2000 until 2019. During almost the whole of that time I sat on the European Parliament Women’s Rights and Gender Equality Committee, becoming the Vice-Chair in 2016. As a result, I have both campaigned and legislated for equal pay, equal treatment between women and men in the workplace, equality in the provision of goods and services, addressing the gender pay gap, abortion rights, the elimination of violence against women, quotas for women on the boards of leading companies as well as improved representation for women on public bodies. This, I believe, gave me an insight into the work Edith did, her motivation and the importance

Introduction

3

of her achievements. While the feminist discourse today is very different from the one pursued by Edith, involving the concept of patriarchy which was unknown during Edith’s lifetime, many of the issues and causes remain stubbornly the same. Child care in Britain still requires improvement, women earn less than men, there are too few women in public life, company boards are heavily male dominated and women still suffer appalling violence. Edith was first elected to the House of Commons in 1938. By this time, she had been married for thirteen years to her doctor husband, Jeffrey Samuel, and had two young children, aged eleven and seven. During the course of the next twenty-three years, Edith rose to become a leading post-war politician, and she remains one of Britain’s outstanding Members of Parliament. Edith not only held ministerial office, she championed change. Virtually singlehandedly Edith took action to eradicate tuberculosis from the milk supply, introducing an Act of Parliament in 1949 following a campaign in the House of Commons and the country lasting nearly ten years. Once the 1945 Labour Government decided food rationing would have to continue, Edith, promoted to Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Food, sold this unpopular measure to the British people. She was rewarded with the position of Minister of National Insurance, of Cabinet rank but not in the Cabinet. Edith was, in fact, the first married woman to be made a government minister. While at the Ministry she was responsible for legislation providing compensation for miners who suffered lung diseases. Edith, who spent several years on the Labour Party National Executive Committee during the 1950s, was also a key player in the party’s internecine strife which raged at this time. In 1961 she was made a life peeress. One of the reasons Edith has gained so little recognition is due in no small part to her steadfast and unwavering commitment to improving the lot of women. Feminist MPs in Britain have always had a tough time, though the increasing number of women in Parliament has improved matters. Other prominent Labour women MPs who were Edith’s contemporaries – Ellen Wilkinson, Jennie Lee and Barbara Castle amongst others – rarely touched issues concerning the financial and social status of women. The received wisdom was that pursuing too much of a feminist agenda in the Labour Party, heavily male and trade union dominated at this time, would be the kiss of death for promotion in Parliament. As it turned out, championing the

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Edith Summerskill

cause of women did little to hurt Edith’s chances of rising through the ranks. Edith was, in any case, not one to be put off something she believed needed to be done. It is a huge indictment of the way political leaders are remembered and celebrated that Edith’s fame during her lifetime did not translate into a concrete legacy. As I progressed with the biography, I became ever more puzzled as to why Edith’s story failed to capture the imagination of succeeding generations. Part of the reason lies in the way history is recorded and later written. In spite of her high media profile, Edith hardly ever appeared in memoirs, diaries and serious political works written at the time. The major Labour Party diarists – Richard Crossman, Hugh Gaitskell and Ian Mikardo – hardly mention Edith and when they do it is in disparaging terms. These male politicians could not see any woman as their equal, and one who championed rights for women was beyond either their comprehension or their regard. There are, in addition, very few references to Edith Summerskill in the vast lexicon of books covering the period she was in Parliament. Edith flits in and out of historical works like a superficial and short-lived gadfly of little consequence to anyone and of no consequence at all to the affairs of state. Since, prior to Margaret Thatcher, women did not run for the leadership of political parties and they were never part of the ‘old boy network’, they were generally not considered for any kind of notable place in the historical account. Edith suffered more than her fair share of slings and arrows from male parliamentarians on all sides of the House of Commons and in the media. ‘Numbskull’, ‘gorgon’ and ‘Amazonian’ were just three insults she suffered from male Labour Party so-called comrades. Edith was confident and outspoken. Even today, assertive women in professional and political life are still often regarded as aggressive, presumptuous, unfeminine and any number of hostile adjectives. Yet the very same words spoken by a woman when they come from the mouth of a man are viewed very differently. It is, I believe, important to recognize not only the valuable work Edith did, but also the risks she was prepared to take. It is hugely to her credit that she would risk all rather than give up on what she thought was right. One of the very few stories about Edith Summerskill which has gained any circulation was her stance on birth control, when she contested the parliamentary seat of Bury in Lancashire in the 1935 general election. Edith refused to be cowed by

Introduction

5

the demands of Roman Catholic priests in the town, who wanted her to take a stand against contraception. Edith quite simply would not go against a woman’s right to limit the number of children she had, a commitment which went to the very core of her beliefs and values. Edith courageously stood up to the priests, and there is evidence that some of Bury’s Catholic voters who would normally have voted Labour did not support her. Although she did not win the seat, this was probably due more to the fact that Labour nationally did not fare well in 1935 than due to the Catholic priests. Edith was to come up against the same issue three years later when she sought selection for the winnable London seat of Fulham West. She went to great lengths to make sure the local Catholic priest would not behave in the way his counterparts in Bury had done. Edith did not confirm that she would accept the Labour nomination to stand in West Fulham until she had an assurance from the priest that he would not interfere in the by-election on the birth control issue. The priest did, in fact, agree not to interfere in the by-election on the issue of contraception, and Edith became the Labour Party candidate. Delaying her acceptance of the nomination until she had sounded out the priest was a very risky thing to do. Edith could have missed an opportunity, maybe her only opportunity, to become an MP, something she had by now set her heart on doing. Edith’s stance in Fulham was a reflection of her career as a whole. She always and quite simply stood up for what she thought was right and what she believed in. She pursued her feminist agenda even though it may have meant she would not be given a place in government. Although Edith always appeared to want promotion to the ministerial ranks, she would not seek preferment at any cost. In this, she was a conviction politician. She was also a doctor who continued to observe the lives of less well-off women at first hand. It was a dynamic and rare combination. There have been very few female medical doctors in the House of Commons. Edith’s daughter was one, as was Dr Ethel Bentham, one of Edith’s predecessors. Edith was the only female medical doctor MP during her time in the House of Commons. Edith herself said it was seeing the plight of the poor and the unemployed during the economic crisis of the 1930s, as she accompanied her doctor father on his rounds, that made her a socialist. The amelioration of poverty, especially for women and children who during the 1930s were completely dependent on the male breadwinner, was always one of Edith’s main campaigning concerns.

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Edith Summerskill

Edith also had her fair share of luck, an essential ingredient for a successful political career. She was lucky to have the chance to go for selection for the Conservative marginal of Fulham West in the by-election in 1938, which only happened because the existing prospective Labour parliamentary candidate resigned. Edith’s luck continued. She was able to contest and win the byelection on her record of opposing appeasement and by being strong and forthright about the need to defeat the Nazi threat to Europe. By the time another general election was fought in 1945, Edith was not only well established as the local MP, but she also benefitted from the Labour landslide. Edith was also supremely lucky in her marriage to fellow doctor Jeffrey Samuel. Jeffrey and Edith ran their general practice together and he always supported her. They were also fortunate in having the financial wherewithal to employ domestic help, by far the most important being Nana, nanny to their children. Edith’s strong values, her straightforward personality and her unshakeable self-belief formed the bedrock of her success. She was, in addition, tall and striking looking. While too much weight was, and still is, given to women’s appearance, there is no doubt that Edith cut a fine figure, and that it helped her throughout her career. Tall, at over five feet nine inches, which was unusual for a woman at the time, slim with russet red hair, Edith was strikingly handsome. Together with her immaculate dress sense and exquisite taste in hats, she looked like a woman with a mission, someone to be listened to and taken seriously. When she entered Parliament, her looks caused comments in the press and would probably, at least initially, have been an asset in the maledominated House of Commons. When she became a minister and then a peer, her demeanour as an older woman with an experience of life would have encouraged confidence in her abilities. Discovering the real Edith Summerskill was a joy and a pleasure. It also proved a long, hard road. Full-length books providing more than one or two occasional sentences about Edith are rare, and the information is almost always focused on something else, with Edith as an incidental afterthought. There are, in fact, only two books which treat Edith as a person and politician in her own right – Making Reputations, edited by Richard Toye and Juliet Gottlieb and published by I.B. Tauris in 2005, which has a chapter on Edith Summerskill; and Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-Bird’s Contesting Home Defence, published by Manchester University Press in 2007. The latter

Introduction

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contains a full account of Edith’s campaign for equality between women and men in the Home Guard during the Second World War. Edith’s own writing – her memoirs, A Woman’s World: Babies Without Tears; her short book on the need for analgesia in childbirth; The Ignoble Art, opposing boxing; and Letters to my Daughter, a collection of letters written to Shirley Summerskill while she was a student – are all carefully crafted. Edith was generally mindful of her public image and rarely gave much away. However, her life story would be even more obscure without these works produced by Edith herself. There is perhaps a lesson in this: that if you think what you have achieved is worthy of being remembered, you should record it when you can. The archival sources did not yield as much as I expected, and I again came across the problem that Edith was just not quite senior enough. This, it appears, will always be a problem for the early women MPs. Yet their story is important in charting the increasing diversity of public life and the way in which opportunities for women and minorities were opened up. Edith never reached the Cabinet and, as a result, does not appear in Cabinet papers except on the rare occasions she attended as Minister of National Insurance. Moreover, the Labour Party NEC minutes do not attribute contributions to individuals, meaning there was not much to be gleaned beyond the general themes. Newspapers, which were on the whole helpful, inevitably function on the basis of an editorial line, so the biographer needs to approach them with caution. The only consistently reliable written source was Hansard, reporting Edith in her own words. I am also indebted to Edith’s son Michael, who left a lifetime of personal papers to the library at the London School Economics, without which I could not have written this book. I sincerely believe the effort was worth it. Edith Summerskill was an important politician, a campaigner and legislator who got things done. The world became a better place as a result of her work. She was also one of the first women to reach the top, or at least as near to the top as it was possible for women to aspire to in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The work of those leading women politicians who have so far been hidden from history is finally being brought into public view. Dr Edith Summerskill is a woman who deserves huge credit, especially for her tireless fight for women’s rights. I fervently hope this book will contribute to her taking her rightful place as one of Britain’s leading mid-twentieth-century political and parliamentary figures.

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1

Early Life

Born on 19 April 1901, Edith Clara Summerskill, the youngest of Dr William Hedley and Edith Clara Summerskill’s three children, seemed destined for a conventional, middle-class life. Yet, having qualified as a doctor, married a fellow medic and having two children, she went on to become a Member of Parliament, one of only a handful women in the House of Commons at the time, a government minister and a peer of the realm. By the time she passed away on 4 February 1980, the Rt Hon Baroness Dr Edith Summerskill CH PC really had done it all. She qualified as a doctor around the time the medical profession was closing its doors to women after the First World War, and subsequently rose to high office as a woman in politics when women were practically invisible in public life. On the face of it, Edith Summerskill had a charmed life. However, during her formative years, all was not as it seemed. Her family looked like the very model of Victorian professional respectability, but underneath the unruffled exterior lay a dark secret. It was a secret never mentioned by Edith Summerskill in public, though it was well known within the family. Edith’s father was a philanderer. This euphemistic word is used by his grandson Michael, Edith’s son, to describe Dr William (Willie) Summerskill’s string of sexual connections which began during his early thirties not long after he had married. Michael’s allegations have been corroborated by his son, Ben Summerskill. Michael has described how, during the First World War, a young man came to the front door of the Summerskill house in Lewisham and saw Mrs Summerskill, Edith’s mother. Having been called up to serve in the war he had, he said, obtained a copy of his birth certificate only to find that his father was William Summerskill. The young man then asked for money, which Mrs Summerskill refused on the grounds that the child’s mother had received regular payments until the child (the young man) was fourteen, the school 9

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leaving age. Mrs Summerskill herself had been the person responsible for distributing this payment.1 Moreover, this young man was not the only ‘love child’ Dr Summerskill fathered; there appear to have been several others. Dr William Summerskill’s grandson Michael was convinced that few women were safe with Dr William. Michael also makes the obvious point that Dr Summerskill seems to have missed: that as a doctor he would have known how to prevent these pregnancies.2 Not only had Edith’s father made this young man’s mother and very likely other women, pregnant, but he also seemed to think it was perfectly acceptable and reasonable that his wife should make the payments to the young man’s mother and other women in the same situation. Edith’s mother handed out the money to the mothers Dr William had made pregnant, recording the amounts in a cash book. Mrs Summerskill, already badly insulted and humiliated, had to face the further indignity of making the payouts and keeping records. She did, however, feel it necessary to take action within the household to limit the damage caused by the doctor’s sexual appetites. The Summerskills, therefore, only employed maids with learning difficulties and other incapacities since even William Summerskill would hesitate to seduce or assault them. Given that the young women made pregnant by Dr Summerskill came to the house for their payments, Edith was almost certainly aware of what was going on. She must also have seen that her parents’ marriage was far from happy. Edith’s mother had been known to say to other women in her family, ‘Marry for money. I was a fool and married for love; look what happened to me.’3 Edith’s father’s behaviour must have affected her when young, and it would have been unusual if she had not carried her experiences forward as she grew up. Dr William Summerskill’s lack of respect for some, if not all, women and the damage he wrought was likely one of the main reasons Edith championed women’s independence, and financial equality between women and men in marriage. While Dr William Summerskill’s predatory sexuality and the harm it inflicted was nothing short of abominable, it would probably have been more acceptable in the early twentieth century than today. However, Dr William, to his credit, consistently railed against the poor standard of midwifery only too evident to a general medical practitioner at the time. Midwives were not registered until 1902 and unqualified women could attend confinements until

Early Life

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1924. In her memoirs, Edith recollects how, when she was a medical student, her father took her with him to a midwifery case attended by an unqualified woman of about seventy. Dr Summerskill insisted that the midwife wash her hands and arms, an easy and obvious thing to do, but one which seemed to have been regularly passed over. Edith’s comment on this state of affairs was straight to the point: ‘women in childbirth all over the world continued to be sacrificed because the most elementary precautions against infection failed to be observed’.4 Edith herself was fortunate in that her father always encouraged her and he was certainly an important influence in Edith’s decision to become a doctor. Dr William had also been known to express regret that his sister Eleanor was never allowed to reach her potential and, as a result, spent many years living at home with her parents. Edith even went as far as to refer to Dr William as a ‘feminist’ in her memoirs. Notwithstanding his hopes for his daughter and his sister Eleanor, William, it appeared, had no qualms about seriously affecting the lives of other women, his own wife included. His efforts on Edith’s behalf were not enough to expunge his behaviour from her consciousness. Instead, Edith spent a lifetime campaigning for the rights of women. Edith Summerskill was born at 1 Doughty Street, Bloomsbury, where her father also held his surgery and carried out his rounds on horseback. Ever the dutiful daughter in public, Edith describes her father as ‘a dedicated doctor who found his fulfilment in ministering to the poor and the sick’.5 She also tells of her own poor health as a child and the ravages caused by the infectious diseases which were made worse by lack of adequate nutrition, particularly in poor communities. One of Edith’s first recollections was puffing and wheezing with bronchitis, a common childhood illness at the time, under a canopy above her bed which was filled with steam from a nearby kettle. Childhood sickness was rife in the insanitary living conditions suffered by the poor at the beginning of the twentieth century, and vaccination was rare, being limited to only a very few diseases. The death rate from infectious illnesses was high; for example, before a vaccine was introduced in 1942, diphtheria killed an average of 3,500 children a year.6 Poor nutrition was commonplace, especially in industrial areas, where rickets was endemic and often accepted as a hereditary complaint. In accordance with medical opinion at the time, Dr William Summerskill believed that children should be ‘fed up’ – given substantial amounts of food

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Edith Summerskill

which would, it was thought, prevent disease. Edith, the youngest child, received the full treatment. She was, as a result, fat as a child and overweight as a teenager. Recalling her own schooldays when presenting prizes as the local MP at Fulham Grammar School in October 1949, Edith told how, as a schoolgirl, she was terrified of the gym mistress: ‘I was always very big and very fat and always getting in the way of the smaller ones.’7 Edith herself thought her bronchitis was caused by overfeeding, and that her father’s passion for preventative medicine had therefore been partly responsible for her condition. Edith was later to lose her excess weight and was, by all accounts tall, slim and striking when she went to medical school. Photographs taken when she entered the House of Commons show her as glamorous and very well dressed. She apparently always watched her weight. Her son Michael tells how during the 1930s Edith breakfasted on grapefruit with a cherry, crunchy rye bread, butter, marmalade and tea while the rest of the family would have bacon and eggs and porridge in addition to toast and marmalade.8 Soon after Edith’s birth the family moved to Forest Gate then, shortly after, to Seven Kings, Ilford, near Chadwell Heath where Dr William stood for the local council as an independent candidate campaigning to rid the area of a rubbish dump infested with disease-carrying flies. At a time when it was common to buy and sell medical practices, Dr William was, it appeared, ambitious for his to flourish. Edith loved the clean air on Chadwell Heath, calling the area a rural paradise after the streets of Bloomsbury. Another relatively rapid move saw the family take up residence in Westgate-on-Sea for what Edith described as ‘a few happy carefree years.’9 Dr William ran a clinic for tuberculosis in Westgate, which may have been the origin of Edith’s concern about that particular disease. Her interest and work on TB culminated in legislation to ensure milk was free of tuberculosis bacteria. The stay in Westgate proved as short-lived as Dr William’s previous moves. In 1914, when Edith was thirteen, the Summerskill family moved one final time, ending up in Lewisham in south London. Her father was forty-eight when the family settled, and Dr William and Mrs Summerskill remained in the area until both of them died during the 1940s. The Summerskill family’s original move out of London may have been due to the state of Edith’s health, as the better-quality air in the countryside and by the sea was considered beneficial for patients with chest complaints. The return to the capital may have been motivated by financial

Early Life

13

considerations, since London would have provided more patients than either a rural or a coastal area. Edith’s health notwithstanding, between Edith’s birth in 1901 and the family finally settling in 1914, Dr William was not only prepared to uproot his wife and children on four separate occasions over a tenyear period, but they also moved considerable distances. The reasons are unclear; it may have been money; it may have been because his sexual misconduct caught up with him. Whatever lay behind the moves, they must have been disruptive for the young Edith. Once settled in Lewisham, it was not all plain sailing for the Summerskills. Dr William had a serious brush with the law in 1918 when he was convicted for attempting to obtain thirty shillings from the Commissioner of Police on false pretences and sentenced to four months in prison. The charge related to an air raid when Dr Summerskill was called by the police to attend to the injured. It was alleged he then charged thirty shillings for patients whom he had not treated. Although the case was quashed in the Court of Appeal on 27 May 1918,10 on the basis that the appellant admitted he had made an honest mistake, the court appearances and the sentence must have been upsetting for Mrs Summerskill and the children. For Edith, it would more than likely have further damaged her perception of her father. Edith’s mother, also called Edith, helped her husband with his medical practice, as was the custom at the time. Having met Dr William while he was at St Mary’s Hospital medical school, Edith senior was, according to her daughter, an energetic woman ‘but the customs of the time offered little outlet other than the management of the home and the organisation of money-raising efforts for medical charities’.11 Edith junior maintained that her mother was ‘just and fair to the procession of maids who provided the domestic labour in our home, but she demanded such a high standard of work . . . [in the kitchen] a girl [would be] vigorously scrubbing the kitchen floor or the large table which was white and worn from years of similar treatment from strong young arms’. Edith senior’s perfectionism also extended to the upbringing of her children. According to Edith junior’s son, Michael, his grandmother would beat her children, including Edith, in the bathroom when they were naked and wet.12 While corporal punishment was common practice at the time, such treatment meted out to her own children was undoubtedly harsh.

14

Edith Summerskill

Not only did Mrs Summerskill have to contend with her husband’s sexual misdemeanours, she, along with her husband, worked ferociously hard. On Sundays, Dr and Mrs Summerskill would lie in bed for most of the day, drinking only fruit juice and water to give their bodies a rest.13 Edith junior was brought up in a household with the strongest possible work ethic, which she in turn took on board in her own life. Reassuringly, Dr Edith Summerskill never used physical punishment on her own two children. Fortunately for Edith, neither her mother nor her father saw Edith junior’s future simply as a housewife. Edith was extremely fortunate in having parents who wished her success outside the home which was far from the usual state of affairs for girls before the First World War. In her memoirs, Edith tells of times when she would go into the kitchen only to be repulsed by her mother who would say, ‘You are not wanted here; go upstairs and get on with your work.’14 From the Summerskills’ arrival in Lewisham until Edith started her medical training, work was school work. Edith, along with her older sister Daphne, attended Eltham Hill School, a state secondary school for girls near Woolwich. In its prospectus, the present-day Eltham Hill School refers obliquely to Dr Edith Summerskill, stating that ‘an early pupil was to become not only an M.P. but also a Minister of the Crown’.15 During the time she was a pupil, the school made considerable efforts with Edith’s education. Edith later described the striking shortage of teachers in science subjects and told how her maths teacher, Miss Canter, stayed after school to provide her with further tuition. Such additional work was essential in order for Edith to enter medical school, as she would need to pass mathematics in the London matriculation examination. Fortunately, Edith was successful in her exam. In October 1918, at the age of seventeen, she began her studies in chemistry, physics and biology at King’s College, London University. Her father, who, for all his many faults had always encouraged Edith to enter the medical profession, had previously taken her to be interviewed by the Dean. Edith describes herself as wearing a pigtail down her back, black cashmere stockings, heavy school shoes and clothes provided for weekend wear as a change from school uniform. Until she qualified, Edith’s father provided an allowance of £1 a week, while any new clothes were bought by her mother.16 Edith lived at home for the duration of her training; anything else would have been unthinkable. Staying with her parents seems to have

Early Life

15

made little difference to Edith’s pleasure in her new environment. She apparently enjoyed herself enormously, accepting invitations to the theatre, opera and ballet from the male ex-services students, often cutting classes to attend matinees. As a result, Edith was not successful in her first examination in the Bachelor of Medicine (MB) course, though she stresses in her memoirs that none of these young men were anything other than pleasant companions and, since they sometimes visited her at home, her parents would have known what was going on. Nevertheless, her father was furious at Edith’s failure, cancelling her holiday at the seaside as he considered she had already had enough relaxation.17 Edith, of course, passed the exam at the next available opportunity. In her memoirs she was as generous to her father as ever, claiming his response to her failing was only to be expected given his own long working hours as a single-handed general medical practitioner. A short time before Edith moved from Kings College to practical training at Charing Cross Hospital, she enjoyed, in the hospital refectory, what was probably the most fortunate and fortuitous meeting of her lifetime. It was mid1919 and she was there having lunch with a friend. Edward Jeffrey Samuel, known as Jeffrey, also a medical student, was lunching on his own. Jeffrey later described this first meeting: ‘I encountered the most beautiful face I had ever seen. It belonged to one whom I later learned to be Edith Summerskill.’18 Edith’s recollection of their first meeting is more prosaic and practical. They were both attending an extra-curricular lecture when Jeffrey, as a senior student, told Edith she would be removed from the hall if she did not stop talking.19 The rest is history. Edith and Jeffrey decided not to get formally engaged but to marry when they had both qualified. By all accounts they enjoyed a delightful courtship with picnics at the Oxford and Cambridge boat race, suppers at Rules restaurant in Maiden Lane, central London and visits to the theatre. Speaking much later to the Kings College Association, Edith told her audience, ‘We did some of our courting within the precincts [of the hospital]. We went across to Fuller’s where in the dim light and intimate atmosphere of the basement we partook of Fuller’s walnut cake.’20 They, of course, met each other’s families. The Summerskills and the Samuels could hardly have been more different. Jeffrey, slim, sandy-haired and quietly spoken, hailed from Llanelli in Carmarthenshire. His family were strict Baptists who attended chapel services held in Welsh, a far cry from the metropolitan Edith

16

Edith Summerskill

and her medical parents. The Samuels had been involved in shipping for generations, exporting coal to the rest of Europe. Jeffrey, however, wanted none of this life, which often involved perilous journeys by sea, and decided to become a doctor. Having rejected the sea, Jeffrey then moved away from the geographical roots of his Welsh nonconformist upbringing. According to Jeffrey and Edith’s son Michael, the Samuel family was surprised by Edith when they first met her; Edith’s striking presence and forceful views were emphatically not what they were expecting. The Samuel family did, however, warm to her, while Edith herself worked hard on the family relationship.21 Jeffrey qualified and left Charing Cross Hospital in 1920; Edith still had four years to go. She did not, as other young women at the time may have done, give up her professional training to get married. Edith stuck with it and qualified as a doctor in 1924, but it had not all been plain sailing. Edith seemed to have had little aptitude for surgery and was referred (failed) twice, something she apparently never mentioned to her family.22 She did, of course, make it in the end, and joined her father’s general practice, working with him until her marriage. Rather than staying in London with Edith, Jeffrey spent a year as medical assistant in the county borough of Swansea then took up a position as the junior partner in a medical practice in his home town of Llanelli in 1922. Although they were never formally engaged, Edith and Jeffrey continued to see each other despite the geographical distance. In the summer of 1921, Edith spent some weeks with Jeffrey in Swansea. Maybe the separation concentrated their minds, though there never seems to have been any doubt about their deep love for each other. Edith’s lack of success in some of her exams may have been related to her separation from Jeffrey and especially her efforts to bring together their London and Llanelli lives. Jeffrey did eventually decide to return London in 1923, taking up a position as Medical Officer at Peckham House, a private mental health hospital in Lyndhurst Way, Peckham, less than three miles from the Summerskill home in Lee near Lewisham where Edith lived with her parents. While at Peckham House, Jeffrey passed Part One of the Diploma in Psychiatric Medicine. According to Jeffrey and Edith’s son Michael, psychiatry, still in its infancy as a medical discipline, may well have been Jeffrey’s preferred specialism.23 However, despite his interest, Jeffrey never gained a full qualification in the subject. Edith, on the other hand, made it quite clear that she did not share

Early Life

17

Jeffrey’s enthusiasm for mental health. Speculation about the individual psyche was some way away from her idea of what medicine and medical practice should be about. Edith’s approach as a doctor and later to politics was always practical, seeking solutions to concrete problems. Edith and Jeffrey were married in July 1925 in Margate, Kent, near Westgate where Edith’s father had once practised medicine. It was a small, family affair, and the receipt for lunch at the Queen’s Highcliffe Hotel in Cliftonville was one of the few personal documents kept by Edith and Jeffrey, perhaps showing the importance of the event for them. Eight people were present, and the meal comprised six courses including lobster, lamb and grilled chicken with four bottles of wine and champagne. All the guests signed the menu. Edith signed it with her married name of Samuel, maybe to be diplomatic as far as the family, and possibly Jeffrey, were concerned or maybe because she had not yet decided to keep her maiden name. Edith, always interested in clothes and fashionably attired, had bought a dress in beige chiffon with matching hat and shoes. The happy couple had together chosen a wedding ring for Edith made of platinum with inlaid diamonds in preference to a wide gold band. Edith felt the conventional gold ring ‘smacked of some primitive survival’.24 She later described the wedding itself as taking place in ‘a little church made beautiful with flowers skilfully arranged by my mother’.25 Unsurprisingly, Edith’s mother had become mistrustful of the motives of most men and warned against the risks – financial, physical and emotional – of marriage. She had also come to the view that financial security in marriage was of the utmost importance since, without it, women could be mistreated without any hope of escape. Nonetheless, both Ediths, mother and daughter, accepted the structure of marriage. Edith junior always thought that, if managed in the right way, marriage was valuable for women in that it provided stability and financial security. In this respect, both mother and daughter were of their time: it was either marriage or life as a spinster. Soon after tying the knot, Edith and Jeffrey decided to go into general practice together, a decision that meant Jeffrey had to give up psychiatry. However, loyal and devoted husband that he was, Jeffrey accepted Edith’s preference that the two of them combine in general practice. Jeffrey’s agreeing with Edith’s desire to go into general practice was the first time he put Edith’s career ambitions above his own, and it was, of course, not the last. Jeffrey was,

18

Edith Summerskill

by all accounts, a quiet and unassuming man with a good heart who loved Edith very much. She, of course, returned his love. Theirs was the strongest of partnerships which continued until they were finally parted by Edith’s death in 1980. Edith, when talking about Jeffrey, always mentioned his ‘gentleness, his humour and more than anything, his loyalty’.26 She was able to rely on Jeffrey completely throughout her political career, in her medical practice and in their family life. In a society often hostile to Edith’s ideas and in the competitive world of politics, Jeffrey was the priceless asset who enabled Edith to flourish. He, on the other hand, seems to have enjoyed their life as a family, which soon came to include two children, and was content to carry out good work as a doctor. Marriage to a strong woman who went on to be a successful politician was not, perhaps, what Jeffrey expected of his life. He was the only one of his brothers to marry a woman who worked outside the home, itself unusual in the 1920s. Edith and Jeffrey, of course, lived in a society which saw the man as the dominant partner in marriage. Nevertheless, according to their son Michael, Edith and Jeffrey achieved a partnership which made both of them contented and in which neither was subservient to the other.27 Once married, the couple needed to make a decision about where they would live. In her memoirs, Edith says that she hankered after the heights of north London, believing such a location would provide purer air than that found where they were currently living as well as more space. By this time Edith wanted enough room for children.28 Edith and Jeffrey duly bought a house in Finchley, moving in 1926. As young doctors – Jeffrey was thirty-one and Edith twenty-five – their joint income was not large, but, since this was the 1920s there was a good supply of cheap household labour and they were able to employ a resident cook and housemaid. Outside of their middle-class home life, Edith and Jeffrey developed a medical practice drawing patients from the less salubrious areas of Wood Green, Edmonton and Tottenham, soon becoming known as doctors to the poor. At this period in her life, Edith maintained, at least for some occasions, the tradition of women taking their husband’s name. When their son Michael was born late in 1927, cards announcing the baby’s arrival were sent out in the names of Dr and Mrs E. Jeffrey Samuel. Michael was delivered at home by Edith’s former teacher at Charing Cross Hospital, Everard Williams, who administered a treatment to

Early Life

19

lessen the pain, thereby converting Edith to analgesia in childbirth: ‘Since that time I have ardently campaigned for analgesia to be available for all women who want it.’29 In 1941, Edith was to publish Babies without Tears, advocating pain control during birth. It was a courageous path to take. James Simpson, the obstetrician who had first used chloroform as an anaesthetic during childbirth in the middle of the nineteenth century, had been denounced by his medical colleagues who considered chloroform not only dangerous to health but also to morals and religion. By the time Edith qualified as a doctor over seventyfive years later, poor women were still being denied analgesia when giving birth, to a large extent because childbirth was in the hands of midwives who were considered insufficiently qualified to administer it. In 1932, the British College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists conducted an investigation into the matter, recommending the use of a gas and air apparatus invented by Dr Minnitt which the college considered to be safe. The British Medical Association begged to disagree, claiming the use of gas and air equipment by midwives would put general practitioners out of business. Once in Parliament, Edith waged a strong campaign to allow all women to have access to analgesia in childbirth; it became one of the issues for which she is best known. Now that she was a parent and in order to maintain her work outside the home, Edith needed a reliable nurse. This was done, not by word of mouth as may have been expected, but by placing an advertisement in a suitable publication, thought to have been the Nursing Mirror. The advert asked the candidate to address herself to ‘Dr and Mrs Samuel (not Jewish)’.30 This casual anti-Semitism is shocking in itself, made worse by the fact that the advert was from a young, professional couple who acted as doctors to the poor and would have been considered enlightened for the time. Whether Edith and Jeffrey were at pains to point out that, despite their surname, they were not Jewish or whether they wanted a non-Jewish nurse is irrelevant. What is very clear is that both Edith and Jeffrey shared the anti-Semitism endemic in the English middle classes between the wars. When mentioning someone’s name they would sometimes say, ‘You know he’s not Jewish, don’t you?’31 According to Michael, Edith was sensitive about her husband’s surname,32 especially in Finchley with its substantial Jewish population; however, Samuel was a common surname in Jeffrey’s native Wales where biblical names proliferated.

20

Edith Summerskill

The Samuel–Summerskill household was typical of the professional classes of the time, just as Dr William Summerskill’s had been. There were three resident employees: the cook, the housemaid and the nurse, christened Nana shortly after her arrival. ‘Nana’, Agnes Robson Wakeford, was twenty-two when she arrived at the Samuel–Summerskill house. Hailing from a village near Berwick in the Scottish Borders, she was, according to Michael, an intelligent young woman who could have done better for herself but was held back by the prevailing discrimination against women. Prior to working for Edith and Jeffrey, Nana had been employed as a second nurse for a wealthy family in Hertfordshire. Once appointed, Nana started work immediately. Sixty years later, following the death of her husband Percy, Nana came back to the family and lived with Edith and Jeffrey’s daughter Shirley. Edith almost certainly could not have had the career she did without the enduring and loyal service Nana gave. Nana allowed Edith to pursue a political career by providing unstinting and loving care to the two children, while the domestic help freed Edith from routine work. Throughout her life Edith was an efficient delegator; she would find someone else to undertake certain tasks in order to free herself for matters she considered more important. As a professional married to another professional, Edith could afford to do this, and it was vital that she chose the staff she engaged wisely. The edifice would crumble if any one of them were not up to the job, none more so than the nanny. Nana proved exemplary and was deeply loved by Michael and Shirley. Michael describes how during his childhood and afterwards, Nana cared for the two children with exceptional fairness and gentleness, providing a source of sanity and order amid the hurly-burly of Edith’s political life and the children’s schooling. This hectic existence may have been the cause of what Michael describes as his parents pulling up the drawbridge at home to protect themselves.33 There were guests, often political contacts, who came to lunch and dinner parties, but few intimate friends. Edith and Jeffrey appeared to rely almost exclusively on each other for emotional support. In 1930 the family moved to Muswell Hill. They now had a large, roomy house near Alexandra Palace with a spacious garden. The surgery in Wood Green was less than two miles away and private patients would visit the house for consultations and prescriptions while samples of drugs and various other medications arrived regularly from pharmaceutical companies. The household

Early Life

21

was organized on traditional lines, with baby Michael having his own nursery. Edith was strict about terms of address. Even in the family, Michael was ‘Master Michael’, Jeffrey was ‘Doctor’ and Edith ‘Madam’. During the 1920s and 1930s, such formality was perhaps only to be expected, though it does feel very hierarchical. In 1931, Edith gave birth to Shirley who would follow Edith to become a doctor and a Member of Parliament. Edith not only breastfed both her babies, but with Shirley insisted on doing so for as long as possible, over seven months in all. Edith was a lifelong champion of breastfeeding, denouncing babies fed the only other way as ‘bottle fed and rickety’. Describing breastfeeding her own children, Edith maintained that, ‘Without any doubt, feeding my own children was one of the most satisfying of my many satisfying experiences.’34 Once Edith had stopped breastfeeding Shirley, her thoughts, according to her son Michael,35 turned towards standing for Parliament. She was helped enormously throughout her subsequent political career by Jeffrey, who was closely involved in bringing up the children in a way that was unusual in the 1920s and 1930s. Michael has told of walks with Jeffrey to Alexandra Palace where they would put halfpennies and pennies into slot machines to listen to the cinema organists, notably Reginald Foort and Reginald PorterBrown. On a more practical note, Jeffrey organized his surgery hours so that he could come home and have lunch with the children.36 Throughout their long marriage and Edith’s high-flying political career, Jeffrey was always there, quietly attending to family affairs and allowing Edith to shine. He appeared to be quite content with this state of affairs despite it being very unusual for the time. If he felt it lessened his standing or compromised his masculinity, the loyal and devoted Jeffrey never let it show. In 1934 the Samuel–Summerskill family moved from Muswell Hill to Highgate Village, less than two miles away. The family’s new home in Fitzroy Park had three storeys and was situated at the end of an unmade road. Fitzroy Park, located in Kenwood, was an area of common land and woods, which had been added to Hampstead Heath in 1927. Edith loved the place for its remoteness and lack of neighbourly hustle and bustle. It was, she felt, perfect for a busy professional wife with a husband and two young children. It is perhaps not surprising that the size of their establishment also increased at this time. In addition to Nana, the cook and the housemaid, Edith and Jeffrey took on a chauffeur, Alfred Hilton, who was about Edith’s age with black

22

Edith Summerskill

sleeked-back hair. Hilton wore a blue suit,37 Edith having sensibly eschewed the livery and cavalry boots which her mother had insisted on for Dr William’s family chauffeur. Although Edith sometimes drove herself, it was often Hilton (always known by his surname) at the wheel of her small Daimler car. Unlike the other staff, Hilton did not live in but had rooms in Highgate Village where he lived with a woman, apparently out of wedlock. Although shocking at the time, the fact that Edith and Jeffrey took on Hilton showed Edith’s willingness to be liberal in such matters. Jeffrey never relied on the chauffeur, but had a Rover 16 which he used to drive to the Wood Green surgery near Turnpike Lane Underground station, just over two miles away. The house itself was converted into suitable accommodation by the modernist architect Elisabeth Benjamin,38 the aim clearly being to make it a fitting residence for an up-and-coming middle-class family. Edith and Jeffrey’s son Michael claims that coming into the house felt almost like entering a film set, but a film set that was also a welcoming home. The long lounge, as the family called the living room, boasted fashionable Crittall windows which could be pulled back to let in light and air. There was a wide, full-length mirror, tubular furniture and modern built-in cupboards. The dining room was designed in a similar way with concealed lighting, a glass table and a broad mirror in which guests could inspect themselves. The fireplaces in both these rooms had been replaced by electric fires surrounded by dully gleaming sheet metal. It was, indeed, an ideal house for entertaining – a matter of some significance, given Edith’s hopes for a political career. Shirley, born in 1931, attended Byron House co-educational school near Fitzroy Place. Michael had been to the same school, subsequently transferring to Highgate Junior School, preparatory school for Highgate School. He was later to go to University College School in Hampstead. Neither Edith nor Jeffrey had any qualms about sending their children to fee-paying schools. It was the norm for the middle classes in the 1930s, even those who were left-wing and radical. However busy Edith may have been, she sensibly always set aside time for holidays. Before Michael’s birth in 1927, Edith and Jeffrey spent time in Nice. Their son Michael tells how he found a photograph of the two of them on the Promenade des Anglais, with Edith wearing a floral hat and long dress and Jeffrey sporting a bowler hat and walking stick. Both young and both handsome, they looked well together. Once the children arrived, Edith insisted

Early Life

23

on three or four weeks’ holiday a year, usually in August, which was almost always spent by the seaside. Edith, Jeffrey, Michael and Shirley were invariably accompanied by Nana. They went to a variety of holiday places in Britain by car, including Selsey in Sussex, Perranporth in Cornwall, and Caernarvonshire in north Wales, where they were staying in 1939 when war broke out. Sometimes holidays were arranged around Edith’s political commitments. In 1935 the family holiday was spent at Lytham St Anne’s in Lancashire so that they could stay with Edith during her campaign for the parliamentary seat of Bury. The Summerskill–Samuels sometimes also went abroad. In 1937 they visited the International Exhibition in Paris accompanied by Edith’s sister Daphne, the only time a family member joined them on holiday.39 Other holidays in Europe included visits to Wissant and Wimereux on the coast of northern France, as well as Calais and Boulogne. Interestingly, Edith and Jeffrey were known to holiday separately at suitable times which would not impinge on the family summer. In 1934, Edith spent Christmas in Switzerland with a woman friend. Jeffrey similarly toured the Carcassonne area of France with the author Richard Aldington and W. H. Stevenson in 1937, and visited Brittany without Edith in 1938. At a time when holidays could not be afforded by the vast majority of people, Edith and Jeffrey obviously felt that they, their children and the nanny needed to get away and indulge in some rest and recuperation. Yet, as doctors, they were never able to leave their professional lives fully behind. On one family summer visit to Cornwall, the lodging was cancelled on the spot because the bedclothes were damp and, more significantly, no pasteurized milk was available. The milk provided was merely marked ‘Tuberclin Tested’. For Edith, in particular, this was not enough; the milk had to be pasteurized to ensure the TB virus had been killed. This incident provided an early example of Edith’s extreme concern about TB, possibly brought about by what she had seen in her father’s clinic in Westgate. During family holidays in France, Edith banned the family from drinking milk since it was impossible to find any which she considered had been adequately treated. Sun was, however, another matter. Melanoma and skin cancer were as yet unknown to medical science. Edith embraced the outdoor movement which flourished during the 1930s, commanding her children to get as much sun as they possibly could on the grounds that it would do them good. Michael was put outside

24

Edith Summerskill

from the time he was a baby to get red and then brown. The long lounge window had been installed in the house in Highgate to allow fresh air in as well as light. The family – parents and children – were, according to the beliefs at the time, striving to be as fit and healthy as they possibly could be. However, certain habits later proved to be harmful but were perfectly acceptable at the time, most notably smoking. The built-in cupboards at the house in Highgate had bespoke space created for smoking materials since both Edith and Jeffrey smoked. While Edith did not smoke a great deal, Jeffrey was a heavy smoker of both cigarettes and a pipe, continuing with the habit until his early sixties when the health consequences of smoking were beginning to become apparent.40 Alcohol was less of a concern for both of them. Edith rarely drank; her favourite tipple was gin and orange. Jeffrey preferred white wine and the occasional whisky. Uncompromised by alcohol, Edith would later take up the campaign against drinking and driving with some vengeance during the Second World War blackout. From the very beginning of their marriage, Edith and Jeffrey worked at creating a strong partnership and sought to provide a stable home for their children as well as living the kind of middle-class lifestyle which Edith, a professional woman and an aspiring politician, felt she needed and required. Yet while Edith was busy establishing her own family, relations with her parents and siblings were not close during the 1930s and 1940s. There were polite Easter and Christmas visits, usually by Edith, Jeffrey and the children to Edith’s parents in Lewisham where Dr William, as head of the family, sat in his chair in command of the proceedings.41 There appears at this time to have been no particular bond between Dr William and Mrs Summerskill and their grandchildren and no emotional closeness between the generations. Neither do there appear to have been any warm feelings between Edith and her two siblings. It may well have rankled with Edith that her brother, William Hedley, known as Hedley and sometimes Bill within the family, had been sent to Harrow. Three years older than Edith, he also followed the family medical tradition, training at Guys Hospital, London, after studying at Exeter College, Oxford, with a short interlude of service in the First World War on destroyers in the North Sea. After qualifying in 1920, Bill embarked on a successful career in ophthalmology, eventually becoming ophthalmic surgeon to the Portsmouth Group of Hospitals in 1948. Prior to this appointment he had undertaken a

Early Life

25

second period of war service as Principal Medical Officer in the merchant navy. During the early 1930s the General Medical Register featured the three medical Summerskills: Dr Edith Clara Summerskill, Downlow Asshe, Vallance Road, London N.10 (Edith and Jeffrey’s home address prior to their move to Highgate); Dr William Summerskill, Sunset Cottage, Germain’s Place, Blackheath, London S.E.3; and Dr William Hedley Summerskill, 10, Harley Street, London W.1., which must have been something of a record. While the addresses may have changed, the three remained registered until Edith gave up her medical practice and William senior passed away during the 1940s. Like Edith, her brother Bill (William Hedley) had a son and a daughter, yet there was little contact between the Summerskill cousins. Bill, however, was interested in politics and fought Tooting for the Liberals in the 1929 general election. Edith, showing her ability to erase matters she did not like or did not agree with from her mind, never mentioned Bill’s candidacy to her children. To add salt to the wounds between Edith and Bill, the latter was strongly opposed to the creation of a state medical service, a cause Edith was to champion until the establishment of the National Health Service in 1948. The third sibling, Daphne, not herself a doctor but married to one, was also involved in politics. A staunch Conservative, she chaired the Leyton Tory Ladies’ Luncheon Club for seventeen years. Edith was, apparently, scathing about her sister, claiming that Daphne was too lazy to undertake the necessary academic and practical work to qualify as a doctor herself. Each of the three Summerskill siblings was active in politics to varying degrees, but for different parties, an extremely unusual state of affairs. Dr William’s brief foray as an independent candidate for a local council together with his concern for the poor and the sick may have encouraged his children to think about politics. However, their thoughts led each of them in a different direction. Their differing political views may also have been a manifestation of the distance between the three of them. They were most definitely not close siblings who shared family holidays and whose children played together when young, and neither was Dr William the kind of grandfather who cherished his grandchildren. The Summerskill family was a distant one which Edith had little to do with after her marriage. In her memoirs A Woman’s World, Edith makes no mention of either her sister or her brother, which can only serve as an indication of the lack of closeness between the three of them. It is not

26

Edith Summerskill

known whether Edith was upset by the lack of contact with her family. We do, of course, know that she and Jeffrey were extremely close and that Jeffrey’s brothers and parents lived a long way away. By the early 1930s, Edith and Jeffrey had created a stable family, set up a thriving medical practice and bought and refurbished a desirable house in a fashionable area of London. These were major achievements for both of them, done only a few years after Edith qualified as a doctor. Such energy and determination could come with an emotional cost. Perhaps due in part to her heavy workload and perhaps also to her increasing material security, Edith’s less attractive characteristics were becoming increasingly evident. She hated failure, and told no one about the problems she had had passing her exams in surgery. Moreover, she and her brother Bill clearly felt some level of sibling rivalry towards each other. Perhaps more tellingly, Edith made little effort at real intimacy outside the small circle of Jeffrey, her children and possibly Nana. As she emerged as a public figure, these traits were increasingly on display. Interviewed by Michael Summerskill in 1989, Ian Mikado, the veteran Labour MP and member of the party’s National Executive Committee, and no fan of Edith Summerskill, did not mince his words: ‘She was a hater was Edith. I’m sure she was capable of great love. People who are capable of great hates are capable of great loves. She had some great loves for her family and maybe others, but she was a hater. People who weren’t in her stream she really . . . well, she would never agree to differ.’42

2

Apprenticeship

Dr Edith Summerskill began her career in representative politics during 1932 when she was co-opted on to the Maternity and Child Welfare Committee of Wood Green Urban District Council. Wood Green UDC proved, in effect, to be Edith’s political apprenticeship. As with many happenings in her life, Edith was lucky in getting her first break in elected politics, and it took place in a relatively straightforward way. In her memoirs, she tells how one morning during 1932, while conducting her morning surgery (her surgery was located in the Wood Green area), the UDC Medical Officer, Dr Malcolm Manson, telephoned her on behalf of the Maternity and Child Welfare Committee. He invited Edith to join the Committee as a co-opted member. Edith agreed, entering politics, as she put it, by ‘the back door’,1 and she was formally appointed on 20 April 1932. Although the way had been paved for women to seek election to local authorities in the 1919 Sex Disqualification and Removal Act, the act in itself did not materially affect the number of women taking up such positions. As Edith pointed out, ‘custom and practice die hard and it was not easy to persuade male selection committees to nominate women candidates’.2 Co-option, allowed under existing legislation, provided a way for the more enlightened local councils to appoint women with specialist knowledge to certain committees. Dr Edith Summerskill, a local general practitioner providing inexpensive treatment for poor patients, was an ideal candidate. Shortly after Edith’s arrival, the Urban District Council was incorporated as a Municipal Borough during 1933. Such local government changes always incur costs, and civic-minded local residents were concerned about the expense of purchasing a chain of office and a badge for the mayor and mayoress. Edith stepped in, organizing a fete at her home in Barratt Avenue near Alexandra Palace, which fortunately raised enough money. This 27

28

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modest event marked the beginning of a lifetime of political entertaining at her home, sometimes with distinguished guests staying with Edith, Jeffrey and their children. Now embedded in local government as well as the local community through her GP practice, Edith sought to extend her personal and political contacts. Once established on Wood Green Council, she identified with the Labour Party. Edith attributed her socialism to her early experiences as a doctor in a poor area of London. After qualifying, she worked with her father in Lewisham. It was the suffering of a woman which finally drew me into the political world . . . At the age of 22, a newly qualified doctor, I went to attend my first confinement. My knock was answered by the young husband, pallid and shabby, with the familiar signs of long unemployment on him. He took me upstairs . . . there lay the patient . . . a girl my own age in labour with her second child. By the bed stood a cot, and standing grasping the wooden bars was a child with a bulging forehead and crooked legs, the classic picture of rickets . . . In that room, that night I became a socialist – I joined in the fight. Not against a class, but against a system.3

Given her own observations as a doctor in general practice and the suffering she witnessed accompanying her father on his rounds, Edith’s desire for a system which allowed such outrages to be improved is understandable. It was, however, an unusual route into the Labour Party, which at this time was largely working class and dominated by the trade unions. Nonetheless, Edith was part of a growing middle-class presence in the party which had been started in earnest by Sidney and Beatrice Webb after the First World War. The interwar years had seen Labour take over from the Liberals as the mainstay of progressive politics in Britain. Edith’s espousal of the Labour cause was therefore not so unusual, especially in London. From 1932 onwards, Edith established a close friendship with Fred Messer, the Labour Member of Parliament for South Tottenham from 1929 to 1931 and again from 1935 until 1950. Fred was also a member of Middlesex County Council. In March 1934, Fred asked Edith if she would like to contest the Green Lanes seat in the Tottenham area for a place on the County Council. Without hesitation Edith answered yes and won the seat in the subsequent local government election. Edith was, however, very aware that as a woman, she might be disadvantaged when it came to this election; the perceived

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wisdom had it that women were less electable than men. Displaying her usual ‘can do’ attitude, Edith sought to counter this view. She gathered a small band of women canvassers made up of her friends in the local Labour Party and grateful patients in the vicinity to campaign on her behalf. They inevitably met with rebuffs, particularly from some of the men they encountered. Edith had her own take on this state of affairs: ‘I suspected [the men] felt our activities outside the home might put ideas into the heads of their wives. The selfish husband experiences great satisfaction in possessing a wife who is always at his beck and call, constantly at her post when he returns, whatever the hour, and anxious to minister to his comfort.’4 The Green Lanes Ward stretched from Turnpike Lane in the north, where Edith and Jeffrey had their surgery, through Harringay to Newington Green near Canonbury, Islington. The incumbent councillor was a Conservative and a woman. Middlesex County Council itself had over eighty members, only twenty of whom were Labour representatives. Edith won, overturning the Conservative majority in the ward, a precursor of her later victory in the Fulham West by-election. Small wonder that a well-heeled supporter on hearing of her success presented her with a bottle of champagne. Edith was returned unopposed at the next County Council election in 1937 and continued in her council seat until 1941. As a new, Labour councillor Edith set out to establish a political profile. On the County Council, where she principally sat as a member of the Public Health Committee, she showed herself to be energetic and eloquent. Building on her professional strengths, Edith took up the cause of the working hours of the nurses employed by the council. At a full meeting of the County Council in June 1936 she worked hard to persuade members to adopt a recommendation from the Public Health Committee for a 48-hour week for the nursing and domestic employees in the council’s public health and public assistance institutions, the control of such hospitals for the poor having been transferred to local government in 1930 when workhouses were abolished. Described as ‘the pertinacious member for Tottenham Green Lanes’ by the Hornsey Journal, Edith declared, ‘Nurses today are sweated . . . Why can’t we get nurses? It was because they are overworked.’5 ‘This Victorian attitude’, as Edith called it, towards nurses’ pay, was exemplified at the same County Council meeting by an elderly gentleman in front of her who jumped to his feet and cried, ‘don’t listen to this woman; she’s

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a revolutionary. If you make this concession, she will be coming and asking for silver baths for the nurses next.’ Edith was certain the philosophy of that member was shared by many who believed that a woman’s vocation should provide sufficient satisfaction irrespective of the conditions of her service. Edith, however, suspected that ‘that irate Tory was more concerned with the prospect of an increase in his taxes if we did do justice to the nurses’.6 For Edith, ill health and poverty went together. The level and administration of poor relief was another violation to be righted. ‘How many of those who are thrown on to Poor Relief through no fault of their own know that the scales of allowances are laid down by the County Council and cannot be altered until we have a Labour majority?’ asked Edith in a Labour Party publication at the end of 1936. ‘Throughout this land, thousands are the victims of our stupid system, which allows poverty, starvation and misery in a world flowing with milk and honey.’7 Concern for the poor and the sick went hand in hand with the pacifism Edith took up in line with Labour policy at this time. Edith passionately opposed a recommendation from the County Council’s Officers and Staffs Committee that County Council employees who became members of the Royal Air Force Reserve should be granted full facilities for attending the necessary training without jeopardizing either their holiday entitlement or their pay: I say deliberately that any young man belonging to the teaching profession who wants to learn how to destroy life by bomb dropping is unfitted to teach our children. When you say to yourselves ‘we must let our teachers go and learn how to drop bombs’ I would remind you that it is not to defend yourselves; it is to disembowel women and children in some other country.8

Edith’s co-option on to the Wood Green Maternity and Child Welfare Committee and her subsequent election to Middlesex County Council came about as a direct consequence of her medical practice in the local area. Edith was a medical practitioner before she took up politics, and her doctor’s instincts remained potent during the whole of her political career. The 1934 Medical Register lists her as based at ‘Downlow Asshe’, Vallance Road, Muswell Hill, London N10 and as Medical Director, Birth Control Clinic, Wood Green. A strong supporter of contraception, which she viewed as a way of improving the lives of women and their children, Edith set up this birth control clinic so that

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poor woman would have access to such services in the same way as wealthier women. Edith also had an entry for Harley Street, where she gave advice on birth control to patients able to afford private consultation. She used the proceeds from her private practice to subsidize both her birth control clinic in Wood Green for women who could not afford to pay much for this service and the GP practice run by Jeffrey and herself in Wood Green and Muswell Hill. The going rate for a doctor’s consultation in the 1930s was one shilling – and frequently more; Edith charged sixpence and was known locally as the ‘sixpenny doctor’. Her patients, especially the women, loved her. She made a place for children to play in her waiting room, with small chairs, books and pictures from fairy tales, allowing mothers to visit her free from worry about what to do with the children. Edith had a natural empathy with her patients. Much later, one former patient, recounting a visit to Edith due to a scalded leg turning septic when she was a child, wrote, ‘When my mother told her [Edith] I was getting bad tempered, her (Edith’s) answer was, “She has every reason to be with a leg like that.” ’ Another patient was a five-month-old boy. His mother described how Edith diagnosed the baby with bronchial pneumonia, wrapped him in a blanket and took him to North Middlesex Hospital herself. The mother gave thanks to Edith for saving her son’s life.9 That Edith and Jeffrey chose to practice in poor areas and usually to charge only sixpence for their services was especially important for women. Since the 1911 National Health Insurance Act only covered wage-earning employees, mothers and children had to pay for medical treatment. Most women therefore had to spend money to go the doctor, which meant that a visit had to be absolutely necessary before poor women would seek help. As a result, people, and especially women, suffered when their symptoms could have been alleviated. Following childbirth, women often put up with conditions which would have been curable if they could have afforded the doctor. In the very worst cases, poor people would die when death could have been prevented. Edith was, of course, a mother herself, giving her an immediate maternal empathy. The appalling conditions for so many of the residents of the Wood Green area were replicated across the country. Millions suffered poverty, inadequate and unsanitary housing, unaffordable medical care and countless other deprivations, many of which had been brought about by the unemployment caused mainly by the Great Depression which followed the Wall Street Crash

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in 1929. Government policy, notably the means test, whereby the unemployed had to face questioning about their income, often exacerbated rather than helped matters. The extension of unemployment insurance schemes in 1920 was a small step forward, though woefully inadequate given the circumstances. Unemployment was the dominant issue in Britain during the interwar years. The numbers out of work rarely went below 1 million and reached a peak of over 3 million in 1933: 24.9 per cent of the working population. Edith and Jeffrey, aware of the poverty and unemployment faced by millions of British people, were first and foremost doctors for the poor. Edith, who had helped her doctor father in a poor part of London, and Jeffrey, with his south Wales roots, both understood the suffering caused by unemployment and poverty. They had set up their first surgery in 1926, at the ages of twenty-five and thirty-one respectively, in Park Road, Harringay, renting and converting a shop and installing a green glass window to provide their patients with privacy. Such was the demand for their services that they moved, but only a few hundred yards away, to Westbury Avenue near Turnpike Lane underground station. As the demand grew still further, Edith and Jeffrey acquired more premises, establishing another surgery in Roseberry Road, Lower Edmonton. They converted a house, using the front downstairs room, the parlour, as the consulting room, and the combined kitchen and dining room at the back as the waiting room. The dispenser (a position later taken over by dispensing chemists) sat in the scullery. Demand also outstripped the space available in Roseberry Road. This time Edith and Jeffrey moved to a former rooming house in Fore Street, again in Edmonton. By the mid-1930s, Wood Green and Edmonton were Edith and Jeffrey’s two surgeries and Jeffrey was the permanent doctor at Wood Green. They were helped by assistants at both premises and by locums for holiday periods. Edith and Jeffrey did not, however, try to tempt newly qualified doctors to join them with the promise of a partnership as was the custom of the time. They kept it in the family; the only doctor admitted to their practice as a partner was their daughter Shirley in 1960. The couple even organized the surgeries’ schedules around the family. Jeffrey would often conduct three surgeries a day, at 9.00 am, 3.00 pm and 6.00 pm, returning home for lunch with his children. This did not, however, prevent them from considering their own financial interests; they just did this in a way unusual for general practitioners at the

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time. The Summerskill–Samuel solution to providing inexpensive care while maintaining a good standard of living was to build up a web of financial arrangements which allowed them not only to treat poor patients who could not pay doctor’s fees but also to live in a desirable house, employ a full-time nanny and other domestic help, send their two children to private schools and live in some style, including provision for Edith’s fashionable clothes. The Harley Street consulting rooms were, of course, part of this arrangement. They also bought three houses – in Catford, Greenwich and Woolwich – which were rented out as surgeries and included space for a couple who would look after the house and clean the surgery. This was not, however, the full extent of their property portfolio. They owned two more houses, one in Ilford and one, used as a surgery, in Walthamstow, as well as their own premises in Edmonton plus two houses next to each other in Wood Green. The house in Walthamstow cost £265, Edmonton £1,150 and the two in Wood Green were £600 each. Edith would have the initial idea, deciding which place could be converted into a surgery, and Jeffrey would see to the details. Finance was arranged with the Abbey Road Building Society, later known as the Abbey National. The building society provided 90 to 100 per cent of the purchase price, with capital and interest payments for ten years, after which the properties would be unencumbered. Edith and Jeffrey paid about £80 a year on each of the Wood Green houses.10 By the mid-1930s, Wood Green and Edmonton were the two surgeries occupied by Edith and Jeffrey. The properties provided a reliable additional income for a professional couple with no apparent access to private or inherited wealth. It was an enterprising business model for two young doctors which served them well in the future. Edith’s passion, both in her medical practice and her political work, was women’s health, especially mothers and babies, and, by extension, birth control. The Wood Green surgery was Edith’s base for her birth control clinic in north London, with a notice in the Roseberry Road premises advertising the facility. Birth control was, however, by no means accepted in the early 1930s. A government memorandum issued in 1931 – after vigorous campaigning by civil society organizations demanding access to birth control for women unable to afford private provision – conceded that local authority clinics could give advice to mothers whose health would be under threat with further pregnancies.

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It is not the function of the Centres to give advice in regard to birth control . . . [but] the Government considers that, in cases where there are medical grounds for giving advice on contraceptive methods to married women . . . it may be given, but . . . should be limited to cases where further pregnancy would be detrimental to health.11

Edith was, of course, in private medical practice not a local authority clinic. However, the 1931 memorandum marked a change of attitude on the part of the government and therefore made it easier for Edith to run a birth control clinic for poor women who had not so far had access to contraception in the same way as those who were better off. Edith mainly fitted Dutch caps, the preferred method at the time. Her clinic inevitably caused some local consternation. Writing to Michael, Edith and Jeffrey’s son, in the 1980s, a former patient stated: I remember my mother quietly changing the subject when I questioned her, and, looking back, I realise just how much your mother [Edith] could have helped her – considering I was the first of eight children and every day was a battle for survival not only for us, but for the majority of families living in poverty.12

Edith, however, never shrank from talking about women’s reproductive health. While contraception was awkward and viewed with distaste if not outright hostility, the question of legalizing abortion was taboo. Edith, becoming increasingly active in the Labour Party, raised the question of abortion at the 1936 National Conference of Labour Women, the only speaker to do so. She reminded delegates that 12 per cent of the women who died did so following an abortion and that 37 per cent of that 12 per cent died following an infection.13 It was to no avail. The leading women in the Labour Party during the 1930s avoided anything which may have caused gender conflict, viewing their role as one of following the party line and responding to the crises which overwhelmed the working class and the Labour Party at the time. Labour leaders were probably also terrified of losing the Roman Catholic vote. Possibly because of her experience with the abortion issue, Edith herself during her long political life had very little to do with the Labour Party’s official women’s organization. Even after being elected to the House of Commons, she rarely contributed or was mentioned in Labour Woman, the official journal of

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the Labour Party women’s sections. She did, however, speak to local Labour Party women’s meetings, which she no doubt regarded as important for her political career. While the attitude of the National Conference of Labour Women towards abortion may perhaps have been understandable, their silence on contraception is less explicable. During the 1920s an energetic campaign to secure birth control for women who could not afford to pay for it had been fought by the Workers’ Birth Control Group (WBCG), an organization made up largely of Labour Party women. Following the government circular on birth control in 1931, many of those involved in the WBCG, including Frieda Laski, Dora Russell and Dorothy Thurtle, viewed the birth control campaign over and done with. They therefore decided to extend the WBCG activities to abortion, establishing the Abortion Law Reform Association to amend the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act which had made abortion a felony punishable by imprisonment. These former advocates of birth control were now bombarded with requests from working-class women desperate to end unwanted pregnancies. Public interest in abortion grew during the 1930s while at the same time apprehension about the decline in the population caused the government to undertake research on maternal mortality which inevitably drew attention to abortion-related deaths. This kind of research together with the increase in the number of birth control and child welfare clinics exposed working-class women’s reproductive lives to official scrutiny. It became apparent that poorer women suffered in a way rich women did not. Those who were better off could pay for contraception and even safe abortion while the poor had little access to such services. This state of affairs was becoming untenable by the 1930s since, on the one hand, public concern about the conditions of the poor was becoming more evident while, on the other, it was increasingly safe for the abortion operation to be performed. Edith and Jeffrey, both progressive doctors and Labour Party members, joined the Socialist Medical Association (SMA) soon after the organization was established. The SMA began its life in the summer of 1930 with a meeting between Dr Charles Brook, a GP who served on the London County Council, and Dr Edward Fabian, secretary of a German organization of socialist doctors. Dr Fabian asked why there was no similar doctors’ body in Britain following the demise of the State Medical Service Association. Dr Brook responded by

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convening a meeting on 21 September 1930 at the National Labour Club in London which resulted in the formation of the Socialist Medical Association. Charles Brook was Secretary and its President was the Labour MP for Reading Dr Somerville Hastings. A constitution was agreed in early November: the SMA’s main aims were a socialized medical service, free and open to all, and the promotion of a high standard of health for the people of Britain.14 As its name suggests, the SMA was predominantly a doctors’ organization. Membership was open to ‘all medical men [sic] who are Socialists’; associate membership was available for members or students of professions allied to medicine,15 and by 1932 the SMA had its own journal, the Socialist Doctor. Only a year after its founding AGM, the SMA affiliated to the Labour Party in 1931, wasting no time in establishing its position. The Labour Party Conference in the following year passed a resolution calling for a national health service to be an immediate priority of a Labour government and two years later the conference accepted The People’s Health, a document prepared by SMA members.16 By 1933, Edith had come up with the idea of holding social events to raise money for the SMA, and as a result she was appointed as its Organizing Secretary. Edith, who clearly had a talent for such activities, organized the Socialist Medical Association Annual Dinner and Dance (SOMEDA) at Thames House on Saturday, 20 May 1933. She obviously enjoyed such occasions, and was not shy in coming forward to take dances and dinners under her wing. SOMEDA was, by all accounts, a great success and raised a significant sum of money.17 Edith also organized a ‘Revel’ for the SMA on the night before its AGM in November 1933. Jeffrey too was active in the SMA, taking up the position of Treasurer in 1935 and 1936. The association was always keen to hear about the medical work carried out by its members and Jeffery reported in 1934 that he had been co-opted as a member of the Mental Hospitals Committee of the London County Council. He had also attended the International Conference of Socialist Physicians in Brunn, Germany, on behalf of the SMA. From its inception the SMA had an internationalist outlook. The association was galvanized into action in 1936 by the need for medical support for the Spanish Civil War. The initially unsuccessful coup by Nationalists and Falangists against the democratically elected left-leaning government brought the rise of fascism into stark focus. The Spanish Civil War

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caused huge suffering and mobilized the British left, including the SMA, to assist the Republican Government. Edith was one of the SMA members who supported the setting up of the Spanish Medical Aid Committee, a decision taken on 8 August 1936. She was also involved in establishing the National Women’s Appeal for Food for Spain. Her work at this time was duly noted by the Republican Government who invited her to Spain in 1938 shortly after her election to Parliament in the Fulham West by-election. The SMA was also in favour of reforming the legislation on the termination of pregnancy. When in 1934 the Socialist Medical Association, perhaps encouraged by Edith, submitted a resolution calling for the reform of the abortion law to the Annual Labour Party Conference, the NEC remitted it to the Standing Joint Committee of Working Women’s Organizations, the official joint Labour Party and trade union women’s forum. Not only did the SJC never bring the resolution to the attention of the women conference delegates, but they also checked the credentials of the SMA,18 presumably to verify they were a bona fide group and not a front for a hostile organization such as the Communist Party. The Labour Party clearly had no intention of holding any kind of debate on abortion. Unsupported within the Labour Party, Edith remained silent on the issue until the 1960s when, as a Labour peer, she took part in the debates in the House of Lords on the 1967 Abortion Act. In her memoirs Edith is very clear that women should make their own decisions on their reproductive health and welfare and that birth control should be easily available: As a modern young doctor I favoured family planning on economic, social and humane grounds. I believe that pregnancy should be a condition brought about after careful consideration and not as a result of some hasty, ill-considered act, the consequences of which might be bitterly regretted afterwards. I regarded Marie Stopes’s pioneering work among the poor women of London with admiration . . . uncontrolled reproduction has been responsible for untold numbers of preventable deaths of mothers and infants.19

Edith did, in fact, visit Marie Stopes’s clinic in Whitfield Street and the two women became friends. Edith was also a member of the Eugenics Society, as noted in her entry in the 1934 General Medical Register. Arguments for and against birth control in

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the 1930s often referenced eugenics, and Edith’s interest in the subject and the society was due to her commitment to birth control. Edith’s overriding purpose was to help poor, overworked women with few resources of their own and make their lives slightly more tolerable through limiting the number of children they bore. During the interwar years, eugenics had not yet acquired the stigma of being associated with Nazi atrocities. Moreover, the idea that heredity decided a person’s life chances, general wellbeing and just about everything else was generally accepted as was the racism inherent in eugenic ideas. Edith would have embraced such views as simply the way things were. Eugenics at this time was, in fact, the subject of serious academic endeavour; there was even a professor of eugenics at University College, London. While a modern reader may feel that Edith made a serious mistake in joining and becoming active in the Eugenics Society, this was not the prevailing view when she noted it in the Medical Register. Nevertheless, as a member of the Eugenics Society, she would have signed up to its aims. The society sought to increase public understanding of its views on heredity and to influence parenthood with the aim of biological improvement of the nation and mitigation of the burdens deemed to be imposed on society by the genetically ‘unfit’. During the 1930s, the Eugenics Society under its long-serving General Secretary Carlos Blacker became interested in what Blacker called ‘considerations of quality’,20 a reference to the eugenics’ concept of improving human beings through deliberate choices about reproduction. The British Eugenics Society had established its Population Investigation Committee in 1936 to examine how new concepts about measuring intelligence, which had begun to gain acceptance in the 1930s, could be used to encourage eugenics ideas. In the mid-1930s eugenics ideas gained ground in both Britain and the United States. Yet, the increasing popularity of eugenics did nothing to soften its language, which was sprinkled with notions of health versus degeneracy, the heritability of traits and disease, the possibility of breeding better people and an overarching feeling of racism and white supremacy. Prominent members included Julian Huxley, John Maynard Keynes and the birth control campaigner Marie Stopes, who was an outspoken supporter of ideas associated with eugenics. Edith, active and involved as ever, took her commitment to providing women with contraception beyond the walls of her surgery. In 1933 she acted

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as honorary organizer of the Malthusian Ball21 in aid of the International Birth Control Movement, whose president was the American birth control activist Margaret Sanger. Thomas Malthus, an eighteenth-century clergyman whose ideas enjoyed a revival during the 1930s, was famous for his 1798 essay which theorized that whenever the food supply increased the population would grow, thereby using up whatever surplus may have been created. The Malthusian Ball’s patron was none other than Her Royal Highness Princess Alice, Countess of Althone. It was held at the Dorchester Hotel on 22 March 1933 from 9.30 pm to 2.30 am. A number of well-known birth control supporters attended; an invitation was even extended to High Court Judge Henry McCardie.22 The ball, combining both Edith’s increasing delight in mixing with influential people and her very real concern for her working-class patients, provided an early example of her talent for networking and getting to know what might be called ‘the right people’. Although Edith undoubtedly enjoyed occasions such as the Malthusian Ball, which allowed her to dress up and quaff champagne, she was in reality far more down to earth, determined to be a good doctor while at the same time advancing the causes she considered important and progressing in Labour politics. Thus during the 1930s Edith became involved in a number of outside organizations, principally to do with medicine, human rights in general and specifically rights for women, including married women. Her energy was something to behold. Although the mother of two young children, a busy doctor with a general practice in a poor part of London and the head of a birth control clinic in Wood Green who also provided consultations for wealthy women in Harley Street, Edith seemed to find time for it all. Furthermore, for much of this period she also wrote an anonymous agony aunt advice column under the name of Dr Ann Moray for the Sunday Pictorial newspaper. One of the first and most moving letters told the story of two children who had caught diphtheria; one recovered and the other did not. Edith aka Dr Ann Moray gave advice about how to prevent the disease.23 Edith’s concern for human rights across the board, which was also a passion of Jeffrey’s, led them both to attend the inaugural meeting on 22 February 1934 of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL). The NCCL’s main aim was to challenge the power of the state when that power was being used against the common good; the organization recognized that in times of economic instability and social upheaval basic rights come under attack. The NCCL was

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created in 1932 after the organizers of the National Hunger March had attempted to deliver a petition with over one million signatures to Parliament. The delivery was due to be celebrated by over 100,000 people who had gathered in Hyde Park to meet the marchers. Thousands of police had also been mobilized against the protest. Serious violence erupted in the park, leaving many seriously injured. Ronald Kidd, who ran the Punch and Judy bookshop in Charing Cross, witnessed police agents provocateurs disguised as workers attempting to incite violence against peaceful protestors in what he considered a brutal fashion. It was these heavy-handed police tactics more than anything else which led Kidd to begin the establishment of the NCCL. There were, however, other events which also encouraged Kidd to act. For example, he was incensed the following year by what he viewed as a biased cinema newsreel reporting of Hitler’s accession to power and the activities of the British Union of Fascists. He was, in addition, concerned that the British Board of Film Censors had prevented a documentary by Ivor Montagu on the German Communist leader Ernst Thalmann, who had been imprisoned by Hitler without trial, from being shown. The board’s defence was that it could not permit the distribution of films about criminals. The NCCL was an anti-fascist organization, as was the Socialist Medical Association, and this may have been one of the reasons why Edith and Jeffrey, actively involved in supporting antifascists in Spain, were attracted to it. There was also some overlap in membership between the SMA and the NCCL. For example, Mrs Haden Guest, wife of SMA member Dr Leslie Haden Guest, was a prominent member of the National Council for Civil Liberties. Since her co-option on to Wood Green Council, Edith had made valuable contacts. What better way to add to her address book than becoming active in an organization like the the NCCL, whose membership read like a roll call of the great and the good on the left: Claude Cockburn, Harold and Frida Laski, Kingsley Martin, George Catlin and Vera Brittain, Ivor Jennings, E. M. Forster, Havelock Ellis, Dingle Foot, Victor Gollancz, A. P. Herbert, Julian Huxley, Bertrand Russell, R. H. Tawney, H. G. Wells and Rebecca West. Also present at the inaugural meeting were MPs Clement Attlee, Aneurin Bevan and Geoffrey Bing, a barrister who would enter Parliament in 1945 as MP for Hornchurch.24 The NCCL provided Edith with a huge networking opportunity: Ronald Kidd and Sylvia Crowther-Smith, later Sylvia Scaffardi, who worked with Ronald in

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establishing the NCCL, regularly visited Edith and Jeffrey at their house in Highgate. Their son Michael recalled the first time he met Ronald: I saw him for the first time in 1938, with his leg in a plaster-cast after being knocked down by a car while on a Hampstead pedestrian crossing. I found this handsome, limping man especially attractive when I learnt that he was vigilant in his campaign against police injustices . . . Ronald joined the small group of men my mother admired.25

Edith and Jeffrey left the NCCL Executive after only one year due to pressure of other commitments, but they remained keen supporters of its principles. During the Second World War, concerned about the freedom of the press, the NCCL organized a rally at Methodist Central Hall, Westminster, on 11 April 1942. Edith was one of the speakers at this event, along with Michael Foot, Aueurin Bevan and D. N. Pritt QC. One of Edith’s other pressing commitments which prevented her from staying on the NCCL Executive Committee was the Married Women’s Association. The Married Women’s Association more than any other body outside Parliament provided much needed support for Edith’s work on women’s rights, particularly financial rights for married woman, through campaigning, fundraising and promoting awareness. Founded by Edith and her friend Juanita Francis in 1938, it also called itself the ‘Housewives Trade Union’. The Married Women’s Association argued that the tasks carried out by women as homemakers were as valuable as those done by male breadwinners. Its original objectives were to promote legislation to regulate the financial relations between husband and wife as between equal partners; to secure for the mother and the children an equal right to the marital home; to secure equal guardianship rights for both parents; and to extend the National Insurance Acts to include women on the same terms as men.26 The status quo at the time was very far from that desired by the Married Women’s Association. All income received during the marriage was deemed to be the property of the husband as was the marital home and all its contents. Edith became the first President of the Married Woman’s Association, to be succeeded later by the author Vera Brittain. There is little doubt that Edith would never have been as effective as she proved to be without the valuable input the Married Women’s Association was always able to give. Prior to establishing the association, Edith

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had flirted with other feminist groups, including the Women’s Freedom League and the radical Six Point Group. Neither proved to her liking. More importantly, Edith could never have had the same level of control over an existing organization she joined as opposed to one she had helped to found. By the beginning of 1934, Edith was being touted as a possibility for a seat in the House of Commons. She had already established herself in local government and was also well known for speaking to branches of the Women’s Co-operative Guild and Labour Party Women’s Sections on subjects relating to women’s health and children. In 1932, once she had finished breastfeeding her daughter Shirley, Edith decided to visit the USSR, possibly to help her quest for a House of Commons seat. Left-wingers frequently made this pilgrimage in what were still the early years of the Soviet Union; Jennie Lee, Aneurin Bevan, John Stanley, George Strauss and Sydney and Beatrice Webb had all been there by the early 1930s. Edith’s trip lasted about two weeks. She went by boat to Leningrad, visited hospitals both there and in Moscow, bringing back samples of the posters used in the clinics. Later, in Bury as a candidate in the 1935 general election, Edith would write newspaper articles about what Britain could learn from the Soviet health system. According to her son Michael, Edith travelled on a passport in the name of Mrs E. C. Samuel which had expired in 1931. However, this did not prove to be a major problem as it was renewed by the British Consul in Moscow in August 1932. Many well-known politicians have cut their teeth in a by-election. Edith’s opportunity came with the death of the MP for the Conservative stronghold of Putney, Samuel Samuel. In her memoirs, Edith relates that even though Putney was considered a lost cause for Labour, there was no shortage of potential candidates. The man who had been selected to fight the next general election for Labour, the actor Miles Mander, would, as the prospective parliamentary candidate, normally have contested the by-election. He was, however, considered an electoral liability by the Labour Party NEC on account of his publishing To My Son – In Confidence (Faber 1934), which was considered salacious due to some of the content being of a sexual nature. The book was deemed a hindrance to Labour winning an election and the NEC did not endorse Mander for the by-election. It also appears he was unable to contest it since he was away working on a film entitled The March of Marcus, an apt title as the Putney by-election Conservative candidate’s first name was none other

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than Marcus. Whatever the merits or otherwise of Miles Mander, his lack of availability proved a massive stroke of luck for Edith. The Putney Labour Party agreed to re-run the selection with a new list of candidates. Miles Mander had unwittingly given Dr Edith Summerskill the break all politicians need. Edith was telephoned by the local Labour Party agent in Putney asking whether she would be interested in contesting the seat. He had, according to Edith, heard her speak in a nearby borough and was impressed enough to approach her about the by-election. Edith herself thought that, ‘The large number of men anxious to be considered for a candidature generally ruled out a woman’s chances. I [Edith] could only assume that the local Party having taken umbrage at the rejection of their first choice decided to shock Transport House, the headquarters of the Labour Party by including even a woman on the short list.’27 The selection took place on a cold, misty autumn night at the party rooms in Putney. When Edith found the National Agent, William Shepherd, standing on the pavement, she assumed it was because the local party did not want him involved. ‘I felt instinctively that as he looked at me he was considering the electoral chances of a woman and that he had concluded that I would probably lose the deposit.’28 On 9 November 1934 Edith did, of course, win the selection. Putney was Edith’s chance and she grabbed it with both hands. Edith, now a thirty-three-year-old professional woman, had everything going for her. Though hardly winnable – the Conservative majority in 1931 had been over 21,000, large even by the standards of that general election which saw Labour virtually wiped off the map – Edith hoped she would do well, perhaps even win with a strong campaign. It was a tall order. The swing to the Conservatives had been 17.8 per cent in 1931, when they took 81.6 per cent of the vote. The beleaguered Labour candidate in Putney, John Lawder, had to make do with only 6,172 votes, 18.4 per cent of those cast. The turnout had been only slightly above 66 per cent; maybe Edith thought she could improve on this. The Conservatives selected Marcus Samuel, the nephew of the deceased MP Samuel Samuel. By a startling coincidence, Jeffrey’s surname was, of course, Samuel. Edith again chose to use her maiden name as she had done when she stood for Middlesex County Council, though the contest was known in less progressive quarters as ‘Samuel v Samuel’. However, the returning officer accepted without hesitation the nomination of Dr Edith Summerskill in her

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maiden name. Edith welcomed this modest success, stating: ‘I feel it is something of an achievement to have broken down a hoary tradition because at the recent Middlesex County Council election [in 1933], which I successfully contested, they would only accept me as Mrs Samuel. Both my husband and I thought it was time we made a stand.’29 Edith was not, however, the first woman parliamentary candidate to use her maiden name. Mary McArthur, who never took her husband’s name, was nominated for Stourbridge in 1922 but died shortly afterwards. Marcus Samuel stood on the National Conservative ticket, while Edith was Labour without the National mark. The National mark was used at the time by supporters of the National Government, a government of so-called national unity, which had been formed in 1931 in response to the extremely serious economic situation following the Wall Street crash. While the Conservatives and Liberals in Parliament supported the National Government, the Labour Party under Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald split, with the majority of Labour MPs and most Labour Party members strongly opposed to Macdonald who chose to remain Prime Minister of the National Government. The Putney Samuel family were bankers with interests in Asia, specifically Japan, and the Shell oil company; on his nomination paper, Marcus described himself as an East India merchant. The Liberals decided not to field a candidate, with former Prime Minister David Lloyd George urging Liberals to support Edith. The byelection was scheduled for 28 November, a mere nineteen days after Edith’s selection. It would be a short and exhausting campaign. By the time of the Putney by-election at the end of 1934 the Labour Party was having to make up its mind about Hitler and the Party’s response to fascism. Edith was very clear in her support for the official Labour Party position in favour of the League of Nations: I shall make world peace one of the main planks of my platform . . . The war note, camouflaged as ‘preparedness’ in the speeches of Tory statesmen, the spreading in this country of the Continental conviction that another war is inevitable, the clamouring for an Air Force that will darken the sky – all attest to this necessity. My Tory opponent has already committed himself to a bigger Navy, a bigger Army and a bigger Air Force.30

During the campaign, Edith was photographed with Jeffrey in the Labour committee rooms standing by a poster which read ‘Friendship not Warships’.

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The committee rooms also boasted a large poster showing the red Flanders poppy with above it the words, ‘Ten million for armaments. Two million for derelict areas. Two millions of unemployed. Half a million on Poor Law. Vote Summerskill.’31 In 1934, prior to the television age and long before the internet, a by-election demanded a strong election address, the one document which would go to every household in the constituency. True to form and instinctively understanding how to communicate and sell herself, Edith commissioned the society photographer Dorothy Wilding to produce a suitable photograph. The result was a dramatic, appealing picture of a strong and beautiful woman ready to take on the world. The section ‘What I Stand For’ in the address set out Labour Party policy: Peace and Disarmament through the League of Nations; Public Ownership and Control of Industry and Finance; Shorter Hours and Higher Wages to utilise increased production; Work for the Unemployed on National Work waiting to be done; Abolition of Family Means Test; Proper Maintenance of the Unemployed until work is available; Slum Clearance, More and Better Houses; Control of Rents until sufficient houses are available; Extended Educational Facilities; Democratic Rights of the People against all forms of Dictatorship.32

The meat of the address was pure Edith, reflecting her passions and concerns. To drive home her message Edith used pithy, direct paragraph headings: ‘The National Government’s Record’, the ‘Poor made Poorer’, ‘The War Danger’, ‘Labour’s Way to Peace and Prosperity’ and ‘Save the Mothers’. The last of these headings stated: ‘It is a national disgrace that during the past three years the rate of maternal mortality has increased. A Royal Commission has stated that at least one-half of the deaths in child-birth are preventable.’33 The address was presented as a letter from Edith’s home – 1 Fitzroy Park, London N6, in Highgate. This was perhaps surprising, since Highgate was some distance from the parliamentary constituency of Putney. The Conservative candidate predictably tried to take maternal mortality out of the campaign, saying it was a matter for doctors not politicians. Edith insisted that the government had neglected the issue, boldly and perhaps unwisely stating that motherhood should be scheduled as a dangerous occupation34 which she compared to mining: sacred, as it was vital to the economy, but badly paid and dangerous.

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Edith used her considerable charm to persuade well-known Labour and other left-leaning figures to come to Putney and support her, which many did, probably because it was a by-election and therefore a high-profile campaign. The visiting speakers included NCCL luminaries Ronald Kidd and Sylvia Crowther-Smith. The press generally commented favourably on Edith’s public speaking, platform style and appearance. Then, as now, such things mattered, especially for women. Edith, a natural, passed with flying colours. The South Western Star, a Clapham newspaper, said of the Labour candidate: She has a splendid presence. She is tall and benign, as well as commanding. People who have seen her, either in her hat and jacket or out of those garments, realise at once that women who are political and social leaders need not be old and soured and withered and cranky. Physically and mentally Dr Summerskill is magnificent, and she does not care who knows it.35

The Ipswich Evening Star was also full of praise: ‘If Dr Summerskill is successful she will be a striking addition to the ranks of women in Parliament, for she is a splendid figure of young womanhood . . . is a brilliant speaker, and I have not the slightest doubt that she would be regarded as the most beautiful of our lady members.’36 Edith herself viewed the by-election campaign as chiefly remarkable for the support she received from the women in north London who had rallied round her in her campaign to win the Middlesex County Council seat. The women apparently travelled in motor coaches and, together with Edith, descended on Putney as they had done in Green Lanes. According to Edith, ‘They [the north London women] objected only to canvassing in West Hill, Putney, where it was reported that the butlers were inclined to be hostile; of course there is no stronger Tory than a British butler.’ In the poorer parts of the constituency, Edith had a record played called ‘Little Old Lady Passing By’, which she followed with a short speech. It seems to have worked, though as Edith pointed out ‘at thirty-three a politician can scarcely be labelled “old” and I certainly was not “little” ’.37 In her memoirs, at the end of the section on the Putney by-election, Edith makes a strong and forward-looking statement about women candidates for political office: One profoundly satisfying aspect of this campaign was the opportunity afforded me of proving to the Party hierarchy that women candidates had vote-catching potential at least equal to men if not in some cases superior. It

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is a fallacy to believe that women lose votes on the grounds of sex; on the contrary women voters if thoroughly canvassed are prepared to support a woman because she is more conversant with the problems at home. And I have never known a politically minded man vote against a woman candidate because of her sex.38

One of the few blots on the by-election landscape came when a Labour Party member wrote a letter to the London Evening Standard stating that Edith was on the side of Stafford Cripps and the Socialist League who wanted the Labour Party and other left-wing groups, including the Communist Party, to combine in an anti-fascist alliance.39 Such an alliance, particularly one involving the Communist Party, was a potentially serious matter as it could have provided Edith’s Conservative opponent Marcus Samuel with strong ammunition to use against the Labour candidate. Fortunately for Edith, Samuel’s attempt to use the letter to cast a slur on Edith did not materially affect the Labour vote in Putney. The incident did, however, reinforce Edith’s strong view that loyalty within the Labour Party was of the utmost importance, an issue which would raise its head again when Edith was a member of the Labour Party NEC in the 1950s. By the end, Edith had fought a campaign which can rightly be described as brilliant. Of course, she did not win – to have done so would have been nothing short of a miracle. But the Labour vote nearly doubled, and Edith achieved a 26.9 per cent swing to Labour, cutting the Conservative majority to 2,663. The result was Samuel 15,999 and Summerskill 12,936 on a turnout of 57.5 per cent. Edith had put her own stamp on her first by-election battle. Her heart was now definitely set on a seat in the House of Commons and maybe even a government position. She was most certainly on her way to greater things, but perhaps with just a little too much confidence in her own electoral abilities and not enough experience in either national politics or parliamentary elections. Edith had no real idea of life outside London. Even so, her opportunity to fight another parliamentary seat came soon enough, though the outcome was again probably not what she wished. Immediately after the Putney campaign, Edith was, according to her son Michael, invited by several local Labour parties to seek selection as their prospective parliamentary candidate. The last general election had taken place on 27 October 1931; the next could potentially have been held as late as

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October 1936. Nevertheless, the Labour Party was gearing up for the fight. One local party, that of Bury in Lancashire, sent representatives to London to discuss the seat with Edith. She was advised that it was an industrial constituency which would provide her with experience she would never get in London. The Bury Labour Party thought the seat was winnable, as apparently did Edith; she was put forward and duly selected in December 1934. It was, however, always a long shot. The result in the previous general election, in 1931, admittedly one of the worst in the history of the Labour Party, was not encouraging. The Conservatives had won with 24,975 votes (70.3 per cent) to Labour’s 10,532, which represented only 29.7 per cent of the popular vote. The turnout had been a massive 81.6 per cent. The odds were not much better than they had been in the Putney by-election, but at least that contest had been held on Edith’s own turf where she was surrounded by long-term allies. Since the 1931 general election had been fought in October of that year, Edith probably thought she had time on her side, as the general election did not need to take place until October 1936. As it turned out, she had less than a year to prepare, since, to the surprise of many MPs, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin dissolved Parliament on 25 October 1935 and called the general election for 14 November. Edith was publicly adopted as the Labour candidate on Monday, 4 November at a meeting of over 400 people at the Textile Hall. There were just ten days to go to polling day. Before the official start of the election campaign, Labour in Bury held the biggest meeting in its history on the evening of 17 October in the Bury Drill Hall. Edith was joined by George Lansbury, Labour Party leader until a few days before Edith’s event, and the former President of the Board of Education, Sir Charles Trevelyan. The hall was packed. Over 4,000 people came to hear Edith and the two prominent Labour parliamentarians; Edith had done well to persuade Lansbury and Trevelyan to come to Bury. The speakers concentrated on the recent invasion of Abyssinia by Italy and the threat to peace; poor law rates and children’s allowances; and, of course, Edith’s Conservative opponent, Alan Chorlton. Chorlton had not, in fact, been the Bury Conservatives’ original choice, which had instead been Mr P. J. F. Chapman Walker. He was, however, dropped in favour of Chorlton, already the MP for the Miles Platting Division in Lancashire close to Manchester, who apparently feared defeat when he heard his opponent would be J. R. Clynes, a former Labour Home

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Secretary. Edith, of course, charged Chorlton with running away, stating, ‘[Chorlton] wanted to leave his Lancashire division because it required tremendous audacity to face the same Lancashire constituency in 1935 as that which he faced in 1931 in face of the government’s broken pledges.’40 On the Italian–Abyssinian dispute, George Lansbury explained that he was a great advocate of the League of Nations, but it should be a league based on justice and equity between all nations. Lansbury condemned war and, though he believed the world was at a parting of the ways, he still thought that force against force would not be the right approach. Sir Charles Trevelyan said he did not suppose that people who had voted on the national declaration of the League of Nations would vote for a government which asked for £100 million for rearmament. On Abyssinia, Trevelyan commented, ‘If Mussolini gets his way, crushes, subjugates and annexes Abyssinia, I am quite certain that Fascism will lead us into a much bigger war than anyone envisages now.’41 Both Lansbury and Edith talked about support for the poor and children. Lansbury emphasized the need for the electorate to concentrate on the municipal elections as a preliminary to the general election and condemned the prospect of millions being raised for mass murder in a possible future war while the unemployed and their families suffered. In the spirit of election campaigning, Edith revealed that Mr Chorlton opposed the increase in children’s allowances from 2s to 3s when the issue had been raised by the Labour Party in the House of Commons.42 In her memoirs, Edith says the election campaign opened quietly. Although she missed her small army of London women, there was a resolute body of Labour campaigners who felt that a town like Bury, with its low-paid workers, back-to-back houses and limited social services, should have become Labour many years previously. In addition to the Conservative candidate Alan Chorlton, there was a Liberal contender, another doctor, named Donald Johnson who lived in Surrey, though he was the son of the late Alderman Dr I. W. Johnson of Bury. Whether the Liberal divided the anti-Conservative vote is debateable; the result saw the combined Labour–Liberal vote stand at 18,910 to Chorlton’s Conservative total of 18,425. Edith rented a small, furnished house for the duration of the three-week election campaign. Jeffrey came into his own during this hectic time. Having been appointed as her election agent instead of a local party member, he drove Edith around the

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constituency, kept her company and lifted her spirits. Jeffrey, of course, had a job which allowed him to appoint a locum to cover his absence. Their children Michael and Shirley, then aged nine and four, joined their parents in Bury for a week during the school half-term. Michael recalls how one constituent remembered the Summerskill children: ‘I worked at the Art Cinema . . . in the café as a waitress . . . Your mother would give us some very interesting talks . . . We all looked forward to her coming to see us.’43 Edith again used the Dorothy Wilding photograph on her election literature. However, her energy, good looks and engaging personality did not cut through in northern Bury in the way they had in metropolitan Putney. As a parliamentary candidate, Edith soon faced a strong and organized foe in the shape of certain elements in the Roman Catholic Church. Edith’s friend Hannen Swaffer wrote in his Daily Herald column under the headline ‘I Heard Yesterday’ on 11 November, three days before the election, ‘clerical interference has been threatened – advice to congregations’.44 The interference which he referred to remains one of the issues for which Edith is mainly remembered, namely her refusal to bow to pressure from Catholic priests to modify her stance on birth control. In 1930, Pope Pius XI had issued the papal encyclical Casti Connubii, which declared contraception to be inherently evil as it ‘violates the law of God and nature’ and was ‘stained by a great and mortal flaw’. Only abstinence was allowed; all other forms of birth control, including the rhythm method, were outlawed. Since there was a large Catholic population in Bury whose ancestral roots were in Ireland, Edith was sometimes asked about her views on birth control which, to her credit, she always gave forthrightly, without trying to evade the issue. Notwithstanding this, Edith never mentioned the subject in any public speech and it was most certainly not in the Labour Party election manifesto. Yet the question of birth control continued to raise its head. Edith describes it thus: ‘It was clear to me that a whispering campaign had been started to discredit me in the eyes of poor Catholic men and women who responded to my appeal on political grounds, but who would be prepared at the last minute at the instruction of the Church to change their allegiance.’45 Five days before polling day Edith was asked to attend a meeting with four Catholic priests in Bury. Jeffrey was present, as were Labour Party officials. The priests told Edith that their Church opposed birth control and they must

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therefore advise their congregations not to vote for Edith. Edith then raised the case of a woman exhausted from tuberculosis for whom a further pregnancy might mean death and asked the priests whether it would not be immoral to withhold information from her which may prevent this happening. The priests replied to an obviously surprised Edith that there could be no immorality comparable to sexual immorality. Nevertheless, the priests did recognize that many of their people wanted to vote Labour. They put a proposition to Edith, which she recounted in her memoirs: ‘If I [Edith] would give an undertaking not to teach any women birth control in the future, they were prepared, from the pulpit, on the following Sunday, to advise people to vote for me.’46 The priests estimated the number of votes in question would be in the region of 5,000. Edith rejected the proposition out of hand, as did at least one of the Labour officials present. ‘I [Edith] found it difficult to believe that in 1935 four men, apparently well informed on social affairs, could in the name of religion come to make such an inhuman suggestion and furthermore stoop to exploit a parliamentary election to secure their ends.’47 There is evidence to back up Edith’s claim that the following Sunday the Catholic congregations were advised to support the Conservative candidate. In 1988, Edith’s son Michael put an advertisement in the Bury Times asking for information on the 1935 general election campaign. At least one of the replies mentioned that a Catholic priest had told his congregation not to vote for Edith because she supported birth control. The writer of the letter, Mrs Holland, said Edith was doing very well until the Sunday before polling. Mrs. Holland recalled that her father came back from canvassing with someone who had just been at a service in one of the Catholic churches. The man told them that the priest at the church had told them not to vote for Dr Summerskill as she was for birth control. The priests, it would appear, had carried out their threat. Edith could nonetheless be proud that she had resolutely stood up for her principles. The fact that this conflict with the Roman Catholic Church in Bury and Edith’s strong stand has stood the test of time, remaining one of the better-known Edith Summerskill stories, may be a consequence of Edith’s own desire to be viewed as a champion of women’s rights, prepared to take on huge vested interests. Edith did not win in Bury, but neither did Labour win nationally in 1935. The Bury result was A. E. L. Chorlton (Conservative), 18,425 = 49.35 per cent of the votes cast; Dr E. Summerskill (Labour) 12,845 = 34.40 per cent; and

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Dr D. Johnson (Liberal) 6,065 = 16.24 per cent. The Conservative majority was 5,580 on a large turnout of 81.31 per cent. Edith would have been disappointed with this result, though her percentage of the vote at 34.4 per cent in a seat which Labour did not hold was a creditable one. The predominantly Conservative National Government, which comprised Conservatives, Liberals and some National Labour MPs, was led by Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. Baldwin gained 429 out of 615 House of Commons seats and just over 53 per cent of the popular vote. Edith may have felt that the Catholic priests jeopardized her chances, but even if they did it was certainly not to the tune of the 5,000 votes they thought they could swing. Neither would the 6,065 votes gained by the Liberal candidate, some of which may have otherwise gone to Labour, have altered the result sufficiently for Edith to win if Dr Johnson had not stood. Edith had commendably stood by her principles on birth control throughout the election and had campaigned on matters dear to her heart about which she was qualified to speak. However, as an ambitious young woman increasingly intent on becoming an MP, Edith’s mistake may have been in accepting Bury in the first place. It was not a good bet in times which were not propitious for Labour, and Edith was an outsider candidate from the capital. The last word goes to a journalist on the Western Mail commenting on the Bury result: ‘Dr Edith Summerskill wife of a Llanelli man who practises medicine in London could not win Bury, and might have done better to have stayed in Putney.’48

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Edith’s defeat in Bury in the 1935 general election did nothing to extinguish her parliamentary ambitions, though she had by now decided that her future lay in London. Attitudes towards women candidates were shifting slightly by the late 1930s, and the Labour Party, and to some extent the Conservatives, professed themselves keen to see women selected as parliamentary candidates. Yet both parties at the national level were unwilling to take measures to ensure that the parties on the ground selected women. Lacking central direction, it was up to the constituency organizations to come up with a candidate. Sometimes a local party would want to consider a woman, a possibility more likely found in the capital than many other parts of the country. Fulham West was a case in point. Remembering Edith’s dynamic by-election campaign in neighbouring Putney during 1934, the Fulham West Labour Party invited her a couple of years later to stand for selection as a candidate for the next general election in what was then a Conservative held marginal seat. Edith’s approach to the selection was quite different from that possibly expected. Now on the threshold of achieving her ambition, she took a very bold and supremely confident step. Still angry following the attack on her by the Roman Catholic priests during the general election campaign in Bury the previous year, Edith warned the Fulham West Labour Party that if they chose her, the same thing might happen again. This was greeted by laughter, but my warning, after my searing experience, was not intended to be treated lightly. Despite this they chose me, but in my second speech to the meeting I emphasised my acceptance was conditional on an assurance from the local Catholic priest that the kind of persecution from which I had suffered in Bury would not be replicated in West Fulham.1

Edith called on the priest the next morning, giving him the whole story. He responded by telling her without qualification that such a thing could not 53

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happen in a neighbourhood where he exercised any power, and was in any case unlikely to happen anywhere in London. Whether or not the priest himself agreed with Edith, he reflected the outlook of the capital, which tended to be less traditional than other parts of the country. The stage was set. Edith’s courage had paid off, and she wrote to West Fulham Labour Party accepting the nomination. In 1936, Dr Edith Summerskill was duly chosen as the Fulham West candidate for the next general election due to be held by 1940 at the latest. Her insistence that she would proceed only on her own terms was typical of Edith; she invariably ploughed her own furrow and pursued the issues she considered important. As Penny Summerfield has commented, throughout her time in politics Edith ‘presented herself as the embodiment of feminine modernity, fulfilling multiple public and private roles: the wife and mother, the medical doctor, the politician’.2 Her forthright behaviour in Fulham at the beginning of what was to be a long and distinguished career was one of the first manifestations of her steely character. She was greatly assisted by her personal appearance and demeanour, which was already in evidence at the beginning of her parliamentary career. A description given by a leading journalist some years later applied equally well to the young Edith: ‘With her tall, handsome figure, her Grecian profile and her hat held high, sailing before her like a figurehead on the prow of a ship, she stands out in any company, a familiar, rather formidable person, respected rather than loved, but never to be underrated.’3 Given that the health of the sitting Conservative MP, Cyril Cobb KBE, MVO, was none too robust, the Fulham West Labour Party selectors might have given some thought to the possibility of a by-election, though this was probably not uppermost in the minds of local Labour Party members. Cobb did, in fact, die on 8 March 1938. Although, on the face of it, a Labour victory in the resulting by-election in Fulham West was not a foregone conclusion, with a Conservative majority of 3,483 in 1935 general election, the seat provided a real possibility of success. Given that the opposition party generally flourishes in parliamentary by-elections, Labour was expected to do well. The national and international volatility of the late 1930s also enhanced Labour’s chances. Edith, as the candidate already selected to contest a general election, was endorsed for the by-election, due to be held only one month after the death of the incumbent MP on 8 April 1938.

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Sir Cyril Cobb had been a long-standing Member of the House of Commons, representing the constituency since 1918 with only a brief interlude following Labour’s success in the 1929 general election when he lost his seat, but then regained it in a by-election the following year. The by-election campaign in March and April 1938 probably ranks as one of the most difficult ever for all sides of the political spectrum, fought as it was amid growing international tension. The world was an unstable place, becoming ever more dangerous. Italy and Germany had formed the Rome–Berlin Axis in October 1936 seven months after Germany had reoccupied the Rhineland in breach of the terms of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. At the end of 1936, Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact aimed at the Soviet Union. Italy joined them in 1937 after leaving the crumbling League of Nations. The League’s primary goals – to prevent war through collective security and disarmament and settle international disputes through negotiation and arbitration – failed when confronted by fascist states intent on expansion. As a major power and a potential countervailing force against Germany and Italy, Britain’s role on the international stage was crucial to the world order. Despite the importance of Britain’s position, the National Government, with Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister and Anthony Eden as Foreign Secretary, proved unable to steer a course which commanded support from the Cabinet as a whole. Eden viewed the United States as essential in opposing Japanese aggression, which threatened British interests in Hong Kong and the Far East. The USA, he maintained, might if required come to Britain’s aid in Europe if the United Kingdom provided support against Japan. Chamberlain, on the other hand, was determined to pursue a policy of appeasement. By the beginning of 1938 the international situation was reaching boiling point. Hitler was preparing for the Austrian Anschluss which took place in March of that year just before the Fulham West by-election. Meanwhile, in line with his appeasement approach, Chamberlain was prepared to recognize Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia in an attempt to keep Italy as an ally and isolate Germany. Chamberlain’s Cabinet agreed that ‘every effort must be made to come to an arrangement with Italy’.4 Eden could not accept this, taking the view that, at the very least, Italian troops should withdraw from Spain as the price for the agreement on Abyssinia. He resigned as Foreign Secretary in February 1938 and was succeeded by the appeaser Lord Halifax.

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At the beginning of 1938 the National Government had 429 seats in the House of Commons. Labour, with 154 seats, was the loyal Opposition. Labour’s manifesto in the 1935 general election supported the League of Nations and attacked the National Government’s perceived ‘vast and expensive rearmament programme’, maintaining that ‘This Government is a danger to the peace of the world and the security of the country.’5 The party’s 1935 election manifesto continued, ‘Labour will propose to other nations the complete abolition of national air forces . . . large reductions by international agreement in naval and military forces; and the abolition of the private manufacture of, and trade in, arms.’ Fortunately for Edith, Labour policy had evolved by the time she began her by-election campaign. Fascist aggression and the war in Spain forced Labour to become more realistic and temper its idealistic tendencies. Once Clement Attlee assumed the Labour leadership after the 1935 general election, the parliamentary Labour Party abstained instead of voting against the arms estimates. Most Labour MPs now pressed for rearmament, though they continued to distrust the National Government and were concerned that additional arms might be used to further imperialist ambitions. The Labour Party Conference in 1937 ratified the document Labour’s Immediate Programme as a manifesto for the next election. It promised to slow down the arms race, put new vigour into the League of Nations and crucially to maintain such armed forces as were necessary to defend the country and fulfil Britain’s obligations as a member of the Commonwealth and League of Nations. The international situation and Labour’s views had shifted enormously since Edith’s candidacy in the 1934 Putney by-election when she coined the slogan ‘friendships not warships’. Unsurprisingly, given the international ferment, rearmament and foreign affairs were major concerns during Edith’s campaign in Fulham West. Her National Conservative opponent, whom Edith describes as ‘the very popular good looking local coal merchant, Charles John Busby’6 stated in his election address, ‘We find ourselves faced with a situation in which there is only one question for every voter – how best can our country be prepared to prevent that threat [of war] becoming a reality and how to meet it if it cannot be averted.’7 Edith began her campaign by attacking the National Government’s handling of international affairs: ‘Mr Chamberlain and his Government should have learnt that the appetite of these Fascists is insatiable and that the betrayal of Spain and Austria is only a prelude to an attack on Czechoslovakia.’8 Edith

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established her credentials as an anti-appeaser during the campaign. She used appeasement against her Conservative opponent and at the same time defied the pacifists in her own party. Though well able to hold her own on foreign policy and the looming crisis, Edith also used her expertise as a general medical practitioner in poor neighbourhoods tending to people constantly below the poverty line to her advantage. Proclaiming that for tens of thousands of our people there is no security between the cradle and the grave, Edith maintained that this would remain the case until the system was changed: ‘Today, infantile mortality is twice as great in poor areas as in those where people have decent homes and plenty of food. When Tories think of security, let them think of places like Jarrow where the death rate among babies is well over twice that of the average for the whole country.’9 Edith fought the byelection on two vital fronts: the looming war in Europe and the poverty and unemployment at home. Edith, lucky as ever, gained the advantage when the Liberal Party decided not to contest the seat. With no other candidates, it became a straight contest between her and Busby. David Lloyd George, still a force though no longer Liberal Party leader, paid a visit to the West Fulham Liberal Association, urging Liberals to vote for the Labour candidate, Dr Edith Summerskill. The impact of Lloyd George’s intervention is hard to quantify. Although it is difficult in any election to draw conclusions about the distribution of thirdparty votes, it was highly likely that the two-horse race benefitted Edith. The Manchester Guardian had no doubt this was the case, stating ‘in the circumstances of the moment 99 out of a 100 of them [Liberal voters] may be expected to vote Labour if they vote at all’.10 Edith herself touched a chord in West Fulham; she was her own greatest asset. Her height (over 5 ft 9 in.), striking good looks, which included russet red hair, and energetic personality drew people to her. She was, moreover, not only a woman but one with a husband and two young children whom she would sometimes reference in speeches and appearances during the election campaign. Edith was, in addition, middle class and a professional. This may have encouraged the voters in Fulham to support her in that they would have felt she was someone who could be a success in the House of Commons. Though sometimes austere and always opinionated, Edith had a human touch in a way that many of the male politicians in the 1930s did not.

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Dr Edith Summerskill achieved her parliamentary ambition on 8 April 1938, winning Fulham West with a majority of 1,421 votes, a 7.3 per cent swing to Labour. There were, in fact, 4000 more female voters in Fulham West than male voters. Whether or not this helped Edith is debateable, but it probably did her no harm. From his time onwards she was generally known in political and journalistic circles simply as ‘Dr Edith’. A woman standing for Parliament and being elected as an MP in the 1930s was part of a rare species. Only nine women in total were returned to the House of Commons in the 1935 general election, with two more elected in subsequent by-elections before Edith’s victory in April 1938. Prior to Edith’s election there were only two Labour women representatives: Ellen Wilkinson and Agnes Hardie. Ellen had been elected in the general election, Agnes in a by-election soon after. As a byelection victor in London and a winner during a period of unprecedented international ferment, Edith gained high-profile national recognition. It was both a blessing and a curse to be a by-election candidate in 1938. Local newspapers, vitally important in the pre-television age, reported the Fulham West by-election throughout the country. Dr Edith Summerskill’s name featured in places as far afield as Sunderland, Leeds, Hartlepool, Coventry, Bury St Edmunds and Portsmouth. Edith was to enter the House of Commons as, if not yet a household name, at least well on the way to becoming one. Thus began a parliamentary career which was to last until her death in 1980. Edith started as she meant to go by using Summerskill, her own name and the name under which she was entered as a doctor in the Medical Register, for parliamentary purposes rather than Samuel, her husband’s name. She was, in fact, the first married woman to use her maiden name in Parliament, inevitably causing controversy. Sir Stafford Cripps, a former Labour Attorney General met Edith to discuss the matter. Edith tells the story in her memoirs: It was not without some amusement that I found myself confronted with a brilliant lawyer, a little out of his depth in questioning me on a matter which he had never encountered before. There was no statute law or regulation, and little custom to guide him, for only a few married women, at that time, entered parliament . . . I helped Stafford Cripps when he returned to those shadowy figures behind the scenes whose prejudices had prompted them to ask him to raise the matter with me. I asked him whether a death certificate would be invalid if I signed it in any other name than Edith Summerskill?

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He had to admit that it would. ‘Well’, said I, ‘if the General Medical Council considers I am competent to undertake professional work, calling for a high sense of responsibility, without changing my name on marriage, why should parliamentarians be more obdurate?’11

Cripps apparently had nothing more to say in answer to this convincing argument. Notwithstanding the attitude shown by certain members of the House of Commons, the issue of Edith’s name had, in reality, been resolved when the returning officer for West Fulham accepted her nomination as Dr Summerskill. Edith had, nonetheless, stood up to the male hierarchy in Parliament and won a victory for feminism. The discomfort Edith caused to some by using her own name rather than that of her husband never really went away. What’s more, both her children took her name. As late as 1966, when Edith’s daughter Shirley was elected to Parliament and chose to keep the name Summerskill, a reporter from Edith’s local paper, the Hampstead and Highgate Express, telephoned Jeffrey, Edith’s husband, to ask what he thought about ‘this flaming feminism’, Jeffrey answered: A man doesn’t change his name when he marries, so why should a wife change hers? If my wife had asked me to change my name, I might have protested. I can’t see any logical reason for a woman to take her husband’s name . . . It’s quite unfair for the children always to take on the name of the father. I was glad to make my small contribution to redress the balance.12

The clashes with Cripps on the use of her maiden name marked the beginning of the overt misogyny Edith, and indeed most of the other women MPs, faced throughout their parliamentary careers. Before the Second World War and even in modern times, assertive women in professional and public life have been regarded as presumptuous, aggressive and unfeminine, while the same words coming from the mouth of a man are heard quite differently. Edith was no exception. She had to deal with misogyny throughout her life. Edith was introduced into the House of Commons on 11 April 1938. Despite widespread press speculation that her two sponsors would be the two Labour women MPs, Ellen Wilkinson and Agnes Hardie, she was, in fact, sponsored by Sir Stafford Cripps himself and the Labour Chief Whip William Whitely. Her looks and mode of dress inevitably became talking points. Edith was dubbed the ‘glamour’ MP by the Nottingham Journal whose reporter more

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importantly described her as ‘one of the most self-composed new members I have ever seen take the oath after a by-election victory and she was an extremely attractive figure as she stood at the bar in her smart black costume, fashionable hat with a fur flung negligently across her shoulders’.13 The real Edith, rather than the journalist’s fantasy, had invited Jeffrey and their two children, Michael and Shirley, into the public gallery so that they could watch the ceremony. Edith would never be cowed by comments on her ability or, indeed, anything else. In Parliament she was determined to continue her fight to improve the lives of women, especially working-class women. In the course of her work as a doctor, Edith had seen just how bad the conditions of the poor were and felt compelled to do whatever she could to improve matters. Previous, and indeed future, Labour women MPs were cautious about being seen to be too feminist. Pursuing rights for women was generally viewed as a road to nowhere. Some parts of the Labour Party were actively hostile to feminism, viewing the class struggle as the proper role for the Labour Party and anything else a distraction. Edith was unusual among Labour women in combining socialism and concern for women and children’s welfare with an unshakable commitment to equal rights. From the 1920s into the 1950s the question of equal rights was more often associated with Conservative rather than Labour women. Because of this, Edith unusually worked with colleagues across the political spectrum. Compared to the other eleven women MPs, Edith stands out as a woman apart. She was professional, middle class and metropolitan, ran a thriving general medical practice with her husband, had two young children and represented the Labour Party. Edith’s medical background not only informed the issues she pursued in Parliament but also the way she behaved as an MP. Edith would use medical vocabulary to add authority to her House of Commons speeches. In March 1942 during a debate on the delay in establishing war-time day nurseries to allow women to work for the war effort, Edith proclaimed, ‘The Ministry of Health is probably aware of the reason for this delay. My diagnosis is simple, but I think a correct one. The delay is due to the reluctance of reactionary councillors to introduce a reform which they think is calculated to spoil women.’14 During the same month, Edith came up with a far more notable example of scientific vocabulary. Addressing fears that women in uniform would lose their femininity, Edith told The Fortnightly magazine, ‘certain

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ductless glands determine the degree of femininity displayed by women and . . . it is scientifically impossible and quite unsound to suggest that a uniform, however severely cut, can influence the secretions of the hormones’.15 Like many of the women MPs on both sides of the House, Edith’s family had an interest in politics, though not an all-consuming one. Her father, Dr William Summerskill, fought an unsuccessful municipal by-election in Seven Kings Ward, Ilford, as an independent in an attempt to ensure action on the plague of flies around evil-smelling manure dumps in the locality. Her brother, also a doctor, called William, though sometimes known as by his middle name Hedley, unsuccessfully contested Balham and Tooting for the Liberal Party in 1929 and never stood for Parliament again. Her sister Daphne, on the other hand, was for some time active in the Conservative Party in Leytonstone in Essex. Politics was therefore in the family, but it was not of the Labour and socialist kind. Edith had originally joined the Labour Party as a result of seeing poverty at first hand when she joined her doctor father on his rounds in poor areas. The other influence was her husband Jeffrey. Although his family were Liberals and strong chapel goers, Jeffrey, in a spirit of quiet rebellion, disavowed religion and claimed he would have been a conscientious objector in the First World War had he not already been a medical student and therefore exempt from military service. Jeffrey’s South Wales socialist sympathies served to confirm Edith as Labour.16 The origins of Edith’s support for socialism and her decision to join Labour are not difficult to understand. Her fierce and unshakable pursuit of women’s rights which went well beyond medicine and poverty is another matter. While her championing of birth control and limiting family size may in part be due to her medical background, it does not tell the whole story. Her own public explanation centres on two women close to her as a child. Miss Collins was engaged by Edith’s mother to look after her three children. She arrived at the Summerskill household following the death of both her parents whereupon her father’s pension ceased and Miss Collins had to fend for herself. Her story upset and offended Edith as she recounted in her memoirs: The selfishness of some old people who exploit the love and kindness of their single daughters is difficult to understand . . . How can they endure year after year watching an unselfish daughter give her time and energies, day

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and night, tending to their wants while she is denied the joy of companionship and entertainment outside the home?17

The other early influence was Edith’s aunt, her father’s sister. Following the custom of the time, Aunt Eleanor, by all accounts an attractive and intelligent woman, was denied any serious education and condemned to wait for some young man to propose marriage. According to Edith, it grieved her father to see one of his sisters, who incidentally looked very like him, being denied higher education even though she was more intelligent that any of his brothers. Eleanor did eventually marry in middle age, but Edith always felt the memory of her father’s frustrated sister unable to fulfil herself never faded from his mind. Consequently, according to Edith, Dr William senior decided there would be no such discrimination as far as his own legitimate daughters were concerned. Edith was rightly proud of her father’s positive feelings towards herself and his sister, and eternally grateful that he provided her with the opportunity of going to medical school. Yet Dr William’s dark side, his sexual incontinence, must have had a massive impact on the young Edith. Not content with fathering a number of ‘love children’, Dr Summerskill senior then made his wife, Edith’s mother, distribute the payments for the upkeep of the children to the women who had given birth. Since the women concerned came to the doctor’s back door, the young Edith almost certainly knew what was going on. Given the shame any revelations about her father’s behaviour would have caused during the 1920s and 1930s, Edith was completely unable to point to these traumatic events when describing the experiences which led her to champion rights for women. It is, however, not at all surprising that Dr William’s intelligent and ambitious daughter should have become a feminist given her father’s conduct. Dr William Summerskill used many women for his own gratification. His daughter later sought to do what she could to right the injustices perpetrated by men such as her father. Since both her parents lived until the 1940s, Edith may well have felt unable to speak publicly about her father’s behaviour while he and her mother were still alive. Born in 1901, she would have inherited the Victorian tradition of outward family loyalty, and in any event would more than likely have disapproved of washing the family dirty linen in public.

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At the time Edith joined the Labour Party and stood for Parliament there were MPs who spoke openly and sometimes at length about their personal lives – the means test, hungry mothers, brothers and sisters, drunken fathers – and related them directly to their socialist beliefs. Their troubles could be blamed on society and the system. While Edith was able to do this in relation to her experiences as a doctor, she never felt she could talk about the intimate family traumas that must have done much to shape her beliefs and probably her personality as well. She too had been tormented by personal anguish but could not reveal its nature. Having seen women suffer at first hand, Edith became determined to do whatever she could to ensure women were protected. She ran a birth control clinic in Wood Green from the mid1920s, campaigned for women to have a fair share of the family assets on divorce and fought for improved maternity provision, amongst many other activities. Her feminism informed her political life from the time she was coopted on to Wood Green Urban District Council to the end of her career in the House of Lords. She was throughout her long career a very rare individual, a socialist and a feminist, fearless in both. Fearlessness was, indeed, a quality which the women MPs at the time needed in abundance. Edith’s two Labour women colleagues, Ellen Wilkinson and Agnes Hardie, shared this attribute, though both were quite different from the feminist doctor. Ellen Wilkinson – who came close to being a legend in her own lifetime, rising from feisty Communist to Cabinet minister – was born into a humble family, her father having worked in a Manchester textile factory. Nonetheless Ellen, thanks to a brilliant intellect and forceful personality, gained a scholarship to Manchester University when in 1910 she won the Jones Open History Scholarship, one of only six such scholarships. Ellen started her involvement in politics in the University Socialist Federation, moving on in 1912 to the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. By 1915, Ellen had become the first woman organizer for the National Union of Distributive and Allied Workers. Her initial foray into national elected politics was in the 1923 general election when she stood as a Communist. In 1924 she was returned to the House of Commons for Middlesbrough East, this time for the Labour Party. Edith and Ellen, whom Edith describes as, ‘4 ft. 11 in. with a mass of fiery red hair and an equally fiery eloquent tongue’,18 struck up a rapport in Parliament. Edith tells how the never-married Ellen liked children, once saying

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to Michael, Edith’s son, ‘If only I had been given the opportunity to drink fresh milk every day I would be as tall as you.’19 Edith and Ellen also differed on feminism, which was never such a deep personal calling for Ellen Wilkinson as it was for Edith. Although early in her career Ellen had championed women’s suffrage and the improvement of women’s working conditions, such issues were by no means her only or most important activity. The other Labour woman in the House of Commons when Edith arrived was Agnes Hardie, the Labour Party Women’s Organizer for Scotland from 1918 to 1923. She married Keir Hardie’s half-brother George who was subsequently elected MP for Glasgow Springburn in 1922. When George died in 1937, Agnes took over his seat, becoming Glasgow’s first female MP. Yet, once in the House of Commons, Agnes seems to have been a largely absent figure. Edith does not even mention her in her memoirs, only talking about Ellen Wilkinson and Jennie Adamson, a later by-election winner, as fellow Labour women MPs prior to the start of the Second World War. There were seven Conservative women in the House of Commons when Edith arrived. Florence Horsburgh, an MP from 1931 until 1945 when she lost her seat, was arguably the best-known woman MP in Britain at the time. She championed welfare issues, introducing legislation to regulate the adoption of children. Irene Ward, who also lost her seat in 1945, was another Conservative with an interest in social conditions, while Thelma Cazalet-Keir’s mother was, so we are told, a strong Christian and feminist. Katherine Duchess of Atholl became known as the Red Duchess due to her support for Republican Spain. Mavis Tate, an MP from 1935 to 1945, was vocal on the subject of equal pay for women as part of the war effort and chaired the 1941 Woman Power Committee. Frances Joan Davidson had recently succeeded her husband in a by-election in June 1937. Last but by no means least was the indomitable Lady Nancy Astor, the first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons, an upper-crust American socialite who was nevertheless a fighter for women and believed more could be achieved by being united rather than divided along party lines. There was also one Liberal woman MP, Megan Lloyd George, the daughter of the former Prime Minister. Although all the women MPs at this time took an interest in social issues and the welfare of children, in 1938 there was only one other MP in addition to Edith who overtly claimed to be a feminist: Eleanor Rathbone, who had fought for women all her political life. Feminist in this

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context is defined as campaigning and taking action on issues which benefit women as a group such as equal financial shares in marriage, health issues which affect only women and maternal welfare. There was little meaningful concept of patriarchy at this time, and feminists generally sought to improve the lot of women in the context of the existing social order. Rathbone, an Independent, was the one woman in Parliament who pursued women’s rights with the same vigour and commitment as Edith, and the woman with whom Edith had the most in common as far as politics and parliamentary work were concerned. Rathbone was, in fact, the only woman MP who remained faithful to suffragist feminism. By 1938, Eleanor Rathbone had been an MP for eleven years, having won the Combined English Universities Seat in 1929. She will be forever remembered for her long-standing and tireless campaign for family allowances, arguing that the economic dependence of women was based on the practice of supporting families, whatever their size, with wages paid to men whether or not they had families and taking no account of the number of dependants. The Family Allowances Act was passed in 1945, a year before Rathbone’s death. However, her fervent wish that the allowance be paid to the mother rather than the man of the family had to wait for another thirty years. Even though Dr Edith Summerskill and Miss Eleanor Rathbone were the only two women MPs at this time who would accept and use the label ‘feminist’, there is no doubt that all eleven women MPs were very conscious of their gender and the struggles each had faced to overcome male prejudice and prove themselves up to the job of a Member of Parliament. Most women MPs in the 1940s and 1950s instinctively understood about ‘women’s issues’ long after the feminism of the Edwardian era had faded away. In that sense they were all feminists. The women MPs, Conservative as well as Labour, took up social issues, often related to their experience as wives and mothers. Legislation concerning children, equal pay, family allowances and later free contraception and childcare may have taken longer to enact without the pioneering work of these early women MPs. The women MPs sat in a House of Commons comprising 615 constituency seats. Even as late as 1938, twenty years after women gained the right to sit as Members of Parliament, there were male MPs who were opposed to women Members in the Commons. One such, who had also opposed women gaining the vote, was Winston Churchill, who consistently

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snubbed Lady Nancy Astor when she first arrived in Parliament. Edith relays a wonderful Churchill–Astor story: [W]hen after many years she [Nancy Astor] asked Winston Churchill why he had cut her, he retorted, ‘When you came into the House I felt you had entered my bathroom and I had no sponge with which to defend myself.’ Astor replied, ‘You’re not handsome enough to have worries of that kind.’20

Although Edith paid respect to Nancy Astor as the first woman MP to take her seat, she was not close to her and neither did she regard her as a good feminist. Michael Summerskill relates a story about her told by Edith, namely that Astor, a keen talker and anxious not to be left out, would keep the women’s lavatory door in the House of Commons open in order to engage in conversation. On a more serious matter, Edith and Nancy Astor disagreed about illegitimate children. Edith felt that women who had children out of wedlock should receive state support, while Astor thought women should resist the temptation in the first place.21 They were two diametrically opposing views encapsulating the differences between the Labour and Conservative parties at the time. Given attitudes such as that displayed by Churchill, finding working space and facilities for the women MPs was always going to present difficulties. When Edith arrived in 1938 there was only one room for women members with a small iron Victorian washstand and a jug of cold water. Following a chilly wash, once the plug was removed, the water flowed into a bucket underneath, a state of affairs unlikely to commend itself to a medical woman who understood hygiene. It was, however, Jennie Adamson rather than Edith who demanded changes, and eventually conditions did improve. The Lady Members’ Room, inevitably dubbed the ‘boudoir’, overlooked the House of Commons Terrace. It was small and cramped and no concession was made to party affiliation. All the women MPs were bunched together in this tiny room. Writing in 1945, after an influx of new women MPs, the Labour MP Jean Mann describes it clearly: ‘Just seven desks and twenty-six women MPs in a room the same size as my loungecum-dining room and, in the small powder room adjoining, not one wardrobe . . . You can have a coat hanger if you buy it yourself . . .’22 Inadequate though such conditions obviously were, they may well have aided cross-party thinking on the social and family issues which most of these early women MPs took up. At the very least, the close quarters provided some understanding of the

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different lives led by Labour and the wealthy and aristocratic Conservative women. Edith tells how the Duchess of Atholl would ‘on changing her frock, present her back to the half-open door to enable her maid, standing in the corridor, to fasten the numerous small buttons which only the maid’s practised hand could manipulate’.23 Friendships such as that between Ellen Wilkinson and Nancy Astor not only began but thrived in such an environment, and the collaboration between Dr Edith and Eleanor Rathbone probably also benefitted from their working conditions. The partnership between Edith and Eleanor was encapsulated in Edith’s Question to the Minister of Health in July 1939, asking whether a woman, if she requested it, should be allowed an analgesic in childbirth, which was forbidden by the Central Midwives Board. Rathbone then followed up Edith’s Question with a supplementary. Edith tells how she and Eleanor Rathbone had a long conversation following this interchange: ‘She [Rathbone] was much older than I, and experienced in the ways of the House, and knew that reforms such as the one I had just ventilated would not come unless every opportunity was seized for focusing public attention on the matter . . .’24 Edith determined to do just that. Taking on board Eleanor Rathbone’s exhortation to use every opportunity to focus public attention, Edith’s contributions in the House of Commons in 1938 and 1939 were almost all on medical matters or issues concerning women and children. There was, however, one notable exception: her maiden speech. Edith chose to attack the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who incidentally had left the chamber before she stood up, for imposing a tax on tea and other food staples, including whale oil, in order to finance armaments. She was pained that the armaments manufacturers would be profiting at the expense of the people and claimed that the government could retrace its steps and return to Geneva, meaning collective security via the League of Nations. Edith continued by pointing out that the country’s social services were suffering due to the government’s economic policy. Her killer blow concerned the water supply. I feel that the people of this country should know that, in the event of a war in the near future, they are not guaranteed water in this Metropolis – that the Metropolitan Water Board, which administers the water supply to 8,000,000 people in this country, has again and again come to this Government and implored it to protect this vital service . . . The Government has turned a deaf ear to these appeals.’25

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It was a brave speech and also one which broke the parliamentary convention that new MPs do not, in their maiden speeches, attack the government. Edith’s first foray into the Commons bear pit met with a mixed response. The Daily Herald loved it, reporting, ‘Dr Edith Summerskill . . . played an unwomanly part in her maiden speech. Instead of binding up Sir John’s wounds [Sir John Simon, Chancellor of the Exchequer] and pouring on oil (whale oil) . . . she dripped in pinches of salt.’26 Her son Michael reveals that she was nervous and trembled while she spoke. He further tells that a few years later Edith described herself as having sat down after the speech feeling ‘humiliated, despondent and out of heart’, an unusual mood for the supremely confident doctor. Edith had told Michael that a note had been passed to her by her friend Josiah Wedgwood, MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme, saying ‘Dear Lady, there are many times in life when courage is the thing that counts – Josh.’27 Wedgwood, noticing that she felt down, was maybe trying to lift her spirits. The Sunday Times was more balanced: ‘Dr Summerskill . . . could think of no better slogan than “Back to Geneva” as a remedy for the housewife’s rising prices; more real was her reminder that water was hardly less important than bread, and that the source of supply must be protected.’28 In 1941, Edith returned to her own area of expertise and major concern, producing a short but hard-hitting book entitled Babies Without Tears. This publication made the case for better treatment for pregnant women and women who had recently given birth as well as for pain relief in childbirth. Having given birth to two children, Dr Edith maintained that, ‘Painless childbirth, or at least relief from the worst pains, should not be a luxury reserved for the fortunate few.’ She continued, ‘It has been unfortunate for women that there has not been a Minister of Health who has endured labour pains.’29 The book also talked about maternal mortality, illness following childbirth and the lack of health insurance for women not in paid work, as well as about diet and nutrition. Babies Without Tears was Edith’s personal manifesto, setting out the main areas she wished to concentrate on as an MP. She was never in Parliament simply as lobby fodder or only to toe the party line. She wished to do whatever was in her power to improve lives, especially those of women. Edith devoted a chapter in her book to the persistently high death rate among women who had recently given birth, over 2,000 in any one year at the time she was writing. She cited the 1934 Report on the Investigation

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into Maternal Mortality which provided much information and showed the seriousness of the matter. Edith typically came up with practical solutions to ameliorate the high number of deaths. She was convinced that a good maternity service was of the utmost importance. By way of example, Edith referred to the poorer parts of London where there was good provision for pregnant women in hospitals run by the London County Council as well as charitable organizations. These included the Queen’s Institute of Nurses, the East-End Lying-In Hospital and the Plaistow Hospital. Women in parts of the industrial north of the country were not always so lucky. She also made a plea for better training in obstetrics for doctors, a demand she would reiterate many times in the future. Edith always claimed that maternal mortality was not caused by poverty alone and that improved medical provision would be hugely beneficial. In a chapter entitled ‘The Aftermath’, Edith talked about illnesses following pregnancy attributable to childbearing and giving birth, a serious problem affecting thousands of women. Since those who did not work outside the home in paid employment were generally unable to be insured under the state scheme in existence at the time, many married women had to pay to see a doctor. Edith assumed, probably correctly, that the numbers of women affected were much higher than they seemed. She singled out cancer of the cervix – which could be caused by neglecting to repair a tear in the neck of the womb during childbirth – as a real danger for women after giving birth. She also maintained that there should be routine testing during pregnancy for harmful conditions such as high blood pressure and toxaemia, and that women should be made more aware of the availability of maternity and child welfare clinics. Starting as she meant to go on, Edith showed commendable courage during her early years in the House of Commons. In July 1938, when she was an MP of less than three months’ standing, Dr Edith intervened in a debate on health administration saying, ‘[I] must confess to being very disappointed. Although he [the Minister of Health] explained that the maternal mortality rate had declined this year, he did not enlarge upon the measures which he expected to introduce next year in order to reduce the rate still further.’30 Edith then pointed out that ‘inexpert midwifery is a factor of major importance . . . education in obstetrics for medical students should be improved’.31 Continuing the subject of maternity, in February 1939, Edith asked the Minister of Health whether he was aware that expectant mothers who desired to enter a county

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hospital were required, in some local authority areas, to submit to the old Poor Law procedure. This was an important question from Edith, relating as it did to the current often less than satisfactory position of less-well-off pregnant women getting adequate medical attention. Although the old Poor Law procedure which had classified poor people who required medical care by their economic status rather than need had been abolished in 1929 when the Local Government Act of that year transferred responsibility for the care of the poor to local councils, in many areas the old prejudices surrounding paupers remained. This had the effect of making admission more difficult. Edith therefore also asked the Minister of Health whether, ‘as this is proving a deterrent to women who desire to enter a hospital for confinement, will he take steps to get these county authorities to waive the regulations . . .?’32 The minister proved less than co-operative and asked for time to reply. During December the previous year Edith had spoken on the government’s Cancer Bill, raising the question of women, in particular housewives on modest incomes, who suffered from cancer. Her impassioned plea asked why poor women went to their doctor too late: What prevents the woman who perhaps has a lump, who perhaps has the first symptoms, going to the doctor in the first stage when we all know that is her only chance of survival? The barrier is an economic one . . . the housewife will economise on every penny. She will have some symptom, but she will put it off because she knows that the money is necessary for feeding her children.33

In her memoirs, Edith tells us that some of her indignation stemmed from the fact that the Health Minister at the time, Walter Elliot, was a doctor and could and should therefore have used his knowledge and authority to change the old order.34 During the debate on the Cancer Bill, Edith stated that, ‘The only solution to the problem, the only long-term solution is to introduce a State medical service in the country so that people can have a free health service just as they have free education . . . It is a kind of Utopia but we know that Utopia will probably come during the next ten years.’35 As a founder member of the Socialist Medical Association, the idea of a state medical service was never far from Edith’s thoughts, and as an MP she continued to campaign for the state service envisaged by the SMA.

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Though few in number, all the women MPs elected between 1918 and 1945 made significant and generally well-regarded contributions in the chamber. Women across the political divide felt a special obligation to speak in debates. Between 1919 and 1945, male MPs contributed 30 million lines to Hansard. Women, so very few in number, contributed 550,053.36 Women MPs spoke to a large extent on issues relating to welfare. Edith also took up subjects which related mainly to women. During 1938, in addition to maternity and women’s health, she spoke on the age at which children were permitted to work in the mines in the African colonies, medical services in civil defence and contributed to the debate on a Bill about holidays with pay. She made thirty-eight interventions in total and asked two questions which required written answers. In 1939, a full year in contrast to the part year she served in 1938, she was inevitably more prolific, making seventy-three interventions and asking two questions with written answers. The bulk of Edith’s parliamentary contributions between her arrival in the House of Commons and the outbreak of the Second World War were on medical matters, generally about how the to improve the living conditions of poor women. In addition to her speeches on women, during this time Edith began one of her toughest campaigns, nothing less than the eradication of bovine tuberculosis from the milk supply. As a doctor, Edith had seen the devastating effects of TB at first hand. She was also perhaps influenced by her father, who had run a TB clinic at Westgate in Kent. Tuberculosis, a devastating bacterial disease which mainly, but not exclusively, affects the lungs, can, in its bovine form, be transmitted from cattle to humans. It was, and still remains, a very serious disease, causing permanent disability in the limbs and, if not treated, will ultimately prove fatal. At least 40 per cent of dairy cattle in Britain were infected with tuberculosis in the 1930s. There were around 2,500 human deaths a year from the disease and many more people suffering illness. Such a state of affairs was a major scandal, since, by the 1930s, bovine TB was preventable with pasteurization, regular testing of the animals to check for the disease and regular meat hygiene inspections. Milk pasteurization and an Attested Herd Scheme were introduced in 1935, but since participation was voluntary these measures did not really improve matters. By 1947, only 14 per cent of cattle were in attested herds,37 and the major route for its transmission to humans was drinking the milk of infected animals. To add dangerous insult

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to avoidable injury, people were encouraged to enjoy milk straight from the cow, something which was claimed to have unequalled health-giving properties. Soon after the outbreak of war in 1939, once the decision had been taken to remove children from the cities to the countryside away from bombing raids, Edith raised the question of the cleanliness of the rural milk in the areas where the evacuees had been sent. She asked the Minister of Health whether, in determining a suitable reception area for children in country districts, investigations were made concerning the cleanliness and safety of the local milk supply. The minister predictably replied that the main considerations were transport and communication, but that such consideration as was possible was given to other relevant factors including any abnormal risks of infectious diseases from such causes as food and water supplies. Edith was not to be fobbed off with such an evasive reply. She responded by informing the minister that, ‘4,000 people died last year from surgical tuberculosis, which was in great part milk-borne . . . does he [the minister] not think that is a rather short sighted policy to send children from a town where there is a safe milk supply to a country district where the milk is unsafe . . .?’ Unable to deny the truth of what Edith was saying, the minister, Dr Walter Elliott, told Edith that he shared her professional feelings, while at the same time maintaining that the danger from the possible infection of the food supply as compared with the possible danger of heavy air bombardment must be weighted one against the other. Edith came back with a typical hard-hitting intervention: ‘Does not the right hon. Gentleman agree – I can assure him this is not a frivolous matter – that a daily dose of tuberculosis milk is surely more dangerous to health than the possibility, perhaps, of an air-raid at some future time?’38 Edith’s campaign to eradicate tuberculosis in milk came to a successful conclusion after the war when she was Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Food. On 21 February 1949 she stood at the dispatch box to move the second reading of the Milk (Special Designation) Bill, which introduced mandatory pasteurization. Keen to encourage the drinking of milk on health grounds, the government, thanks in large measure to Edith’s relentless and occasionally obsessive pursuit of clean milk, had now taken concrete steps to allow everyone to enjoy milk free from disease. When Edith arrived in the House of Commons, civil war continued to rage in Spain with increasing civilian casualties. In July 1938, as a result of their

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support for the Republican cause, the Spanish Government invited Edith and Ellen Wilkinson to visit the refugee camps which sheltered women and children and study the food supplies available for civilians. They both accepted, though when the time came Ellen Wilkinson was unable to make the trip due to ill health. In view of the air attacks, going to Spain was a courageous decision, and one which, of course, meant leaving Jeffrey and her small children in order to venture into a dangerous environment. It was typical of Dr Edith to say yes to such a perilous mission, trusting that Jeffrey and Nana, the children’s nanny, would hold the fort at home. Though she loved Jeffrey and the children and carved out family time, her career was equally important. Whether this was simply Edith’s view of the way it had to be, or whether she felt she had to keep up with male politicians for whom family matters often appeared secondary, is not clear. However, in her own way and with her own issues, Edith was as determined as any of her male colleagues. Since Edith had a strong record of support for the Republican Government and had been one of those responsible for sending medical supplies to Spain, her invitation was perhaps not unexpected. Edith travelled on her own to Paris, where she met up with the publisher Hamish Hamilton and the Communist Otto Katz who was assistant to the head of the Western European Comintern. They then went to Perpignan where they met the Spanish Consul Tomas Bilbao. Edith related in her memoirs how in Barcelona, their first major stop, she was woken up by a bomb which seemed rather close. In actual fact it was an isolated incident and no harm was done. In Spain everyone had a ration card, there was no sugar, milk or coffee in the shops and no oranges, as they came from Valencia which was cut off. The refugee children’s centres were sad and sorry places with just enough milk for the small babies. The centres were used by families who were unable to feed their children and also took in children whose parents had been killed. The children themselves were pale and wasted. Speaking in the House of Commons after the visit, Edith reported that, ‘I went [to Spain] to investigate what is meant by the slow starvation of the civilian population of Spain . . . I examined babies who had no fresh milk, no eggs, no butter, very little meat and who were living literally on black bread, beans and dried cod.’39 Even in the face of this great hardship, to which the British Government turned a blind eye and pursued a policy of non-intervention, the Republican Government vowed to fight on. Lieutenant-Colonel Modesto,

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commander of the Republican army in Ebro and one of the key people who met Edith’s group, summed it up: ‘We are a small enemy but we have great teeth.’40 Edith and Modesto seem to have clicked, causing him to say, ‘English women are very cold but if they have fire near them they burn.’41 Modesto, in fact, took the opportunity to provide Edith with information which, when reported on her return to London, caused controversy, namely that 10,000 troops from Italy, which supported the Fascists (Nationalists) in Spain, were said to have landed from Majorca at Vinaroz, a strategically important port. In July, shortly after her return from Spain, Edith, in a parliamentary debate, drew the attention of R. A. Butler, Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, to her earlier written question to the Prime Minister asking whether he (the PM) had received information about the landing of 10,000 Italian troops at Vinaroz on Friday, 15 July, and whether he would make representations to the Italian Government to prevent further intervention. Butler replied that the British Government had ‘received reliable reports concerning the landing at Vinaroz of certain shipments of local Spanish troops from Majorca. The total numbers in question appear to have been between five and six thousand, of which 1,500 are reported to have landed on the day in question. I have no information which would confirm the Hon. Lady’s statement about the landing of Italian troops.’42 The discussion then ended, leaving Edith high and dry, but true to form she did not give up. In a major parliamentary debate on the Anglo-Italian Agreement in November 1938, Edith told the House, ‘I was on the Ebro Front at the end of July . . . and I was given information, which was well authenticated, that 10,000 Italians had landed at a small town about 48 hours before in the East of Spain.’ She continued that ‘the least that has always been suggested in the House is that no further Italian reinforcements have been going into Spain since . . . April 1938’. In relation to the troops, Butler again maintained his previous position: ‘They were Spaniards coming from the Balearic Islands.’43 Both these exchanges must have been humiliating for Edith. Furthermore, earlier in the year she had had to put up with Marcus Samuel, her old Putney opponent, sounding off in the Wandsworth Borough News, claiming, ‘Socialists still believe anything they are told, provided it is told them by some foreigner, and, after all a letter read to Dr Summerskill in English, even if it was read out by the Foreign Minister, Sr. del Vayo . . . might quite possibly be a bit of the usual war propaganda.’44

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The war in Spain was by mid-1938 seen as a precursor to what might happen across the rest of Europe. It was rare for Edith to be challenged on a point of detail, and there is evidence to show that in this case she was right and the British Government was wrong. Much later, her son Michael asked Hugh Thomas, author of The Spanish Civil War, the authoritative text on the conflict, about the troops and the exchanges in Parliament. Thomas replied: It seems to me that over 3,000 men left Italy for Spain in June 1938, and another 2,500 in July, i.e. a total of 5,697 during those two months – as well as two destroyers being assigned to the Nationalists and some other aircraft. The summer of 1938 was thus one of the most active periods of the whole war in terms of Italian aid to Spain. I cannot tell whether these troops arrived in Vinaroz nor whether they came via Majorca. If we are talking about the same 5,000 to 6,000 men then Edith was right and Butler wrong.’45

Edith herself regarded this visit to Spain as important in itself, enabling her to see at first hand what was going on, and she produced a handwritten account in a small exercise book. The significance of this visit is perhaps underlined by the fact that this record is one of the few of her personal papers to survive.46 Following her return to London, Edith was invited to the United States under the auspices of a relief organization to tell the Americans about the conditions faced by the Spanish working people. Edith, tireless as ever and displaying her trademark boundless energy, ended 1938 by visiting New York with a side visit to Canada. Edith’s first transatlantic trip seems to have gone well. She addressed audiences at universities and women’s clubs during the day and public meetings in the evening before travelling overnight by train to the next assignment. In New York, Edith took part in a march to the fur market on Seventh Avenue to protest against the persecution of German Jews. She met and apparently liked New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia,47 who opposed the Nazis and had improved the city’s social services. While the trip may have been political, it was not all work and business. Having been introduced to the bridge player Ely Cuthbertson and his wife, Edith became intrigued by their unusual living arrangements. The couple were fortunate enough to have three apartments, one on top of each other: one for husband, one for wife and one they shared. Edith also visited Harlem and the Cotton Club, meeting the singer Paul Robeson who was later to stay with the Summerskills in London. On her return, Edith gave her son Michael, as a memento, one of the Cotton Club’s

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little wooden hammers used by the almost exclusively white audience to show their approval of the entirely black performers.48 By the end of 1938 Edith had fought and won a by-election, spoken several times in the House of Commons and visited both Spain and the United States, as well as continuing to work as a medical general practitioner. She also had two young children, aged seven and eleven. Michael claims not to have missed her during the 1938 Christmas period since her telephone calls from the Queen Mary crossing the Atlantic or a foreign hotel seemed to suffice, being both exotic and exciting.49 Importantly, their father Jeffrey was with them, as was Nana, their faithful and long serving nanny. Edith always completely trusted Jeffrey and Nana to care for the children in her absence. Back in Britain, Edith attended the House of Commons assiduously. Importantly, she developed a rapport with the Labour leader Clement Attlee, whom she greatly admired, stating that, ‘never, in his political life, has he been guilty of disloyalty; the interests of the [Labour] Party are always his first consideration . . . He served the Party patiently and without ostentation . . .’50 Attlee proposed a toast at the wedding of Edith’s daughter to John Ryman in 1958. As an elder statesman, he also attended the launch of Edith’s memoirs, A Woman’s World, in 1967. Edith and Clem got on well: in 1945 she would be rewarded with ministerial office. However, the country first had to overcome the intervening six years of all-out war.

4

The Second World War ‘If a married woman had had an opportunity of dealing with Mr Hitler, she would have known just what reliance to place on him.’1 Dr Edith Summerskill’s quick-fire retort to male hecklers at a meeting of the Married Women’s Association (MWA) in 1939 drew considerable attention from the press. The West Fulham MP showed herself yet again to be the supreme mistress of what would later come to be known as the sound bite. Having attempted disruptive tactics, the thirty men from the Plymouth Bachelors’ Association, who had turned up on Friday, 28 April to protest against one of their number being refused permission to speak at an earlier meeting of the MWA, eventually quietened down. As the Bachelors were leaving, Dr Edith commented, again in her own inimitable way, that since the average age of the Plymouth Bachelors Club was twenty-two, the club would soon be liquidated in the ‘only natural way’. Dr Edith Summerskill had been an MP for nearly a year at the time of Neville Chamberlain’s ill-fated meeting with Adolf Hitler in Munich. Elected in April 1938, she was thirty-eight years old when war broke out in September 1939, a mother of two children, the oldest of whom was approaching his teens, and a new MP. While Europe tore itself apart and civilians had for the first time to cope with blanket bombing, Edith’s children, Michael and Shirley, were evacuated out of London and her doctor husband, Jeffrey Samuel, joined the Royal Army Medical Corps. The Second World War was, nonetheless, a successful time for Edith; she made her mark and laid the foundations for her future political career. Although she was against war during the 1930s, as were many in the Labour Party Dr Edith, always actively opposed fascism and worked strenuously for the war effort throughout the Second World War. The Labour Party itself had moved on from its pacifist position and by the late 1930s was not only deeply opposed to fascism but also took the view that force 77

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would have to be used if no other acceptable solution could be found. Edith reminded a Fulham Labour Party gathering in July 1940 that ‘they must keep their chins up and refuse to be defeatists in this serious time’.2 The necessities of war, with men away in the service of their country, inevitably drew attention to women and the new roles they could and would have to undertake in a modern ‘total’ war which affected the whole population. There had never before been such a focus on women, their place in society and how women’s traditional roles as wives, mothers and housekeepers could be adapted to provide ‘woman power’ in the nation’s fight for survival. The social changes for women in Britain were greater during the Second World War than during the First World War, despite the latter taking place under the shadow of the movement for women’s suffrage. Although women gained the vote at the end of the Great War, the upheaval which occurred between 1939 and 1945 was far more extensive. Male bastions such as the armed services and munitions factories were forced to use women in occupations hitherto thought unsuitable. Although subsequent efforts during the late 1940s and 1950s to return women to the home have detracted from the changes in women’s lives during the war itself, women’s roles had in fact changed dramatically and fundamentally. Realistically, there was never any prospect of a permanent move back to the pre-war era. Edith recognized this profound change. In the preface to her 1941 booklet ‘Women Fall In’, she quoted a speech by the Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies in 1941 in which he praised the courage, the action and endurance of Britain’s women and predicted, ‘The vast movement of women into the service of the nation . . . marks the beginning of a new era.’3 Edith soon became one of the leaders in the initiatives designed to bring more women into the war effort. She quickly realized that the national emergency would provide unparalleled opportunities for women. Almost all of her public work between 1939 and 1945, carried out with her trademark energy and enthusiasm, was on behalf of women, especially housewives and mothers. Edith was a powerful and unwavering advocate, one of very few women MPs at the time and one of even fewer who dedicated virtually all her energy to the rights of women. Women proved vital in war; whether the male establishment would have proved willing to involve women to the extent they did without the efforts of Edith and a handful of other women MPs is an intriguing question. Edith’s contribution, however, can never be in doubt.

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Edith will always be remembered for her virtually single-handed efforts to establish women in the Home Guard in a fully combatant role. She was also fully engaged in the ‘woman power’ question of involving women in significant wartime work. In addition, Edith campaigned for women to receive the same compensation as men for war injuries and for more nurseries so that women could do their bit without having to worry about childcare. A regular contributor to House of Commons debates, Edith served on a parliamentary committee looking into the public health consequences of food rationing, where she gave special consideration to the housewife, and another committee examining the living conditions for women in the three services. The febrile atmosphere of the Second World War encouraged rather than hindered the active and determined Dr Edith Summerskill. It provided opportunities which she grabbed with both hands; by 1945, Dr Edith was established in politics with a national reputation. She had contributed to the BBC radio programmes The Brains Trust and Monday Night at Eight and had gained press notices for, amongst other things, issues to do with women and the war. In August 1943, Edith was quoted in the Daily Mirror during what the newspaper called ‘Women’s Day in the House of Commons’, saying, ‘It is curious that there has not been a strong agitation yet for the rate for the job for women in the services.’4 Edith’s high profile was no mean feat for a new female MP who concentrated almost all her time and considerable skill on matters concerning women. The fight for women to take on combatant roles in the Home Guard was unlike any other campaign or topic Edith chose to take up either before or after the Second World War, yet remains the one for which she is mainly remembered. It concerned women, but in a specialist role markedly different from Edith’s usual concerns about women as wives and mothers. Although there were parallels with the campaign by almost all the women Members of Parliament for more women working in factories and otherwise taking part in war work on the home front, women in the Home Guard was, at best, a niche concern. The subject raised none of the economic concerns Edith generally brought up in connection with women. It was a simple demand with a quantifiable outcome. Dr Edith would, however, have recognized that it was one which provided plenty of scope for personal publicity, something she always enjoyed and maybe even pursued.

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The beginnings of the Home Guard can be traced back to May 1940 when Anthony Eden referred in a broadcast to the desire of men of all ages to do something for the defence of their country. He therefore invited them to join the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV), later renamed the Home Guard. Made up of men who for one reason or another were deemed not able to join up for active service, home defence during the Second World War gained a reputation as an inferior organization languishing at the bottom of the pile, and was later beautifully satirized in the ever-popular television comedy Dad’s Army. The women who wanted to join were predictably met by fierce opposition from the military establishment. Edith, equally fiercely committed to gender equality and wishing perhaps for an eye-catching issue, immediately took up the cause of women in the LDV, asking in the House of Commons on 2 July 1940, ‘May I ask . . . how we are to fight in the streets and in the houses . . . if women are excluded from Local Defence Volunteers?’5 Edith, moreover, wanted women in the LDV/Home Guard to be more than cooks and clerks; she saw them as serving in the same capacity as men. Underlying the official objections to women in the Home Guard was the notion that it was not appropriate for women to bear arms, a view held by the Secretary of State for War after February 1942, James Grigg, which extended across the military hierarchy. Grigg dismissed Edith as ‘our Amazonian colleague’, using the phrase as an insult rather than anything positive.6 Edith herself thought the cause of the opposition to women’s involvement in combat lay in persistent nineteenthcentury attitudes to femininity, notably the idea that women were weak and gentle creatures who needed protection. Dr Edith maintained that, even if once true, this was no longer the case; aerial bombardment did not discriminate between women and men, and women were increasingly employed outside the home. As a result, more and more women (and men) had no time for the outdated prejudice against women’s role in combat. Edith was particularly angry about the discrepancy between the government’s refusal to allow women into the Home Guard and the National Service (No 2) Act of December 1941. The Act provided for men aged eighteen to fifty-one to be compelled to serve in the Home Guard and for single women and childless widows aged twenty to thirty to become liable for service with the women’s auxiliary forces. Edith was further incensed when Winston Churchill and the Secretary of State for War David (later Viscount) Margesson

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(served December 1940–February 1942) encouraged sixteen-year-old boys to volunteer for searchlight, anti-aircraft and costal defence Home Guard duties. Edith was outraged that boys were being asked to do work which could have been done by mature women. She may, on this occasion, have overreacted. The government was concerned that women entering the Home Guard might deplete the number available to work in industry, civil defence and in the women’s auxiliary forces. The Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, was particularly sensitive about the supply of women to civil defence.7 Edith, on the other hand, claimed that there were many women in rural areas far away from factories who were keen to serve in the Home Guard. Edith ran her campaign for combatant women in the Home Guard with customary gusto. At the end of 1941 she asked the government to reconsider its policy and allow women into the official Home Guard, pointing out that that a large Women’s Home Defence (WHD) Corps had already been established on a voluntary basis. Units had been set up across the country through cinema and local newspaper advertisements and word of mouth; it was estimated that by 1941 London membership of the WHD was over 10,000. Edith herself became Chairman of the Women’s Home Defence while Venetia Foster of the Amazon Defence Corps served as Treasurer. Edith took her membership of the WHD seriously, participating in rifle drill as a member of the Parliament branch of the WHD. One of the WHD’s influential supporters was Dame Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, Director of the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service) from 1939 to 1941, who, like Dr Edith, was known for her equal rights views. Dame Helen and Dr Edith co-operated to present a ‘memorial’ to the War Office which recommended the enrolment of women in the Home Guard for part-time, unpaid training and duties in case of invasion, similar to those performed by women serving with the regular forces, plus any other tasks which may be necessary in an emergency. They also proposed that women in the Home Guard should have a uniform – a khaki cap, a brassard and possibly a khaki overall. The memorial was signed by twenty leading figures including members of the Women’s Voluntary Service, the Home Guard, politicians, heads of academic institutions and military figures. Yet it did not succeed. The Secretary of State was quite simply not convinced that there was a need for the enrolment of women. The War Office, always hostile to women in the Home Guard, regarded Dr Edith Summerskill and Dame Helen Gwynne-Vaughan as

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cranks who coveted men’s part in the war and would not be content with ‘appropriate’ wartime roles for women. Sir James Grigg, who had replaced David Margesson as Secretary of State for War, said to Dr Edith’s face that he wanted to hear no more about ‘your bloody women’.8 Edith, in typical fashion, remained determined that women be enlisted into the Home Guard as fully combatant members to guard the barricades, go on reconnaissance and carry out other duties after being trained in the use of the rifle and, if necessary, automatic weapons. The WHD, an active and expanding organization, held a rally in Trafalgar Square, London, on 19 April 1942. Following the rally, the government, by now clearly rattled, considered completely suppressing the Women’s Home Defence. The Permanent Under-Secretary at the War Office, Sir Frederick Bovenschen, stated that the training given to the Women’s Home Defence appeared contrary to the law which prohibited assemblies of persons for the purpose of training in the use of arms unless authority had been given by His Majesty, the Lord Lieutenant (of the county) or two Justices of the Peace.9 This was strong stuff, and looked as if Bovenschen was implying that the WHD was an illegal organization. He had overstepped the mark, and, far from suppressing the organization, the War Office continued to tolerate its existence. Some local commanding officers did, in fact, train WHD members in the use of arms even though Sir James Grigg remained implacably opposed to women combatants. Edith took up the related matter of women’s role in the event of invasion, asking her Labour colleague Ellen Wilkinson, by this time a Home Office Under-Secretary, in June 1942, ‘Is the hon. Lady aware that there is no provision for the instruction of women in the country except that given by the Women’s Home Defence, and further that there are now 200 Women’s Home Defence units in large towns, universities and Government Departments, and does she not think it is time the Government took some official action?’10 As a member of the government, Wilkinson was evasive, only prepared to say that there were women serving on the invasion committees. Thanks in some degree to the dogged campaign fought by Dr Edith and the increasing number of women serving in the Women’s Home Defence in a voluntary capacity, the War Office in August 1942 asked the Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces, Bernard Paget, to undertake an inquiry into women’s role in the Home Guard. Paget, an opponent of women having any kind of involvement in the organization,

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thought that if they needed help from women, they should ask the WVS (Women’s Voluntary Service). However, many local Home Guard commanding officers thought differently, and most expressed the view that women should be given some recognition. Meanwhile, Edith, by now aware that the likely proposals on women in the Home Guard would not allow women to be armed, met Major-General Lord Bridgeman, Director-General of the Home Guard, in October 1942 to tell him that women’s duties should not be limited to clerical work and cooking. It proved an inauspicious meeting, but Edith, true to form, would not give up. She met Bridgeman again in January 1943, having been referred to the head of the Home Guard by Secretary of State for War James Grigg, who did not want to see her. From Edith’s point of view, this meeting was no more successful than the earlier one. The small amount of progress which had been achieved was made public on 20 April 1943 when Sir James Grigg announced a scheme for ‘nominated women’ to serve with the Home Guard. He told the House of Commons that it had been decided that a limited number of women, proportionate to the strength of the Home Guard, might be nominated for service as auxiliaries with the Home Guard to perform non-combatant duties such as clerical work, cooking and driving. There would be no uniform, though the women would wear a badge or brooch. Edith’s endeavours to admit women to the Home Guard on an equal footing with men were not successful. Women were allowed to serve with the Home Guard but not on the same terms as men. In reality, once the women were established, the policy of the wartime government was to quietly ignore them. The government did not give them their own collective name, did not provide a uniform and did not pay them. Following considerable pressure from Dr Edith, the War Office did, however, grudgingly agree to provide the Home Guard women with a certificate to mark their service. Certificate or no certificate, the women who had served, albeit in noncombatant roles, with rather than in the Home Guard, never achieved the kind of prominence which would have ensured a place in the history of the Second World War. Finding enough workers for the war effort at home was a continuing theme throughout the conflict. Woman power – placing women for war work in factories and similar workplaces – could have gone some way to easing the problem. Yet it proved a more difficult task than might have been expected.

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Even though there was an increasing shortage of labour at home and an everpressing need for a stronger military capability abroad, prejudice against women working in ‘men’s jobs’ remained strong. Women in the 1930s did work outside the home, but mainly in low-paid women’s jobs such as cooking and cleaning; about a third of married women were employed in such a way. The prevailing view, whatever your social status, was that well-paid work should be primarily for men and that the proper place for women was running the family home. Edith’s qualifying and then practising as a doctor was very unusual. Female representation in her chosen career as a Member of Parliament was even rarer; their number at any one time could be counted almost on the fingers of two hands. This state of affairs was given official sanction. Maintaining women in their traditional roles, it seemed, was more important than encouraging them to undertake paid work for the war effort. Official government policy prior to the war had strengthened sex discrimination. Women public employees were generally not allowed to earn more than 80 per cent of male pay for the same work with the same qualifications. Jobs were demarcated into ‘women’s work’ and ‘men’s work’. Even the state unemployment system worked against women: they received considerably less than men in benefits for only slightly lower contributions. Such official attitudes, mirrored across industry and the public at large, militated against women even making it into the workforce let alone securing decent employment and decent pay. As a result, during the first year of the war the female labour force increased very slowly in spite of the national emergency requiring additional workers. Yet the women were there. In November 1940 over 300,000 women were registered as unemployed,11 available to work but without a paid job. Women’s exclusion from the labour force was to a large extent due to ‘women’s work’ being narrowly defined, mainly as domestic service, nursing, caring and teaching. Women’s entry into the mainstream workforce, beginning to become essential for the war effort, appeared still to be governed by rigid attitudes towards women’s position in society. Discouraging, if not outrightly forbidding, women’s employment in what were thought of as men’s jobs was becoming increasingly unsustainable. This was, in fact, recognized by Winston Churchill’s new government in 1940 when it set up the Woman Power Committee (WPC) to look at utilizing women for the war effort. The WPC began its life in February 1940 when a deputation of

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backbench women led by Nancy Astor urged the Chief Secretary to the Treasury to make more use of the services of women. Given there were only fifteen women in the House of Commons at this time, organizing such a deputation was a courageous thing to do. The plea, in fact, turned out to be successful, and the Extended Employment of Women Agreement was signed in May 1940. This agreement marked a major change in government policy, albeit with women workers designated as temporary – in their jobs only until the end of the war. The Woman Power Committee itself came into being when the Minister of Labour, Ernest Bevin, accepted a proposal from the Conservative MP Irene Ward to set up a small group to look at using and including women in the war effort. The WPC began to function by the end of June 1940, though its exact status within the government was not at all clear. The Conservative MP Mavis Tate became its chairman and Ethel Wood was appointed secretary. Edith and Agnes Hardie were the two Labour women MPs serving on the committee. Edith would become one of the WPC’s most active members throughout the war. The scale of the ‘woman’ problem was ably set out by the committee’s secretary, Ethel Wood, Lord Hailsham’s sister, who turned out to be an ardent feminist, in a small book entitled Mainly for Men. Though written under the aegis of the WPC, it reflected the author’s rather than the committee’s views. Pulling no punches, Ethel, writing in 1943, described the prejudice and discrimination faced by women in all walks of life, and stated that her book was ‘concerned with redressing the misfortunes of women in a man-ruled world’.12 The establishment of the Woman Power Committee was by no means generally accepted by the male dominated House of Commons; the committee came into existence mainly because women MPs came up with the idea and then fought for its implementation. It was not all plain sailing for either Edith or Agnes. Efforts to encourage other Labour women to support the committee were not successful. The Standing Joint Committee of Working Women’s Organisations, a huge organization of trade union and Labour Party women, which had been founded in 1916 and reported directly to the Labour Party National Executive Committee, decided against joining it. The Labour MPs Ellen Wilkinson and Jennie Adamson also warned against it. Their opposition centred on the concern that the WPC would favour upper-class women in filling supervisory

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positions in factories which would block the only means of promotion for women on the factory floor. Their view was also that the selection of forewomen should, in any event, be carried out by the relevant trade unions. (An agreement with the TUC on this and other issues was, in fact, concluded at a later date). Edith clearly had no such scruples, either when the WPC formed or at any other time. Her acceptance, even enthusiasm, for the Woman Power Committee illustrates not only her distance from the trade unions, by far the most influential part of the Labour Party at this time, but her commitment to women and women’s issues. Edith’s motivation, as ever, was to make women’s lives better, in their families and with their husbands and children, and, importantly, to improve their financial wellbeing, whether at home or at work. Despite his initial support, Ernest Bevin proved reluctant to co-operate fully with the Woman Power Committee, and he made sure it was not given official status as a government advisory body. Instead, in March 1941 the government established a new Women’s Consultative Committee (WCC) at the Ministry of Labour, made up of trade union and professional women, as well as three women MPs from the three main parties – Irene Ward for the Conservatives, Megan Lloyd George for the Liberals and Dr Edith Summerskill for Labour. The WCC was an additional committee formed by Bevin to sideline the Woman Power Committee and give him more control over decisions about women and war work. Edith was now as embedded as she could possibly be in the action being taken by the government and Parliament on women and the war effort. It was, however, a frustrating business, causing her to proclaim in March 1942, ‘I wonder what the country would say if the whole question of man-power were dealt with by women . . . I am beginning to feel the war is being prosecuted by both sexes but directed only by one.’13 In March 1941 the government granted the Woman Power Committee’s request for a debate on womanpower in the House of Commons. Held on 20 March, the debate was opened by Mr A. Assheton, the Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Labour, who described the government’s new registration scheme. This stipulated that all women born after 1 January 1920 would have to register so that a survey could be undertaken to ascertain how many of them were available and what they could best do for the war effort. Older women would be registered later. Ten women spoke in the womanpower debate, including of course, Edith Summerskill. The others – Florence

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Horsburgh for the government plus Irene Ward, Megan Lloyd George, Agnes Hardie, Viscountess Davidson, Eleanor Rathbone, Mavis Tate, Jennie Adamson and Thelma Cazalet – came from a range of political persuasions. Edith spoke about the need for day nurseries to allow women with children to work, a matter which occupied her for the duration of the war. She condemned the government’s proposal for ‘minders’ for children, arguing that day nurseries would be far more preferable. I am told that the Minister of Health is sending out circulars to local authorities asking them to provide day nurseries, and that many local authorities are failing to provide them . . . I suggest that the Minister of Health is dealing with the local authorities so gently, and is so afraid of applying compulsory powers, that he is allowing them to sabotage the war effort.14

Edith continued by raising the question of the employment of pregnant women. If a pregnant woman was already employed, she proposed that the woman’s work should cease four weeks before the date of confinement and that the woman should be allowed sufficient time off work to breastfeed her baby. Dr Edith raised these questions about pregnancy and breastfeeding in a virtually all male House of Commons in line with her view that babies were not only a female matter but involved men as well. At a time when breastfeeding was definitely not a topic for discussion in polite society, Dr Edith proclaimed to Parliament, ‘I am a little afraid that this scheme [registration] will result in the present generation of babies being bottle babies.’15 Day nurseries, pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding, matters of the utmost importance for most women, were issues Edith made her own. The womanpower debate in March 1941 was unfortunately but perhaps inevitably a mainly female affair. The only men who spoke were from the government. Edith, never shy in coming forward, commented, ‘As I gaze at the backbenches, I am shocked to see how little interest is displayed in this question; but when I see the galaxy on the Front Bench I am encouraged to think that women are no longer to be treated with levity, but should be regarded seriously, and their contribution to the war effort given its proper place.’16 The women MPs themselves formed a strong cross-party female alliance on the womanpower question. The fact that there was a coalition government from

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1940 until the end of the war made cross-party working easier than before and more acceptable. The women MPs, all of whom shared one room in the Palace of Westminster, may have found the concept of working across the political divide less of a problem than their male colleagues due to the fact that all of them were crowded together in a single space and, as a result, came to know each other well. Cross-party working appeared to suit Edith, who forged working relationships with other women across the political spectrum. The second House of Commons debate on womanpower took place on 5 March 1942; Edith again spoke forcefully. By 1942 the country badly needed to increase the workforce. Edith, who was only too aware of the problems, maintained that this would be easier said than done, observing, ‘There are many old-established factories which are still resisting the large-scale introduction of women for no other reason than they have never had women.’17 And she again raised the question of day nurseries: At this stage, after 2 ½ years of war, when we need the labour of every woman in the country, when married women are offering their services but are unable to obtain work because they cannot find accommodation for their children, I discover the rather curious situation in which the Minister of Health and the President of the Board of Education . . . had [to] go to a conference of local authorities to plead with them . . . to open day nurseries . . . I ask the Minister of Health what action he is to take . . . to deal with local authorities which still refuse to make this provision.18

Summing up the debate, the Minister of Labour, Ernest Bevin, made reference to day nurseries but made no concrete commitment about opening more of them. Nonetheless, in her memoirs, which were published in 1967, Edith was sympathetic towards Bevin, possibly because he had been brought up by a single mother who had no option but to take paid work. Her assessment was charitable: ‘Ernest Bevin always recognised that a woman working outside the home was called upon to do two jobs. He therefore asked employers to remember this and give special consideration to women who had household responsibilities.’19 Edith was not content with simply raising the question of women and the war effort in the House of Commons and on the Woman Power and Women’s Consultative Committees. In 1941 she produced on her own initiative a forty-eight-page pamphlet published by Hutchinson called Women Fall In – All you want to know concerning training, pay, conditions,

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billets etc. It covered employment in the Land Army, nursing, the auxiliary territorial service, the Women’s Royal Naval Service, the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, air raid precautions, the auxiliary fire service, the women’s voluntary services and women in the police and engineering. Dr Edith added words of encouragement to women leaving home to work in another location: ‘Women leaving their homes for the first time . . . should not regard the change as something unpleasant. Rather look upon it as an adventure which would not come in peace time.’20 Though apt to use a ‘doctor knows best’ tone, Edith always believed that women, given the chance, were capable of anything.21 Despite the efforts of the Woman Power Committee, the Women’s Consultative Committee and Ernest Bevin himself, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the Minister of Supply, Lord Beaverbrook, were less than enthusiastic about including any more women in the war effort than was absolutely essential. Nevertheless, in November 1941 the War Cabinet, possibly more out of necessity than conviction, agreed to compulsory national service for childless widows and single women aged between eighteen and sixty. The National Service (No 2) Act was passed the next month. The resulting mobilization of women was much greater than in the First World War and far exceeded other countries fighting in the Second World War. The campaign waged by Edith and the other women on the WPC and the WCC had been as successful as it possibly could have been. Women in the Home Guard and the womanpower question were only two of the many matters which preoccupied Edith during the Second World War. In addition to her political and parliamentary work, she had to think hard about her children and the kind of provision which would be best for them while the war raged. During a debate on emergency regulations on the day war was declared, Edith had conversations with two different Conservative MPs, both of whom, she tells us, showed compassion for her. The first, an unnamed Conservative for whom Edith sometimes prescribed medication for arthritis, offered to provide a home for her children during the war with his sister in Canada. The other, Sir Jocelyn Lucas, wanted Edith to take one of the Sealyham terrier dogs he bred since he felt unable to feed dogs as well as people during a time of war austerity. On being asked about Canada, Nana, the children’s loyal and devoted nanny almost broke down, crying, ‘Oh no, please don’t send us. If we were torpedoed, I can’t swim; I might be able, in a life-belt, to hold one

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child up, but do you think I could hold two?’22 The dog, called Happy, proved an easier decision. Happy joined the family and was evacuated with Michael, Shirley and Nana to a house in Stony Stratford in Buckinghamshire. Once established in their new home, in accordance with Edith’s belief that boys and girls should be educated separately, Michael went to a state secondary in nearby Wolverton while Shirley attended a private girls’ school in Stony Stratford itself. Other left-wingers in public life took a different view on evacuating their children across the Atlantic. Edith’s friend Vera Brittain, who was married to George Caitlin, sent their children John and Shirley, later Shirley Williams, to the United States. Unlike Edith and Jeffrey, Vera Brittain was on the ‘Black Book’ list created ahead of Operation Sea Lion, the Nazi plan to invade Britain if the Luftwaffe had won the Battle of Britain. The infamous list contained 2,820 names Hitler considered enemies of the state, traitors and undesirables who were marked for punishment and death. Michael and Shirley’s sojourn in Stony Stratford did not last long. After the German occupation of France in mid-1940, Edith and her husband Jeffrey Samuel decided Herefordshire was safer than Buckinghamshire. Edith’s visits to her children became rarer and Nana played a greater role in the children’s upbringing, taking it upon herself to explain the facts of life to the thirteenyear-old Michael.23 Dr Jeffrey Samuel, now aged forty-three, had entered the Royal Army Medical Corps as a lieutenant at the beginning of the war, and was soon nicknamed Sammy. Jeffrey, known for his irreverent sense of humour, claimed that, as a specialist in psychiatry, he depleted the army’s strength by finding people who were psychologically unfit to serve. During the course of the war he was posted, safely and unexcitingly to Folkestone, Hatfield, Darlington and Northern Ireland. Jeffrey’s only exposure to risk was in Belfast where officers from his barracks at Carrickfergus were warned to travel in pairs as supporters of the Irish Republican Army were wont to remove their khaki trousers. Edith, secure in the knowledge that her husband and children were safe, was left alone in London in late 1939 working as an MP and continuing her medical practices in Wood Green and Edmonton without Jeffrey’s help but with other assistance. This must have been particularly hard for Edith since until this time she had either lived with Jeffrey and their children or prior to their marriage with her parents. Now she was in war-torn

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London on her own. Edith, practical as ever, appeared to deal with whatever emotions she may have felt by throwing herself into her work. At the same time as Michael and Shirley moved to Herefordshire and the children changed schools once again, Edith and Jeffrey decided that Michael should take the surname Summerskill. Shirley had already been given her mother’s surname, which she confirmed by deed poll some years later. Michael was, apparently, none too happy with this change, which he claimed had been made without any discussion with him.24 Both children now had Edith’s surname. The ever loyal Jeffrey defended the decision in an interview with the Sunday Express, stating, ‘In our family we don’t agree that the children should necessarily take the husband’s name.’25 While this was self-evidently the case, Edith and Jeffrey were worried that if the worst were to happen and the Nazis invaded Britain, they might be targets since the myth that Jeffrey was Jewish on account of his surname persisted. Notwithstanding Edith’s feminist views on keeping her own surname, the deciding factor in this case may have been that she and Jeffrey had decided it was better to be safe than sorry. However, no family was safe in wartime. In the middle of 1941, Edith’s surgery in Edmonton was destroyed by a bomb. Edith and Jeffrey had run their GP practice since the beginning of their marriage, and the destruction must have hit Edith severely. If there was any advantage at all, it might have been that, since she was forced to cut down on the medical practice which she had been running without Jeffrey since he joined the army, Edith now had more time for the House of Commons and family life. Edith also at this time resigned from Middlesex County Council where she had represented the Green Lanes Ward for eight years, citing pressure of other work as the reason for her decision. By a stroke of good fortune, Jeffrey, by now promoted to major, was posted to Aldershot at around the same time as Edith became free to spend more time at home. Edith therefore rented a furnished house in Camberley, not far from Aldershot, and Jeffrey came home every night. Michael and Shirley joined their parents there; Shirley went to Luckley School near Wokingham while Michael attended St Paul’s School, which had been evacuated to Easthampstead Pak near Bracknell. Family life had been resumed. The family later moved to a rented flat in Knightsbridge, possibly to be relatively close to Dr Edith’s marginal parliamentary constituency.

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Edith continued to make her mark in the House of Commons throughout the war years. She was one of the very few women in Parliament and she also had a clear sense of what she wished to achieve, particularly when it came to improving women’s lives. From 1939 onwards, Edith was one of the leading proponents of the fight to secure equal personal injury compensation for men and women, a campaign which lasted until April 1943 when women were finally granted compensation at the same level as men. On 24 October 1939, Edith spoke on a humble address which had been moved by her Labour colleague Jennie Adamson. The address called for the Personal Injuries (Civilians) Compensation Scheme 1939 to be annulled. The scheme as it stood was manifestly unfair to married women: housewives were not entitled to personal injury compensation as only those in paid work or employed in civil defence were eligible. Edith spoke passionately in support of Jennie Adamson’s initiative in moving the humble address. If this Article [the lack of compensation for housewives] remains as it is, it will mean in effect that, if we had an air raid to-morrow and married women throughout the country were mutilated in such a way that they could not carry out their work, these regulations would be such that a housewife could not obtain one penny of compensation for herself, whereas in the same household her daughters and sons who were working, or her husband, would be compensated. A housewife may be blinded or left without a limb and yet the Government are not going to give her one penny in compensation for herself . . . In law she is not gainfully employed. In cooking, scrubbing, washing and doing the whole work of the household, she is not in fact earning her livelihood, and, therefore, she is not eligible for any compensation at all.26

Edith was supported by the Conservative Viscountess Astor, another example of the cross- party collaboration among the few women in the House of Commons. Lady Astor made the point that the Compensation Scheme reflected the wider question of the rights of married women, noting that when a husband died his wife could legally be left with nothing at all. Edith added, ‘Imagine the position of the injured woman [the housewife]. She is entirely dependent. She cannot say: “I will leave this and go out to work” . . . The whole thing is absolutely inequitable.’27 As we have seen, women working together across political parties became a regular feature in the House of Commons during the Second World War. Unfortunately, on this occasion Jennie

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Adamson, Edith and Nancy Astor were not successful: the humble Address was defeated, albeit narrowly, by only twenty-four votes. Never one to give up, Edith continued to press for equal compensation, putting two Questions to the Minister of Pensions in November 1940, both of which were answered negatively: [H]ow many husbands of wives seriously injured in air-raids have been allowed a weekly sum to pay another woman to perform the household duties; and in how many cases has this money been paid to the injured wife for the same purpose? [H]ow many housewives have suffered serious injury as the result of airraids; and as they receive no compensation owing to housework in the home being regarded by the Government as having no monetary value, will he reconsider his position?28

Edith spoke again about equal compensation for men and women who sustained war injuries in a debate on the issue in the House of Commons in May 1941, saying, ‘The women of this country are willing to give everything – their limbs, their lives, everything – to prosecute the war. Therefore I ask him [the Pensions Minister] to treat them like soldiers, honestly, equitably, in order that they may be proud of their country after the war.’29 A parliamentary select committee on equal compensation comprising thirteen MPs, including five women, was eventually set up, meeting during 1942 and at the beginning of 1943. Edith was appointed a full member along with women MPs Megan Lloyd-George, Agnes Hardie, Thelma Cazalet-Keir and Mavis Tate, making the committee more representative of women than may have been expected. Edith’s focus was, unsurprisingly, married women. One well-known select committee witness, Sir William Beveridge, bore the brunt of Edith’s uncompromising championing of the housewife: He [Beveridge] is suggesting that she [the housewife] should be compensated by less amount because her value is much smaller than that of a man . . . Supposing a woman doctor is married to a lawyer, the woman doctor is having a child and she cannot work . . . you are only going to compensate her according to what she is doing in the household and not according to her potentialities?30

Edith and the women MPs were eventually successful. On 7 April 1943, Sir Walter Womersley, Minister of Pensions, announced in the House of Commons

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that ‘non-gainfully employed persons, male and female, including housewives, shall have their present rates of injury allowance and disablement pension increased in all cases to those at present paid to gainfully occupied men’,31 and that these payments would be brought into effect on 19 April 1943. It had been a long struggle for what was essentially a matter of fairness. Another woman-centred topic was that of the allowances provided for wives and children of men in the services. In November 1939, Edith, together with Ellen Wilkinson, Jennie Adamson and Agnes Hardie, sent a letter to the Prime Minister asking that what they considered an inadequate allowance be increased.32 An increase was eventually granted towards the end of the war, but these allowances remained meagre for most of this period. Some months later a quite different aspect of the 1940s’ view of women became apparent when the House of Commons considered the Old Age and Widows Pension Bill in February 1940. Again, it was a subject in which Dr Edith took a considerable amount of interest. She was, however, obliged to make a judgement about which of its provisions was more important for women. The bill proposed lowering the pensionable age for the wives of insured men and unmarried women to sixty years, but in return their contributions would go up by three pence (3d), while those from insured men would only rise by two pence. This had the potential to become a thorny issue, even though the additional payment to be made by women could be seen as a trade-off for a lower pensionable age. Edith, in this instance following Labour Party policy, seemed unaware of any such a subtlety: ‘I want to explain how unjust it is that women should be asked to pay 3d and men 2d, and that it is more unjust because the Government have given the impression that they are being kind and helpful towards women of 60 when, in fact . . . they are heaping further financial burdens on their shoulders.’33 She introduced her argument in the House of Commons by saying: I have been struck by what I would call the nineteenth century flavour in the tone of hon. Members’ speeches towards women. Unfortunately, only one woman has taken part in Debates, but hon. Members opposite have approved the Bill because it will help weak and helpless women who are suffering from premature decay at the age of 60 . . . What the Government are doing is to behave like a bad and exceedingly hard-headed business man towards women.34

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Edith also made the point that since women who had passed their childbearing years had higher life expectancy than men of the same age, maybe they were not so tired and worn out as the male MPs thought. Yet there was another side to the question. The National Spinsters’ Association, formed in 1935 to campaign for state pensions for unmarried women at fifty-five, claimed that women were often forced into involuntary retirement at earlier ages than men. The reasons for this included discrimination by employers against postmenopausal women and the fact that many unmarried women gave up work in midlife to care for ageing relatives. A government enquiry did, indeed, find substance to these arguments: rates of unemployment among spinsters over forty-five were higher than for men of the same age and these women also found it harder to re-enter employment.35 Edith, on the other hand, took the view that the National Spinsters’ Association was undermining women’s bid for equality by demanding pensions for women at age fifty-five. Edith was, however, generally sympathetic to pensioners. She spoke up for the elderly in October 1939 during a House of Commons debate on the taxation of sugar, a perennially controversial product. The government was seeking to raise sugar duties by 1d per lb. on the fully refined product. The projected revenue was £8.5 million for the last three months of 1939 and £18 million for a full year,36 a not insignificant sum towards the war effort. Edith, along with many in the Labour Party, did not agree with the tax. She was, according to the Fulham Chronicle, shocked when the Chairman of the Parliamentary Health Committee, Sir Francis Freemantle, who was also a doctor, stated during a discussion on the Finance (No 2) Bill that sugar was not an essential element for nutrition. Edith retorted: The old age pensioner (whose plight had already been raised in the Committee) had very few comforts in life and should not be called upon to abstain from sugar in tea . . . What the Hon. Gentleman who has just spoken should have told the Committee is that sugar is one of the cheapest foods enjoyed by the workers, and he knows that physiologically that is absolutely true. Sugar is a carbohydrate which provides warmth and energy for those people who cannot afford more expensive foods.37

While Edith was definitely in favour of sugar, which she obviously saw as essential, she was very much against other commodities she may have liked but considered unnecessary. When a scheme for ‘standard’ footwear came

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before Parliament, a question was asked as to whether the continued manufacture of coloured footwear would be permitted so that women could match their shoes with prevailing fashions. Edith, famously well dressed, spoke out, saying, ‘In view of the fact that all classes in this country are being asked to refrain from buying luxuries, I hope the Minister will not encourage the manufacture of luxuries of this kind?’38 In June 1940, speaking in support of National Savings Week, Edith asked women ‘not to discard a frock in wartime for the reason that some of their friends might have seen them wearing it last year’.39 Edith apparently had not bought a dress since the war began, though she had got hold of a couple of belts and some white pique collars and cuffs to give her old outfits new life. She also continued to wear the exuberant hats which were becoming her trademark. The war notwithstanding, Edith herself seemed determined to maintain her image as a smart and elegant professional woman. Edith, as a doctor, mother and MP, had always had an interest in food and nutrition. In July 1940 she was appointed to a Parliamentary Committee to advise the Minister of Food on problems with the nation’s diet; five years later she would be Minister of Food in the newly elected Labour Government. Having observed how substandard nutrition had weakened resistance to the influenza epidemic after the First World War and how poverty caused physical weakness due to poor diet, Edith took the matter to heart, believing that every housewife should plan her housekeeping with an eye to maintaining a balanced diet and to building up the resistance of her family to infection. She was particularly keen on having enough protein and not replacing it with carbohydrate, and she extolled the virtues of milk. Food rationing, required mainly because food imports fell during the war, began in Britain in January 1940 when bacon, butter and sugar were rationed followed by meat, tea, jam, biscuits, cheese, eggs, lard and milk. People were able to survive on the amount of food allowed, but care was needed to get the best out of the ration book. Alcohol was also on Edith’s radar. Speaking in a House of Commons adjournment debate in early January 1940, she raised the matter of road accidents and deaths caused by the blackout, specifically those caused by driving under the influence of alcohol, which at the time was not illegal. The number killed on the roads as a result of the blackout rose to 600 a month during 1939. In 1940, one person died for every 200 vehicles on the road. In

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2006 this statistic had been reduced to one in every 2,000. While the main reason was the lack of street lighting and drivers going too fast, there seems little doubt that alcohol played a part. Edith supported a speed limit of 20 miles per hour and berated the Minister of Transport for not raising the question of drinking and driving, arguing that ‘some kind of severe penalty should be imposed upon those who are convicted of dangerous driving as a result of drinking’.40 During the course of the debate, Edith spoke of her surprise that the Front Bench laughed when she mentioned drinking and driving – an indication both of their attitude to alcohol and being in charge of a car when under the influence as well as to women Members of Parliament. The treatment Edith received for talking complete sense about drinking and driving is reminiscent of that meted out to another prominent woman minister, Barbara Castle, who as Minister of Transport introduced the breathalyser in 1967. At the start of the war, Edith had expressed concern at the treatment of British women married to foreigners. Under the 1914 British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act, these women lost their British nationality when they married a non-British citizen, although British men married to foreign women retained theirs. Until 1939, British women married to foreigners living in the UK were exempt from the provisions in the act requiring aliens to register with the local police. However, this changed once war had been declared and such women were now required to register. Together with Nancy Astor, Edith protested about this new provision and went on to help women who refused to register. Those whom Edith supported included a countess married to a French soldier and a former manager at the Café Royal, known to Edith during the 1930s when the Café Royal was frequented by socialists.41 Edith was, however, only able to deal with individual cases. The registration provisions remained throughout the Second World War and were not changed until the British Nationality Act was passed in 1948. Though important for her career as a politician and her personal standing, the House of Commons was only a part of Edith’s life during the war years. She continued to campaign outside Parliament on issues to do with women and children. In 1941, Edith published her book Babies Without Tears. Advocating the use of a painkiller in childbirth as well as improved maternity services, Babies Without Tears was effectively Edith’s personal manifesto. Given the

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importance of women and childbirth to Edith as a mother, a doctor and a campaigner, she continued to write about these subjects. Wanted – Babies, a twelve-page pamphlet about the lack of recognition given to housewives, came out in 1943. Edith firmly believed that the falling birth rate, which had, in fact, been decreasing for seventy years before her pamphlet was published, should be seen as a social problem. She estimated that by 1950, half the electors would be over forty-five and Britain would be a nation of older men and women. In order to halt the decline, women needed to have more babies and be encouraged to do so by being treated with more respect while also having greater financial security. The pamphlet sought to improve the status of motherhood and make the wife who worked unaided in the home an equal partner by giving her a legal share of the family income. In order to achieve this, the state should provide a family allowance for children of at least 8s per week for the second child and a larger sum for subsequent children; supply subsidized part-time home helps; ensure painless childbirth; make hospital accommodation available for two weeks for the confinement period followed by two weeks in a convalescent home; and give health insurance benefit for eight weeks before and after the confinement.42 Against the odds, major social reforms emerged from wartime Britain, including the 1944 Education Act, improvements in the welfare system and, following the war, the establishment of the National Health Service. Seen against this background, Edith’s small booklet on childbirth and family support did not seem too surprising; she was perhaps following a wider movement to improve living and working conditions. Edith’s Wanted – Babies booklet also provided her with a platform, something she needed since her views were not widely shared outside political circles. Newspapers in 1941 and 1942 carried very few references to the idea that the kind of family allowances Edith was proposing would halt population decline. Typically, Edith was not satisfied with simply writing. She wanted concrete action and became secretary of a group of Labour MPs who met under the chairmanship of John Parker, MP for Romford in Essex. This group was set up to gather signatures on a petition with the modest aim of securing government provision of five shillings a week for each child, starting with the third. Beyond her support for Parker, Edith together with her friend Juanita Frances, as Chairman and Secretary of the Married Women’s Association, campaigned for the

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allowance to be paid for all children and that it should go directly to the mother. Edith strongly believed that it was better to give the money to mothers than to trust men. The provision of a family allowance for children gained some traction during 1942. By the end of that year the issue was resolved, at least in the short term, with the publication of the Beveridge Report, officially entitled Social Insurance and Allied Services. The report proposed, amongst many other things, an allowance of eight shillings per week for all children. The 1945 Labour Government did, in fact, introduce child benefit, though payment made directly to the mother as Edith envisaged had to wait a further thirty years. In line with the founding aims of the Married Women’s Association, Edith and Juanita Frances raised three specific contemporary injustices: that women’s savings from the housekeeping money belonged in law to the husband; that there was no national insurance scheme for widows; and that housewives were not in law treated as workers in their evidence to Beveridge’s committee. Edith, charming and personable as ever, made friends with the austere William Beveridge and was invited to his wedding in 1942 to Jessy Janet. He also took on board some of Edith’s concerns in his report, including the workings of the unemployment insurance and the health insurance schemes. Beveridge’s plan for social security treated women as a special insurance class of occupied person and treated man and wife as a team. Always vigilant in raising injustices in the way women were treated by officialdom, Edith also attempted to improve the position of women in relation to post-war credits. Following the April 1941 budget – dubbed the ‘one tax and one shock’ budget, which raised income tax to ten shillings in the pound, reduced the personal allowance and raised the rate of tax paid on the first £165 of earnings – the government introduced post-war tax credits to be paid at a future date to refund some of the high taxes paid during the war. The post-war credit provision in the 1941 Finance Act allowed for either husband or wife to receive an apportionment of the credit without the consent of the other. For Edith this did not go far enough. She maintained it would not be fair to women, which was, in fact, the case because the tax system itself discriminated against women in that the husband was assessed for both spouses. On this as on other issues, Edith was well ahead of her time; it took forty years for women to be treated as individuals in the tax system.

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Edith never compromised on her feminist principles, even being willing to challenge the government on matters relating to security. During 1940 the government began a propaganda campaign to prevent secret information reaching the enemy. One of the slogans which appeared on posters urging people to be careful what they said and to whom they said it was ‘Be Like Dad, Keep Mum’. Edith viewed this as sexist and contrary to the idea that women could and would undertake paid work. She was scathing about those who had produced the offending words: ‘There is no modern woman in Whitehall to advise the government on these matters.’43 Edith even raised the matter of the disturbing poster in the House of Commons, asking the Minister of Information ‘whether he is aware that the poster bearing the words “Be Like Dad, Keep Mum” is offensive to women, and is a source of irritation to housewives, whose work in the home if paid for at current rates would make a substantial addition to the family income; and whether he will have this poster withdrawn from the hoardings’?44 The Minister of Information, Duff Cooper, was having none of it and replied, ‘I am sorry if words intended to amuse should have succeeded in irritating. I cannot believe that the irritation is very profound or widespread.’45 It was not the first time Edith had been critical of the Ministry of Information. At the beginning of the war, in October 1939, Edith addressed her attention to the way the newly formed ministry, nicknamed the ‘Mystery of Information’ in some quarters, was doing its job. There was a growing understanding of the power of radio and a desire to harness film and the print media in support of the war and boost morale. The British people in 1939 had yet to be convinced that war was both necessary and winnable. Edith gave her two-penny-worth during an adjournment debate in the House of Commons on 11 October 1939. Typically, it concerned women and Edith was, unsurprisingly, the only female speaker: If you asked any publicity expert he would say that when he is composing his publicity . . . he has at the back of his mind always how he will approach the women of the country . . . I am absolutely amazed when I read in the official report the list of headquarters staff of the Ministry of Information and find that out of 91 members there are only 22 women.46

The ministry, it seems, began to take notice of Edith. She received a letter dated 15 June 1943 from the Minnie, as it was sometimes more or less affectionately

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known, asking her to write a 2,000-word article on women in Parliament destined for a leading American women’s magazine such as Woman’s Home Companion. Edith always had an eye for publicity, and was invited onto radio programmes throughout the war. Her main contribution was as a panel member on the popular Brains Trust on thirteen separate occasions, four of which were ‘transatlantic’, linked by telephone to participants in the United States. Initially entitled Any Questions (not to be confused with the later programme of the same name), The Brains Trust started out on the forces radio service on 1 January 1941. It continued for eighty-four weeks and was typically heard by 29 per cent of the UK population, generating about 5,000 letters each week from the general public. The broadcast was soon moved to peak times on Sunday afternoons to maximize its following. The most frequent team members were chosen from the ranks of the academic, cultural and political elite: Professor Cyril Joad, Malcolm Sargent, Aldous Huxley, Rebecca West, the journalist Hannen Swaffer, Jennie Lee, wife of Aneurin Bevan, and Quentin Hogg, a politician. Edith, forceful and quick-witted went down well in such an environment. Yet Edith was not always the ideal radio participant, sometimes being too convinced of her own worth and her own point of view. The radio programme Calling All Women on 24 April 1941 asked Edith to make a fiveminute presentation. Edith apparently agreed to make cuts to her original script, understanding, at least according to the BBC, that it was essential not to overrun. However, when it came to the live broadcast, Edith was still reading when the light went out as the announcer, Mr Pellissier, stood behind her with an astonished expression on his face. The next item, Maurice Winnick’s dance band, had, of course to be announced. Edith was ‘very angry . . . breathing fire as she left’. The inevitable letter from Edith followed, protesting to the BBC Director-General about being cut off: ‘I am not a prima donna. [It was] damaging to my professional reputation both as an MP and as a Doctor.’47 During an appearance on the BBC’s Kitchen Front, a programme designed to provide women with tips on housekeeping, Edith’s strayed from banal practicalities into the realm of rights for women, stating, ‘I would give a woman who works in the home a legal right to a part of the family income after all the expenses have been paid. This would add dignity to the job of cooking, washing, mending and scrubbing. I am expanding a new idea which will

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provoke thoughtless husbands and a few harem-minded wives to attack.’48 As a relatively new MP, Edith appeared on For You Madam, a magazine programme for women, in February 1939. This was followed by other programmes for women: Mostly for Women, a talk by Edith Summerskill in November 1942, and Woman’s Page in 1944, about her visit to Australia and New Zealand. In addition to these public broadcasts, Edith continued to give anonymous advice on the BBC under the name of Dr Kennedy in the same way that she had written under the pseudonym Dr Anne Moray in the Sunday Pictorial before the war. She was generally able to combine within her personality both the caring general practitioner and the outraged public representative. Although The Brains Trust was about weighty political matters, most of Edith’s other radio appearances were generally about women and women’s lives at home. Away from the limelight, Edith became a member of the Parliamentary Committee on Amenities and Welfare Conditions in the Three Women’s Services in February 1942. Spanning fifty-eight pages, the committee’s report, which was published on 5 August 1942, gave detailed consideration to all aspects of life in the WRNS, the WAAS and the WAAF covering minimum standards of warmth, food accommodation and hygiene; good leadership by efficient and understanding officers; full utilization of individual capacity; and encouragement for the service women. Edith, ever the medical doctor, was concerned with both pregnancy and venereal disease.49 The report did, in fact, discuss illegitimate pregnancy, but only in terms of public perception and how it impacted on the reputation of the Armed Forces: ‘Vague and discreditable rumours about the conduct of women in the Forces have caused considerable stress and anxiety . . . Your Committee realise that the public may ask what statistical evidence is available to support their statements that allegations of immorality in the Services have little or no foundation.’50 The report claimed that according to enquiries that had been made, there were very few illegitimate pregnancies. In her memoirs, Edith notes that during the war years the pregnant woman in the forces was well cared for and arrangements made for her confinement. As long as the necessary arrangements were made, the woman could return to her unit after the birth. Edith observed that ‘This humane and moral approach to a very old situation marked a change in attitude.’51 Just as the report on the conditions of women in the three services

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claimed that there were few illegitimate births, it also maintained that there was adequate provision to deal with venereal disease in the armed services. However, Edith could and would not accept that treatment for venereal disease was adequate as far as the civilian population was concerned. On 15 December 1942 she moved a humble Address in the House of Commons accusing the government, which had recently proposed regulations to combat VD, of not acting strongly enough. The regulations laid down that a person named by two separate individuals as a suspected source of venereal disease infection could be requested by the local Medical Officer of Health to attend for examination and be treated if necessary. Edith wanted compulsory notification of venereal disease and a blood test for expectant mothers. She exhorted MPs ‘to realise that the casualties during the last year from venereal disease were far greater than the casualties of the Blitz’,52 which may or may not have been true. Later in the debate she spoke sympathetically about prostitutes, considered to be a major source of infection. Edith probably rightly thought that a man may blame a prostitute for his infection and then wrongly inform against her. Dr Edith implored the House ‘to think of the unfortunate, and probably stupid, girl [prostitute] who has become infected, who is informed against by a second man . . . It may be that the girl will be wrongfully informed against . . . If this Regulation is introduced . . . it may cause hardship and injustice to some unfortunate woman.’53 Despite her telling arguments based on medical evidence, Edith was not successful. The overwhelmingly male House of Commons was not yet ready for the kind of action she advocated. During 1943, Edith took up the case of Mrs Blackwell. Mrs Blackwell, who Edith described in her memoirs as a hard-working housewife who was also thrifty, took in lodgers to help her husband pay off the mortgage. Mrs Blackwell shopped at the Co-op and left her dividends to accumulate, and after sixteen years of marriage they totalled £103. The marriage then broke up causing Mrs Blackwell to leave home. As a matter of course, she took her savings. However, Mr Blackwell had other ideas, successfully applying to the County Court for the savings to be transferred to him. The Married Women’s Association financed an appeal by Mrs Blackwell which was heard on 28 October 1943. The appeal was not allowed. Lord Justice Goddard, one of the Appeal Judges, summed up the case: ‘In my view there is no legal right for a wife to retain savings made out of housekeeping money. Even if there had been an

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arrangement between the husband and wife with regard to these savings, I am far from saying that this sort of domestic arrangement can necessarily result in a legal contract.’54 The Second World War in Europe came to an end on 8 May 1944, though the war in the East would not be finally concluded until 2 September 1945. In April 1944, Dr Edith Summerskill visited Australia and New Zealand as part of an Empire Parliamentary Delegation organized by the Empire Parliamentary Association. Edith was the only woman in that delegation. It was a gruelling visit, made by way of New York and Washington and lasted over four months. Ever the doctor, Edith visited medical facilities amongst many other official engagements. A special welcome home event attended by representatives of sixteen women’s organizations was organized for her on 24 October in Queen Mary’s Hall at the YWCA in London. According to a report in an Australian newspaper, ‘those who listened to her talk had the feeling that Dr Summerskill had been a good ambassador and that she would do much to give the people of England a better understanding of Australia’.55 As war drew to a close, the political parties in Britain began to make preparations for the general election. In April 1943 the Labour Party published its ground-breaking pamphlet A National Service for Health. At more or less the same time the wartime Coalition Government announced their intention to establish a comprehensive, unified health service, and a White Paper, entitled A National Health Service, was published in February 1944. The Socialist Medical Association (SMA) thought the White Paper did not go far enough and asked that pressure be maintained on the government. Dr Edith, an early SMA member, was one of the Labour MPs who criticized the proposals when the House of Commons debated them in March 1944: ‘I criticise it [the White Paper] . . . because, in my opinion, the White Paper puts the interest of doctors before the interest of the patients. My criticism is that it is planned primarily to cure disease, rather than to prevent it, and I am a little afraid that we are in danger of making the nation medicine-conscious rather that health conscious.’56 Later in the same debate, Edith gave her views on the White Paper as a whole: ‘This is a step forward but it is a faltering, not a bold step. I ask the Ministers to be bold, to grasp this nettle, and make adequate provision, and I am sure they will have the lasting gratitude of the poor and needy of this country.’57 The bold step began two years later under a Labour Government of which Dr Edith was a member.

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The political parties were from 1944 onwards beginning to think about the forthcoming general election, the first since 1935. From 1935 to 1940 Britain had been governed by the Conservatives, the majority party in the National Government. Prior to that government, there had been five years of the Lloyd George coalition after 1918 and less than three years of two separate Labour minority administrations. Labour was by no means the natural party of government, though there had been signs during the late 1930s that support for Labour was growing. One of Edith’s concerns was, of course, that Labour should have more women parliamentary candidates. In an edition of The Labour Organiser published in April 1945, Edith proclaimed, ‘It has been said that women voters will not vote for another woman. I don’t for a moment believe it. They are too seldom given a chance in any case. To quote from my own case – and I believe it tallies with other women MPs – I have found women to be my keenest supporters during elections and I have fought three.’58 On a personal level, the end of the war brought mixed emotions. The Summerskill–Samuel family returned home to London. The wartime evacuation and the temporary living arrangements it entailed had finally ended. Sadly, both of Edith’s parents, Dr William Summerskill and her mother Edith Clara, née Wilde, had died during the war from natural causes brought on by old age. Edith had been a prime mover in campaigns to change the status of women, ranging from woman power for the war effort to ensuring child benefit was included in the Beveridge Report to gaining equal compensation for war injuries. Her tireless fight for women to be admitted to the Home Guard on an equal basis to men deserves more credit than it has so far received. Above all, Edith put women on the map. Women’s concerns – childbirth, breast feeding, care of children, women’s pensions, rights for housewives – were now on the political agenda. Between 1939 and 1945, Dr Edith Summerskill made a huge contribution to the struggle for women to be seen as citizens in their own right and to have economic and social equality with men. She had also launched her future career.

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‘The Labour Government with its massive support in Parliament represented the strength of feeling in the country . . .’1 Edith’s comment on Labour’s landslide victory in 1945 was succinct and to the point. The general election held on 5 July resulted in Labour winning 393 seats to the Conservatives 192, thereby gaining an overall majority of 151. The Labour manifesto, Let Us Face the Future, had promised good food in plenty, useful work for all and comfortable labour-saving homes. The Labour Party described its programme as ‘a practical expression of [the spirit of Dunkirk] applied to the tasks of peace’.2 It was the first time Labour had won an outright majority, and it had been achieved against the seemingly invincible Winston Churchill. Edith had again contested Fulham West, the seat she had first won in a by-election in 1938 by a wafer-thin margin. It was the first time she had sought re-election since the wartime coalition had ruled out going to the country before the end of the Second World War. Edith’s result in Fulham West showed a 9.7 per cent swing to Labour; she beat her Conservative opponent by 19,537 votes to 12,016. Her seat was safe for the foreseeable future. It was the first time in the House of Commons for many of the Labour MPs returned in 1945, which obviously gave Edith, with her seven years’ experience, an advantage in seeking preferment. She was, however, up against notable newcomers such as George Brown, Barbara Castle, Bessie Braddock, Richard Crossman, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan and Hugh Gaitskell. Such an influx of talent together with the dramatic change in the composition of the House of Commons meant that Edith had to compete hard for any kind of ministerial position. There is little doubt that she wanted to rise in the political hierarchy; Edith would never have been content to remain on the backbenches. Despite the comment by one 107

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old-time Conservative MP, Sir Cuthbert Headlam, that, ‘the new Labour MPs are a strange looking lot. One regrets the departure of the sound old Trade Unionists and the advent of this rabble of youthful, ignorant young men,’3 the 1945 intake comprised some very able and hard-working men. There were also twenty-four women, the highest number ever and nine more than the previous peak of fifteen in 1931. Victory over Japan, VJ Day, was celebrated on 15 August 1945, the same day as the State Opening of Parliament marking the new Labour Government. The nation at large was ecstatic, looking forward to the promised New Jerusalem providing free health care, the easing of poverty, the building of new homes and much more. Yet Britain was to remain gripped by wartime austerity for the duration of the government’s term of office. As David Kynaston put it, ‘Heavy coins, heavy suitcases, heavy tweed coats, heavy leather footballs . . . Meat rationed, butter rationed, cheese rationed, jam rationed, eggs rationed, sweets rationed, soap rationed, clothes rationed. Make do and mend.’4 The war had been won and Labour had ambitious plans for the peace, but the newly elected government considered the country was not yet strong enough to shed its wartime way of life. The economic position was, unfortunately, made incomparably worse by the new President of the United States, Harry Truman. As soon as the war with Japan ended, he abruptly cancelled the wartime Lend-Lease agreement which had been concluded in 1941 and put American resources at the disposal of any nation whose defence was considered essential for American security. The only possible course of action the British Government felt it could take was to negotiate a new loan with the United States, a task duly accomplished thanks to the persuasive skills of John Maynard Keynes. However, the price was high. Britain had to agree not only to American involvement in foreign policy and defence but that sterling would be convertible to dollars on demand, which could under certain circumstances cause a run on the pound and a financial crisis of 1931 proportions. The only chink of light was that repayment would not begin until 1951. It was against this economic and social background that Dr Edith Summerskill was appointed Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Food, a junior ministerial post outside the Cabinet. Given that wartime rationing was still in place in 1945, Edith’s job at the Ministry of Food was important and high profile. She may, however, have expected a more senior government post

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in light of her parliamentary experience and her professional background as a doctor. The Ministry of Health, committed to establishing the National Health Service, would on the face of it have been a more obvious place to make use of Edith’s expertise. Edith, a founder and active member of the Socialist Medical Association which campaigned for a state medical service during the 1930s, was an ideal candidate and a seemingly obvious choice for the all-important Health Ministry, even possibly the top position of Minister of Health. The reason she was not chosen was more than likely political. Aneurin Bevan, a leading light of the Labour left in the House of Commons, was made Health Minister, partly to give the Labour left in the House of Commons a significant position, thereby hoping to engender unity in the party and government. Prime Minister Attlee would, moreover, have understood that Dr Summerskill and Aneurin Bevan would not necessarily have seen eye to eye and it would therefore have been a mistake to make one junior to the other in the ministry. Both had strong, but not obviously compatible personalities. Their earlier pre-war friendship had faded away as they went their separate ways. The worst outcome for both the Labour Party and the country would have been ministerial disagreements over the introduction of the flagship National Health Service. Yet it was not all about managing politics and personalities. Attlee also recognized Bevan’s talent and energy which the Prime Minister considered enough of a recommendation to give the often rebellious and divisive Bevan two of the most important briefs in his government, namely health and housing. The ostensible reason Attlee gave for appointing Bevan was simple: ‘He had great ability.’5 Edith may have felt that being passed over for a position in the Ministry of Health was a double blow. She was both a medical professional and importantly a campaigner on behalf of women and children. The health of these two groups would inevitably be an important focus for the new Labour Government. Edith herself at this time considered that not enough was being done on behalf of women. Unlike almost all of her contemporaries, Edith recognized that much more was required for women in the home, in the workplace, for women’s representation in politics and much else besides. Only a few months before the 1945 general election, Edith had asked the Coalition Minister of Health Henry Willink, ‘In view of the fact that the Minister of Labour has indicated that as many women as possible will be needed after the war, how

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does the right hon. and learned Gentleman propose to provide for the care of small children?’6 Edith, an avid campaigner for nurseries during the war, had, amongst many other activities, written an article for the Sunday Pictorial in 1942 praising the wartime day nurseries set up so that women could work outside the home for the war effort,7 and she continued to advocate such provision after the war. Her only caveat was that they should be properly staffed. Although Edith was assured by Mr Willink that the wartime nurseries would be closed only in special cases, and that they were not being closed rapidly, his assurances bore little relation to reality either at the beginning of 1945 or throughout the term of the Labour Government. These nurseries were run by local authorities, and the Exchequer halved the local authorities’ grant, sounding the death knell of the nurseries. By the end of 1947 only 878 local authority day nurseries were in existence, a drop of almost 700. Edith had clearly not managed to convince either the wartime coalition or her own government of the need for nurseries to enable women to work. Official policy had been for women to return to the home to free up jobs for men returning from the services. The position Attlee gave to Dr Edith Summerskill at the Ministry of Food did, in fact, match her knowledge and background very well, even though it may not have fulfilled her personal ambition. Edith herself commented on how difficult it must have been to become a minister with no knowledge of the department: Having regard to the number of potential Foreign Secretaries in the House it would seem that . . . a personal opinion in the field of foreign affairs suffices. On finance, economists differ, and so the poor Minister cannot be blamed if the views of his advisers, which he echoes in the House, are proved unsound . . . Briefing from a well-informed Secretary [civil servant] is important, but the supplementary question charged with special knowledge cannot always be anticipated and this is when the newcomer to the dispatchbox can reveal an abysmal ignorance if he has failed to do his homework. At least I took comfort from the fact that I knew a good deal about the work of the Ministry of Food.8

Edith’s blithe assertion that she knew all about food is typical of her supreme self-confidence. She was one of only three women chosen as members of the government in 1945, the other two being Ellen Wilkinson, in the Cabinet as

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Education Minister, and Jennie Adamson, who was appointed Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Pensions. By September 1946 the press were touting Edith as a future Cabinet minister. One newspaper commented, ‘Dr Edith Summerskill . . . at the Food Ministry, is one of the younger junior Ministers expected to attain full Cabinet rank soon.’9 At the beginning of the following year, Edith was described as ‘well on top in the Labour Party’ by the Fulham Chronicle, her local paper, which was generally anti-government and often derided Edith’s efforts. Speculation about Edith’s future promotion reached its height in February 1947 following the tragic and premature death of Education Minister Ellen Wilkinson: ‘[T]here is much speculation . . . on possible successors. Dr Edith Summerskill is regarded as a hot favourite. She has been efficient as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food and is skilful in debate.’10 But it was not to be. Ellen Wilkinson was succeeded as Minister of Education by George Tomlinson, and Edith, in spite of being tipped for promotion in the reshuffle which took place in October 1947, remained at the Ministry of Food until the 1950 general election. The Minister of Food when Edith became Parliamentary Secretary in 1945 was Sir Ben Smith who remained in post until May 1946. A hansom cab driver in London before becoming a trade union official, Smith had been elected MP for Bermondsey, south London, in 1924. Although he had served as Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Aircraft Production during the Second World War and then represented the United Kingdom in Washington as Minister Resident for Supply, Smith was never the right person to deal with food and rationing after the war since he knew virtually nothing about food distribution and cared little for the details of rationing. William (Bill) Deedes, a journalist and later editor of the Daily Telegraph, told Edith Summerskill’s son, Michael, that Ben Smith was ‘totally the wrong man to be in a sensitive job and was really a modest disaster. I can remember him floundering about.’11 Ben Smith‘s incompetence contrasted sharply with Edith’s ability and grasp of the subject. However, when Ben Smith went, it was not Dr Edith Summerskill who succeeded him as Minister of Food but John Strachey, possibly because Clement Attlee thought it best to keep the competent Edith in what was a difficult job. Edith’s being passed over for promotion was also more than likely a reflection of the anti-woman view of the time. Women rarely gained preferment in any of the professions. Moreover, Edith, an assertive and

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articulate woman, was the target of misogyny in Parliament, the Labour Party and the media. Words uttered by a woman were received very differently from the same words when they came out of the mouth of a man. Strachey was altogether a different prospect from the hapless Ben Smith. The only notable point of similarity between Smith and Strachey was that Edith disliked Strachey as much, perhaps even more, than she had disliked Smith. Both men inevitably had their faults, and Dr Edith rarely made much attempt to hide her feelings. Edith, moreover, felt uncomfortable with what she viewed as John Strachey’s too intellectual approach to politics. According to her son Michael, Dr Edith was clear where her own beliefs came from, namely her experience as a medical practitioner among the poorest people in London, and she found it difficult to understand Strachey the writer and polemicist.12 Edith may also have been put off by his background and the lack of consistency in his political views. Educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, John Strachey began his involvement in politics in 1923 at the age of twenty-two by writing for the Independent Labour Party publication New Leader. He entered Parliament in 1929 and became close to Oswald Mosely, though he never accepted fascism. In conjunction with Victor Gollancz and Harold Laski, he founded the Left Book Club in 1936, though he was soon to change his mind again and adopt Keynesianism and the Roosevelt New Deal. Strachey served in the RAF during the war, rising to the rank of wing commander. Before being moved to the Ministry of Food, Wing Commander Strachey was UnderSecretary of State for Air. On a personal level, Strachey appears to have had few political friends. Michael Summerskill relates a telling story about John Strachey, an anecdote about personal vanity. Strachey was, apparently, once invited to dinner with the Summerskill–Samuels in their house in Highgate. Even during the war, Edith had not lost her liking for inviting guests, particularly from the world of politics, to her house. A mirror ran the length of the room opposite Strachey’s chair. He apparently could not take his eyes off his own reflection.13 John Strachey took over the direction of the Ministry of Food at the age of forty-four: coincidentally, he and Edith had been born in the same year. While the Minister of Food was not in the Cabinet, the position was ‘of Cabinet rank’. The ministry was, in fact, more significant than Prime Minister Attlee initially realized. In its naivety the new Labour Government thought that with the

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coming of peace the food problems of war would be resolved, but there was no quick improvement and the food supply remained limited for many years. It was a global rather than simply a national issue. By March 1946, Herbert Hoover, Chairman of US President Truman’s Famine Emergency Committee, estimated that 20 million tons of food were needed during March to July 1946 to feed the starving nations of Europe.14 Hoover even advocated the establishment of a world food czar. The rather more prosaic organization in existence until 1946 was the Combined Food Board comprising representatives from the United States, Great Britain and Canada. While Britain’s food situation may not have been as precarious as that across continental Europe, matters were still extremely serious. On 27 May 1945, just over a month before the general election and less than three weeks after VE Day, cuts were made to the basic ration. Bacon went down from 4 ozs to 3 ozs, cooking fats from 2 ozs to just one and the equally meagre meat ration had to be taken in corned beef. The decision to further cut rations inevitably caused public anger and may have contributed to the Conservative election defeat. The world shortage of food was made more acute by the liberation of Germany and other large food importing countries in Europe. Edith’s son Michael recalled during this period one of Edith’s few substantial disagreements with her husband Jeffrey Samuel over the question of food for Germany. Jeffrey apparently favoured the Morgenthau Plan for Germany, originally proposed during 1944 by the United States Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. The plan, most of which was opposed by Britain, aimed to eliminate Germany’s ability to wage war by abolishing its arms industry and removing or destroying industrial plants and equipment in the Ruhr. Jeffrey Samuel apparently supported the idea that a de-industrialized Germany should be turned over to farmers. Edith, on the other hand, thought the Morgenthau Plan was unrealistic. The inescapable fact remained that the people of Europe, devastated by war, needed feeding, as did the people of Britain itself. From 1945 until 1950, Edith Summerskill played a central role in attempting to persuade MPs and the population at large to accept the government’s policy of maintaining food rationing. The Daily Telegraph journalist Bill Deedes was very complimentary about Edith while excoriating John Strachey: ‘The only person who made any sense in that Department [Food] was Edith Summerskill. John Strachey wasn’t everybody’s favourite and he certainly wasn’t the sort of person who applied

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himself to any kind of detail.’15 The news journal Cavalcade held the view that John Strachey loaded Edith Summerskill up with the enormous amount of work that fell to the Food Ministry and that ‘the Doctor’ got through it unruffled and without strain.16 Edith certainly did carry out the lion’s share of work in the House of Commons while Strachey kept the more high-profile matters for himself, a state of affairs reported by the Western Mail in December 1946 when the newspaper observed that Edith Summerskill ‘had spent much more time during a particular debate at the Treasury Table than the Minister himself and that Strachey had spoken on the important matters while Edith dealt with the less interesting ones’.17 Edith commanded the House of Commons with her capacity for hard work and her communication skills. Reporting on food parliamentary questions in November 1948, Punch provided this backhanded compliment: Dr Summerskill occupied a good deal of Question-time and quite a few other Members sampled the brickbats (or perhaps, in view of her Ministerial office, custard pies would be a better simile) she jerked across the floor from time to time. Nor is she above flinging one over her shoulder at the benches behind her if it seems to be merited. After all, the rationing system is nothing if not equalitarian [sic].18

Edith’s obvious success may have been a reason the Prime Minister did not seek to promote her. Although it might appear counter-intuitive, Attlee may have decided it was better to keep Edith, who did a sensitive job well, in the more junior post rather than taking the risk of appointing someone new. Although Ellen Wilkinson had by this time sadly passed away, Attlee may also have been wary of appointing another woman to the Cabinet. Rationing dominated Edith’s workload, outside as well as inside the House of Commons. The Ministry of Food began its existence during the First World War and much later merged with the Agriculture Ministry in 1955. It was a wartime creation and its continuation for ten years after the end of the Second World War was a manifestation of the economic damage done to Britain by the war, the time it took to recover and the Labour Government’s view that they had no alternative to extending wartime austerity. Britain had, moreover, had some experience of food control during the First World War. When in 1936 another European conflict loomed, the Director of the London School of

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Economics and distinguished expert William Beveridge was commissioned to produce a report on food policy, having led an earlier inquiry on the subject. Beveridge’s work was extremely important given Britain’s lack of self-sufficiency in food and consequent need to ensure an adequate supply and a workable system of distribution. At the start of the Second World War, in 1939, the United Kingdom, with a population of about 50 million, was importing around 70 per cent of its cheese and sugar, almost 80 per cent of fruit and 70 per cent of cereal and fats as well as half of its meat. Beveridge firmly believed state control of food was essential when it was in short supply: State trading in food is practicable and in times of prolonged shortage is necessary. It is within the wit of man to find an alternative to competitive private enterprise with market prices as a means of obtaining and distributing food, to replace economic human laws, to substitute managed for automatic provisioning of the people.19

The idea of state control of food was thus well established by the outbreak of the Second World War. Since rationing would not be completely over until 1954, food distribution was effectively nationalized for fourteen years. Edith was at the forefront of both carrying out and justifying the policy for five of those years, from 1945 until 1950. Rationing aimed to spread the pain of the food shortages during and after the war in an equitable fashion and was intended to prevent those with more money being able to pay high prices for food while the poor starved. The system in use in 1945 had been created by the wartime coalition; the Labour Government that took office that year inherited an existing arrangement rather than establishing one for itself. Edith and her governmental colleagues chose to continue to implement what was already there rather than seeking to develop the system in their own way. Food consumption was divided into three categories. The first was guaranteed rationed food which accounted for about a third of calories. Next came foods that were controlled less rigorously on account of their inconsistent availability, for example milk, eggs, fish, fresh fruit and vegetables. The third category was the non-rationed foods: bread until mid-1946, potatoes until 1947 and civic restaurant or canteen meals, which were all deemed essential to prevent hunger. Shopkeepers were provided with enough food for registered customers. Purchasers generally, but not

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always housewives, had to present ration books so that the coupons relating to rationed items could cancelled. *(See appendix at the end of this chapter.) The British public were manifestly angry about having rationing continued after 1945 at a time when people thought that since the war had been won, rationing should be abolished or at the very least reduced. The issue was inevitably high on the political agenda during the early post-war years. The Ministry of Food was under constant attack from 1945 to 1950, as was the Parliamentary Secretary, Dr Edith Summerskill. According to the Spectator, as early as December 1945 ‘sacrifice was no longer necessary or fashionable’.20 In Gallup polls conducted between June 1946 and April 1949, rationing of food was regularly mentioned as one of the three most urgent domestic problems, and Mass Observation identified food shortages as the ‘top civilian grumble’ in the spring of 1946. During the winter of 1947–8, social surveys showed food shortages to be considered the most important national problem.21 Given Edith’s high public profile, Prime Minister Attlee, with whom Edith had always been on good terms, may have seen her as a strong character able to act as a convincing advocate for the government’s food policy as well as a woman able to relate to the housewife. Her job was made more difficult, however, by the anti-austerity and anti-rationing stance taken by the Conservative Opposition, which, while reflecting public opinion may well have also encouraged public discontent. Food, specifically its availability and distribution had indeed become a matter of special interest for the Opposition. Following their rout in the 1945 general election, the Conservatives, still led by wartime legend Winston Churchill, began actively looking for a way back into government. The consensus forged during the war melted away after 1945 and austerity became fair game for political debate and argument. The Conservatives now took the view that rationing and food controls were largely a consequence of mismanagement by the Labour Government rather than an inevitable consequence of the war. The Conservative Party constantly exploited rationing and food shortages in their propaganda in the country and their activities in the House of Commons. Conservative MPs attacked the Labour Government’s food policy and Edith, whose job it was to defend the government. Controls were depicted as an erosion of traditional liberties. The introduction of 13,551 new statutory rules and orders or statutory instruments between August 1945

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and January 1951 caused Winston Churchill to proclaim, ‘while shortages persist some controls are inevitable, but wartime controls in time of peace [are] a definite evil in themselves’.22 Criticism of the bureaucracy which operated the system was a major part of the Conservative attack. The party stood ‘all along the line for the individual, for the little people, against . . . the Big Boss State’. Red tape was alleged to stifle enterprise since ‘managers and traders constantly find that the vital permit, without which they cannot go ahead, is in the hands of a subordinate who knows nothing whatever about the business in question’.23 The system used to administer rationing, in particular the ration book seen as symbolizing the inadequacies of the government, became a favourite topic for newspapers, especially those hostile to Labour. As the voice of Labour’s food policy in Parliament and the government’s leading spokesperson in the country, Edith was inevitably one of the main targets. A letter in the Dundee Courier and Advertiser in June 1946 summed up the wrath felt by some: ‘After the glaring example of muddle and waste of the Ministry of Food . . . one would think her [Edith’s] department would lessen their activities in that direction. But no. They seem determined to try their hand in planning bigger and more expensive muddles in meat etc.’24 The ministry had, in fact, already begun to address such concerns. Edith spoke about this in the House of Commons, stating that a joint committee would be set up by the Ministry of Food and the Ministry of Agriculture to reorganize food distribution.25 She had also submitted a supplementary estimate for £49,840,000 in March to cover, amongst other things, the increase in prices for home produce and paying the salaries of the additional staff required to administer the changed arrangements. Those working in local food offices were often called ‘snoopers’ by the less sympathetic newspapers. Edith’s own local paper, the Fulham Chronicle, proved one of the worst offenders in attacking the Food Ministry, referring to the . . . gigantic snafu in the Socialist-Labour bureaucracy now dominating British existence . . . This great swarm of food administrators that have taken over since the Socialist-Labour Government came to power have erected one bureau on top of another; licences and cross licences, pyramids of regulation, price differentials, edicts, directives, a whole mountain of red tape.26

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Edith, however, maintained that criticism of the ministry could be traced to one thing – the world shortage of food. The government’s methods were not perfect, but they could be proud of them.27 Meanwhile the Ministry of Food undertook its own advertising campaign. The main vehicle, ‘Food Facts’, was designed to reinforce the message that food rationing was necessary and to help housewives make the best use of the available food. The projected expenditure on such advertisements for 1948 was £135,096 according to a statement in Parliament made by Edith.28 The Conservative approach was vividly demonstrated in the debate in the House of Commons on the rationing of bread. The wartime Coalition Government had consistently refused to contemplate bread rationing as it was seen as a staple food necessary to prevent hunger. Order 5496 to ration bread was introduced in the House of Commons on 18 July 1946. The Conservative case against the order was presented by none other than the Opposition leader and war supremo Winston Churchill, an interesting change of direction for the seventy-one-year-old aristocrat who had probably never prepared a meal in his life. The Minister of Food John Strachey answered Churchill’s opening salvo in what inevitably became a long and heated debate in a full House. It fell to Edith to wind up, proclaiming: I believe our people like to know the truth. In this we are emulating the right hon. Gentleman, the Member for Woodford [Winston Churchill] who in the dark days of the war . . . used to say, ‘I have bad news, but I believe the people should be told the truth because they can face it.’ Unfortunately . . . We see tonight an Opposition which has revealed a reckless approach to a very serious matter, and which has shown to the whole country a willingness to gamble with the bread of the people.29

Contrary to her outward confidence, Edith admitted in her memoirs that ‘the early Christians before their consignment to the lions could not have felt more apprehensive than I did that night. The jeers and counter-jeers drowned my voice time after time, and I emerged feeling that was indeed the end of my parliamentary career . . . I only hoped Hansard the next day would prove the adequacy of the case.’30 Of course it did, and Edith would retain her position as Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Food until the general election in 1950.

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Bread rationing in the UK was abolished in July 1948 while Edith was still at the Ministry of Food. Recent academic research has revealed that it had been introduced as part of extensive negotiations between the British Government and the United States on the allocation of North American wheat and on the terms of US loans and Marshall Aid necessary to secure the revival of the British economy after the war.31 Rationing the country’s main food was one of the Labour Government’s most difficult and unpopular decisions. Edith, Labour’s most prominent, if not its most senior, minister with responsibility for both food and the ration book inevitably bore much of the opprobrium. To make matters worse, Edith, as a junior minister, had little input into either the international negotiations or the decision to ration bread. The reputation of the Ministry of Food declined even further when potato rationing was introduced at the end of 1947. From the last months of 1945 onwards, the humble potato became an increasing cause for concern. The debate on the Emergency Powers (Defence) (Charges) which sought to reimpose levies on certain potato sales was moved in Parliament by Edith on 17 December 1945. Even the conscientious Parliamentary Secretary found potatoes less than thrilling, saying, ‘The subject is a rather dull one . . . I do not think that potatoes can ever be exciting.’32 She continued her speech by expanding on the various charges for the different kinds of potatoes. The regulations were immensely complicated as seed potatoes, for instance, were treated differently from those sold to be eaten. Potatoes came up four times again in the House of Commons in 1946, each time being dealt with by Dr Edith. Following the harsh winter of 1946–7, full potato rationing was introduced in the House of Commons on 24 November 1947. The two main staple foods, bread and potatoes, had come to be controlled by the state. Between August 1945 and the end of 1949 Edith is listed 1,278 times in Hansard. Her activity ranges from speaking on legislation to answering oral questions to presenting responses to written questions. By any standards it was an extraordinary parliamentary workload, giving a whole new meaning to Parliamentary Secretary. It also indicated the huge interest in food during the immediate post-war years. The quantity of answers to written questions provided by Edith as Parliamentary Secretary is especially striking, numbering 114 during 1946 alone. Edith herself provided a useful insight into the role of parliamentary questions, writing in her memoirs:

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Parliamentary questions have an alarming effect upon Civil Servants; they are obsessed with the idea that a question is an implied criticism of themselves. The fact is that although some questions in the House are of general concern, most questions are put by Members who have some special or constituency interest in the matter. Consequently a Member’s chief anxiety is to reach his own question.33

During the first flush of idealism following her appointment as Parliamentary Secretary, Edith liked to think that the Ministry of Food was chiefly, albeit not exclusively, concerned with providing the population with a balanced diet and that its duty was to ensure that none of the existing nutritional diseases could be laid at its door. Edith believed that the ministry could improve the nation’s diet, reflecting later, ‘As I had always advocated better food and less medicine as the correct approach to healthy living, the Ministry of Food suited me.’34 Edith’s confidence was better placed than may have been expected. Nutrition for the poorer sections of British society did, in fact, improve. During a parliamentary by-election in Paddington in November 1946, Edith and the Minister of Food John Strachey explained that, despite rationing and shortages, the standard of nutrition was higher over the country as a whole than it had been in the pre-war years.35 Protein levels remained constant during and after the war years.36 National food surveys were carried out regularly to discover how people were faring on their rations, and by the end of 1947 Edith was able to say that the food allowance was on average about 2,000 calories a day, enough to ensure adequate nutrition since 1,500 calories was considered the amount required to prevent disease. The rations could, of course, be supplemented with unrationed foods.37 By the end of 1949 a government White Paper, Food consumption levels in the United Kingdom, reported that nutrition was better than it had been before the war. Edith herself, in an article in the popular magazine Tit-Bits, claimed that no one was undernourished now: ‘[T]hat section of the community which suffered from chronic undernourishment between the two wars is better nourished today than it ever was before.’38 There was, in fact, more equality between the middle classes and those who were less well off in terms of diet and nutrition than there had been in the pre-war years, an achievement of the 1945-1950 Labour Government which has received little recognition. While rationing played its part in ensuring food distribution was fairer across the board than had previously

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been the case, the government also provided food subsidies, a policy intended to equalize the food supply for items consumed by the poor and the working class. In 1942–3, £145 million was spent on food subsidies, including £35 million on bread, flour and oatmeal, £23 million on meat and the same on potatoes, £11 million on milk and £13 million on eggs. Dr Edith, speaking at a meeting of the Southern Regional Council of the Labour Party in September 1949, praised the subsidy system, stating, ‘Food subsidies enabled the poorest to buy their rations. They did more to protect the health of the people than any costly medicine.’39 One of the unintended consequences of Edith’s hard work and diligence was that she became personally identified with government policy. Too often the press blamed Edith rather than the departmental minister or even the government for schemes and initiatives which went wrong. Such a close involvement was not always beneficial for Edith, and was particularly harmful when the Ministry of Food tried to introduce an unpleasant fish from South Africa into the nation’s food supply. Snoek, pronounced ‘snook’, provided a prime example of Edith’s tendency to become too close to her brief, providing the media with a way to attack her rather than those truly responsible. Snoek, it was considered, would provide the ideal solution to the three immediate issues concerning food at the end of the Second World War: the severe shortage, the lack of dollars to pay for imports and the nation’s nutritional requirements. Snoek, a Dutch word for pike, is a long, thin species of snake mackerel. Its initial mention in Hansard referred to one of the first consignments on its way to Britain which was feared to be of low quality – perhaps an omen for the future failure to persuade the British to eat the fish. Edith promised an inspection would be undertaken once the goods had arrived.40 Despite Dr Edith’s best efforts, snoek would soon become a millstone around her neck. As one South African newspaper put it, ‘Dr Summerskill has had more taunts from fellow MPs, music hall comedians and housewives over her unpopular protégé snoek than can be kept count of . . .’41 Edith’s task was to persuade British housewives to buy snoek, which came to Britain in tins, and their families to subsequently eat it. With her customary confidence, Edith jovially invited women MPs to visit the Ministry of Food to try snoek for themselves. The event was not a success. The MPs were unimpressed, Jean Mann, Labour MP for Coatbridge and Airdrie, expressing her dissatisfaction with the

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observation that ‘it tasted to me like the Dead Sea, then dragged into the Red Sea to give it a false colour’.42 Edith never quite understood the objections to her special food. Though it tasted horrible and looked even worse, Edith nonetheless fell in love with it. She would never willingly give up her very own snoek. Thus, the Ministry of Food demonstrated its commitment to the fish by advertising snoek in the national press. In July 1947, Edith provided the House of Commons with the information that advertisements had run during the weeks beginning 13 and 20 June with a total cost of between £6,000 and £7,000. The Ministry of Food also told housewives how to make snoek tastier and Edith herself held snoek parties, even persuading her son Michael, by now studying at Merton College, Oxford, to hold one such event in his college rooms. All these efforts were to no avail. Snoek was a huge flop. As Edith commented, ‘One can never forecast how an apparently minor matter may blow up into a fierce political storm. The stomach provides a useful barometer.’43 She also, perhaps belatedly, understood that the word snoek (snook) would never be completely accepted across England. Edith, the face and voice of food policy from 1945 until 1950, would be tarred for ever more by the snoek debacle. Clearly bothered by the adverse publicity, she told the Market Research Society towards the end of 1949 that when the country was exhorted to eat whale meat following snoek, she thought that politically she would be finished. A.C.G. in the Manchester Guardian composed the following rhyme: In snoek and whale she made it plain, She found no hidden thrill. Indeed, they made her summer wane And undermined her skill. When housewives worried how to fit Such things for snacks and suppers, She worried too – lest she should hit The Parliamentary scuppers.44

Edith was caught out again when it came to butter and margarine. Having been invited in 1948 to speak to the Oxford University Labour Club on ‘The Technology of Food’, about food processing, Edith explained the method used to add certain vitamins to margarine so that it would be equivalent to butter in nutritional value. Edith went on to claim that that the quality of margarine had

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improved to such an extent that it was impossible to tell its taste from that of butter. She was immediately challenged. Colin Prestige, one of the students, offered to be subjected to a taste test. Edith agreed and invited Mr Prestige to her home the next day to take the test, evidently believing no harm would come of it. The opposite turned out to be the case. Having been tipped off and sensing an opportunity to attack the Parliamentary Secretary, the Daily Express ran the story. Edith’s number at the Food Ministry in the Whitehall telephone exchange area – Whi 7935 – was besieged by housewives claiming they could indeed tell the difference.45 The butter–margarine controversy stayed with Dr Edith in a way she did not seem to quite understand: ‘For some reason quite obscure to me the butter or margarine story has stuck throughout the years implying I presume that my judgment on other issues is equally faulty.’46 Edith’s departmental concern for the overall diet of the nation as well as people’s daily ration led her to encourage changes in eating habits to try to ensure adequate nutrition for the people. In attempting to encourage such changes, Edith was sometimes accused of adopting a ‘preachy’ tone when addressing the public, which did not always go down well. During 1946 she claimed that ‘every man longed for a juicy steak . . . Meat was an index of prosperity whereas fish, particularly herring, were a symbol of hard times.’47 Her message was clear – people should be prepared to try all kinds of nourishing food, even though some of them may be associated with poverty and may not be particularly pleasant to eat. While Edith may sometimes have been condescending and appeared to take little pleasure in food, no one could accuse her of slacking. Throughout her time in the Ministry of Food, Edith toured shops to study queues, received deputations from housewives and gave speeches urging resourcefulness. Edith certainly knew about the nutritional value of food and the necessity of a balanced diet. The downside was that she had no previous experience of administration. Lilian Owen, one of Edith’s private secretaries, told Edith’s son Michael that She [Edith] knew little about running a government department when she arrived, but, under the expert hand of Ministry officials, she quickly grasped the reins, and worked most responsibly in the administration of the department. My general recollection is of an extremely keen and energetic junior minister, who had great consideration for her staff, whom she treated as equals.48

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Edith’s view of her new role was rather different. She felt she had been thrown into a strange environment with little support. ‘On my first day at the Ministry I was told that it had been arranged for me to visit various places concerned with food production and distribution, accompanied either by the commercial head in charge of a particular division or the relevant Civil Servant . . . I observed after trial and error that the Civil Servant generally wore a black trilby and carried an umbrella and the businessman a bowler hat.’49 When Edith learned that she was expected to address conferences of businessmen in the food trade, her initial reaction was to tell her civil servants that, having only ever addressed medical conferences, she did not feel capable of such a thing. In the end she had no choice; conferences were part of the job. Dr Edith, of course, proved as capable in this new arena as in everything else she had done. At her first trade event which concerned confectionery, Dr Edith was accompanied on the platform by Messrs Mackintosh and Cadbury whom she described as the aristocrats of the business. During her speech, Edith decided to lighten the atmosphere by talking about her own sweet tooth, especially her liking for liquorice. Warming to her theme, she then said she would like to meet liquorice producer Mr Percy Bassett. It turned out he was in the room and called out, ‘Here I am; I am Percy Bassett.’ Edith felt after that little diversion everything else at the conference was easy for her. She was to use the same technique again at a soft drink luncheon at the Savoy Hotel where she told her audience that, as the wife of a Welshman, Idris lemonade had always found favour with her and that she pictured it being dispensed by a tall, dark Welshman with a tenor voice. Sure enough, a man answering to that description got up and said, ‘Here I am and I can sing.’50 Edith came to look forward to trade meetings as an escape from the fierce exchanges in the political arena. The system of state control of food inevitably led to a black market in controlled items; the wartime ‘spiv’ has acquired legendary status. Concern about such activities surfaced quickly, with rationing itself and the government’s regulations often seen as the culprits. Conservative MPs were keen to attack the Labour Government while often taking a relatively lenient line on those who contravened the rules. In October 1946, Mr Charles Taylor, Conservative MP for Eastbourne, claimed that the government was forcing thousands of people on to the black market51 while a month later the backbencher Mr H. R. Spence protested in the House of Commons that people were being unfairly

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penalized when they had not contravened the law.52 Edith had, in fact, announced a review of food distribution in June 1947 which was intended to address the black market as well as government distribution. Nevertheless, illegal dealings were to continue. Edith was asked again at a later date about such activity in the House of Commons by Major Legge-Bourke, replying, ‘Letters are frequently received in my department containing allegations of food offences. They are examined and dealt with on their merits, and those which contain sufficiently specific information are investigated.53 Alcohol was not rationed, but was nonetheless mentioned on many occasions, as the shortage of wheat and barley affected its production, especially beer. Edith’s work was gruelling, dealing as it did with food shortages, the administration of rationing and the complicated regulations. A difficult situation was made worse in that many of the proceedings in Parliament took place late at night. While Dr Edith relied on her civil servants to help prepare the answers, there is no doubt that she was on top of the detail and understood the complexities. Meat rationing was based on price not quantity. In Parliament, Edith dealt with questions on animal slaughter, animal feed, the transit of cattle, the allocation of offal, meat inspection and much else, but there were surprisingly few questions about the availability of the food itself, possibly because much of the meat Britain required was imported from Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Brazil and Denmark, as well as other countries not in the dollar area. In August 1946 an agreement was concluded between the United Kingdom and Eire for foodstuffs from Ireland to be imported into Britain, now possible since the end of the Second Work War in which Eire had remained neutral. The meat problem was also lessened by the introduction of substitutes such as rabbit. Cheese, however, was a completely different matter. A lively debate on the types and quality of cheese available took place in response to a government order in the House of Commons at the end of February 1946. Ostensibly about controlling cheese imports, the discussion soon turned to taste and individual preferences, with one MP condemning home-produced British cheese as ‘mousetrap’. Such culinary niceties seemed completely beyond Dr Edith who replied by saying, ‘I deplore the fact that it [British cheese] has been characterised as “mousetrap” cheese, because I can assure hon. Members that all cheeses have the same nutritional value.’54 Commenting on this response from Edith, her son Michael has

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provided an insight into Edith’s views on food and cheese in particular: ‘If she had been more interested in experimenting with food, she would not have answered in this way. At home she served processed packaged cheeses, in small triangles wrapped in silver paper, and occasionally cheddar.’55 Edith was, in fact, personally indifferent to food, which she did not really appreciate or enjoy. According to her grandson Ben Summerskill, the fridge at the Summerskill–Samuel house in Highgate was very small, an indication that food was not one of Edith’s main concerns. The fats which were rationed included lard, butter and margarine, a serious blow to women seeking to make food palatable. In response to a petition on the recent reduction in the fats from 19,000 housewives in Sheffield presented to the Minister of Food in early March 1946, Edith made her sympathy clear but added that ‘the cut would not have been imposed had it not been quite inescapable in view of the supply position’.56 The somewhat surprising inclusion of soap in the rationing of food came about because at the time soap was made of the same materials as margarine. Soap rationing was characterized by its exemptions. Cleaning products made of substances other than those used in soap bars were not rationed and there were special allowances for manual workers, infants, invalids and expectant mothers. Sugar, which at this time was used extensively for jam-making and food preservation as well as for cakes, pastries and confectionary, was considered important. Between 1946 and 1949, Edith discussed sugar in the House of Commons seventy-eight times and the subject featured on forty-one separate occasions during 1949. This was due in large part to its many uses – sweets and confectionary, cakes and pastries, beer and other alcoholic beverages, jam and preserves, carbonated drinks as well as general use in meals and beverages, especially tea. A mainstay of British life, tea nevertheless came from countries on the other side of the world. Edith had reluctantly to tell the House of Commons in February 1947, ‘I cannot hold out any hope for an early cessation of tea rationing. As the estimated world production of tea falls considerably below world demand, there is likely to be increasing competition for these short supplies.’57 Two particular items not immediately related to food distribution stand out among Edith’s work at this time, namely alcoholic drinks, which were not rationed though some of the ingredients were, and food preservation. There was no shortage of MPs who liked a drink. Sir Waldron Smithers, Conservative

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Member for Orpington, a whisky drinker and a constant thorn in Edith’s side, was notorious for being inebriated in the House of Commons. Edith’s son Michael tells how Sir Waldron was frequently so drunk that he had to be helped to his waiting car by his chauffeur and subsequently by the station porter until his train arrived to take him home. Other heavy drinkers who did battle with Edith were John Baird and Frank Bowles. Edith once admitted to the latter that she was a drinker of very little shandy.58 Edith, who hardly touched alcohol at all, was perhaps unusual in her drinking habits in the male dominated House of Commons. In terms of food preservation, unfortunately, during the immediate postwar period the means did not exist to either can or freeze food in sufficient quantities to make any inroads into the need for rationing. But food preservation, notably canning and freezing, began to generate interest during 1946. On 6 March Major Niall Macpherson asked on what basis the Minister of Food was allocating imported tinned fruits to the grocery trade and how long the stocks would last. Edith replied that since canned fruits are sold on points (explained in the appendix), the question of registration did not apply and it was therefore difficult to predict how long the stocks would last.59 Freezing was already a possibility in 1946; however, when asked by Mr De la Bère whether some portion of the soft fruit crop could be put aside for quick freezing, Dr Edith replied, ‘I agree that the quick freezing process has a great future, but I am afraid that at the moment we cannot encourage it because we have not sufficient fruit.’60 In addition to cuts in basic rations, lunches and dinners classified as banquets were prohibited for many groups such as sports clubs, regimental gatherings, business organizations and trade unions. It inevitably fell on Edith to justify this austere regime in the House of Commons: ‘[T]hey [the MPs opposite] must appreciate the reactions of the ordinary housewife, who cannot partake of these meals [banquets] – the housewife who is harried, who finds it very difficult, planning for her family, and who finds these meals [banquets] often given in restaurants to large numbers of people, an added irritation.’61 The government did, however, relent when it came to weddings and funerals. In October 1946 the Liverpool Echo reported that ‘Dr Summerskill stated that the only social gatherings for which the Ministry authorised supplies of rationed food were weddings and funerals, and entertainments organised by

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reputable bodies for the sick, wounded or disabled, the aged, the poor, the blind children and young people under 19.’62 On the other hand, over 2,000 ‘British Restaurants’, otherwise known as civic restaurants, were run by local authorities in schools and church halls where a plain three-course meal could be bought without using the ration book. In contrast to her uncompromising statement on banquets, Edith praised this provision during the debate in Parliament on the Civic Restaurants Bill: ‘Food is the first essential for human well-being, and the civic restaurant, together with the industrial canteens and the school meals service, is complementary to our rationing scheme. The Bill [The Meals (Service at Social Functions) Order 1947] we are discussing today . . . is part of our national food policy.’63 Civic restaurants was another example of the less-well-off part of the population being aided by the Labour Government. There was general agreement in the press and Parliament that Edith, against the odds, had done a good job at the Ministry of Food. The truth was that immediately after the war the British people wanted the food they had been used to eating and they wanted an end to rationing. Everyone had had enough of wartime austerity and were eagerly anticipating the new dawn promised by the Labour Party in 1945. Unfortunately for the Labour Government and Dr Edith Summerskill, the face of food controls, it did not seem possible to end food rationing at that time. Rationing of some commodities was, in fact, to continue until July 1954, three years after the Conservatives returned to government.

*Appendix The rationing system for food was both comprehensive and complicated. The following provides a brief description. Rationing of all the items listed below continued beyond 1950, Dr Edith Summerskill’s last year as Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Food.

Meat The meat ration included beef, corned beef, veal, mutton and pork. Meat was the only commodity rationed by price rather than weight in order to continue

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the customary choice between quantity and quality. Meat was first rationed in March 1940. From the end of that year until 1950 part of the ration had to be purchased as tinned meat. Meat prices were raised during the second quarter of 1949. Children under five were entitled to only half a ration, pregnant women an additional half ration from 1943. From 1944 there was a special ration for Christmas. Coalmines received a special ration in 1946. Bacon and ham were dealt with separately and were rationed in January 1940.

Cheese Cheese was rationed from May 1941. In addition to the ordinary ration, a supplementary ration of 12 oz. per week was issued to a large number of workers such as those in the agricultural sector who did not have canteen facilities.

Fats Fats rationing included butter, rationed in January 1940, margarine (July 1940) and in November 1941 lard and cooking fats. The maximum quantity of butter permitted was 2–4 oz. a week and cooking fats 2 oz. Extra rations for Christmas were introduced from 1944.

Soap Soap came under the Ministry of Food as soap and margarine were made from the same materials. It was rationed in February 1942. Shaving soap, scourers, shampoo powders, dental soap and soapless detergents were ration-free. Many manual workers, infants, invalids and expectant mothers received additional soap rations.

Sugar and preserves Sugar was rationed in January 1940. Additional rations were granted for Christmas in 1944 and in the summer to encourage fruit preserving. Preserves were rationed in March 1941 and could be exchanged for sugar – also to

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encourage preserving – from 1942. Preserves were transferred to the points scheme after 1944. The majority of preserves were re-rationed in August 1948 and the rationing ended in December 1948

Tea Tea was rationed in July 1940. From July 1942, children under five received no tea ration and people over seventy were granted an additional allowance from December 1944.

Points rationing Points rationing was introduced in December 1941 to guarantee equitable distribution of certain foods deemed to be luxury or non-essential items: canned meat, fish, beans and fruit; biscuits; rice, oats and other cereal products; condensed milk and some cheeses; dried fruits and pulses; and certain preserves. Points functioned like an alternative currency. Each item was given a points’ ‘price’ which was adjusted according to supply and demand. Seventy points were allowed per person until the second quarter of 1945; 92 during the third quarter of 1946; 101 for the second quarter of 1947; 116 in the second quarter of 1948; and 75 for the second quarter of 1949. Points differed from ordinary rationing in that a number of categories were included.

Personal points Personal points, introduced in July 1942, applied to chocolates and sweets. The personal points ration was detachable from ration books and frequently used by individuals rather than purchased for the household. After 1944, additional rations were issued to children under eighteen and people over seventy during the Christmas period. Sweets were de-rationed in April 1949 but rationing was reintroduced in August as demand significantly outstripped supply. Taken from Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Rationing, Austerity and the Conservative Recovery after 1945’, Historical Journal 37, no. 1 (March 1994): 194.

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The weather, that most unpredictable aspect of British life, conspired against Prime Minister Attlee’s Labour Government in no uncertain terms. The ‘big freeze’ of January 1947 reduced Britain’s already dented morale to almost rock bottom. It was a terrible time for those who, having lived through six years of war, now had to endure, in addition to rationing, bitter cold and power cuts. Many of those who had viewed Labour as their saviour were having second thoughts, which made Edith’s job at the Ministry of Food more difficult than ever. Writer and diarist Florence Speed, living in Brixton in south London, was one of the millions who shivered. Her diary entry for 24 January reads, ‘I was frozen today, gas is on at such low pressure. Worked with scarf over my head, mittens on my hands, & rug around my legs.’1 January 29 was the coldest day for many years. The lights went out all over the country, electricity was off for long spells, gas in the big cities was a quarter of its usual pressure and new snow drifts halted most transport. The British people suffering extreme weather and other privations including food rationing were becoming increasingly alienated from a government which was failing to deliver the fruits of victory. Writer and editor John Lehmann claimed the country had been crushed, as civilians had to accept officialdom ordering them about: ‘The adrenaline [i.e. of war] was no longer pumped into our veins . . . The cards and coupons that still had to be presented for almost everything from eggs to minute pieces of scraggy . . . meat . . .. seemed far more squalid and unjust than during the war.’ Lehmann continues with comments which could, perhaps with some justification, be levelled against Food Parliamentary Secretary Dr Edith Summerskill: ‘Worse still, to my increasingly disillusioned eye, was the kind of mean puritanism that the newly triumphed Labour MPs and their officials appeared to have decided was the proper wear of the day. Too many of 131

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them seemed to think there was a virtue in austerity and shabbiness, in controls and restrictions . . .’2 From her early days in politics, Edith had been perceived as possessing a bossy streak, a ‘doctor knows best’ attitude, possibly necessary in her professional life but sometimes a liability in politics. Her son Michael cites two examples of this tendency during her time at the Ministry of Food. In 1949 she described the eating of bacon and eggs at breakfast as ‘a fad’ and ‘a fashion which was superfluous at such an early hour’,3 and at a public meeting in Woolwich when a man in the audience complained about the meat ration, Edith retorted, ‘You sound as if you get your wife’s meat ration too.’4 Edith’s later attempt to tell women how to wash up must have been one of her worst bouts of bossiness. A Kent housewife retorted, ‘Really Edith, first things first, please. Give us enough to make our plates dirty and then tell us how to wash them up.’5 The fuel crisis of February and March 1947 was followed by floods and, crucially, a dollar crisis over the summer when convertibility was suspended leading the British Government to introduce a savage package of import cuts from the dollar area, including a reduction in the meat ration. Speaking in a debate on the latest cuts, Edith disingenuously blamed the world food shortage for the many and severe criticisms of the Food Ministry made by MPs. ‘The difficulties of housewives, queueing, rationing and the problems of distribution, are surely symptoms of a malady which is not endemic to this country . . . But even the Ministry of Food could not anticipate the floods, frosts and the appalling climatic conditions which faced the farmers . . .’6 Edith’s contribution to the debate feels more like an appeal from a government flattened by the weight of the forces of nature outside its control and the responsibilities following the disasters than a confident ministerial speech in the House of Commons. Nonetheless, Edith ploughed on, working hard and doing a difficult and increasingly soul-destroying job. The conditions in the country were ripe for the emergence of protest groups. One such was the British Housewives League (BHL), a mainly middle-class organization which claimed that its membership in November 1947 was twice that of the Communist Party in the UK. Gaining some front-page press coverage, the BHL proved a prominent if not a particularly successful campaigning body. Edith claimed, probably with some justification, that ‘I derived some comfort from the knowledge that most of the protests at our [the

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government’s] public meetings came from a noisy element calling themselves the Housewives League; and it is not irrelevant to mention that most of these ladies were opposed to the Government on political grounds.’7 The BHL was essentially libertarian with links to the ‘Never Again’ Association, which was opposed to the Beveridge proposals, and supported the anti-nationalization campaigns such as those organized by the Cement Foundation and Tate and Lyle, though it was never a front for the Conservative Party. The Conservative approach eschewed organizations which could be perceived as extreme, concentrating their efforts on exploiting the continuation of austerity, which, the Conservatives astutely realized, disproportionately affected the rightward leaning middle-classes. In a Mass Observation survey published in September 1949, two-thirds of the London middle-class housewives thought they were not getting sufficient essential foods – butter, eggs and milk – which they had been used to during the interwar years. Food controls had, however, improved the diet of poorer people. The unintended consequence of rationing – making nutrition more equal between income groups – was, inevitably, viewed as a Labour policy, and the general unpopularity of the system boosted the Conservatives. Edith’s casual dismissal of the concerns expressed by the British Housewives League may well have reflected the wider view of Clement Attlee’s government which never seemed to quite understand the national mood against controlling one of the things – food – that everybody needed. Edith herself, in addition to her huge parliamentary workload, undertook both international duties and numerous engagements outside the House of Commons. In May 1946 she attended a meeting of United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization in Washington accompanied by her old Socialist Medical Association colleague Dr Haden Guest, now the Labour MP for Islington North. Upbeat as ever, Edith praised the work of the Food and Agriculture Organization, stating that it was ‘the first practical attempt to share the food of the world so that all nations shall enjoy freedom from want’.8 The following year Edith led the British delegation to the Food and Agriculture Organization, this time meeting in Geneva. Edith addressed the conference, which was reviewing the world food position, saying, ‘I can assure you we shall not allow our temporary difficulties in any way to shake our confidence in the need and value of international organisation . . . Efforts are needed in all countries.’9 At home, Edith was a sterling defender of her ministry’s policy,

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fulfilling a host of public engagements. The many events in which Edith was involved included a day in Birmingham in March 1946 visiting British Civic Restaurants; a visit to the Divisional Food Office at Tunbridge Wells in May of that year, where she inspected the kitchens; and, towards the end of 1946, a speaking engagement at a conference of the Main Line Railway Canteens Association. On 21 May 1946, immediately before the Food and Agriculture Organization meeting in Washington, Edith addressed the National Baby Welfare Council on what she called ‘social medicine’.10 Following her success on the wartime Brains Trust programmes, Edith made time for radio broadcasts in her capacity as the de facto Food Ministry spokesperson, including one on wheat in March 1946. Throughout this period, Edith continued to maintain her joie de vivre at public meetings which, before the age of television, were often attended by hundreds of people. At one such event, addressed by the MP Francis Noel-Baker, Edith replied to a heckler, ‘You must have grown up frustrated. Frustration leaves its mark.’11 The gentle sexual innuendo would more than likely have delighted the audience who came to be entertained as well as informed. Edith’s five years at the Ministry of Food were in many ways her finest hours. It was vital work and Edith did a difficult job reliably with great tenacity, demonstrating a prodigious attention to detail, all the time navigating her way through the changed political landscape following the 1945 general election. Edith pioneered the way for women in front-line politics, first by attaining ministerial office and then by acquitting herself admirably. Helped by the Food Minister John Strachey’s apparent lack of interest in his brief, Edith stepped up to the plate and filled the gaps in a commendable fashion. Throughout these tough times Edith always maintained her commitment to women and families, drawing attention to the plight of the housewife faced with rationing. Dr Edith’s tenure at the Ministry of Food saw food distribution made more equal, with improvements in nutrition for poorer families. Food was effectively nationalized, albeit for a relatively short period of time, with arguably greater success than other industries taken into public ownership by the 1945 Labour Government, such as iron and steel, which were rapidly privatized by the Conservatives in 1951. In 1949, Edith was made a Privy Councillor in recognition of her work, becoming the first married woman to be admitted to that august institution. In her memoirs, Dr Edith tells how King George VI did

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not want a woman to kneel before him as was customary. Edith, apparently, would have liked to have suggested that, since kneeling to the sovereign was a sycophantic medieval custom not consistent with Cabinet responsibility, it should be abolished all together. Sensibly she kept her mouth shut.12 Despite her heavy schedule, Edith never stopped her feminist campaigning. She remained President of the Married Women’s Association for the duration of her time as a government minister. The association, co-founded by Edith before the war, was important as it served as a base for her work on behalf of women and provided her with valuable support. In her presidential address in 1949, Edith discussed the problems of the married woman over forty-five, noting: This association has got to teach her how to relieve what sometimes she feels is the futility of her existence. When her children married and she was freed from chores, the middle-aged woman was apt to become a little frustrated . . . Our association should tell the women that middle-age connotes maturity and is not a sign of approaching old age.13

Now that she was in her late forties, it was perhaps inevitable that Dr Edith would become more interested in older women. However, she did not concentrate wholly on this age group; for example, in August 1946 she did a radio piece on girls’ education. Edith was elected to the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the Labour Party in 1944 in the section reserved for women. The other sections which made up the NEC were one for the trade unions, one for constituency Labour Parties and one for affiliated organizations such as the Socialist Medical Association. Edith would now attend the Labour Party annual conference as a member of the National Executive Committee and reply to debates in that capacity. The high point of her attendance at the party conference while a minister was probably on 1 October 1947 at Margate when she stood in for an indisposed Aneurin Bevan for the debate on the National Health Service. The bill to establish the NHS was making its way through Parliament at this point. Edith replied on behalf of the National Executive Committee, giving a wellreceived speech about why the country needed a National Health Service: ‘In the future nobody will be denied the best specialist service in the world. No mother need look in her purse to see if she has enough money to call the doctor for her child. No housewife need neglect symptoms of disease until she

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is past medical aid.’14 She also spoke about how the NHS would benefit doctors in general practice by giving them financial security. In 1948, at Scarborough, Edith came top of the ballot in the Women’s Section for the Labour Party NEC ahead of Alice Bacon MP and Margaret Herbison MP, also beating Barbara Castle MP and Bessie Braddock MP, both of whom were unsuccessful. During the same conference, Dr Edith defended the food policy of the Labour Government on behalf of the NEC, stating, ‘I believe . . . the policy which we have pursued in maintaining controls on the essential foodstuffs is the right one.’15 The NEC won this vote despite dissatisfaction that rationing continued after the end of the war. Dr Edith was also busy in the late 1940s and early 1950s visiting local Labour Parties and undertaking many other engagements, speaking, for example, to the Labour Party in Nottingham in June 1949 on the future of social democracy. In February of the same year she chaired a Socialist Medical Association conference on food, nutrition and health. Two of Edith’s long-standing campaigns came before the House of Commons while she was a government minister – analgesia in childbirth and eradicating tuberculosis in milk, the latter with more success than the former. The Private Members’ Analgesia in Childbirth Bill was introduced as an allparty measure, with the second reading moved by the Conservative Peter Thorneycroft on 4 March 1949. He opened the debate by stating, ‘The object of this Bill . . . is to see that far more women in the future get some relief from the pains of childbirth than has been the case in the past.’16 The bill was seconded by Leah Manning, Labour MP for Epping, and supported by the Liberal MP for Anglesey Megan Lloyd George. Peter Thorneycroft continued, ‘We who support this Bill believe that if we can get it on the Statute Book, we shall have done something at any rate towards the reduction of the sum total of human suffering.’17 He later told the House how difficult it had been to achieve acceptance of any degree of analgesia in childbirth: ‘[I]t [the battle to gain acceptance] to some degree has been a battle against apathy and prejudice . . . It is astounding, when we remember that it was a hundred years ago that this principle was first started, to consider how little progress has been made.’18 Only 7 per cent of women giving birth in England and only one woman in 433 in Wales were provided with relief when delivering their babies at home assisted by a midwife.19 The bill would impose a duty on local authorities and

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hospitals to have adequate equipment and, according to Peter Thorneycroft, would involve no increase in expenditure other than that already approved by Parliament. There was considerable agreement during the debate which was attended by Edith, who intervened only twice to make practical points. Arthur Blenkinsop, Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Health, answered for the government. Although it supported the bill in principle, the government was nevertheless concerned about imposing new duties on local authorities and new penalties on hospitals. Mr Blenkinsop was, however, confident that the aims of the bill could be delivered without needing to increase the burden on the health system. Peter Thorneycroft, on the other hand, was not convinced that local authorities would use their powers without the full force of the law. During the parliamentary debate the government had been ambivalent about whether legislation was the best way to deal with the matter of pain relief in childbirth. Eleven days later, Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan was specific: the government could not support the bill. He was of the view that the current legislation relating to the National Health Service and the services offered by local authorities already provided adequate powers for both hospitals and domiciliary midwives to administer analgesia, generally in the form of gas and air, to mothers giving birth.20 The bill therefore failed to become an Act of Parliament. Despite Thorneycroft’s assertion that no additional finance would be required, Bevan’s objection appeared to have been entirely about money. He feared that a statutory duty to provide pain relief in childbirth would be expensive, and he was clear that he would not commit any additional expenditure to relieving women’s pain when giving birth. Bevan also probably believed that the measure represented an under the radar Conservative attack on the fledgling National Health Service and that the cost of the measure could perhaps have overwhelmed the Health Service and undermined the principle that health care should be free at the point of use. The underlying reason for Bevan’s complete lack of sympathy and his rejection of the Private Member’s Bill may well have been simple misogyny. Dr Edith, always the loyal minister, said nothing in public about Aneurin Bevan’s lack of support for one of the causes dear to her heart. However, there is some evidence to show that the bill did put pressure on local authorities to use their powers to carry out its provisions. In May 1949 the Secretary of the North Nottinghamshire Nursing

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Associations reported that 206 mothers had used the newly introduced analgesia service, and that ‘Dr Edith Summerskill had reacted very favourably towards this part of the associations’ work and had aided them considerably.’21 Notwithstanding the efforts made by local authorities, the Analgesia in Childbirth Bill, in fact, remains the only attempt in British history to give mothers the legal right to pain relief when giving birth. The second reading of the Milk (Special Designations) Bill was debated in the House of Commons on 21 February 1949. The bill aimed to eradicate tuberculosis from the milk supply, a cause Edith first took up as a medical student following in the footsteps of her father who had run a TB clinic. Recognizing the bill’s prosaic name, Edith in her opening speech said that she would always think about it as the ‘Milk (Save the Children) Bill’ and that she ‘would go as far to say that this Bill can be regarded as ancillary to the National Health Service Act because, when it comes into operation, it will be found to have the effect of reducing the incidence of tuberculosis and disablement. Even the death rate in the country will be reduced as the result of the introduction of this Bill.’22 The bill decreed that all retail milk had to be sold subject to special designations; it would not be sold simply as milk. All the designations indicated that the milk was free of TB. There would be tuberculosis tested (TT) milk; accredited milk derived from a single herd; pasteurized milk; and sterilized milk. Furthermore, milk producers would now have to be licensed. The bill also introduced changes in the procedure for dealing with infringements, and a licence could be suspended if the licensing authority thought it necessary, subject to appeal. Those present during the debate were largely on Edith’s side and the measure had large cross-party agreement. The most fulsome praise inevitably came from the Labour MPs supporting Edith. Somerville Hastings, an old colleague from her days as an activist in the Socialist Medical Association, made the point that, since diseases other than TB were found in milk, treating it in the ways advocated in the bill would do more than eliminate tuberculosis. Between 1912 and 1937 there had been 115 epidemics of dysentery, scarlet fever, typhoid and septic sore throat involving 4,000 people which were found to be due to milk and those who handled it. Only pasteurization would eliminate all such diseases. Dr Hastings said he was ‘enthusiastic about this Bill and I am sure that every member of my profession who really understands the subject will agree with it’.23 The Milk (Special

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Designations) Bill became an Act of Parliament when it received the Royal Assent in May 1949. Edith, with her customary self-belief, referred to the act as ‘my finest hour’.24 Following Labour’s election victory in 1950, albeit with a severely reduced majority, the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, appointed Dr Edith Summerskill Minister of National Insurance. National Insurance was important enough at this time to merit a ministry of its own; only later was it combined with similar provisions in a larger department. The ministerial position was ‘of Cabinet rank’, meaning Dr Edith sometimes attended Cabinet meetings, but was not a full member. It was a big step: Edith Summerskill was now very near the apex of government. Her result in Fulham West had, however, been a disappointment. Edith was returned at the general election held on 23 February 1950 with a reduced share of the vote, down from 61.9 per cent in 1945 to 51.1 per cent, a decline of 10.8 per cent. Overall, Labour’s majority was reduced to just five seats. The result was a fragile Labour Government and a Prime Minister who would soon seek a stronger mandate. Dr Edith Summerskill was the first married woman to become a full government minister, and she remained, as she always had been, acutely conscious of her status as a wife and mother. Edith the politician had always made much of her husband and two children during campaigning and in Parliament; she had no intention of downplaying her wifely and maternal role now that she was becoming successful in Parliament and politics in general. It was also becoming apparent that she no longer had the same kind of friendship with other women MPs as that she had before the war. Edith did not seem to be close to any of the Labour women elected in 1945. Barbara Castle, on the opposite side of the Labour Party left–right divide, viewed Edith as an adversary on the NEC,25 though the two women were to work together on equal pay for women. Jennie Lee, om the other hand, does not even merit a mention in Edith’s memoirs. Jean Mann, MP for Coatbridge and Airdrie from 1945 to 1959, in her book Woman in Parliament had little to say about Edith that was complimentary. As far as her male colleagues were concerned, there is practically no evidence that Edith forged any particularly close working relationships. Edith herself admired Ernest Bevin, the son of a single mother who championed improvements to the position of women, and was also close to Prime Minister Attlee. She hardly mentions the other male heavyweights –

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Herbert Morrison, Hugh Dalton, Stafford Cripps – in her memoirs, though it appears that her pre-war friendship with Aneurin Bevan cooled after he had been made Minister of Health, a position Edith may have wanted and for which she was well qualified. Edith tells in her memoirs how, on her first day as Minister of National Insurance in its grand offices situated in Carlton House Gardens, a former woman secretary asked if everything was in order. In response, Edith asked which of the several telephones on her desk provided her with a private line. The reply given by the lady from the ministry was that there was no special phone and that we (i.e., the ministry) like to keep a note of all incoming calls. Edith was apparently unhappy at this prospect: The thought of not speaking to my husband, the children and Nana without the interference of a third party dismayed me. As I stood in that room for the first time as the new Minister I was only conscious of a warm feeling of love for my family flooding my whole being. I knew then that my family took precedence over any worldly aspirations.26

Needless to say, the telephone arrived the next day. It is not known whether the ministry knew that in 1950 the oldest of Edith’s children, Michael, was an undergraduate at Merton College, Oxford, and his sister Shirley was in her late teens. Edith did, however, hit the nail on the head when she wrote, ‘Undoubtedly women with families can only happily undertake work which carries a high degree of responsibility if they are confident that their family is well cared for in their absence.’27 When Princess Anne was born on 15 August 1950, Edith, in typical fashion, not only wanted to join in the celebrations, but to be at the front and centre. Keen to publicize her ministry and perhaps her status as a mother, Edith came up with the idea of going to Buckingham Palace and presenting Princess Anne’s mother, then Princess Elizabeth, with a family allowance book. Sir John Walley, a senior civil servant at the Ministry of National Insurance, supported Edith. Unsurprisingly, King George VI’s Private Secretary, Sir Alan (Tommy) Lascelles, poured a generous portion of cold water on the scheme and overruled Edith and Sir John on the grounds that the Princess already had a child, Charles, who had been born before the Family Allowance was introduced.

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Edith proved as assiduous at the Ministry of National Insurance as she had been when Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Food. During the twenty months’ duration of the 1950–1 Labour Government, Edith introduced three bills: the Workmen’s Compensation (Supplementation) Bill, second reading on 21 February 1951; the National Insurance Bill, second reading on 26 April 1951; and the Pneumoconiosis and Byssinosis Bill. This last bill did not complete its passage through the House of Commons before the general election held on 25 October 1951, and was subsequently taken through its remaining stages by the Conservative minister Osbert Peake. The first of these bills, all of which went on to become Acts of Parliament, tackled the unfortunate position of survivors of industrial accidents which occurred before 1924. These workers were left outside the main provisions of the 1925 Workmen’s Compensation Act because some of their terms of compensation were more favourable than those in the new act. As a result, they were then excluded from later legislation which improved the position of the post-1924 men. The new act sought to put this right. The additional money required would come out of the Industrial Injuries Fund and there would also be an allowance for a dependent wife if the man were completely incapacitated. Edith concluded her speech in the House of Commons moving the bill with the words, ‘These men have been waiting a long time for this measure of justice and I am very pleased to be introducing a Bill which removes a long-standing grievance.’28 The bill received the Royal Assent on 21 March 1951. The 1951 National Insurance Bill was intended as an interim measure to deal with some issues arising out of the original 1946 National Insurance Act which the government felt could not be delayed until the review of the whole scheme, which was scheduled for 1954. However, the ramifications of this interim bill turned out to be nothing like as simple as introducing a few tweaks while waiting for a future review. Sir John Walley, Deputy Secretary at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance from 1958 to 1966, has described the events in 1951 surrounding National Insurance as a ‘time bomb’.29 There were a number of factors contributing to this unfavourable prediction. Firstly, the 1946 National Insurance Act had provided, apparently as a last-minute amendment from Herbert Morrison, that after five years from October 1946 when the act became law, contributions were to be increased. This increase was therefore built into law so that only another law could undo it. There was,

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in addition, the predictable Labour backbench pressure to increase national insurance benefits. When the 1946 National Insurance Act was first introduced into the House of Commons, some left-wing Labour MPs including Barbara Castle and Sidney Silverman had campaigned for larger benefits to be introduced sooner than the proposed start date of 1948. The campaigners also wanted benefits to be provided for a wider range of people, especially those above pension age. These demands did not go away. During 1951 the group of MPs seeking to increase National Insurance benefits chose Bessie Braddock, MP for Liverpool Exchange, a fearlessly outspoken and formidable campaigner, and Douglas Houghton to be their spokespeople. Houghton, who represented Sowerby in Yorkshire, was the leader of the Inland Revenue Staff Federation in addition to being an MP. He also called himself a feminist and was a member of the Fawcett Society. As a result, Houghton seems to have felt that he and Dr Edith Summerskill were kindred spirits, though whether Edith felt the same way is unclear.30 She did, however, hold a meeting with MPs including Braddock and Houghton, together with her ministry officials, which resulted in Dr Edith proposing a bill to increase the 1946 benefits while maintaining the existing legislation to increase contributions, thereby safeguarding the government’s financial calculations. Although the backbenchers rejected this proposal, they did accept an alternative, that there should be an increase in National Assistance payments, less of a headache for the government as these benefits could be more easily adjusted than National Insurance payments.31 Whether this outcome satisfied honour on the government side is a moot point. Deputy Secretary Sir John Walley’s view was that Dr Edith Summerskill and Hugh Gaitskell, appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in October 1950, were too ready to break away from the structure of the post-war legislation. Sir John thought the ground had not been properly prepared and that Summerskill and Gaitskell had too easily accepted that extra money would be available as the contributions increased. Sir John also thought that the Summerskill– Gaitskell proposal should have been considered in the context of the Treasury’s prediction, made at virtually the same time, that the anticipated unemployment figures would go down by 4 per cent from 8 to 4 per cent, which would mean that less money could potentially be set aside for the unemployment part of the National Insurance budget. Whether or not Sir John Walley was correct,

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what is clear is that backbench Labour MPs were inordinately influential. Clement Attlee only had a majority of five, hence circumstances favoured backbenchers inclined to challenge the government and provided the conditions for them to win concessions. It was not a recipe for either strong government or potential electoral success. Edith introduced the Second Reading of the National Insurance Bill in the House of Commons in April 1951. The Bill as it now stood provided ‘for reducing the payments out of moneys provided by Parliament into the National Insurance Fund; for increasing the rate of widowed mothers’ allowances . . . and of retirement pensions . . . of women over the age of sixty-five and men over the age of seventy; for increasing benefits . . . in respect of children’,32 together with provisions concerning paying contributions after pensionable age. Edith, the doctor who became a socialist after seeing appalling poverty in deprived areas of London, was clear about her own commitment to the Bill: ‘I have always believed that one of the truest measures of the greatness of a Government is the treatment of its old people and children. Fine words . . . mean nothing if we do not help those people to be dignified, serene and happy.’33 Having spent five eventful years at the Ministry of Food, Edith was gaining a strong record in government for providing people-centred services. Her capacity for hard work and attention to detail were as evident at the Ministry of National Insurance as they had been at Food. Edith moved the First Reading of her third and last bill as Minister of National Insurance on 25 July 1951. The Pneumoconiosis and Byssinosis Benefit Bill provided compensation for those completely disabled by these two conditions and their dependants, necessary because neither disease had been covered by the earlier Workmen’s Compensation Acts. Both were caused by breathing in dust. Pneumoconiosis, suffered disproportionately by coalminers, affected the lungs due to the inhalation of dust, a condition characterized by inflammation, coughing, and fibrosis. In her memoirs, Edith quoted the Medical Research Council: ‘Pneumoconiosis is in general a progressive disease but the rate of progression is variable . . . In some cases . . . the progression may be relatively rapid, but in the majority it is slow.’34 Miners could have the disease for many years, eventually ending up chronic invalids. Edith, due in part to Jeffrey’s south Wales connections, took a keen interest in this disease. Byssinosis was caused by prolonged inhalation of textile fibre dust. Although Edith was

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keen to include men (and potentially women) who had been partially disabled by these diseases in the bill, as the government minister she could not discover a way to overcome the administrative and technical difficulties which were of a medical nature. These workers therefore had to be excluded from the terms of the legislation. Only those who were deemed completely disabled were entitled to compensation. Edith’s Parliamentary Secretary was the former miner Bernard Taylor, the MP for Mansfield. Two other ex-miners, Tom Brown, MP for Ince, and Harold Finch, MP for Bedwelty, spoke in the debate on the bill. Brown, the only surviving member of the Committee of Inquiry set up in 1922 to investigate the incidence of dust disease, was able to make a valuable contribution, explaining the need for legislation to take account of miners who had shown pneumoconiosis symptoms prior to its introduction. Edith was also guided by conversations she had had with her father about dust-borne diseases, which he thought may have been linked to the polluted atmosphere of London. The same conclusion could, Edith decided, be applied to coalminers, a group of people she greatly respected, observing that, ‘ “Belly-aching” commonly indulged in by other workers seldom characterizes the miner; I assumed that if one spent many years in the presence of danger the knowledge that one had survived each day’s occupational hazards must instil an abiding cheerfulness.’35 The Pneumoconiosis and Byssinosis Benefit Bill had been read a second time before Clement Attlee called a general election for 25 October 1951. The resulting Conservative victory did not, however, mean the end of the bill, which became law on 7 December 1951 under the new Conservative administration. On arriving at the Ministry of National Insurance, Edith chose Mrs Dorothy Rees, MP for Barry, as her Parliamentary Private Secretary. Dorothy Rees was from Wales and therefore had first-hand knowledge of many of the issues facing the minister. While Edith appreciated Dorothy, whom she praised as conscientious and hard-working, the minister was also thankful that she had a reliable colleague who could relieve her of the day-to-day inquiries from Members in the lobbies. Mrs Rees unfortunately lost her seat in the 1951 general election, prompting Edith to comment, ‘I marvelled at our democratic system which could afford to dispense with the services of one of the most efficient Members of Parliament who had ever served in the House of

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Commons.’36 Edith’s view of civil servants in general was rather different. She was curious, to use her own word, that in the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance, where scientific knowledge was sometimes needed in assessing health and medical matters, she had never met an administrator with a science degree. It seemed to Edith, herself a scientist by virtue of being a medical doctor, that to introduce a man with a science qualification into the Civil Service was just not done. She concluded in her memoirs that ‘it would be conceding that a Civil Servant should relinquish his amateur status and possess some expertise which was opposed to all tradition and custom’.37 If scientific advice were required it had to be obtained from outside the ministry; a civil servant of the administrative grade must have an Arts degree, come from Oxford or Cambridge and belong to the male sex. Edith also tartly observed that the Civil Service hierarchy regard themselves as superior to any minister, especially as ministers came and went while civil servants went on for ever. True to form, during her short tenure at the Ministry of National Insurance Edith challenged such attitudes. When asked by the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, Sir Edward Bridges, if she would allow the transfer of Sir Henry Hancock, the Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of National Insurance, to another post, Edith took a strong line. Having asked Sir Henry if he wished to leave and being told that he was happy in his current post, Edith carried out Sir Henry’s wishes to intercede on his behalf, making it clear that he wanted to stay in his current post. Accordingly, Edith decided to refuse to agree to the suggestion that he should be transferred. She subsequently ruefully admitted that naively she thought that would be the end of the matter. Of course, it was not, and Sir Henry Hancock left the Ministry of National Insurance. Edith’s view of the behaviour of the Head of the Treasury speaks to the truth of the controversy: The fact that a woman had challenged the Secretary to the Treasury may well have clinched the matter. As women were not encouraged in the Civil Service I assumed that a woman Minister would not find much favour in the eyes of the Head of the Service. Prejudice is so widespread that a woman has to be far superior to her men colleagues of a similar grade to be considered for promotion . . .38

Edith had, of course, to deal with departmental business in the House of Commons. Her own direct and pithy style, developed while at the Ministry of

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Food, was still very much in evidence. In March 1950, Edith replied to Cyril Osborne, Conservative Member for Louth, by admonishing him for unfounded accusations: ‘There have been other occasions when the hon. Member for Louth (Mr Osborne) has raised matters on the Adjournment and, in his characteristic, impetuous manner has levelled wild and baseless charges which, after the Adjournment, he has regretted.’39 Dr Edith clashed with Conservative MPs Sir John Mellor Bt. and Ralph Assheton during June of the same year about the securities of the National Insurance (Reserve) Fund. When, during the debate on the securities in the House of Commons, it became clear to Dr Edith that Sir John Mellor had either not read the papers or did not understand them, she duly responded to the beleaguered baronet: With due respect, the right hon. Gentleman cannot teach me my job. I have read the Report of the Public Accounts Committee, in which I know the hon. Baronet takes a great interest. I understand the position perfectly well. The fact is that the hon. Baronet, I think, is a member of the Public Accounts Committee and he did not attend the meeting. In future, if he attends the meetings, he will not fall into these errors.40

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that she was an articulate and able woman, Edith attracted derision from a certain kind of long-standing Conservative Member. Sir John Mellor continued his assault on the National Insurance Funds throughout Edith’s time as the minister. On 25 October 1950, following one of Sir John’s lengthy interventions, Edith responded by stating that this particular debate was the last one to be held in the House of Lords Chamber, which had been requisitioned by the Commons after their own premises were bombed in 1941, the Lords having moved temporarily to Church House. As the last speaker in the debate that night, Edith waxed lyrical about the Commons’ return: ‘It falls to my lot tonight to be the last speaker at this Box. It is appropriate enough that it should be a woman who has the last word . . . I have no intention of allowing my last speech in this House to be marred by any acrimonious exchanges with the hon. Baronet, although he has tonight and in the past tended to provoke me . . . I want to make this last farewell . . . My one regret is that we are leaving this Despatch Box behind, this black, ugly Box of no intrinsic value. A Box which I have felt under my hand so often and which I have grown to love.41

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Closing the debate, the Speaker, Douglas Clifton Brown, said that as Speaker for almost the whole period since the Commons Chamber was destroyed, he had had a very happy nine years in the temporary home. While Minister of National Insurance, Edith became involved in the Middle East almost by chance, as she puts it in her memoirs.42 Edith went to Egypt in mid-1950 following the general election after which she was appointed Minister for National Insurance. Her visit had come about as a result of a weekend trip in January by the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, who had encouraged Egypt to work at becoming an economically prosperous Arab state. On his return, Bevin discussed the social conditions in Egypt with Edith, asking her to assist the Egyptian Minister of Social Affairs, Ahmed Hussein, who was due to visit London, to help his country establish a system of national insurance. Edith duly met Mr Hussein, a former Professor of Agriculture at Cairo University, at the Ministry of National Insurance and arranged for him to visit clinics, National Insurance offices, schools, hospitals and any other institutions he considered of special interest. Edith duly received an invitation to visit Egypt to open an insurance office designed to administer an insurance scheme for widows. The country was indeed in dire need of the improvements in living and social conditions that the Egyptian Government was attempting to introduce. In 1950, 75 per cent of the population was illiterate, an appalling state of affairs which the then Minister of Education, Taha Hussein, was trying to remedy by making schooling compulsory. Edith was quick to note that this applied only to boys; the girls were still to be kept at home on the land.43 Dr Edith herself, a female minister and a married woman with children, travelling without her husband but with two male civil servants, was the object of some awe and wonderment. Mr Hussein and his wife took a more enlightened view, welcoming a visit from a woman minister which they felt gave encouragement to the country’s tiny feminist movement in its struggle to emancipate Egyptian women.44 Edith, ever the medical doctor, took an interest in the diseases rife in the rural areas of Egypt, many of which were caused by people drinking and bathing in the polluted water found in the network of canals used for irrigation. Until only a short time before Edith’s visit, 80 per cent of Egypt’s population suffered from bilharziasis, caused by a parasite which infested the canals. Worse than bilharziasis was ancylostomiasis, a serious condition caused by a

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parasite living in the soil. Malaria still occurred in the rice fields of the Nile Delta while eye conditions such as trachoma, which causes blindness, were everywhere. The people also suffered nutritional diseases such as pellagra due to a diet deficient in important minerals and vitamins. Not before time, the Egyptian Government was making an effort to establish a way of life in keeping with the times. The Liberation Province was one such project, characterized by sanitary conveniences and specially chosen inhabitants, with families comprising no more than three children and polygamy and divorce forbidden.45 It was a brave venture, but conditions did not improve until the building of the Aswan Dam. During her visit, Edith met King Farouk, a notorious royal playboy. She was especially taken aback that at no time did he ask for her views on the pressing social problems of the country or indicate that he was concerned about the poverty and misery suffered by so many of his people. Edith came to the conclusion that Farouk was a rather stupid man.46 The Egyptian royal family lived in a great splendour and the king had an array of bodyguards and secret agents. It was a third-world country still living in the Middle Ages. The only surprise was that the revolution which took place in 1952 and the consequent abolition of the monarchy the following year had not happened earlier. The visit to Egypt made a huge impression on Edith, especially in relation to the poverty and ill health of most of the Egyptian people she had seen, especially when compared to the conspicuous extravagance indulged in by the King. The visit cemented her view that Egypt deserved much better. Six years later during the Suez crisis, she actively campaigned against the Conservative Government’s use of force against Egypt.

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The Labour Government’s slender majority of five became increasingly unsustainable during 1951. Accordingly, in an attempt to improve matters, Prime Minister Clement Attlee went to the country on 23 October 1951. Dr Edith again contested Fulham West where she fought a two-horse race. Her opponent this time, however, was not a Conservative but the former Labour MP William Brown who ran as an independent candidate. Dr Edith hung on, but her result was perilously close. Although she gained a small, 0.6 per cent, increase in her vote, Edith saw her majority cut to a mere 2,583. Labour nationally fared even worse. The Conservatives won a majority of seventeen in the House of Commons, and Winston Churchill became Prime Minister for a second time at the age of seventy-six. Edith was fifty years of age. She was perhaps old enough to feel that, now Labour was in Opposition, the best years were possibly over. On a personal level, since both Michael and Shirley were grown up, her relationship with her children was also changing. Had Labour won the 1951 general election, Edith’s life may have continued much as before, holding ministerial office and relishing her participation in politics. Instead, she held the Shadow Health portfolio and served on Labour’s National Executive Committee for much of the 1950s. Yet it was not the same as ministerial office, and Dr Edith was perhaps not as contented with her lot during this period as she had been when Labour were in power. During the 1950s, Edith’s personality traits, already in evidence, became more prominent. Since entering politics with her election to Middlesex County Council in 1934, Edith had over the years developed an increasingly austere public persona in order that she as a woman politician in a virtually all-male world would be taken seriously. That Edith was married with two children before becoming a Member of Parliament added to the superwoman image. 149

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On the other hand, following her time at the Ministry of Food, she was seen in some quarters as bossy and hectoring, like an overbearing headmistress. Her public perception was probably not helped by Dr Edith’s frequent use of medical terms in her speeches and conversation, noted by, amongst many others, Barbara Hosking, Labour Party Assistant Information Officer from 1952 to 1955.1 Having been appointed the first married woman government minister in 1951, Dr Edith seemed to have done it all, including becoming a household name through newspaper and radio appearances both during the Second World War and then as Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Food and latterly as Minister of National Insurance. It had been a long, tough road. Edith never quite made it into the Cabinet, but she had served as a minister of Cabinet rank, enjoyed a long and companionable marriage and brought up two high-flying children, one of whom (Shirley) followed her into medicine and politics while her son Michael became a barrister. Whatever she might have felt about Opposition, Edith made the most of her new circumstances and, in November 1951, she won a place in the Shadow Cabinet. Known at the time as the Parliamentary Committee, it was elected by all members of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and the Party leader then allocated portfolios. Edith was given Health. Aneurin Bevan, who had had been transferred from Health to be Minister of Labour and National Service in April 1951 did not stand for the Parliamentary Committee at this time. Her new portfolio must have pleased Edith since she now achieved in Opposition what had been denied her in government. Edith determined to make the best of Opposition and her new position. She continued to dress to impress, and the newspapers still felt able to comment on the appearance of women MPs in a way they would never have dreamt of for men. The Evening Standard inquired whether Edith intended to show off the green feather-trimmed hat she had worn to a reception at the Libyan Embassy on a visit to Ascot.2 The satirical magazine Punch was less charitable about Edith herself and did not feel the need to confine itself to her sartorial choices. On one occasion it devoted most of a page to ‘The Analects of Edith’ following her public praise of Confucian philosophy.3 Meanwhile, certain newspapers would not let go of the old chestnut about Edith’s use of Summerskill not Samuel.4 Edith inevitably suffered far more than her male counterparts from such personal intrusion by

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virtue of being one of the very few women at the top. Edith, a successful professional climbing the ladder in public life, often came face to face with misogyny. Assertive women were, and still are, regarded as presumptuous, aggressive and often viewed as lacking in intelligence. The same words and conduct coming from a man would be seen very differently. Edith perhaps also attracted attention because she championed the cause of women. Only a few months after the 1951 election, tragedy struck, unleashing a torrent of grief across the nation and the Commonwealth. King George VI, who came to the throne in 1936 on the abdication of his brother Edward VIII, died on 6 February 1952 at the shockingly young age of fifty-six. He was succeeded by his elder daughter, the twenty-five-year-old princess who now became Queen Elizabeth II. Following the royal funeral on 15 February, the wreaths and floral tributes laid at Windsor were seen by over 250,000 people from all over the country. Parliament, of course, paid its own respects. On 19 February a delegation of MPs visited Buckingham Palace to wait on Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and convey the messages of condolence and assurances of affection which had been passed by resolution of the House of Commons. Dr Edith Summerskill had the honour of being deputed by the House of Commons for this duty along with seven other MPs. The delegation was led by Sir Walter Elliott, and the other MPs were Mr Ralph Assheton, Viscountess Davidson, Mr Clement Davies, Miss Florence Horsburgh, Mr G. H. Oliver and Mr Arthur Woodburn.5 Edith, in Opposition, albeit in the Shadow Cabinet, now had more time at her disposal. It is to her credit that, having been a high-profile MP and government minister, she now returned to her first interest, women, their treatment in marriage, their lives and their position in society. Two days before the general election, Edith had written in the Star, a London newspaper, on the ‘women’s vote’.6 Although Labour lost the election, thanks to Edith the party had at least made a small effort to appeal to women. Women in politics was one of Edith’s perennial themes; in February 1950 she published an article in Co-operative News entitled ‘Do women get a fair share in politics?’7 This article was, in fact, part of a wider ‘Women for Westminster’ campaign which Dr Edith helped launch to increase the representation of women in Parliament and on public bodies. Showing a rare acceptance of the idea that women voters had special concerns distinct from those of men, the Daily Herald published

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an article by Dr Edith on 13 March 1952 on the new Conservative Government’s first budget and what it would mean for women. Improved rights for women in marriage had always been one of Edith’s major interests, and now, freed from ministerial office, she expanded her campaigning on this subject. In March 1952 she had a short article in the Daily Herald on husbands being cruel to wives, saying, ‘I do not suggest that meanness and selfishness are qualities which reside only in the male. But in the great majority of homes the man is the wage-earner and controls the purse strings and, therefore, it is he who has the power to allot what he thinks for housekeeping expenses.’8 Although Edith’s contributions during her years in Opposition in the early 1950s were mainly about health, her Shadow Cabinet responsibility, her feminism remained as strong as ever, and she spoke in House of Commons debates on women where possible. On 24 April 1952, Edith made a strong intervention on the provision of nurseries for young children. Almost all of those set up during the Second World War to allow women to contribute to the war effort had been closed down with indecent haste. As one of the leading advocates for nurseries, Edith fought hard to maintain the provision: ‘There is a curious idea prevailing that the day nurseries are used by . . . women who have well paid jobs . . . there is overwhelming evidence that day nurseries are used by mothers with illegitimate children, by women whose husbands have left them, by women whose husbands are disabled . . .’9 The following month she spoke about the disparity between the rates of National Insurance and National Assistance, using a family with three children as an example.10 She also made her mark in a fractious debate in May 1952 in support of a motion for equal pay in the public services, which called ‘upon Her Majesty’s Government to announce an early and definitive date by which the application of equal pay for equal work for women in the Civil Service, the teaching profession, local government and other public services will begin’.11 It was eventually passed, though as a motion it was not binding on the government. Having won the ballot of MPs at the end of 1952 to bring forward a Private Member’s Bill, Edith introduced the Women’s Disabilities Bill, the culmination of many years campaigning by Edith and the Married Women’s Association. The bill sought to improve matters for women who were separated from their husband by court order or divorce. As the law then stood, although a separated

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woman could legally obtain a separation allowance, the payment did not always reach her. This bill intended to help her get the money the court had ordered by allowing it to be deducted from the man’s pay at source. The bill also dealt with the ownership of the joint property of a husband and wife if they decided to separate either by divorce or judicial separation. At the time, apart from property owned by the wife before marriage, everything else belonged to her husband. Anything the wife acquired during the marriage was by the husband’s grace and favour, and even her own earnings were deemed to belong to her husband. The result of this state of affairs was that on divorce or separation, many women faced economic destitution. The bill also gave the court the power in the case of divorce or judicial separation to divide any joint savings and any household goods bought during the marriage equally between the husband and the wife. Importantly, the proposed legislation would also cover the wife who lived in the same house as her husband where the husband wilfully refused to pay maintenance for his wife and children. As Private Member’s Bills were not generally supported by the government, Dr Edith’s attempt to bring about these legislative changes was unsuccessful. Parliamentary procedure rarely allowed Private Member’s Bills to become law since adequate time was only allowed if the government supported the measure, which they did not in this case. Edith’s bill, facing huge opposition from lawyer MPs and others, was talked out. She had, however, raised awareness, an important achievement in the early 1950s when attitudes to women and marriage were beginning to change and the new social realities needed to be recognized. One of the functions of the House of Commons has always been to reflect the major issues of the day and allow MPs to raise matters of concern. Edith was one of the first MPs to express alarm about nuclear testing, particularly the way in which contamination of the atmosphere could be detrimental to health, including the genetic effects of nuclear explosions. In March 1955 she moved a motion ‘That this House urges upon the Government the need to give further consideration to the long-term and remote effects of continuing nuclear explosions . . . and expresses its fears as to the dangers facing humanity as a result of continuing radioactive contamination of the world’s atmosphere.’ It was Edith’s motion and she spared no-one’s blushes: [W]ar has been a male pastime since the dawn of time and women, against their strongest instinct – that of procreation – have always been drawn into

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the undertow . . . I have no intention of making sensational statements about the genetic effects of experiments with the hydrogen bomb. I simply want to convince the House and the Government that there is a prima facie case for an examination of the whole problem.

Edith continued by drawing attention to the medical issues, The radiostrontiums from hydrogen explosions can fall out at great distances and later be eaten, through being in vegetables, and so on, by humans and grazing animals . . . the human foetus is highly sensitive to radiation . . . [and] may be destroyed through milk obtained from cattle which have grazed on infected grass.

Dr Edith also talked about the fatal diseases which could follow a thermonuclear explosion and the risk of genetic mutation. Ultimately the effect of radiation was cumulative and not confined to one geographical area.12 Edith’s speech was an epic tour de force, raising new scientific discoveries in a rational and well-argued fashion. A detailed debate followed, with the Minister of Health, Iain Macleod, unfortunately ignoring Edith’s words, claiming instead that the amount of radiation in Britain was not worth worrying about. Despite the force of Edith’s case, the government inevitably won the vote. Edith’s work shadowing Health was important since the Conservative Government did not always defend the National Health Service. When in March 1952 the Conservatives introduced a measure to extend and recover certain charges for the National Health Service which had been put in place by the previous Labour Government, Edith opposed the increases. Referring to the proposals on dental care, she commented forcefully, ‘These charges, quite major changes in the dental charges, have been made today and I think that there is some evidence that this Bill was hastily conceived by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and thrust upon a bewildered Minister of Health . . .’13 The following year, Dr Edith made a detailed contribution on a motion concerning hospital beds for the chronic and aged sick, stating amongst much else, ‘It is unfortunate that many hospitals, including teaching hospitals, are reluctant to allocate a fair proportion of beds to the aged sick . . . the medical student, without training in the care and treatment of this type of patient, is not adequately equipped to enter medical practice.’14 During the passage of the

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Television Bill which allowed for the establishment of commercial television, in 1954, Edith took the opportunity to ask what would happen to an unscrupulous advertiser trying to sell ‘some worthless preparation guaranteed to cure certain complaints’.15 In addition to several speeches on food hygiene, Edith returned to her lifelong concern about clean milk, moving, in a debate on the provisions relating to milk, that ‘The Ministers may make regulations for controlling the use of milk churns, milk bottles and milk crates . . . and for requiring that any person who obtains permission or control of such articles to take reasonable care of them.’16 As a Shadow Minister, Dr Edith during the early 1950s had to deal with many other topics, including some which had been and still were important to her as a feminist doctor – maternity beds, analgesia in childbirth and overprescribing by doctors. The Conservative Government was compelled against its own instincts to deal with major issues emerging during the 1950s. One was air pollution, which moved up the official agenda following the great smog of 1952. Smog had become a major scourge by the mid-1950s, and action against pollution was urgently needed. The Clean Air Bill had its Second Reading in November 1955. Dr Edith was, as ever, forthright in her contribution to the debate and drew attention to a particularly serious matter in Clause 1 (3): ‘This Clause prohibits dark smoke from chimneys, but then gives any factory owner the chance to plead successfully that the fuel used was unsuitable. That makes nonsense of the Bill . . . The lowest grade of fuel can be used provided the equipment is efficient.’17 Life in the House of Commons was not, however, all hard slog. One of the lighter parliamentary episodes at this time which touched on Edith involved a newly elected woman MP, Patricia Ford, who had been returned unopposed in early 1953 as an Ulster Unionist Party MP for her late father’s constituency of North Down. Perhaps reflecting her inexperience and maybe a desire to make a name for herself, Mrs Ford decided to write an article for the Sunday Express in April 1953, soon after her arrival in Westminster, headlined ‘What a Baptism’.18 Ford told of a room upstairs in the House of Commons with a couple of beds. According to her, the old stagers got there first, and one night she found both Dr Edith Summerskill and Mrs Bessie Braddock stretched out on them snoring. Bessie Braddock was quick to take this up in the Chamber, stating that Ford’s article was not correct and that she, Bessie Braddock, had

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never entered the room in question and had never slept alongside her Right Hon. Friend the Member for Fulham West. Braddock was obviously upset by the ridicule she received from some of the media especially in relation to her size – heavily built was the euphemism generally used. During the debate on Bessie Braddock’s point of order, Patricia Ford did apologize. The Speaker, William Morrison, wound up by saying, ‘I shall consider the matter further, but I say now that it has never been considered proper Parliamentary comment to disclose what happens in our own private apartments.’19 On 8 March of the following year, 1954, Patricia Ford joined Edith, Barbara Castle and Irene Ward in presenting an 80,000-signature petition to Parliament demanding equal pay for women in the public sector. The petition had been organized by the Equal Pay Campaign Committee (EPCC) and was supported by Barbara Castle even though many in the Labour Party distrusted the committee since it was led by Conservative women MPs. The Labour leadership was at best equivocal on equal pay at this time. In 1951 the Labour Chancellor Hugh Gaitskell claimed that increased family allowances would have to accompany any step toward equal pay20 on the basis that he believed equal pay would push up prices. Gaitskell created doubt that the Labour Government even supported the very idea. Although Edith did not participate in the EPCC, possibly because as a member of the Shadow Cabinet and the Labour Party NEC she felt unable to stray too far from the party line, she was very much in evidence at the presentation of the petition. Edith along with the three other presenters arrived at Westminster in horse-drawn carriages decorated in rosettes and streamers in suffragette green and white. The petition was heard in the House of Commons the following day. However, the matter was not yet settled. Following the assertion by the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer R. A. Butler on 6 April that a gradual solution to this problem would prove to be the right one, Edith addressed a meeting of over 500 women two days later. Dr Edith in fighting mode angrily referred to an old antisuffrage argument that women were not capable of fighting on the front line, asking how the government could maintain ‘this prejudice against women when the H-bomb heralds an era when war will no longer be a man’s affair’.21 As a member of the Labour Party National Executive Committee, Edith had the task, along with her NEC colleagues, of replying to one of the debates at the party’s annual conference. At this time, speeches such as these were generally

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quiet affairs, but at Margate in 1953 Edith gained some press coverage when she said that the NEC had decided that a future Labour Government would immediately raise National Insurance benefits, mainly old age pensions, at a cost to the Exchequer of about £140 million. ‘They [the National Executive Committee] realised that they would be committing our future Chancellor of the Exchequer to a very big expenditure of money . . . but nevertheless the National Executive was prepared to make this a priority.’22 The following month, some Labour MPs went on the offensive in Parliament, waging a fight against expensive food brought about by the end of rationing. Edith asked Mr Osbert Peake, the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance, at what stage he would act to avert great hardship.23 The debate ended with Peake predictably defending the Conservative Government. Britain and the wider world changed profoundly during years following the Second World War. The international order would never be the same again. For a short time, Edith had a role in politics outside the United Kingdom when she was appointed by the British Government in 1953 as one of the UK’s representatives to the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe. Edith attended her first meeting at its headquarters in Strasbourg on 7 May. She was therefore unable to attend the debate on her Women’s Disabilities Bill held at the same time in Westminster. The Council of Europe, founded in May 1949 to uphold human rights, democracy and the rule of law in Europe, was made up of twelve states: Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom plus Greece and Turkey. Dr Edith, it appears, made a strong contribution to the Council. In an article entitled ‘Women at Strasbourg’ for the European and Atlantic Digest, the author Emma Dangerfield reported, ‘But recently the cool brain of Dr Summerskill has been brought to bear on the proceedings of the Assembly, and should she have time and inclination to concentrate more on European problems it may well be that she will become one of the outstanding feminine personalities at Strasbourg.’24 Unfortunately, this was not to be. Edith was not reappointed the following year due to the Labour Party’s ambivalence towards the Council of Europe. She ceased to be a member of the Assembly on 20 May 1954. Edith’s next role was as Deputy Chairman ([sic] of the Labour Party for the year 1953–4, a position appointed annually by ‘buggins’ turn’, with the longest

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serving member of the Party’s National Executive Committee taking up the position. The Deputy Chairman post would, unless something catastrophic happened, lead to the incumbent becoming Party Chairman the following year, again for one year. Sure enough, Dr Edith duly became Labour Party Chairman from October 1954 to October 1955. The Labour Party Chairman had the important job of chairing the party’s annual conference, the National Executive Committee and certain NEC subcommittees. By the time she became Deputy Chairman, Dr Edith had served a lengthy apprenticeship, having been first elected to the Women’s Section of the NEC in 1944. She served on both the NEC and the Shadow Cabinet, the twin organs of Labour Party governance and policymaking, for six years, albeit with a break of one year from the Shadow Cabinet when she was not re-elected. She eventually came off both committees in the late 1950s, marking the end of an era of involvement in Labour Party politics at the highest level. On both the NEC and the Shadow Cabinet, Dr Edith was a leadership loyalist. She always supported Clement Attlee and later Hugh Gaitskell, causing some left-wing MPs and NEC members to view her as on the right wing of the Labour Party. The truth was that Edith was impossible to categorize. As both an NEC and Shadow Cabinet member, Edith worked closely with the staff at Transport House, Labour’s headquarters in Smith Square near the Houses of Parliament, during the 1950s. Barbara Hosking, Labour Party Assistant Information Officer between 1952 and 1955 and the Party’s Broadcasting Officer from 1965 to 1977, remembers Dr Edith as resolutely middle class, and because of this staff at Transport House deferred to her.25 While the staff may have deferred to her, predictably but quite unforgivably, Edith had to put up with sustained personal attacks while on the NEC from some of the more misogynist male members. Edith, an assertive professional woman, endured such treatment during the whole of her time in politics, being attacked for words which would have been greeted with quite a different attitude had they come from a man. Ian Mikardo MP, an NEC member in the early 1950s and widely regarded as a communist fellow-traveller, opposed Edith with great gusto, making disparaging personal comments. He called the women members of the NEC ‘Amazons’ and Dr Edith in particular ‘Medusa the Gorgon’.26 More damaging was the comment made by Hugh Gaitskell. Though he would have been more in tune with Dr Edith’s political outlook

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than Mikardo, in his diaries he claimed that Edith was emotional, did not listen and was not really intelligent.27 Although not published until 1983, the views expressed in Gaitskell’s diaries must have been apparent at the time on both the NEC and in the Parliamentary Labour Party. Richard Crossman, another male diarist who would serve in Harold Wilson’s Cabinet, demonstrated an even higher level of anti-woman spite. The fact that he was on the left of the party and therefore on the opposite side to Edith when it came to supporting the Labour Party leadership does not excuse his remarks. In his diary entry for November 1957, Crossman wrote, ‘Jim Griffiths [another NEC member] is gaga and so is Edith Summerskill.’28 This was only one of a number of attacks on Dr Edith by Crossman. On 14 November 1958, discussing the result of the shadow Cabinet elections in which he was not successful, Crossman railed, ‘And what idiocy that George Brown, who is at least capable and effective at the Despatch Box, has been replaced by poor old, effete numbskull Edith Summerskill as a result of a sympathy vote for her being chucked off the NEC.’29 Crossman is correct in stating that Dr Edith had not been re-elected to the National Executive Committee at the Labour Party Conference that year. Whether her election to the Parliamentary Committee was due to a sympathy vote is another matter, especially in view of the fact that that only Labour Members of Parliament voted in that particular election. Although Crossman’s diaries were not published until 1981, these entries provide an indication of what Edith was up against. The Labour Party was consumed throughout the 1950s by damaging and seemingly interminable internecine warfare. The origins of the trouble went back to 22 March 1951 when Labour was still in government and Edith was Minister of National Insurance. Hugh Gaitskell, who had become Chancellor of the Exchequer when Stafford Cripps resigned in October 1950, had to produce a budget in particularly difficult circumstances, given that Britain was becoming increasingly overstretched with military spending commitments demanded by the United States. America was by this time heavily involved in the conflict in Korea and ever more afraid of a third world war. The USA sought to mitigate its own problems by making greater demands of its chief ally, the United Kingdom. Hugh Gaitskell, anxious to comply with the demands of the United States, sought to recoup money from the National Health Service by reducing the hospital estimates by £10 million and introducing charges for prescriptions, spectacles

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and false teeth. The proposal split the Cabinet, with Aneurin Bevan, MP for the Welsh mining constituency of Ebbw Vale, who had been appointed Minister of Labour in 1951 after founding the NHS as Minister of Health, leading the charge against Gaitskell. Bevan’s actions at this time marked the beginning of the battle for the soul of the Labour Party, which continued for the best part of a decade. Edith, who was present at the Cabinet meeting which considered Gaitskell’s plans and could, as a doctor, claim some interest and expertise in the issue, said that, while she had always opposed prescription charges, she had less of a problem with charging for teeth and spectacles.30 Dr Edith, a prominent member of the Labour Party NEC, was perhaps hoping to steer the Cabinet towards a middle way. Compromise, however, proved impossible. On 24 April 1951, Aneurin Bevan, Harold Wilson, the young President of the Board of Trade, and the left-wing Minister of Supply John Freeman resigned from the government. Bevan’s resignation speech was significant in that it was the first public marker of Labour division in the post-war era. Labour’s defeat in the October 1951 general election, which ushered in thirteen years of Opposition, set the stage for a lengthy battle between Aneurin Bevan and the party leadership. Edith found herself in the middle of the hostilities. She always supported the party leader, though unusually for Edith, she refrained from making public statements. Despite Bevan’s desire to be leader of the Labour Party, the struggle was as much about ideology as power, though it was later to turn into a personality contest as well, with the wouldbe-leader, Bevan, against the actual one, Gaitskell. As Labour Party Deputy Chairman in 1953–4 and Chairman in 1954–5, Edith always stayed firmly in the Party leader’s camp. As one of the leading figures in the party, Edith had a pivotal role to play, and remained unwaveringly loyal to Attlee then Gaitskell throughout the 1950s. In her biography, Barbara Castle, a left-wing player and supporter of Aneurin Bevan, called Edith ‘one of our bitterest critics on the National Executive’.31 According to her son Michael, Edith rarely mentioned her travails with Bevan and his supporters, nicknamed the Bevanites, outside the closed confines of the National Executive Committee and private meetings in the House of Commons. Since a great deal of the antagonism was played out in the press, Edith’s reluctance to indulge in offensive comments in public may account for the fact that she has received little recognition for the part she

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played. The first salvo following the general election was fired on 2 March 1952 when fifty-seven Labour MPs defied the whip to vote against the defence estimates. The official line had been to accept the estimates since they were largely based on the budget drawn up by Gaitskell in 1951. Labour would then express no confidence in the government carrying them out. The row over the defence estimates had at its core the relationship between Britain and the United States. The same was true of the two other major issues which came to the fore during 1954, namely American policy in South-East Asia, including the South East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) Treaty, together with the difficult question of German rearmament. Attlee and the majority in the shadow Cabinet who were loyal to the leader supported the United States while the left-wing minority, siding with Aneurin Bevan, wanted Britain to be as independent as possible from the USA and spend far less on defence. When Bevan gained a place in the Shadow Cabinet at the end of 1953, it was initially a source of relief, at least among some MPs, since they thought Bevan might now be back in the fold. Yet it was not to be. On 13 April 1954 in the House of Commons, Bevan undermined Attlee’s stance on South-East Asia, in particular the party leader’s attempt to avoid condemning the American Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. Bevan resigned from the Shadow Cabinet the next day. The other matter, German rearmament, was parked when the French National Assembly voted to postpone further action. Although Bevan and his followers were outnumbered in the Parliamentary Labour Party, accounting for only about one fifth of the total, as well as in the Shadow Cabinet and the National Executive Committee, Bevan had huge support among the Labour grassroots. However, lacking any input into policy and with no executive powers, ordinary party members, even when acting en masse at the annual Labour Party Conference, were not influential at this time. Internal Labour tensions continued during 1954, and there was a battle for the position of Party Treasurer at the Labour Conference held in Scarborough from 27 September to 1 October. The post was important since in theory it was elected by the whole Labour movement and the contest was a stark left–right choice: Aneurin Bevan against Hugh Gaitskell. Gaitskell won, dealing another blow to Bevan’s leadership hopes. Edith, always the loyalist and well embedded in the Labour Party establishment, supported Gaitskell, even though the two did not get on well on a personal level.

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Luckily for Edith there was more to life than party strife. In August 1954 the Chinese Government invited the Labour Party National Executive Committee to visit their country. According to Edith in her memoirs, the NEC had waited hopefully for this invitation because they knew the whole Labour movement was anxious for them to make a goodwill visit to East Asia in an attempt to establish a more cordial relationship. Edith, Deputy Party Chairman at this time, was chosen to represent the party along with party leader Clement Attlee, Aneurin Bevan and Labour Party Chairman Wilfrid Burke plus Morgan Phillips the party’s general secretary. Before setting off on their travels, the Labour Party delegation had received an invitation from the Prime Minister of the Soviet Union, Georgy Malenkov, to break the journey to China in Moscow and be guests of the Soviet Government for a few days. This visit to the two most powerful Communist countries aroused considerable controversy. The Cold War was by now a feature of international relations; the three-year Korean War had only just ended, and McCarthyism was still a fact of life in the United States. While many of Labour’s leading politicians had no illusions about the political nature of the Moscow regime, Edith herself still believed that a socialist economic system, if it could be installed in a manner compatible with freedom, was desirable.32 The international situation was, of course, the major concern of those hostile to or merely uncomfortable with the visit. There was, however, another concern, namely that the Chinese and Soviet invitations had been made to the Opposition political party rather than to the British Government. This upset diplomatic protocol in that such an invitation should have been government to government not government to the Opposition party. There was the additional matter that the Labour Party was socialist and thus perceived in some quarters as more tolerant of communism than the Conservatives. In the Star newspaper on 9 August Clement Attlee, in response to questioning on the matter, was quoted as saying he did not think the Chinese would use the tour for propaganda purposes. On being asked by an American journalist while at London airport waiting for the aeroplane whether there was any feeling that this trip represented an increase in British Labour friendship with China and a lessening of it with the United States, Attlee replied, ‘Our friendship holds with the United States. We are in favour of world peace and the more contacts we can make the better.’33 As news of the visit spread, the Social Democrat Swedish Prime Minister invited Clement Attlee, Dr Edith and their colleagues to spend their first night

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away in Stockholm and attend a dinner on 9 August 1954 as guests of the Swedish Government and the Swedish Social Democratic Party, Labour’s sister party. The evening went well, despite Aneurin Bevan complaining about the singer engaged to provide the entertainment. The next stop was Moscow via Finland. According to Edith, ‘At Helsinki airport we found a shining sage green plane emblazoned with a red star awaiting us. The interior of the plane had been especially equipped with two divans upholstered in brown poplin, a plum coloured carpet and brown table covers all trimmed with fringe to match the carpet.’34 No expense had been spared. The Labour delegation’s arrival in Moscow was equally welcoming. A young woman with two small children married to a civil servant had been deputed to look after Edith during the visit. The Russian told Edith that a nurse provided to help with her children and household duties would arrive at her home at 8.30 am and leave at 6.00 pm. Edith commented in her memoirs, ‘She [the young Russian woman] did not guess how many professional women with children in Britain would envy her that precious domestic help.’35 Whether or not Edith was being deliberately naive is open to interpretation. What is certain was that the young woman in question received such help because she was the wife of a civil servant and the Communist Party looked after its officials. Other families were unlikely to have been so lucky. The Soviet leadership pushed the boat out for their Labour visitors. The British delegation was invited to dinner on the first evening by Prime Minister Malenkov at the former house of Maxim Gorky in beautiful countryside twenty or so miles outside Moscow. It was a grand affair, obviously important to the Soviets as all the inner circle were there including Mr Malenkov, Mr Molotov, the Foreign Secretary, and his deputy Mr Vishensky, with Mr Mikoyan, the Trade Minister plus the Secretary of the Party, Mr Khrushchev, and Mr Shvemik, the Chairman of the Soviet Trade Unions together with war hero Madame Popova. The British visitors were accompanied by the Ambassador Sir William Hayter. Edith was not surprised to see only one woman on the Soviet side since a lack of women in high positions was the norm across the world. Despite lamenting that she had not brought glamorous enough clothes, Edith immediately joined in the spirit of the event, hitting it off with Prime Minister Malenkov. ‘I was surprised to find Mr Malenkov much shorter and plumper than I had expected, yet his eyes were humorous and it

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was clear that he was determined to extend to us a very friendly welcome.’36 Malenkov did not disappoint. He led Edith into the garden and picked her a bouquet of red and white phlox.37 Elements of the British press, always keen to show politicians, especially Labour women, in the worst possible light, overinterpreted this gesture. The Daily Sketch called Edith ‘the naïve doctor’ and ridiculed her response to press questioning on the flower gift, ‘Why shouldn’t he pick me flowers?’ The Sketch’s snide rejoinder – ‘We could tell her, so could the Americans’38 – was perhaps to be expected from the only national newspaper to oppose outright the Labour visit to the Soviet Union and China. Ever the doctor, the next day Edith managed to squeeze in a visit to a Maternity Clinic and Hospital with the Chief Medical Officer of Health for Moscow. The treatment of women in childbirth had, according to Dr Edith, changed little since her last journey to the Soviet Union in 1931. Specifically, the women concerned were given ‘suggestion’ treatment, in that they were told and were expected to believe that there would be little if no pain, and denied anaesthetics. Edith, of course, made her displeasure known to the (female) Chief Medical Officer. That evening, the British Embassy hosted a return dinner for the Soviet leaders. This time Mr Malenkov had a long talk with Edith about feminism which he purported to support and declared himself a champion of women. Having learned that 51 per cent of students at Moscow University were women, Dr Edith asked Malenkov if he approved. Malenkov replied, ‘Women have been oppressed for too long. It is no good trying to establish equality in the State without helping women in the first place.’39 During the evening, Edith proposed a toast to Soviet women. She also claimed later in the year at a rally in Scarborough held during the Labour Party annual conference that, as prospective Chairman of the Labour Party, she had invited Mr Malenkov to London. Malenkov had apparently replied with a twinkle in his eye, ‘If I agree, would you promise me a visa?’40 On one level, the visit had been successful. Socially the two sides got on well, the dinners were both splendid and joyful, and even raucous in parts thanks to the free-flowing vodka. Yet there was an uncomfortable feeling on the British side. According to the Manchester Guardian correspondent G. S. Gale, ulterior motives were suspected. The general analysis of the Western Embassies appears to be this: the Soviet Union, by its friendliness and the duration of its hospitality, has tried to create a breach between the Labour and Conservative parties. It has been Sir

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Winston Churchill whom all had wanted Malenkov to see, and it has been Mr Attlee who has seen him . . . It can safely be assumed that American opinion . . . views the whole business with decided coolness, and Mr Hector McNeil (a Labour MP and former Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs who objected to the visit) has voiced American sentiments far better than Mr Attlee has done . . . The Russians have gained from the visit more than [the] Labour delegation, Britain and the West have done . . . nothing of any consequence was talked about.41

The British Labour visitors left Moscow for China on Thursday, 12 August 1954. Having greatly enjoyed Moscow, Edith was sad to leave: ‘Our stay in the Soviet Union seemed all too short, but as the object of our journey was to visit China we could not delay longer.’42 Ever eager to impress, the Soviets had provided an aeroplane and staff to carry the delegation to Peking. They were due to stay there for three weeks and then visit Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Rangoon and Beirut. Despite its length, the China visit proved less noteworthy than that to the Soviet Union, possibly due to its greater distance from Britain and its lesser political significance. Nevertheless, Aneurin Bevan did get a waspish mention in the Daily Sketch when, on arriving in Stockholm on the way to the Soviet Union and being met by the Chinese Charge d’Affaires, it was Bevan rather than Clement Attlee who was singled out by the Chinese government official for the delegation welcome delivered through an interpreter.43 The journey from Moscow to Peking was arduous, involving five stops en route. This did not, however, put off some British journalists who chartered an aeroplane to follow the Labour delegation. Edith tells how one hot afternoon when she was relaxing in a bathing pool in central China, a voice she did not recognize said ‘How do you do,’ to which Edith replied, ‘You speak English very well.’ The voice continued, according to Edith, with some asperity, ‘I ought to. I’m The Times correspondent. This is the first time I have caught up with you.’44 According to Edith, the Chinese Prime Minister Chou En-Lai (Zhou Enlai) was anxious to have her opinion on the new marriage law introduced into the People’s Republic of China. The law gave women the same right as their husbands to divorce, with Conciliation Courts being established to hear both sides. In addition, child marriage was prohibited. Edith paid the inevitable visit to the Ministry of Health which was run by a woman. She also travelled to

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many areas of China in addition to Peking, including Mukden, Anshan, Tangshan, Shanghai, Hangchow and Canton. Dr Edith was especially taken with the number of babies to be seen everywhere; the average family had five children, and she expressed her concern about the pressures of a rapidly increasing population on the food supply. This led, inevitably, to Edith advocating that family planning should be encouraged. Unlike other policy areas where she claimed that the Chinese were open to discussion, on this matter ‘the country seemed to be united in their opposition. The reply was without exception “Mother China needs more children.” ’45 The delegation eventually travelled on a private train supplied by the Chinese Government from China to Hong Kong where Clement Attlee left them to honour a longstanding invitation to visit Australia and New Zealand. After a short stay during which Edith and Aneurin Bevan enjoyed the hospitality at Government House, the Labour visitors moved on to Japan. Edith told a touching tale of her predicament at their first Japanese luncheon when she was expected to sit on a cushion with her legs under a low table. Being tall and wearing a skirt, Edith worried about exposing her underwear. Aneurin Bevan, no less, agreed to stand in front of her when she got up to avoid unwanted embarrassment. Edith’s last engagement in Japan was, improbably, a visit to a brothel, an apparently well-run institution paying taxes to the government. Although attitudes in Japan towards prostitution were beginning to change by this time, Edith reported that ‘the attractions of prostitution in Japan did not differ fundamentally from those of other countries; the difference lay in the facilities offered in Japan . . . The Japanese show a crude realism in accepting prostitution as fact, and a strict commercial sense . . .’46 Bangkok, Singapore and Burma followed Japan. The delegation spent a few days in Rangoon, talking to government representatives, and on their departure, in honour of Edith’s praise for the elegance of the Burmese women, the Prime Minister presented Edith with a length of green hand-woven silk cut for a longyi and a silver parasol. A short stop at Calcutta was next on the agenda followed by Beirut, the final destination. It had been a very long and comprehensive trip. The Labour Party delegation arrived back in London on 14 September 1954. Edith clearly enjoyed the travel and soon appeared to suffer from itchy feet. Just after Christmas 1954 she was on her travels again, this time for a threeweek visit to Israel and Jordan. The Israeli Government had invited Edith to

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see how they were progressing in the administration of welfare and similar services. She was accompanied for the Israeli part of the visit by fellow NEC member Jim Griffiths, MP for Llanelli, who had also served as Minister of National Insurance. They set off on 2 January 1955 and both left Israel on 13 January after which Edith went on to Jordan alone. She visited rural areas and an army training camp, amongst other places, to get an idea of the way the Israeli system worked. Never a true friend of Israel, Edith was reported to have shocked the elders of a remote community of Druses on Mount Carmel when she brought the headman’s newly married daughter-in-law from the women’s quarters into the village square. Edith then made the terrified young woman shake hands with all the men assembled there, a remarkably cruel thing to do. Edith later said this was a protest against what she considered the absence of sex equality in Israel. Justifying this behaviour, Edith said, ‘No doubt the situation is partly due to the Rabbinical laws which train women not to expect equality.’47 She appears to have been unaware that the Druse were not Jews. She also seemed to have either not realized or not cared about the effect on the Druse woman she bullied. Edith’s attitude towards the young Druse woman showed the dark underside of her character. Edith always believed she was right and would sometimes go to extraordinary, and occasionally unacceptable, lengths to prove herself. There was a personal arrogance about Edith which appeared to grow stronger the older she became. Following this unfortunate incident, Edith continued to Jordan on her own. She was particularly concerned about the plight of the refugees who had been displaced following the war which established the state of Israel in 1948. At the time of Edith’s visit, Jordan had about 500,000 refugees from Palestine, more than any other Arab country. Most of them depended on rations distributed by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and survived without running water or any sanitary provision. About 130,000 lived in organized camps while the rest were in shacks or worse. Many lived in whatever place they could find in the towns and villages. Edith, of course, spent some time with the refugees, talking to them to ascertain for herself the true horror of their plight. She was then able to see at first hand the work of the Arab Legion, as the Jordanian Army was known, a volunteer force largely financed by the British. A visit to Bethlehem and the obligatory hospital followed before she set off for London from the airport in Jordan’s capital, Amman. On her return, Edith wrote three

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articles for the Star, a London newspaper, on 26, 27 and 28 January, about her visit to the Middle East. Edith at this time appeared restless and in need of something more than participating in Labour Opposition efforts on health and serving on the party’s National Executive Committee. The early 1950s were not perhaps her best years. Lengthy foreign trips with no discernible outcome never seemed to be enough. While her continuing work on women, particularly the status of women in marriage, provided meaningful activity, Edith still felt she wanted to do more. Boxing, which Edith had long opposed, now became her chosen subject and she fought hard to have it banned. This was indeed a far cry from her previous endeavours on the condition of women and children and the control of disease. During the 1950s, boxing was lucrative not only for the boxers themselves, but also for the managers and promoters. It was, moreover, extremely popular amongst the general public. Floyd Patterson, Rocky Marciano and Jake LaMotta were world famous. In Britain, Randy Turpin had defeated Sugar Ray Robinson for the world middleweight title in 1951. Boxing was taught in schools throughout the 1950s and was seen by many Labour politicians, including Dr Edith’s fellow NEC member Bessie Braddock, who became honorary president of the Professional Boxers’ Association, as a way out of poverty. Although its harmful effect on boxers’ bodies, particularly their brains, was understood, there was little appetite to curtail, let alone abolish, what was seen by many as a legitimate sport enjoyed by a wide range of people. The medical profession was a rare exception, and doctors mainly supported Dr Edith. In June 1959 an article in the medical magazine the Lancet urged doctors to fight for the abolition of boxing.48 Edith was not, however, satisfied with the action, or lack of it, taken by her fellow doctors. She later wrote in her memoirs, ‘I noted that the crooked legs among our children were a thing of the past, yet while the medical profession had applied its energies to this aspect of preventative medicine it permitted, in the name of sport, small boys to deliver punches to the most sensitive part of the human body – the brain.’49 Edith’s attacks were not confined to the physical harm caused by the sport. More damaging to herself and her personal reputation was the high moral tone in her book, The Ignoble Art, published in 1956, which, as well as seeming to condemn those who enjoyed boxing, came across as farfetched when she claimed, ‘The first step to ensuring world peace is to control by example the destructive impulse.’50

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Edith began her campaign against boxing in earnest in the early 1950s. In February1952, after she won the Private Members’ Bills ballot, she decided that, on this occasion, the Women’s Disabilities Bill was more deserving of her support than an anti-boxing Bill. However, the Northern Daily Mail reported that if she ever won the ballot again, she would sponsor a bill against boxing.51 In December 1953 Edith, debated with boxing promoter Jack Solomons at the Niblett Hall, Kings Bench Walk, Inner Temple on the motion that this House wishes professional boxing to be banned. Sixty-three people were present, not all of them lawyers. Commenting on the debate from the floor, following the contributions by the invited speakers, Edith made the point that ‘the British public is well aware of the harmful and degrading influence of prize fighting, but has little opportunity to express its views’.52 In the end, the consensus was that Edith had won on points.53 In both 1953 and 1954, amendments to the budget were put down in the House of Commons which aimed to reduce the entertainment duty on boxing. Dr Edith recalls when speaking on the amendment in 1953 rather late in the evening that she found it difficult to be heard above the noise made by her opponents. However, when she did the same thing a year later, the House was quiet and attentive.54 Edith, rather improbably, thought MPs were now signifying agreement with her point of view. In March 1954 she organized a deputation to the Treasury which included eminent physicians, a head teacher and a Nonconformist minister to urge that the entertainment duty on professional boxing should not be reduced.55 Edith and her supporters won the day: the Chancellor of the Exchequer did not lower the entertainment tax on prize fighting in the budget. It was perhaps an unsurprising victory, since a Chancellor of the Exchequer would be unlikely to reduce taxes without a very good reason. Edith, to her cost, never distinguished between amateur and professional boxing, seeing each as having the same objective: to knock your opponent out in the shortest possible time. Neither did she accept the argument that boxing was about self-defence. Edith’s uncompromising stance meant that she did not gain the support of those Labour MPs and party members who took part in and supported amateur boxing, a sport enjoyed disproportionately in working-class, Labour-supporting areas. Edith viewed all boxing as male aggression, an instinct which should be suppressed rather than encouraged: ‘Should we, in a world still full of cruelty and inhumanity, permit a public

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display of men fighting each other, when all who are honest within themselves know that such a display caters to the basest instincts?’56 When The Ignoble Art was published, both the Labour newspaper the Daily Herald and the Daily Mirror came down hard against her. Tom Phillips in the Daily Herald wrote, ‘I would be guilty of misconduct if I recommended her book to you – just as Dr. Edith would be if she advised you to have a major operation by a person who was not a qualified surgeon and had never seen a human body.’57 Meanwhile, Peter Wilson in the Daily Mirror attacked Edith mercilessly: ‘[T]he most remarkable thing about it [the book] is the number of half-truths and absolute “no truths” which she has been able to pack into such a small compass.’58 Edith devoted much time and energy to her fight against boxing, a subject which was obviously very important to her. Determined to make her views known to as wide a public as possible, she sought and gained significant media coverage, continuing her mission in Parliament until the 1960s. Her memoirs, published in 1967, included a whole chapter on boxing. Dr Edith sustained this campaign on her own, unsupported by most of her fellow MPs. Although much of the medical profession was on her side, there was no organized group of doctors actively helping her, and there was certainly no equivalent of the Married Women’s Association. The anti-boxing campaign was pure Edith. It is not known whether Jeffrey fully supported her. While he as a doctor would undoubtedly disapproved of boxing, that would not necessarily mean that he agreed with Edith’s long-running campaign. Edith’s views were, unfortunately for her in terms of her parliamentary career, already well known by the time she had to face the contest of her political life when the boundaries of her West Fulham constituency were redrawn. The failure to make any progress against boxing was only a very small part of the cataclysm which engulfed Edith in 1955. The year in question proved to be the worst in Edith’s political life. While the Labour Party was tearing itself to pieces in the left–right fight, Edith suffered the first setback of her career when, following a redistribution of parliamentary constituencies, West Fulham and East Fulham were to merge into one seat. The luck which had allowed her to stay as the MP for Fulham West from 1938 until 1945 without an election and then to win a large majority in the 1945 Labour landslide, seemed to be deserting her. The Labour MP for East Fulham was the former Under-Secretary

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of State for War, Captain Michael Stewart. Only one of the two MPs would remain in the House of Commons representing the new Fulham seat; it was Summerskill or Stewart. Edith herself investigated the possibility of representing Wood Green where she and Jeffrey were known as local doctors, though there was a problem in the shape of Joyce Butler, the local council leader, who had already been chosen as the prospective parliamentary candidate by the Co-operative Party, which was as good as having been formally selected for the seat. In January 1955 the Labour Party National Executive Committee, of which Edith was now the chairman, tried to keep her as an MP by postponing the decision to endorse Joyce Butler’s candidature. However, the NEC failed to overcome the local loyalty to Butler and Edith ceased to be a contender in what would have been, had it gone ahead, a very controversial NEC decision. The Sunday Express in its ‘Crossbencher’ column referred to Edith’s interest in Wood Green as being ‘vigorously promoted by Transport House’, adding that ‘Mrs. Butler . . . outpunches Dr. Summerskill easily . . . A ruthless Party boss is Mrs. Butler on the Wood Green Council . . . I cannot see them ignoring her wish to be picked for Parliament.’59 The combined East and West Fulham Labour Party had met on 3 March 1955 to make their choice. Michael Stewart won. Edith Summerskill, the current Chairman of the Labour Party and a Fulham MP since 1938, had been defeated. Although some Labour Party members in Fulham, especially those who were housewives, may have blamed Edith for the rationing of food, which was still fresh in their minds, Edith’s fearless, and perhaps unwise, pursuit of issues which were unpopular with large parts of her electorate did not help. Many men in Fulham would not have agreed that husbands should be forced to declare their earnings or with what they perceived as Dr Edith’s belief that housewives should be paid. Edith’s campaign to ban boxing was undoubtedly another nail in her coffin. The Earl’s Court stadium was situated in Fulham and many Labour Party members were amateur boxers. Nonetheless, Edith’s rejection came as a surprise to her if not to her opponent. The Fulham Gazette praised her work ethic: ‘In West Fulham they all knew her, and she was liked by her constituents. Until recently she spent a good deal of time among them and they could always turn to her for advice.’60 The two protagonists were well matched, but ultimately, Michael Stewart was perhaps the better tactical politician, having built up strong contacts with local party members and trade

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union branches. There was, unfortunately, also an element of misogyny. In an interview with Edith’s son, Michael Stewart conceded that . . . in the period when your mother was rising in politics, a woman had to be more aggressive or she wouldn’t get anywhere . . . If you weren’t aggressive, you were thought of as very charming, but really not equal to the rough and tumble of politics. If you were equal to the rough and tumble of politics, that showed how aggressive and unwomanly you were. It was a more unjust world.61

Edith showed little womanly grace towards her successful opponent, and her son Michael said that she never spoke to him again.62 The failure to be selected for the new Fulham seat had a huge effect on Edith. Michael Stewart had entered Parliament in 1945. Having been first elected in 1938, Dr Edith was the senior of the two. She was also a national figure in a way that Stewart was not. Tellingly, there is no mention at all of her failure in Fulham in her memoirs. At the beginning of March 1955, Dr Edith Summerskill, Chairman of the Labour Party National Executive Committee, member of the Shadow Cabinet and former government minister, was without a seat in Parliament after the next general election. Although there are no surviving records showing Edith’s immediate reaction to her rejection by Fulham, it is inconceivable that she would simply have given up politics. She was fifty-four years old, in relatively good health and a leading figure in the Labour Party. Facing her political nadir, Edith would most certainly have been actively looking for a new constituency, using all her contacts to secure a safe seat. She was not disappointed. On 14 April 1955, Arthur Deakin, General Secretary of the influential Transport and General Workers’ Union, sent Dr Edith a letter addressed to her home with the offer Edith must have been hoping for. ‘I [Deakin] understand that you [Edith] intend to get a nomination for the Warrington Constituency and I have today spoken to our Regional Office asking them to do all they can to mobilise our people in the constituency in support of your nomination.’63 The sitting MP for the safe Labour seat of Warrington, seventy-year-old Dr H. B. W. Morgan, had, it appears, been persuaded to stand down. Although she may have lost the confidence of some Labour Party members in Fulham, Edith had maintained her position with those at the top. She was always loyal to the Labour leadership and on the NEC

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she supported Arthur Deakin’s position. Edith was a valuable ally. For her part, Edith understood she was fortunate to return to Parliament. Meanwhile Labour’s internecine struggles continued apace. Edith had to cope with losing Fulham and subsequently gaining Warrington in the midst of chairing a National Executive Committee riven by conflict over the fundamentals of Britain’s future. The left, led by Aneurin Bevan, continued to rail against the majority on the NEC who were loyal to the party leader. Battles raged within the Labour Party, with German rearmament and the South-East Asia Treaty as two of the controversial long-term questions. However, it was the manufacture and testing of the hydrogen bomb which came to dominate politics at this time. The decision for Britain to actually make the hydrogen bomb, originally taken by the Conservative Government in 1953, finally came before the House of Commons in the form of a debate on a government White Paper on 2 March 1955. The Labour Shadow Cabinet accepted the need for Britain to manufacture the H bomb. Aneurin Bevan, no longer a member of the Shadow Cabinet since his resignation over the South-East Asia Treaty in April 1954, lashed out in a House of Commons debate against his own side, asking whether nuclear weapons would be used with the support of the British Labour movement against any sort of aggression.64 This was strong stuff which could lead to disciplinary action. Accordingly, the Shadow Cabinet met on 7 March to discuss taking the whip away from Bevan. Edith made the running in demanding the withdrawal of the whip, powerfully supported by Sir Frank Soskice, Herbert Morrison and James Chuter-Ede. It was eventually agreed, by nine votes to four, that Aneurin Bevan should have the whip removed.65 The Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) met on 16 March, a meeting chaired by party leader Clement Attlee who listed the evidence against Bevan. The PLP in the end also voted to take the whip away from Aneurin Bevan, by 141 votes to 112, a majority of twenty-nine. Edith commented to her son Michael, ‘I feel we have done the right thing by the whole Labour movement.’66 Such a small majority was not, according to Bevan supporter Michael Foot, enough for a proper killing.67 The Times, the Manchester Guardian and the News Chronicle clamoured for Bevan to be expelled from the Labour Party. The Economist was especially emphatic: ‘To falter now in pushing the affair through to its logical conclusion would be to concede the moral victory to Mr Bevan.’68 Soon after the Parliamentary Labour Party’s decision to remove the

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whip from Bevan, Edith was the main speaker at a Scottish Council of the Labour Party conference held on Sunday, 20 March and attended by over 600 delegates. Many of those present booed and stamped their feet in a demonstration against the decision regarding Bevan. Edith responded in the only way she could – by not taking sides: ‘the Press on the Bevan issue had emphasised the “personal factor” . . . we have been concerned with the future of the Socialist movement’.69 It now fell to the Party’s National Executive Committee, chaired by Edith as Labour Party Chairman, to decide whether Bevan should be expelled from the Labour Party itself. The party leader, Clement Attlee, who had never been wholly convinced that Aneurin Bevan should be expelled, proposed that Bevan appear before a special subcommittee of the NEC to answer the charges against him. The subcommittee, chaired by Edith, met on 29 March 1955 at 10.30 am at Transport House, Labour’s headquarters in Westminster. There were seven other members of the subcommittee, including Clement Attlee, Hugh Gaitskell, the Party Treasurer, and MP Barbara Castle as well as the Labour Party General Secretary Morgan Phillips, who did not have a vote. The subcommittee eventually decided by five votes to three to recommend that Bevan be expelled from the Labour Party. The five in favour included Edith, who had decided to use her vote as chairman to do everything she could to ensure the subcommittee came to the correct decision – Bevan’s expulsion. As chairman, she had, moreover, chided Bevan for his behaviour during the meeting when he reacted with suspicion to many of the questions he was asked.70 The final decision at the subsequent NEC meeting was that Bevan should be warned that the party would take drastic action against future violations of party discipline. Edith’s attacks on Aneurin Bevan, albeit in private, resulted in her making several enemies, not least Nye’s fiercely protective wife, Jennie Lee, who accused Edith of being a puppet of right-wing union bosses and hounding Nye out of the party.71 Edith, in fact, bore no malice towards Aneurin Bevan, whom she undoubtedly remembered as a friend from the 1930s. She was, indeed, able to travel with him on the delegation to China and presumably the two were on good terms during the lengthy visit. Edith was never able to hold back when she considered a matter of principle to be at stake, and it was a quality that gained her respect and resentment in equal measure.

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Hard on the heels of this extraordinary and unfortunate bout of internal warfare, Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who had replaced Winston Churchill as Prime Minister the previous month, called a general election, to be held on 26 May 1955. Edith fought a strong campaign in her new constituency of Warrington against only one opponent, the Conservative candidate, a fortyfour-year-old surveyor named Mr Herbert Henry Davies. Both Edith and Mr Davies were able and predictable in their allegiances and policies, and there was nothing particularly noteworthy in the Warrington election campaign. Two matters did, however, stand out. On the Conservative side, Mr Davies decided not to hold any indoor public meetings, which were generally par for the course at the time, a policy Edith called ‘anti-democratic’. Mr Davies took the more modern view that people would prefer to watch television rather than leave their homes. He did, however, expound the Conservative message out on the streets over a loudspeaker attached to his car. Edith, on the other hand, reckoned she addressed over 100 street meetings as well as many more in schools and at factory gates. On one memorable occasion she was let down by her complete lack of knowledge of popular culture. On being told that she would have to ‘compete with Sabrina’ who would be on TV at the same time that she (Edith) was due to take part in a televised party-political broadcast, Edith asked, ‘Is she a Conservative politician?’ Sabrina was, as almost everyone else in the room was aware, the ‘curvaceous blonde’ of Arthur Askey’s TV programmes. Edith did, however, acquit herself well in Labour’s broadcast, in which she featured alongside Harold Wilson. Thirty seconds of Chopin were followed by a caption ‘your money’s worth’, with pictures of greengrocery and joints of meat. An invisible commentator said that the programme was for housewives, those who had to make do on a pension and young couples. Edith, in a smart dress and pearls, spoke to the housewives: ‘All of us shop. We have simply displayed all the main foods so that we can show you how prices have gone up.’72 Edith continued by speaking as a doctor about the nutritional value of food. Although some journalists found the broadcast too sentimental, Edith came over well as someone direct, sincere and genuinely concerned about the poor and the weak. She went on to win Warrington comfortably, although the turnout was down from 82.7 per cent to 73.9 per cent. She polled 22,721 to H. H. Davies’ 17,075, a majority of 5,646, winning 57.1 per cent of the votes cast. But the Labour Party did not fare well nationally, partly because of the

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internal warfare. The new Conservative Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden substantially improved on Churchill’s 1951 result, gaining a majority of sixty seats in the House of Commons. Edith, returned for the Warrington constituency, remained in the Shadow Cabinet and the National Executive Committee, serving as Chairman of the Party until her year in office ended in October 1955 following the annual Labour Party conference. Her next major task was to chair this conference, held in Margate. The party had agreed, after much consideration, that the event be televised following the reporting by the BBC of the Conservative Party conference the previous year. The day before the arrival of the cameras, Edith warned delegates from the Chair to expect hotter than usual conditions because of the lighting. BBC correspondent Leonard Maill recalled that ‘they all turned up the next day with hats coming down over their eyes and dark specs’.73 In the event, Edith had to warn the media, particularly the photographers, ‘If you don’t behave, I shall have to ask Mr Attlee’s permission to speak to you more harshly than I have done before.’74 The sunshine outside the conference failed to dissipate the tension in the hall itself. The real action turned on the reasons why Labour had lost the general election, held a few months earlier. This was the pitch on which Aneurin Bevan chose to make his next move. Former Cabinet minister Harold Wilson had produced a report on the election which Bevan now attacked in a closed session which might as well have been an open one, since efforts to keep the discussion on the election defeat confidential failed dismally. Bevan ‘caused the stormiest of scenes and received the biggest ovation given to any Labour politician for years’.75 All except the trade union delegates cheered him to the rafters, and Edith, in the chair, was forced to allow him more than the five minutes’ allotted time, a ‘Welsh five minutes’ as the Party General Secretary Morgan Philips described it. Although the conference accepted the Wilson report, which left the new National Executive Committee free to take whatever action it liked, Bevan’s speech spearheaded a concerted attack on the leadership and Labour policies at the general election. Bevan’s behaviour predictably proved the exact opposite of Edith’s measured speech at the beginning of the conference. Edith, the loyal Chairman, blamed Mr Butler’s optimism about prosperity for Labour’s poor showing in the election, saying, ‘It is undoubtedly true that the result can in large part be

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attributed to the optimistic statements of the Chancellor of the Exchequer regarding the prosperity of the country, which rallied his supporters and reduced those non-politically minded workers to a state of apathy.’76 Perhaps the most telling debate at the conference, after the Bevan episode, concerned the hydrogen bomb. The background to the debate was the summit of the ‘big four’ – the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and France – held at Geneva in July 1955 which had aimed to promote a more peaceful world. Issues discussed included disarmament, the unification of Germany and increased economic ties. Though nothing concrete was decided, the summit was a useful first step in easing Cold War tensions, and the deliberations seemed to have been in line with Labour’s own views set out in the manifesto for the 1955 general election, which desired disarmament and sought to reduce world tension. This was not enough for some of the delegates to the Margate conference, however; noisy opponents of the H-bomb made their presence felt. They were, however, in a minority and the resolution put to the conference and supported by the leadership, which sought to press for a reduction in armaments and seek international agreement on the bomb, was carried. The nearest Edith came to any strong public position on the H-bomb was when she highlighted the health hazards of fallout from the atom and hydrogen bombs. Ever the loyalist, Edith wrote an article in the Labour Party publication Fact Sheet in November 1955 supporting the conference resolution on the Cold War. This would be her last action relating to the Labour Party conference she had chaired. Edith had acquitted herself well. Since a considerable amount of the conference proceedings were televised, she had been on display to a national audience in a way never before faced by a Labour Party chairman. Edith, as ever, rose to the challenge. With a new seat in the House of Commons and her membership of the Shadow Cabinet and the National Executive Committee, both of which were elected annually, secure for another year, she was as safe, for the time being, as she possibly could be.

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An Unstable World Dr Edith, who always maintained a remarkable degree of idealism and a genuine desire to help the poor and the needy, had developed an increasing interest in Middle Eastern affairs since her visit to Egypt as Minister of National Insurance in 1951. Her main concern was the plight of the Arab, particularly Palestinian, refugees displaced after the war which followed the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Edith’s views on the Middle East had crystallized following her visit to Lebanon at the end of the Labour Party delegation’s trip to the Soviet Union and China in 1954. While in Lebanon at this time Edith gained a new friend in Edmond Naim and she subsequently began to consider Middle Eastern politics in more detail. Edith recalls that, after the long, hot journey from Rangoon to Beirut, the Labour delegation’s last stop, she longed for a dip in the sea. While quietly floating in the water, she was beckoned from the shore to meet a group of young men in the midst of a heated debate on the Arab–Israeli question. Edith described herself as, ‘Exhausted from my journey, my bathing suit clinging to me and my hair becoming loose from under a silk handkerchief.’ She continued her narrative, ‘Later that night the traditional hospitality of the Arab world swept us [the Labour delegation] up to a party in the hills outside Beirut, where congenial companionship accompanied by music and song . . . made a fitting end.’1 The official business was to see members of the Lebanese Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), Labour’s sister party. In the course of the luscious hospitality and the serious political discourse, Edith met Edmond Naim, at the time a leading light in the PSP who later stood for election to the Lebanese legislative assembly and would become Governor of the Lebanese Central Bank, head of the Lebanese Bar Association and President of the staterun Lebanese University. In a tribute following his death, Edmond Naim was described as ‘one of Lebanon’s greatest and wisest men’.2 179

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From September 1954 until November 1959 Edith and Edmond Naim exchanged regular letters, about two to three per month from each of them, though sadly, apart from one letter from Edmond Naim, only Edith’s side of the exchange has survived in photocopy form. Given the time the post took to travel from London to Beirut, this was clearly a prolific correspondence, and was not to be their last, as they resumed writing to each other in the early 1960s. Edith’s letters are not quite what would be expected from a top female politician to someone who was a leading figure in his own country and the wider Arab world. In her first communication to Naim, Edith expressed how pleased she was to receive his first letter so soon after leaving Lebanon. Surprisingly, all the correspondence is done in Edith’s almost illegible handwriting rather than being typed, and the letters contain very detailed news of some of the most important events in her life. On 10 November 1954, the week Edith moved a censure motion in the House of Commons, she wrote to ‘my dear Edmond’, ‘To write to you is a relaxation for you are the only person in the whole world to whom I write in my own bad writing.’3 Edith’s letter dated 23 November 1954 is especially striking. While planning the visit to Israel for early 1955, Edith wrote to Naim saying that she was increasingly feeling that she should go to Jordan from Israel to see the refugees and the sites of the various incidents at the frontier, a visit which had the full approval of the Jordanian Ambassador to Israel. Accordingly, Edith was now making plans for the trip and was due to arrive on 8 January. In what appears to be a bold move, in her next letter she asked whether Naim would meet her in Amman ‘for the weekend . . . The prospect is exciting. After the sightseeing we could drive up into the hills, and finish all the conversations we have begun in our letters.’4 He initially agreed, but Edith then changed the dates to arrive in Jordan on 14 January. The two of them did, nevertheless, meet, though Edith was not at all happy with what transpired. In a reply to Naim dated 7 February 1955 she asked angrily, ‘Did you really think I have forgotten Amman? I remember every incident, and particularly our first dinner together, when I told you why I could not continue to write very often. I went to the Near East, and especially to Jordan . . . to have a calm quiet talk with you. I was denied that.’5 Tellingly, Edith concludes this letter with, ‘My dear Edmond what I am trying to say, so clumsily, is that your feeling for me must not be encouraged by me, and perhaps the best way of achieving this is not to write too often.’6

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They did, in fact, continue with their regular correspondence. Edith’s next letter to Naim was dated 18 February: ‘Please blame the cold snow sometimes, and not me if I have hurt you, for my heart is as warm as if I had been born under your sun.’7 Edith soon followed this with another letter on 7 March: It is snowing again today, and I am thinking of the snow on Mount Lebanon over which I passed on my way from Amman to London. I also think . . . of you, waiting in the lounge of the Philadelphia Hotel . . . I did not expect to see you . . . and your smile which included your eyes gave me a wonderful welcome.8

Edith wrote on 17 March with a rare glimpse of her own doubts and fears: ‘I sometimes wondered – forgive me – if you would be interested in my activities . . . Now I know that your friendship is real.’9 Following a few matter-of-fact letters, on 9 May Edith chastised Naim for writing to her attacking the British as the cause of the troubles in the Arab world. She also criticized the Arab states for failing to stand up for themselves. Following this last letter, though probably not because of it, Edith’s letters to Naim became less concerned with their relationship. On 20 June, Edith communicated her disappointment that Naim would not be at the Socialist International Conference on 11th July and completely accepted the reason – his father’s serious illness. Yet on 20 June, Edith was again writing that she had hoped Naim would be at the conference and made it very clear that he should have told her before that he could not attend. In response to an unknown invitation from him, Edith ended her letter, ‘So I am afraid bathes in the lukewarm Mediterranean must remain only wonderful dreams.’10 Yet Edith had not quite given up. On 2 August she wrote, ‘Yes, I remember – nearly a year ago now – giving you a small phial of my perfume with a red coloured top, which reflected warm and friendly lights. I had hoped that it had sometimes reminded you of our friendship.’11 There appears to have been some kind of rift at this time, for in her following letter dated the next day, Edith says she could not bear to quarrel with Naim. Edith was, however, still looking to Edmond Naim for support, especially when it came to the cause of the Palestinians. On 21 September, having first asked him if he had received her birthday present for him, Edith then told Naim that she lost her temper in an argument about the Arabs ‘behind closed doors in Committees’ – judging by the context, these must have been

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committees connected with either the Shadow Cabinet or the National Executive Committee. Edith believed her outburst had been provoked by the supporters of Israel – Zionists as she called them – who, she claimed, could not tolerate hearing the other side of the case. ‘One is not always lucid when filled with fury, however justified,’12 were the words Edith used to excuse her behaviour. On 15 October, Edith wrote to Edmond Naim about her chairing the 1955 Labour Party Conference in Margate, telling him that the consensus was that she had not done too badly, and she had previously reported on Aneurin Bevan’s defeat as Labour Party Treasurer by Hugh Gaitskell. On a less triumphant note, Edith criticized the British Asian Fellowship for holding a meeting at the 1955 Conference on the Middle East that included a Jewish speaker and a Bevanite but no one representing the Arab interest. She was also displeased with Naim’s Lebanese friend Clovis Maksoud, who managed during the party conference to deliver two separate sprays of flowers to both Edith and Barbara Castle, whom Edith described as the chief woman Bevanite. Such presents may not have mattered but for the fact that both sprays were delivered at the same time to a hotel lounge in Margate full of members of the Labour Party National Executive Committee. Towards the end of the year, on 1 December, Edith wrote to Naim saying she had been invited to go to Jordan with the Shadow Cabinet in January 1956. Her colleagues would go on to Israel while Edith proposed to travel to ‘Irak’ [sic], aiming to arrive about 15 January, and would spend some time in Damascus on the way. Since Damascus was not far from Beirut, she wondered whether Naim could see her for the weekend. She had, it appears, received no reply by the time she wrote again on 15 December. On 30 December, Edith received a parcel containing handkerchiefs from Naim. Edith’s next letter told him that the official trip to Jordan had been postponed; she, however, would travel alone, flying to Baghdad on Friday, 6 January 1956. She would then go to Beirut via Damascus, arriving in Beirut on Thursday, 19th and due to leave on Monday, 23 January. Edith ended by asking Naim that, if he wanted to reply to this letter, to send his letter to the Philadelphia Hotel in Amman. The two of them did, in fact, see each other. Edith wrote that ‘my brief visit to the Lebanon . . . was wonderful, and will always remain a fragrant memory – except for the last night. I am sorry that we did not have a few hours quietly looking at your books and listening to your records.’13 By 31 January, Edith was thanking Naim

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for sending her photographs of the visit, and in a letter dated 23 February she told him that she remembered every perfect minute. On 10 April 1956, Edith wrote to Naim sympathizing for the death of his brother-in-law and asking whether she should write to Naim’s sister on the death of her husband. That such a thought should even occur to Edith points to a closeness between her and Edmond Naim, though whether it was an intense platonic friendship or something more romantic is open to speculation. It certainly seems that Edith did not correspond with anyone else in the way she wrote to Naim. Later in the same month (25 April), Edith reminisced in her letter about the time they spent on a rock at Baalbeck, a city about fifty miles north-east of Beirut, during her earlier visit to the Lebanon. She continued, ‘Please never think that because you and I enjoyed these perfect moments in the Lebanon, that I can repeat them elsewhere with somebody else’14 This was to be the last personal exchange, at least on Edith’s side, for some while, although she did thank him for his telegram of support on her visit to Port Said and for the birthday greetings on 30 March, which he unfortunately sent during the wrong month. On 29 August 1957 Edith sent Edmond Naim good wishes for his birthday, presumably at the right time. The remainder of the letters Edith sent during 1957 dealt with political matters. Only one letter from Naim to Edith, dated 24 February 1957, has survived from this period. It is a warm communication, praising Edith for her words, ‘Never . . . compromise with the truth and your principles.’15 There appears to have been no correspondence during 1958, probably because Lebanon was then in turmoil, threatened by a civil war between Muslims and Christians and having subsequently to deal with Operation Blue Bat, an American military intervention in Lebanon carried out in line with the Eisenhower Doctrine under which the United States would intervene to protect regimes it considered threatened by international communism. Thankfully for Lebanon, the unrest ended in September 1958. Edith’s last surviving letter to Edmond Naim from the 1950s was dated 10 November 1959 and included the result of the elections to the Labour Party Shadow Cabinet. Edith’s letters to Edmond Naim during the 1950s, intimate in parts and always chatty and relaxed, are both unexpected and faintly shocking. Here was one of the very few top women politicians in Britain in the mid-1950s, married with children, exchanging personal feelings with a noted Lebanese politician,

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albeit of the Christian Maronite tradition and the same political persuasion as Edith, who was seventeen years her junior. It is not clear if anyone else knew about this correspondence. Edith’s letters are written on notepaper sometimes headed with her home address, Pond House, Millfield Lane, Highgate, and sometimes from the House of Commons. Whether the letters are the manifestation of a platonic meeting of minds or indicate some level of romantic attachment is open to debate. Naim, so much younger than Edith, could possibly have been a substitute son, particularly given that Edith and her actual son, Michael, did not always see eye to eye and that Edith had a very low tolerance for those who disagreed with her. At the very least, Edith’s letters to Edmond Naim show she had the capacity for strong personal feelings and that she could and did express them. The correspondence may also indicate an inner loneliness on Edith’s part, possibly due to her heavy workload leaving little time for personal relationships. Known for a slightly distant manner in public and always completely in control, the letters to Edmond Naim show a different, softer side to Edith’s character. Michael Summerskill made no reference to Edmond Naim in his comprehensive set of documents about his mother. The letters were tucked away in a separate file among Edith’s papers, which suggests that either no one in the family had paid them much attention or that it had been decided to keep this part of Edith’s life under wraps. It is, however, safe to assume that, had Jeffrey been aware of the contents of some of Edith’s correspondence with Edmond Naim, he would have found it upsetting, to say the least. By pursing the relationship with Naim, Edith risked alienating those closest to her. Since, by all accounts, Edith had few people who were real friends outside her immediate family, she was taking an enormous risk. However, the personal aspects of the writing were not by any means the mainstay of Edith’s letters to Naim. The correspondence is mostly about Edith’s life in politics, sometimes disclosing events she did not subsequently refer to in her memoirs, A Woman’s World. In particular, on 7 May 1955, Edith told Naim about losing out in Fulham when the two constituencies were merged into one, which she did not mention in any of her later public statements. Naim was, in addition, told about Edith’s political broadcasts on the BBC, her views on Aneurin Bevan and the Labour Party visit to the Soviet Union and China. She also mentioned the publication of her anti-boxing book, The

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Ignoble Art, during 1956. However, her main political discourse, which runs through all her letters from 1954 to 1956, was the Middle East. Edith’s support for the Palestinian Arab cause was more than likely the reason she began her correspondence with Edmond Naim, and her contact with him would almost certainly have strengthened her resolve in favour of the Arab countries. Edith’s Arabist views caused her to be outspokenly anti-Zionist. Her position on this complex and seemingly irresolvable issue was entirely binary – if you were pro-Arab and thus pro-Palestinian, you were anti-Zionist. Edith, a former member of the Labour Government and a leading figure in many progressive socialist causes during the 1930s was, by the 1950s, proposing what in effect amounted to the dismantling of the Israeli state. Her son Michael tells how Edith frequently said to him that Israel should abandon its sovereignty and form a federation with neighbouring Arab states.16 At the end of 1956, the aftermath of the crisis over the Suez Canal allowed Edith to act on her deeply held sympathies and show her colours as an active advocate for the Arab countries, a position which did not accord with the official Labour Party view favouring the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Edith broke the habit of a lifetime over the Arab question by moving away from the majority of the Shadow Cabinet. For the first time in her political career, Edith became an unwavering champion of a particular aspect of foreign policy, namely the plight of the Palestinian refugees, and a strong supporter of the Arab states. Having always concentrated on domestic issues, especially those to do with women, and later with food policy and welfare as a member of the government, this was a huge change of direction, far greater than her decision to campaign publicly on boxing. Although the Labour Party had been in Opposition since the end of 1951, Edith was not simply an ex-minister. Until 1958 she was a member of the party’s ruling National Executive Committee and up to and during the Suez crisis a member of the Parliamentary Committee (Shadow Cabinet) and Labour’s spokesperson on the important Health portfolio. This mattered, because in taking a pro-Arab position, Edith was going directly against Labour’s policy on Israel. Until Edith Summerskill took her stand, Arab nationalism, unlike Zionism, had no political ties with Labour, and the Arab cause lacked moral legitimacy largely due to Syria and Lebanon having been under Vichy control (and therefore by 1941 ‘pro-Axis’) during the Second

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World War. The left-wing magazine Tribune, supported by leading MPs Aneurin Bevan and Richard Crossman, made a clear link between the Arab states’ behaviour in the Second World War and the Labour left’s refusal to recognize Arab demands. Major Labour figures on both the centre and the right of the party, such as Clement Attlee, Hugh Dalton, Herbert Morrison and Ernest Bevin, were also eager to check pro-German feeling in the Arab countries. Dr Edith, it seemed, was fighting a lone battle. Most senior Labour politicians were never sympathetic to her point of view. As mentioned in one of her letters to Edmond Naim, Edith went to Syria and Jordan unofficially in January 1956 on a fact-finding mission to gather information which she thought could be of use to the Labour Party. The Shadow Cabinet had originally intended to send its own delegation to Israel and Jordan, but had postponed the visit following concern that Parliament might be recalled early to discuss the export of surplus war material to the Middle East. Having decided to go it alone, Dr Edith would seek to find out more about the living conditions of Palestinian refugees. She therefore met the Syrian Prime Minister, Mr Said Ghazzi, in Damascus. On Tuesday, 3 January, Daily Express journalist Rene MacColl, dubbed as ‘Dr Edith’s Fan’ in the headline to an article under his by-line, reported on a recent meeting he had with the Syrian Foreign Minister Salah Bitar. According to MacColl, Dr Edith was something of a star in Syria, and Bitar, who had previously met Edith, called her a fine lady and viewed her as an ally. As a socialist himself, the Foreign Minister told MacColl, ‘We are aware of the position taken by your Socialist Party. We pin our hope on it.’17 He was presumably referring to Dr Edith’s personal view and not that of the Labour Party as a whole. Edith’s ventures into Middle Eastern politics never met with general approval either from her Labour colleagues or the British press. However, she did fare better when dealing with her parliamentary brief. New health innovations were coming to the fore during 1956. One of the most far-reaching was establishing the link between smoking and lung cancer. In March, Edith asked the Minister of Health, Mr R. H. Turton, whether, now that he had the facts about smoking, he would take action, remarking that ‘the most effective long-term policy, which I ask the Minister to consider . . . is to introduce this subject into a course of elementary hygiene in the school-leaving year for boys and girls’.18 During May, Edith was on the opposite side to the Conservative

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Irene Ward in a debate on the cost of the National Health Service. It was unusual for the two women to be on opposite sides of an issue they both cared about, since they, in common with many of the women who became MPs before 1945, often agreed with each other and worked together harmoniously. On the whole, the women in the House of Commons adopted a less confrontational approach than the men. At this time Edith took the view that the NHS was underfunded in that in 1953–4 it received only 3.24 per cent of the gross national product as opposed to 3.75 per cent in 1949–50, while Irene Ward, of course, supported the government. Since ceasing to be a government minister, Edith had never stuck rigorously in Parliament to her Shadow Cabinet responsibility. The same was true in 1956, the year her book The Ignoble Art was published. Dr Edith was not going to let go of boxing, which she viewed as a matter of health and wellbeing rather than sport. In February she put a written question to the Attorney General, asking whether he was aware of cases where a prize fighter had been killed; and whether he would take steps to clarify or amend the law to define or establish and enforce the criminal liability of promoters in such cases to pay damages or compensation to dependent relatives.19 Edith also spoke on boxing in June on a motion to exempt all games and sports from entertainments duty except horse and dog racing. Commenting on prize fighting, which would have been exempt from the tax under these proposals, she made a plea from the heart, arging that ‘the business . . . regarded amateur boxers as its source of supply . . . [for] those men [promoters] who exploit young men, those men, who after years of exploiting these young boxers, find themselves financially better off, their health unimpaired, while the health of the young men they have exploited has definitely deteriorated’.20 Edith was opposed during the debate by Labour’s Ian Mikardo, who specifically mentioned boxing. A number of other Labour MPs singled out soccer and rugby league as sports in need of a reduction in taxation. Edith was no doubt heartened when the motion was not put, meaning it was defeated. Dr Edith’s return to domestic politics was, however, cut short in July 1956 when the President of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had recently overthrown King Farouk in a military coup, nationalized the Suez Canal Company. The company’s two major shareholders, the United Kingdom and France, inevitably viewed this as a hostile act against them. Nasser, meanwhile,

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became a hero throughout the Arab world, gaining additional credibility by promising that the revenues gained by the nationalization would be used to build the Aswan high dam. The future of the dam, crucial for alleviating the extreme poverty suffered in the Nile delta and bringing Egypt into the modern world, had been in doubt since the United States had cut off discussions about its funding following Nasser’s acceptance in 1955 of a massive arms deal with Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia. This agreement with a Communistcontrolled country had the effect of making Egypt the military leader in the region. Both the UK – now with a new Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, who had succeeded Winston Churchill in April 1955 – and France were fearful that Nasser meant to control the free flow of oil and other Western goods through the Suez Canal. Consequently, the two European countries entered into a secret pact that proposed using armed force to continue their two countries’ unhindered control of the canal. Meanwhile the nascent state of Israel joined with Britain and France. Israel, not yet eight years old, had since 1952 endured a propaganda campaign emanating from Egypt aimed at undermining the existence of the Jewish state. Unknown at the time, the three countries concluded an agreement behind closed doors and planned an invasion. Despite their interests in the Middle East, the United States refused to support Britain’s use of force against Nasser. President Eisenhower, in fact, threatened serious damage to the British financial system should the invasion go ahead. In denial about the international realities, including the United Nations’ refusal to back the use of military force, on 31 October 1956 Britain and France began their efforts to capture the canal with a bombing campaign. The Israelis had, meanwhile, attacked the Egyptian Sinai two days earlier, on 29 October. Armed force against Egypt was vehemently opposed by the Labour movement in Britain, and on Sunday, 4 November Edith spoke at a demonstration against the military action in Trafalgar Square organized by the National Council of Labour and attended by nearly 30,000 people. The rally marked the launch of a movement against the Conservative Government’s policy in Egypt. The main speaker was Aneurin Bevan, Labour’s Shadow Colonial Secretary. Edith was there presumably because she was a strong and consistent champion of the Arab cause rather than because of any obvious alliance with Bevan. Following the disembarkation of British and French troops at Port Said and Port Fuad on 5 November, Edith again made her opposition public. In Warrington, her new

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constituency, on 18 November, she said that the only way Sir Anthony Eden could redeem himself in the eyes of the world was to admit that the action Britain and France had taken in Egypt was an error.21 The attempt at invasion ended in disaster, turning out to be a complete fiasco, with British and French troops withdrawing on 22 December. Israel, on the other hand, did attain navigation through the Straits of Tiran. Hard upon the heels of the failure of the British attempt to deal with the Suez crisis came the resignation on 10 January 1957 of Prime Minister Anthony Eden. Though not all the British press had been in favour of Eden’s use of force, patriotic fervour had inevitably been stirred up by a foreign war, however short-lived. Support for the action on Suez was certainly strong at the Conservative Party Conference at Llandudno in October 1956. Then, on Tuesday, 31 October the government gained a healthy majority in the House of Commons for its action. There were only a few Conservative rebels, despite the fact that the UK United Nations Association opposed the invasion. A letter to the Kent and Sussex Courier summed up the feeling of many British people who disagreed with Labour’s official policy opposing the military action: ‘Gaitskell’s broadcast to the nation on Sunday evening last must surely rank as the worst example of authorised sedition this country has experienced.’22 Once the fighting had ended, Edith jumped into the fray with an abundance of courage and a reckless disregard for wider public opinion. Seemingly without consulting anyone, including her parliamentary colleagues, Dr Edith made arrangements to visit to Egypt via the Embassy of India in London, which handled British relations with Arab countries. The Indian Government therefore acted as intermediary in organizing the visit. Although Dr Edith’s opposition to the failed invasion was entirely in line with Labour policy, her rapid decision to visit the affected areas and her outspoken support for Egypt did not garner support from senior Labour figures who were silent in public about Edith’s proposed mission to the former battlefields. Just like boxing, this was Edith’s show and hers alone. In order to justify her action, Edith proposed to go to the affected areas as a doctor to see the injured people for herself. On 8 January 1957 the Indian Embassy counsellor responsible for organizing the visit wrote to Edith: ‘I have sent a telegram to our Embassy in Cairo saying you will be reaching Cairo from Beirut on the afternoon of Saturday, the 12th January, and that you will be taking the next available plane from Cairo to Port Said.’23 Edith accordingly

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set off for a five-day trip. She planned to visit hospitals, schools and welfare organizations ‘to see’, as she said, ‘for myself the true position about causalities’.24 The Evening Standard was just one of the publications critical of the visit: ‘For, in the eyes of the world she [Dr Edith Summerskill] goes to Egypt not as a doctor but as a politician . . . Dr Summerskill’s arrival in Port Said will be seized upon by Nasser’s publicists. It will provide new material for anti-British propaganda.’25 Relations between the United Kingdom and Egypt were at a critical stage. Any friendly approach by a leading British politician, albeit from the Opposition benches, could be seen as encouraging Nasser and undermining British interests. Yet Edith ploughed on, taking no heed of the way her trip was being reported. Her tin ear was such that she felt she could even meet Colonel Nasser himself, which she did on 17 January 1957. Edith faced a barrage of press fury when she returned to Britain. She pulled no punches when she landed at London Airport on 23 January: I think if the British people had seen and heard what I have seen and heard there would be a general election. What I have discovered is that the Government deceived the country . . . I think the desire for a quick surrender in Port Said made the invaders, and I put it as high as that, ignore the needs of the Egyptian casualties.26

Obviously shocked and deeply disturbed by what she had seen, Edith leapt into the fray and allowed her emotions to override her judgement. Edith could not agree that the official figures of the dead and wounded, which were set out in an official report compiled by the President of the Law Society, Sir Edwin Herbert, in December 1956 and accepted by Lord Monckton the Defence Minister, were correct. She accused Herbert and the government of underestimating the number of civilians and military personnel killed, wounded and detained in hospital. Sir Edwin put it at 2,750;27 Edith thought the number was more like 3,000 civilians alone. There was no evidence that Edith’s tally was correct. This was an example, regrettably an extreme one, of Edith letting her heart rule her head. She was in a state of shock and she assumed everyone else would feel the same as her. She also, perhaps more significantly, stated that the British forces in Port Said had disregarded the need to keep civilian casualties to a minimum.28 Disputing the government’s estimate of the number of killed and wounded, criticizing British troops for

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unnecessary civilian deaths plus the earlier meeting with Colonel Nasser was a toxic mix. Much of the press laid into her with unbridled enthusiasm, while she faced stinging criticism from Tory MPs in the House of Commons. Labour in Parliament remained relatively quiet – Edith was, after all, one of their most senior MPs. Following an interview with the BBC Panorama current affairs programme, the presenter Richard Dimbleby on Monday, 28 January 28 1957, referred to the situation as the ‘Summerskill Business’. Edith seemed unable to help herself or her conduct following the ill-fated visit to Egypt. On 24 January 1957, the day after her return, she had an article published under her own name in the Star, a London evening paper, in which she stated: The day before I left Egypt I saw about forty men in blue berets – soldiers of the United Nations. They were Danes, Indians, Canadians and others enjoying themselves on short leave from the desert. We were near the pyramids at the time. I stood and looked and felt profoundly moved and thankful for their presence. Here I felt there was in what they represented the hope of the world. As I watched them a guide approached me to offer his services. I declined, saying I had seen the pyramids . . . He looked at me hard and asked, ‘Are you an American?’ I said no. ‘A Canadian?’ ‘No’ . . . So next he said, ‘Then you must be a Swede’. For the first time in a much travelled life I had not answered immediately on being asked about my nationality that I was British. I had the scene in the Port Said hospitals in my mind. Then I did an astonishing thing. My forefathers came from Norway . . . four hundred years ago. I said to the guide, ‘I am Norwegian’.29

Denouncing Britain in such a way to a tour guide in Egypt was one thing; publicizing it in a London newspaper was quite another matter – breathtaking in its rashness. Conservative backbenchers in the House of Commons would not let Edith’s extraordinary behaviour go unremarked. On 28 January, following an oral question from Edith about dental treatment, Sir Stephen McAdden, MP for Southend East, asked, ‘Is it in order for those who have renounced their British nationality and adopted Norwegian to ask Questions in the House of Commons?’30 Following this attack, Edith defended herself by a variety of means, including a letter to the Warrington Examiner.31 Nonetheless, there were MPs who would not give up. A week later, Colonel Sir Alan Gomme-

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Duncan, MP for Perth and East Perthshire, intervened in a debate in the House of Commons on the cost of the Suez campaign detailed in the Army Supplementary Estimates, stating that ‘the action of Sir Anthony Eden was the bravest action taken in modern times . . . I hope that some hon. Members who have disparaged their country in sonic [sic] of their remarks will think again.’ When George Brown, the ebullient Labour MP for Belper, challenged GommeDuncan to say who he meant, the Colonel replied, ‘The right hon. Lady the Member for Warrington (Dr. Summerskill) is the first in my mind, and I am glad that so many hon. Members opposite have contradicted the right hon. Lady in saying that our troops behaved horribly and callously.’32 Though not present at the beginning of the debate, Edith arrived to answer some of the accusations against her, saying, ‘[O]f those eight questions I [Edith Summerskill] put to Sir Edwin Herbert, none has been denied. Furthermore, I was prepared to face him, but he was afraid to face me. Sir Edwin Herbert came on the B.B.C. on a film instead of in person.’33 Although George Brown made a gallant job of defending Edith, neither he nor Edith herself were able to adequately defend her conduct. Meanwhile, both Edith’s former friend, Daily Herald columnist Hannan Swaffer, and Sir Beverley Baxter, who had once been a Beaverbrook journalist and MP for Wood Green where Edith and Jeffrey had their surgery, waded in to criticize Edith. As if this were not enough, Edith’s own brother joined in the chorus against her. William Hedley (Bill) Summerskill, now an ophthalmic specialist in Portsmouth, held the distinction of being the family genealogist. On 31 January 1957 he wrote to the Daily Telegraph to inform its readers that: Members of the Summerskill family deplore that their family has been drawn into the controversy concerning Dr. Edith’s recent unpatriotic activities. It is untrue that her forebears came from Norway to the north-east coast of England four hundred years ago. The Anglo-Norman family of Summerskill (de Summerskale) is among the oldest of English families and has lived in the West Riding of Yorkshire for nearly nine hundred years in and around the hamlet of Somerscale, from which it took its name. A family history of thirty-three generations records its loyalty to its country and the present generation has not been backward in serving in the two world wars . . . As she [Edith] did not absorb her strange opinions from the Summerskills, it is to be regretted that she does not follow the accepted custom of always using her husband’s name.34

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Perhaps because Edith was at the end of her tether and definitely because she remained convinced of the rightness of her case, she prepared to take a libel action against Randolph Churchill, the journalist son of the former prime minister. In a vicious article entitled ‘The Viking and the Vicerine’, Churchill had laid into both Lady Mountbatten, wife of the First Sea Lord, and Dr Edith Summerskill, more for the sake of making his points than any connection between the two women. The offending passage on Edith read, ‘Dr Edith was in the dock on a . . . charge: namely that of having been paid by Colonel Nasser when she went to visit Egypt and then of having spoken in a contemptuous and disparaging way about the conduct of British troops.’35 Edith’s solicitors, Theodore Goddard & Co., wrote to the Evening Standard saying there was not the slightest justification for that ‘most serious allegation’ and asking for an immediate apology, which was given. Sir Frank Soskice MP, a leading Labour lawyer, dissuaded Edith from attempting to procure an apology from Randolph Churchill on the grounds that, since it would not have been forthcoming she would have to face costly legal action.36 The parting salvo in this sorry saga came in October 1957 when Edith Summerskill was not invited to the service of remembrance for the South Lancashire Regiment in Warrington’s parish church. It was the first time since the service was inaugurated that the town’s MP had not been asked to attend. Edith, it appeared, had been snubbed by the regiment for her criticism of British troops in Suez. The leader of the Labour Group on Warrington Council, Alderman David Plimston, commented, ‘I did not know . . . that the MP had not been invited. It is the first time this has ever happened and I can think of no other reason than the Egyptian affairs as to why she should not have been asked.’37 The years after the end of the Attlee Government had seen Edith wrongfooted in a number of areas. Following her peak as a government minister, she was, perhaps, looking for a new political role and a way of maintaining her previous status. Her letters to Edmond Naim also point to some level of dissatisfaction with her personal relationships. While Edith and Jeffrey’s daughter, Shirley, continued to live close to them after her marriage in 1957, their son Michael was never as geographically or as emotionally close. Whether or not the relationship between Edith and Jeffrey continued to be as close during this period as it had been earlier is a matter for speculation. Edith’s demanding career, now more focused on her own interests than government

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business, together with the fact that they had been married for over thirty years and that their children were grown-up must have signalled a big change for them. Tellingly, Michael Summerskill’s papers say very little about Edith and Jeffrey’s life together during the 1950s in contrast to earlier times. The Suez crisis in 1957, however, proved relatively insignificant compared to the nuclear arms race which was beginning to heat up. The Soviet detonation of an atomic device in September 1949 followed by the United States testing the first thermonuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb, on 1 November 1952, led to a rapid escalation of the USA–USSR arms race. Nuclear weapons became the number one geo-political concern. Not to be outdone, the United Kingdom waded in during May 1957 with Operation Grapple, the first British H-bomb test. The Arab world aside, Edith showed little interest in defence and foreign affairs. Her only ambition during the bitter battles over nuclear weapons which dominated the Labour Party during the 1950s was to support the leadership. The leader in 1957 was Hugh Gaitskell, who was to remain in that position until his death in 1963. According to her son Michael, Edith respected the agreed Labour policy – to support the H-bomb and nuclear testing – in the interest of ensuring Labour was an electable party.38 Yet, it was almost impossible in the febrile atmosphere of 1957 to sit on the proverbial fence. Events were moving fast. The National Council for the Abolition of Nuclear Tests, which later became the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), was launched in 1957. On 12 May 1957, Edith took part in an anti-nuclear demonstration by women in Trafalgar Square, which she described as ‘one of the most inspiring meetings I have addressed’.39 Over 1,500 women, many wearing black sashes, had marched from Hyde Park in the pouring rain and about 3,000 attended the rally. Those present in the square included the author Vera Brittain, Joyce Butler MP and prospective parliamentary candidate Renee Short. While the march itself was only for women, men could join the rally in the Trafalgar Square. Rather than speaking at the rally about the H-bomb and the world order, Edith concentrated on radiation, which she said would make women sterile, adding that it was the maternal function which determined women’s approach to life.40 She also criticized the press for not publicizing the march and rally ‘because there was a widespread feeling that to oppose nuclear tests and nuclear warfare could only be playing into the hands of the Soviet Union . . . [T]his demonstration of women in a November

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downpour was in fact a protest of mothers against the folly of polluting the atmosphere with fall out.’41 Meanwhile, the Labour Party was imploding on the nuclear issue. Specifically, Aneurin Bevan, former thorn in the side of party leader Hugh Gaitskell and the effective leader of the Labour left, came down in favour of multilateral nuclear disarmament. The debate between ‘multilateralism’ and ‘unilateralism’, whether to seek to diminish, and possibly end, the possession of nuclear capability across the world by international negotiation or simply to scrap Britain’s own nuclear arsenal, thereby withdrawing from the nuclear arena, was a huge topic in the Labour Party from the mid-1950s until the 1980s. Bevan’s decision, made public in a speech to the Labour Party Conference in Brighton on 3 October 1957, had a massive impact, especially the section where he maintained that a British Foreign Secretary without nuclear weapons would go ‘naked into the conference chamber’. Bevan continued: No nation is entitled to try to exterminate an evil by invoking a greater evil than the one he it is trying to get rid of. The hydrogen bomb is, of course, a greater evil than the evil it is intended to meet. But, unfortunately, the USSR and the USA are in possession of this weapon, and we are in danger of being exterminated as a consequence of their rivalries and their antagonisms.42

Although they came to the issue from very different starting points, Dr Edith Summerskill and Aneurin Bevan appeared now to be on the same side. The first Aldermaston anti-nuclear weapons march took place over Easter, 4–7 April 1958. The march, which reflected a significant strand of left-wing opinion, was organized by the pacifist group Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War (DAC), which was set up to assist non-violent direct action and achieve the renunciation of nuclear war, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a unilateralist organization whose aim was for Britain to get rid of its nuclear arsenal irrespective of the actions of the other nuclear powers. The route took the protesters from Trafalgar Square to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire. Thousands of people joined the fifty-two-mile-long march. Considered a success, CND organized the same event the following year, and the Aldermaston marches became an annual feature until the mid-1960s. Edith, perhaps thinking she could make it clear that her involvement was against the radiation caused by nuclear fallout

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and not a stand against the need to defend the country, had initially agreed to attend the march in 1959. The march itself was, of course, against the policy adopted by the Shadow Cabinet, and Hugh Gaitskell together with other leading lights in the Labour Party refused to support it. Edith, having agreed to be there, suddenly pulled out at the last minute. Her ostensible reason was that the DAC had proposed a ‘voters’ veto’ to encourage people to withhold their vote from any parliamentary candidate who did not support CND policy. Although Edith would more than likely have been opposed to such a ‘voters’ veto’, her real motive for withdrawing was probably that she did not wish to go against Shadow Cabinet policy. In this instance, Edith’s loyalty was stronger than her personal views. Moreover, she genuinely saw the Labour Party as an assurance against war in the future and regarded her party as the progressive alternative to the Conservatives. It was therefore a contradiction in terms to support an organization or person who was opposing the Labour Party.43 Edith had, in the end, decided that loyalty to the Labour leadership and adherence to Labour policy trumped a peaceful extra-parliamentary protest opposed by the Labour leadership. Edith continued to work assiduously in the House of Commons during the late 1950s up to the 1959 general election, acting as Labour’s top Health spokesperson until the end of 1957, when she lost the annual election to the Shadow Cabinet, possibly due to her position on the Middle East and maybe also because she had been around for a while and some Labour MPs may have wanted a change. Notwithstanding these reasons, Edith was re-elected the following year and remained in the position until the general election of 1959. Her return was not too surprising, since the Shadow Cabinet was elected by the Parliamentary Labour Party. Members of Parliament were on the whole more in tune with Edith’s politics than the Labour Party in the country, who were instrumental in deciding the results of the elections to the National Executive Committee. On 1 March 1957 the Conservative MP Joan Vickers introduced the Second Reading of her private member’s bill, the Maintenance Orders (Attachment of Income) Bill. In her speech opening the debate, Vickers paid tribute to Dr Edith Summerskill ‘for the stepping stones . . . laid in a direction which has made it more possible, perhaps, for the Bill to be accepted today’.44 The bill, which was later taken up by the government and made it through the

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parliamentary process to become law, allowed maintenance following a divorce to be deducted at source from the man’s earnings, a measure fully supported by Dr Edith and the Married Women’s Association. Dr Edith, active as ever in Parliament, was listed in Hansard as having spoken in ninety debates during 1957, sometimes making more than one intervention. Three interventions on health and social services stand out. On 19 March 1957, Edith moved a motion deploring recent government measures which placed an increasing burden on those least able to pay. She talked particularly about the need for school meals and the harm done by raising the cost, saying, ‘I am not raising a party issue . . . when I ask the Government not to reverse the progressive nutritional policy of the last twenty years.’45 Four months later, Edith spoke in a debate on mental illness and mental deficiency, noting the Report of the Royal Commission on the matter. In welcoming the Royal Commission report, Edith talked about her early years with her husband: ‘My experience of mental hospitals was not acquired only as a medical student. I actually did my courting in a mental hospital, where my future husband was a medical officer.’46 On 16 December, Edith raised the question of proprietary drugs, asking the Minister of Health what action he was taking to prevent doctors prescribing proprietary drugs when those from the National Formulary would be as effective, her point being that National Formulary prescriptions were much cheaper and should be used wherever possible. The minister replied that he did not have the powers to prevent doctors prescribing the drugs they thought necessary.47 One of Edith’s more interesting initiatives in the House of Commons at this time took place on 27 February 1958, when she proposed a debate in the House of Commons on the television programme Your Life in their Hands. The show, which brought live hospital procedures directly into people’s living rooms, was television’s first attempt at reality broadcasting. Commissioning such a programme was a radical move by the BBC, and it did not meet with universal approval. Edith was one of its severest critics. She roundly condemned the programme, claiming, ‘in the opinion of many responsible people, [it] causes distress to the sick and plants seeds of fear and apprehension in many other people’.48 Later in the debate, Anthony Wedgwood Benn, who would in the future serve in Harold Wilson’s Cabinet, told the House that Dr Summerskill did not speak for the Labour front bench.49 Edith, it appeared, was prepared to

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diverge from the Labour leadership when the matter was within her personal sphere of expertise and her Shadow Cabinet portfolio and, crucially, when there were no obvious adverse consequences. Continuing with her parliamentary brief for the rest of the year, Edith raised the connection between lung cancer and smoking in June, asking what was being done to educate boys about ‘the danger of acquiring this habit’?50 Edith, elected to the Shadow Cabinet again in November 1958, also pursued the issue of radioactivity. In a debate on setting up a board to monitor radioactive content in food across London, she reminded the Minister of Health, Derek Walker-Smith, that the danger was cumulative and therefore every little degree of radioactivity mattered to the individual.51 Dr Edith took part in 116 debates during 1959, a heavy workload by any standard. Almost all her interventions were on health matters. During January she contributed to the Second Reading of the Mental Health Bill, which sought to implement many of the measures recommended by the Royal Commission on mental illness and mental deficiency. The bill was founded on two main principles – as much treatment as possible should be given on a voluntary and informal basis and, where compulsion was necessary, there should be adequate safeguards for the liberty of the individual and the protection of the public. There were, however, fears that the bill could be hampered by a lack of psychiatrists and their helpers. Edith subsequently claimed that ‘the shortage was due to a failure to teach psychiatry adequately in the medical schools and to the prejudice of doctors’.52 Edith returned to the issue of boxing in June, asking the Prime Minister, now Harold Macmillan, who had succeeded Anthony Eden in January 1957, whether he would set up a select committee to look into the conduct of boxing contests. The request was politely declined.53 Throughout 1959, Edith maintained pressure on the government in relation to smoking and lung cancer, radiation and much more. At the same time the Opposition Labour Party were gearing up for a general election which they thought they could win. It eventually took place on Thursday, 8 October 1959. Dr Edith’s opponent in Warrington was Frank Stansfield; the result was strikingly similar to 1955 in that she gained 22,890 votes to the Conservative Party’s 17,791, a majority of 5,099 with exactly the same turnout of 73.9 per cent of the electorate. Edith had fought a successful campaign on Labour’s national policies – lower interest rates for house purchases, the abolition of NHS

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prescription charges, building more schools and recruiting more teachers, ending unemployment in the nation’s black spots, increasing pensions and introducing national superannuation and ‘relentlessly’ striving for peace and disarmament. Labour nationally did not fare so well. The ruling Conservative Party won their third election in a row, increasing their majority to 100 seats, and Harold Macmillan continued as Prime Minister. Having spent eight years in Opposition, Dr Edith at the age of fifty-eight now faced the prospect of another five without any chance of ministerial preferment. This, taken together with her failure to be re-elected to the National Executive Committee in 1958, must have felt like a less than appealing prospect. By 1959, Edith had been in the House of Commons for twenty-one years, at the upper end of the average amount of time served, which was between ten and twenty years. At the beginning of 1957 in a mischievous article the Daily Express had suggested that Edith could be moved to the House of Lords along with Winston Churchill’s wife Clementine Lady Churchill and Bessie Braddock. The Express felt that Edith’s move was ‘Not so much in the way of an honour but as an expedient.’ The newspaper then referred to what was then her proposed visit to Egypt, which the paper had always opposed, stating, ‘She [Edith] intends visiting the sick in Egypt because she has remembered she is a doctor. She might remember then that she is an official Lady and not act in a manner likely to cause embarrassment to others.’54 In the January 1961 New Year’s Honours, Edith was, in fact, made a life peeress as Baroness Summerskill of Kenwood. She was the only woman peeress in the 1961 New Year’s Honours, and since the introduction of life peerages in 1958, only four other women had received the distinction. At the age of sixty, Baroness Dr Edith Summerskill PC had again become a pioneer in Parliament. When she was first elected in Fulham West, she had been one of only thirteen women in the Commons; in the Lords she was in an even smaller minority. A rhyme in circulation at the time sums Edith up nicely: Years have gone by since she first cocked a snook At fussy wartime palates, threw the book At butter-lovers (‘Margarine’s the stuff :’) Then, after Suez, put us in a huff, Being ‘ashamed of being British,’ and Tried hard to have our beastly boxing banned,

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Lately, it seems, we have been hearing rather less, Controversy does not become a Baroness.55

Edith’s public statements on her elevation to the Lords were predictably sanguine. At no point did she give any indication that she wished to remain an MP. Her successor in Warrington was the former MP William Thomas Williams who had represented Hammersmith South and then Baron’s Court from 1949 until 1959, when he was defeated in the general election. A noted left-winger and supporter of Aneurin Bevan, it seems unlikely that the Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell would have gone out of his way to secure Thomas another seat by seeking to put Dr Edith in the Lords. The most likely explanation for Edith’s peerage was that she actively wanted it, probably thinking that the House of Lords could give her a platform to again be a pioneering woman. Jean Mann, Labour MP for Coatbridge and Airdrie, viewed Edith’s acceptance of a peerage as a sensible decision: ‘How wise of Dr Edith Summerskill to go amongst the Lords.’56 The other relevant matter was her health. By 1960, Edith had developed an arthritic hip and was becoming increasingly less mobile.57 Despite having been the MP for Warrington, Edith was still based in London. A prestigious place in the House of Lords would have suited her circumstances very well. Unfortunately, her preference to keep Dr Edith in her title could not be accommodated by the Garter Principal King of Arms, whose duty was to ensure that titles complied with the traditions of the House of Lords. She therefore took her place as Baroness Summerskill of Kenwood.

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Edith and Jeffrey moved from their wartime residence in Knightsbridge back to Highgate during 1950. Their new home, Pond House, Millfield Lane, London N6, was a five-bedroomed house built in the 1920s on the edge of Kenwood with a huge garden. Edith and Jeffrey were to stay there until her death in 1980, though during the 1970s they sold some of the land to the actor Robert Powell.1 The house, unfortunately, proved a magnet for burglars, and one of the penalties of life in the public eye was that such events appeared in the press. In March 1952 the News Chronicle reported that the house had been robbed for the second time in six months, with the thieves cutting the telephone wires and removing a small pane of glass in a ground-floor window. Edith told the newspaper, ‘They stole a lovely silver rose bowl presented to me by Mansfield (Notts) Corporation after I opened playing fields there. It was inscribed and I think it was one of the things that caught their eye.’2 She also mentioned some presentation pieces Jeffrey had lost. By 1949 their son Michael was reading law at Merton College, Oxford. Their daughter Shirley would soon follow, to study medicine at Somerville College and then St Thomas’ Hospital in London. The choice of Oxford University is worthy of note, given that neither Edith nor Jeffrey had attended Oxford or, indeed, Cambridge. Michael, it would appear, was put under great pressure by Edith to gain entrance to Oxford. Not only did he change bedrooms at the Highgate house to a larger space equipped with shelves for his books, but Edith also provided extra tuition so that he could prepare to win a scholarship, which he did go on to achieve. Nonetheless, there is evidence of tension between Edith and Michael emerging at around this time. Inevitably, her family life was not as rosy as Edith would have had everyone believe. Michael tells how both he and Shirley were strongly encouraged to study medicine. 201

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Shirley did but Michael did not. Michael’s description of the way Edith and Jeffrey talked to him about his choice of degree makes disturbing reading, even allowing for the culture of the times: ‘The searing cross-examination I underwent from Edith and Jeffrey, with its suggestions of wrong-doing, perhaps for being wilful, perhaps for being affected by other influences, made me feel like a religious or communist defaulter . . .’3 Shirley, however, was more compliant, maybe taking note of Edith’s view that women without marketable qualifications were at the world’s mercy.4 In other words, a woman without financial independence would have to rely on someone else, usually her husband, and in so doing she might find herself without any means of support. Once installed at Merton College, Oxford, Michael became active in student debating societies. Despite his adolescent rebellion, Michael proved more like his mother than he may have realized. In 1949, already a frequent speaker at Oxford Union Society debates, he put down a motion on the order paper asking that Rule 11 be amended so that members of the women’s colleges should be admitted to the Oxford Union. Edith tells in her memoirs how she, a member of the government at the time, asked the Labour Party Chief Whip William Whiteley for a pair for a two-line whip so that she might hear Michael speak in Oxford. Whiteley was reluctant to do so. However, as luck would have it, Captain Crookshank, the Conservative MP for Gainsborough, happened to be passing while the conversation between Edith and the Chief Whip was taking place, and offered to be the pair. Given that Crookshank was a bachelor not well disposed to women, Edith was surprised; she never discovered why he acted as he did. Edith, freed to attend the Oxford Union, sat in the public gallery with Jeffrey. Michael was, inevitably in 1949, in a minority. Edith remarked that ‘the interruptions and howls of dissent [to Michael’s speech] suggested that he was making a proposal opposed to all the decencies of life. The suggestion that intellectual ability was not confined to one sex unleashed howls of fury.’5 The motion was lost by a large margin. Edith was, however, more optimistic when John Ryman, reading law at Pembroke College and who would become Shirley’s husband, moved a similar motion a few years later which was defeated by a much smaller number of votes. Having herself spoken at the Oxford Union a few months before Ryman, Edith recounted how during her speech she had been rudely interrupted by a dishevelled undergraduate. When Ryman spoke, she was in the public gallery with Shirley. The Union

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Society President, rising before the debate, introduced a special guest in the public gallery. He was, of course, referring to Edith. The surprise occurred when the young man who had heckled Edith during her earlier appearance at the Oxford Union went to the public gallery and presented her with a bunch of flowers. Edith’s comment is telling: ‘This astonishing incident seemed to me to be absolutely out of character with the Oxford Union; it served to prove to me . . . the unwisdom of arriving at hasty conclusions.’6 Although Dr Edith loved flowers, it may have been the apology contained in this gesture rather than the gift itself that made such an impression on her. On the other hand, the flowers may have just been a student stunt which Dr Edith’s literal mind had simply not understood. While obviously proud of Michael’s activities at Oxford, relations between mother and son did not always run smoothly. A letter from Michael to Edith, dated 5 July 1950 and sent from Merton College, is full of angry feelings towards his mother. Not once do you [Edith] admit that there could have been anything wrong . . . it is a sign of your complete ignorance of me [Michael] as a separate individual. You conclude by saying, in effect, that you are prepared to ignore your own son’s past distress when you realise how unhappy many Indians are. As you say ‘our own little troubles seemed small in comparison with this great human effort to help millions of hungry and diseased people. Michael, let’s get on with the job.’7 (underlining in original)

Even making allowances for the possibility that Michael’s adolescent angst may have been exaggerated, he was obviously unhappy and did not feel supported by Edith. Things would get difficult again when Michael announced his intention to marry Florence Elliott, whom he had met at Oxford where she attended St Hilda’s College. According to Michael’s son, Ben Summerskill, Edith did not always see eye to eye with Florence’s family, and the relationship was sometimes strained.8 The Elliott family came from Clydeside and some of their number had been involved in recent strikes. Although this activity may have ruffled a few of Edith and Jeffrey’s feathers, it is difficult to understand why they should have found Florence’s father Sydney anything other than a suitable father-in-law. Sydney, a left-wing journalist who began his career in the co-operative movement, was exactly the kind of person they might have admired. Having moved from Clydeside to Manchester in the late 1920s,

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Sydney was appointed editor of the Sunday newspaper Reynolds News in 1929. In 1941, Sydney Elliott moved to London to work on the Evening Standard, then edited by Michael Foot, whom he replaced as editor in 1943. Elliott, however, left the paper in the run-up to the 1945 general election when the proprietor Lord Beaverbrook urged him to advocate voting Conservative, taking up a position as editorial adviser at the Daily Mirror. He was appointed editor of the Daily Herald in 1953. The tension between the Elliotts and Edith may have been about the timing of the marriage as well as Edith’s feelings about the family involved. Edith wanted the couple to wait; she considered them too inexperienced and still too much like undergraduates. Perhaps she also remembered how she and Jeffrey waited until she had qualified as a doctor before they wed. However, despite his mother’s objections Michael and Florence decided they would marry, and the wedding was announced early in 1951. The Press Association contacted Edith as soon as the news broke to congratulate her and Jeffrey, only to find that Michael had failed to tell his parents. Jeffrey, calmer and quieter than Edith, attempted to pour oil on the troubled waters. The marriage itself was a quiet affair in the Oxford Register Office in April 1951. Edith, however, remained unconvinced. She was less than enthusiastic when Florence and Michael announced they were expecting their first child, Edith’s first grandchild, in 1958, stating, ‘I know it is the habit of film stars to announce their babies well in advance. We doctors are more reticent. We regard it as rather vulgar to announce babies before they are born.’9 Anna Summerskill was born in January 1959, followed by Ben and Claire in 1961. Michael and Florence later divorced and Michael had two further children from his second marriage. Shirley was closer to Edith than Michael, possibly because women’s campaigner Dr Edith Summerskill took greater interest and felt emotionally closer to her daughter than her son. Edith’s collection of letters, Letters to My Daughter, written to Shirley when she was a student and then a junior doctor, demonstrate a feeling for her daughter which Edith did not appear to have for her son. According to Edith’s grandson Ben, Shirley herself was devoted to her father, partly no doubt because he inevitably spent more time at home than Edith.10 Shirley’s brother Michael claimed Shirley was like Jeffrey in character in that she was gentle and unassuming but that she also bore a striking physical

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and vocal resemblance to Edith, with people confusing their voices on the telephone.11 Michael also believed that Shirley herself did not wish to become a doctor. Instead, she wanted to study English and write, a desire later achieved when she published two novels. Nevertheless, Shirley pursued medicine, qualifying as a doctor in 1958. Yet it was never to be Shirley’s adventure alone. The penalty for having a famous mother was constant media interest. In March 1955 the Evening Standard ran an article on girls who follow in their mother’s footsteps which included a photograph of Shirley with Edith.12 Edith did not, however, wish Shirley to be only a doctor; throughout Shirley’s early life it was clear that Edith wanted her daughter to follow in her own footsteps. Therefore, as well as studying medicine, Shirley was encouraged to engage in politics at Oxford, which she did with some success, becoming an officer of the Oxford University Labour Club. Shirley also took part in a new women’s debating society, the Oxford University Intercollegiate Debating Association (OUIDA), an undergraduate society which attracted a number of women who would later become prominent in their respective fields, including Shirley Caitlin, later Shirley Williams; Val Mitchison, who married the journalist Mark Arnold-Foster; and Anne Chesney, a leading member of the Liberal Party and later the wife of the philosopher Richard Dummet. But not everyone looked favourably on OUIDA, and its members had to face the usual misogynistic rants. Robert Robinson, who rose to fame as the presenter of the BBC programme Points of View, wrote in the university magazine Isis in 1949 that the OUIDA women who took part in debates were, ‘[h]ideously mascaraed and disguised in Dior gym-slips’.13 Edith, it appears, was pleased that Shirley was involved in OUIDA even though the association did not endure after the initial rush of enthusiasm. Oxford University proved fertile marriage ground for both the Summerskill– Samuel children. Shirley met her future husband at the Oxford University Labour Club, joining her brother and her parents in that their student relationships turned into marriage. Edith appeared to find John Ryman more to her taste than her son Michael’s wife. As an engaged couple, Shirley and Ryman attended the tumultuous 1955 Labour Party Conference in Margate which Edith chaired. They later married in the crypt of the House of Commons, a venue secured courtesy of Edith’s being an MP, on Saturday, 3 August 1957. A reception organized by Edith and held in the grounds of Pond House

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followed the ceremony on what was apparently a gloriously hot day. As Edith recalled, ‘My daughter’s wedding day resembled mine in one important respect; the sun shone throughout the day and even the cake was finally brought out to be cut in the garden.’14 It was by all accounts a fine event attended by many of Shirley and John’s Oxford friends with the guest of honour the former Prime Minister Clement Attlee, with whom Edith had always had a strong political relationship. Attlee apparently gave what Edith describes as a well-judged speech, which pleased her very much.15 Shirley changed her name to Summerskill by deed poll when she was twenty-one, and, like her mother, kept her maiden name on marriage. Once they became man and wife, the couple took up residence in a small flat above Edith and Jeffrey in Highgate. Unfortunately, Shirley contracted pneumonia only four months after the wedding, missing her final medical examinations which had to be postponed. Edith had gone in the ambulance with Shirley to St Thomas’ Hospital and cancelled both an appearance in the House of Commons and meetings in her Warrington constituency to be with her daughter. However, not even a serious illness could stop the press reporting on Dr Edith; the New Chronicle amongst others ran a piece on Shirley’s stay in hospital. Once she was on the road to recovery, Edith took her to the Canary Islands to convalesce. Having qualified as a doctor in 1958, Shirley joined Edith and Jeffrey in their practice in North London in 1960. Unfortunately for Shirley and possibly to Edith’s disappointment, the marriage to John Ryman was not a success. The couple divorced in 1971, three years before Ryman became MP for Blyth in Northumberland and seven years after Shirley won the parliamentary constituency of Halifax in the general election of 1964. Ryman’s election in 1974 proved controversial for the falsifying of election expenses. John Ryman was not a good MP. His frequent absences from the House of Commons once prompted Chief Whip Bob Mellish to ask on the radio for anyone who spotted John Ryman to get in touch. Moreover, Ryman’s love of fox hunting was a liability in sections of the Labour Party. He did, however, survive as an MP until 1987. Following his divorce from Shirley, Ryman married four more times. In April 1992 he was accused of defrauding two women out of their life savings. Given Ryman’s conduct, it was perhaps fortunate that Edith died in 1980 and therefore missed some of the worst of it. Shirley herself remained in the

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House of Commons until the 1983 general election when she lost her seat. She never married again. Having been Shadow Minister of Health when Labour was in Opposition from 1970 to 1974, she served as a Junior Minister in the Home Office under Roy Jenkins and then Merlyn Rees for the whole of the 1974–9 Labour Government. She became an Opposition Home Affairs spokesperson when Labour lost the 1979 election, and also served on the Labour Party National Executive Committee from 1981 to 1983. In her memoirs, Edith remarks that although the 1966 general election changed the party representation in the House of Commons, the sex differential had shown little alteration, there being 25 women MPs out of a House of Commons with 630 Members. Shirley Summerskill was chosen to Second the Address on the Queen’s Speech at the beginning of the Parliament. Edith was very proud that Shirley chose to speak up on behalf of women MPs, and quotes this passage in her memoirs: I wish to pay tribute to a . . . small group in this Parliament – the women Members. The psephologists, all of whom seem to be male, have decreed that the swing to female candidates at the Election was greater than that to male candidates. Whatever the reasons for this may be, no Hon. Member would deny that in the Government women are playing a successful part. We have come a long way from the time when militant suffragettes accosted Ministers in Downing Street and demanded the vote. But this is not the end of the journey. While the passage in the Gracious Speech concerning the Government’s productivity, prices and incomes policy is a most welcome one, the exclusion of any mention of equal pay for women will not pass unnoticed. I would respectfully remind Right Hon. Gentlemen in the Government that the railings around the Palace of Westminster can be used again.16

Dr Edith, herself one of the most distinguished women ever to sit in the House of Commons, was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in the 1966 New Year’s Honours List in recognition for her political and public services. As she remarked in her memoirs, Edith was especially pleased to receive messages of congratulations sent by women’s organizations whose causes she had helped to promote. Now in the House of Lords and freed from government office, Dr Edith Summerskill, a distinguished long-serving politician, again took up the reins on behalf of women but this time with a

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lifetime of experience to strengthen her case. Dr Edith never viewed the House of Lords as a cushy retirement club; she may even have hoped for ministerial office when the Labour leader Harold Wilson became Prime Minister in 1964. However, it was not to be. According to the Observer,17 Wilson would have liked to have had her in his Cabinet, but was reluctant to appoint peers. He may also have considered that Edith at sixty-three was too old or he may simply have had other people to promote. There had, in any case, never been the kind of rapport between Harold Wilson and Dr Edith that she had had with Clement Attlee. Dr Edith, first elected as an MP in 1938, was from a different, pre-war, political generation than Harold Wilson and she was inevitably slightly removed from the mid-1960s concept of modern technological progress, what Wilson called the ‘white heat of technology’. Dr Edith herself was always loyal to Wilson, claiming that in 1966 ‘his [Wilson’s] attitude has not altered because his majority has increased . . . Harold Wilson is interpreting his socialist principles in a modern, practical manner . . . he aims at creating a society in which the interest of the community prevails over that of any section’.18 Dr Edith had entered the House of Lords before Wilson became Prime Minister, and she immediately took up her cudgels with a vengeance, becoming in the view of many one of the grandes dames of the Labour movement. Dr Edith, it appeared, had become one of the Labour Party’s elder stateswomen. Her view of the Lords, straightforward as ever, was that the second chamber could, and indeed should, be used to promote worthy political causes. One of the most important reforms she championed was to allow the termination of a pregnancy to be legalized in certain situations. To this end, she spoke on the Second Reading of a Bill moved by Lord Silkin, a forerunner of the 1967 Abortion Act. Edith spoke as a mother, something she had often done in the past and evidently intended to continue to do. In the House of Lords in 1965 she spoke out just as she had done as the fearless parliamentary candidate for Bury in 1935 when she had championed birth control in the face of strong opposition from the Roman Catholic Church. In her memoirs, Edith asked what right celibate men had to decide the fate of women by pronouncing on abortion law reform.19 Throughout the ages, the interests of the mother and her unborn child have been closely associated with the survival of the community . . . To-day,

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literate people in the space age, in well populated countries, are not prepared to accept the taboos unquestioningly – and in the matter of abortion the human rights of the individual mother . . . must take precedence over the survival of a few weeks old foetus without sense or sensibility. I say to those who . . . suggest that by destroying the foetus of a few weeks we are thereby committing a crime, it cannot be compared with the condemnation of a fully grown woman, perhaps with a small family.

Dr Edith, however, was no advocate of abortion on demand. She continued her speech by referring to a visit she had made to the Soviet Union where abortion clinics had been established in 1920 so that a woman could have her pregnancy terminated on demand: I feel very strongly that the provision of facilities to secure an abortion must not be looked upon as a reason for not using some method of birth control . . . When I first visited the Soviet Union in 1932, I asked to see one of these abortion clinics . . . six operating tables were being used simultaneously and every few minutes a fresh batch of women were wheeled in . . . I was reminded very disagreeably of an assembly line in action . . . Safeguards are very important; otherwise the floodgates will be opened.20

Dr Edith also made an impassioned case for abortion in the case of rape, stating, ‘A girl who has been the victim of rape cannot be expected to feel anything but loathing for the man who has assaulted her . . . [W]hen pregnancy results it violates her maternal functions.’21 Dr Edith was in the vanguard of a group of new life peers drawn from experts in a wide range of subjects. On 2 December 1965, the Evening Standard observed, ‘More important . . . has been the new blood the House has drawn from experts in a wide range of subjects. Elder statesmen such as Lord Attlee and Lord Butler. Economic experts such as Lord Plowden, doctors such as Lady Summerskill, sociologists such as Lady Wootton and many more.’22 By 1965, Dr Edith had, it seems, returned to her campaigning life with enthusiasm. Although completely convinced of the need for legal abortions, Dr Edith’s view of the oral contraceptive pill was more ambivalent in that she was concerned about possible side effects. On 28 November 1962 she put down a Question in the House of Lords asking Her Majesty’s Government whether they would prohibit the distribution of oral contraceptives pending the report of the General Medical Council assessing whether steroid contraceptives

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might predispose to thrombosis. Dr Edith continued this attempt to prevent the pill being readily available before its full impact was known, raising the matter again in the House of Lords in 1967 and 1968. By 1970, Dr Edith was still unsure whether the possible risk from oral contraceptives had been resolved. In January of that year she asked the government why the Committee on Safety of Drugs had not taken appropriate action since the makers of Normenon and Verton had recently announced that they had ceased manufacture of these oral contraceptives.23 True to form, Edith did not give up, and in May 1970 she questioned the minister about the possibility of thrombosis due to the contraceptive pill, saying that only one in ten thromboembolic episodes was reported to the Committee on Safety of Drugs.24 Edith once more spoke of her misgivings as to the safety of oral contraceptives in March 1971. Yet, despite her best efforts, Dr Edith’s pleas fell on deaf ears; the pill was widely available by the early 1970s. Boxing was another of Dr Edith’s campaigning causes which she continued to champion after becoming a baroness. In May 1962 she moved the Second Reading of the Boxing Bill,25 which made provision for the potentially harmful aspects of boxing to be examined by a Parliamentary Select Committee. Unfortunately for Dr Edith, the bill did not receive enough support to get through the Second Reading. Never one to abandon her course of action or to give up on something she considered important, Dr Edith asked a topical question during February of the following year about the broadcasting of boxing on television, specifically whether the government was aware that on the evening of 6 February an exhibition of prize fighting was shown on BBC television delaying the normal news bulletin. Edith stated that the consequence of this was that millions of people who abhor such displays were trapped into witnessing this spectacle.26 She therefore wanted the government to make representations to the BBC to ensure the same kind of thing did not happen in the future. Unfortunately for Dr Edith, her entreaties did not lead to action by the BBC. But her continuing vocal opposition to boxing demonstrated just how determined Dr Edith could be and how she refused to give up even when she had little support and could therefore make no headway. Boxing notwithstanding, most of Dr Edith’s interventions in the House of Lords were on matters concerning women. Edith was aged sixty when she entered the Lords, but her advancing years did nothing to diminish her feminist

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fervour. Freed of both ministerial and constituency constraints, she quite possibly now felt free to follow her heart. Dr Edith had long campaigned against the inequality of the position of wife and husband in marriage. She had an opportunity to continue this work when Leo Abse’s Matrimonial Causes and Reconciliation Bill came to the Lords in 1963. This bill, among other things, allowed for divorce by consent when the couple had been separated for seven years and for estranged couples to have a three-month trial reconciliation before divorce. Dr Edith opposed both the divorce with consent and the reconciliation clauses. Although the consent clause had been withdrawn during the committee stage, she feared the Lords would reinstate it. Dr Edith’s arguments for both clauses were that they were part of a ‘husband’s Bill, drafted by a man who doubtless meant well, but who failed to recognise that marriage has different values for a man and a woman’.27 Dr Edith’s contention, somewhat old-fashioned by the 1960s, was that divorce by consent after seven years would lead to the assumption that a marriage would only last for seven years. The three-month reconciliation clause was problematic because the woman might become pregnant during that time and the man would have no obligation to stay with her and the child since it had only been a trial period. Dr Edith was supported in her view by Lord Hodson, a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, who thought the bill would only help the rich and that poorer people would make no use of its provisions. In the end, the clause to allow divorce with consent after seven years’ separation was not included in the bill, which was passed with the reconciliation clause intact. It eventually became the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1963. Dr Edith had been concerned for many years that married women did not have an automatic right to the matrimonial savings. In July 1963 she moved the Second Reading of her Private Member’s Bill, the Married Women’s Savings Bill, which sought to put into effect the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce which stated that ‘savings made from money contributed by either the husband or the wife or by both for the purpose of meeting housekeeping expenses (and any investments or purchases made from such savings) should be deemed to belong to the husband and wife in equal shares unless they have otherwise agreed’.28 Edith then pointed out that the law as it then stood in England and Wales did not provide the wife with any entitlement to anything since it all belonged to the husband. Having recognized the injustice of this, the Royal Commission

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believed an amendment to the law was desirable. In her speech supporting the Royal Commission, Edith attacked those peers who thought women would be dishonest if entrusted with money and provide sub-standard food for their husbands in order to horde their savings. She also drew attention to the plight of the older widow or deserted mother as those particularly in need of a change in the law to allow them money to live on. The bill was committed to a Committee of the Whole House and became law as the Married Women’s Property Act the following year, 1964. This legislation marked the final stage of a long campaign by Dr Edith and the Married Women’s Association. Her commitment and tenacity proved invaluable in this instance. During the year after the Married Women’s Property Act gained the Royal Assent, Dr Edith took up the case of Mrs Lily Ince. On 7 April 1965 she moved a Question in the House of Lords on Lily Ince’s behalf, ‘To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether a statement can be made on the present condition of Mrs Lily Ince who has been in prison for six months for failing to give her husband a share of the house-keeping savings which she contends are monies given to her over the years by her children for her keep.’29 Edith hoped the Lord Chancellor would ask the Official Solicitor to facilitate an appeal in the case of Mrs Ince, whom Edith claimed had offered her husband a sum of money she thought reasonable in the circumstances. The problem was, of course, that there were no precedents for Mrs Ince’s stand, although the Lord Chancellor thought that Lily Ince may be released if some accommodation could be made with her husband. Edith’s association with this case came mainly through her continuing involvement with the Married Women’s Association who assisted Lily Ince in her stand. The financial security of women both within marriage and if a marriage should fail remained one of Dr Edith’s main concerns and one of her major campaigns. She had further scope to be in the forefront of reform after Labour won the general election in 1964, when the Lord Chancellor set up a Law Commission to examine obsolete laws. In 1966, following a general election which gave Labour a substantial majority, Dr Edith piloted the Matrimonial Homes Bill through the House of Lords, moving its Second Reading on 14 June 1966. She thought the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce which sat from 1951 to 1954 was wrong in that it only recommended protection for a spouse who had been left in the matrimonial home and therefore did

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nothing for a husband or wife who had been driven from the home by the conduct of the other. She contended that the husband or wife who had been constructively deserted ought to be able to apply to the court for an order restoring possession of the home. The idea behind the bill was, as Edith pointed out, to ‘recognise the valuable contribution which the woman in the home makes to society, and that at least in return she and her children should not be denied the security of that home in the event of her marriage proving unsuccessful’.30 The Matrimonial Homes Bill became law in 1968. Another of Edith’s long-standing campaigning goals had been achieved. In addition to striving for women to have a fair share of the family’s assets in marriage, Dr Edith was also a strong supporter of single women and their dependants. In November 1965, she attended a meeting in the Palace of Westminster convened by Rev. Mary Webster, a Congregational minister, to launch an organization known as the National Council for the Single Woman and her dependants. To Edith’s great surprise, the meeting was so well attended that it had to be moved to the Grand Committee Room off Westminster Hall where over 800 women were in attendance. The meeting discussed the plight of women carers who, having looked after parents and close relatives until their death, then found themselves alone and without the ability to find a job and often with little or no money. The meeting had been an important event, raising matters which needed, but had not so far received, attention. In February 1967, Dr Edith spoke in the House of Lords on another aspect of women and their dependants, namely children born out of wedlock. Edith focused on the law and the provisions made for the unmarried mother and illegitimate children. In 1964, 7.2 per cent of live births were to unmarried mothers and about 40,000 of these babies were adopted. The largest single group of never married mothers was aged nineteen. Dr Edith supported the establishment of family courts to hear maintenance and affiliation proceedings with the aim of getting the putative fathers to accept more responsibility for their children. In line with her sympathetic views, Dr Edith stated in the Lords that law reform should be based on the principle that all children are of equal value and they should be granted all the rights and privileges their innocence merited.31 The speech was both bold and far-reaching. Granada Television conducted an interview with Dr Edith which was broadcast on 23 February 1967, the day after her speech drawing attention to the issue in the House of Lords.

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The wider issue of the need to take action on the discrimination against women throughout society was beginning to move up the political agenda during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Equal Pay Act, which gave an individual a right to the same contractual pay and benefits as a person of the opposite sex in the same employment where a man and a woman were doing like work, received the Royal Assent on 29 May 1970. In addition to like work, the act stated that its provisions would also apply to work rated as equivalent under an analytical job evaluation or work that was proved of equal value. Equal pay had long been one of Edith’s campaigning interests and she had been a member of a cross-party delegation that had presented a petition containing 80,000 signatures to Parliament in 1954. Other prominent women politicians who were present included Barbara Castle, Labour MP for Blackburn; Irene Ward, Conservative MP32 for Tynemouth; and Patricia Ford, the Ulster Unionist MP for South Down. Although Edith was never in the forefront of the action on the 1970 Act, she nonetheless played an active role and spoke convincingly in the debate in the House of Lords: During the last few years the industrial woman worker has become more restive and militant. I recognised this in Trafalgar Square last year when women from the Midlands and the North joined Londoners in demonstrating for equal pay. It was evident again on that historic occasion when the striking machinists from Ford’s – relatively un-supported by men, although there were one or two male trade unionists – came to Friends’ House to put their case. It may seem immodest to say so, but I am very pleased that I had the privilege to address both those meetings.

The government introduced the Sex Discrimination Bill in 1975 and Dr Edith Summerskill again took the floor in the House of Lords to support it. I am hoping that this little Bill will help to create a climate of public opinion which will reinforce our demand for the next step. Meanwhile women must be vigilant, for I expect every manoeuvre and trick to be deployed to evade the provisions of this Bill, for there are those who are determined to cheat women, just as we have been cheated since the 1919 Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act . . . In case your Lordships think I am tempted to exaggerate, that despite the great shortage of doctors since the war medical schools limit the intake of woman to a small quota.33

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Dr Edith continued by asking why the Church of England had been excluded from the provisions of the bill. She also spoke about the Factory Acts and the necessity of ensuring that pregnant women were protected from heavy manual work which could cause harm. The adoption of the Sex Discrimination Act later in 1975 marked a watershed in British politics. Women were now deemed to have equality of opportunity with men and this was protected in law. While not everything in the act was watertight and its shortcomings soon became evident, it was a huge force for change. Dr Edith Summerskill, feminist MP then campaigning peer whose commitment had never wavered, had taken a leading role over many years in achieving recognition that women too had rights and were equal with men. While a considerable amount of Dr Edith’s time in the House of Lords was taken up with matters to do with women, she also played her part in the great social reforms introduced by the 1964 –70 Labour Governments, speaking in favour of the abolition of the death penalty and the reform of legislation on homosexuality in order to decriminalize homosexual acts between consenting adults. Health issues remained important to Dr Edith who had always emphasized her medical training and practised as a doctor for much of the time she sat in Parliament. In March 1962 she raised the issue of Distaval, otherwise known as Thalidomide, asking the noble Lord, Government Minister Lord Newton, ‘does [he] not think that this is another case where the pharmaceutical industry has been given complete freedom to put on the market drugs which have not had an adequate clinical trial’?34 Dr Edith not only attended debates in the House of Lords, but also accepted numerous invitations to speak to outside organizations, though these inevitably became less frequent by the end of the 1960s as Edith herself became older and possibly more frail. Many of these engagements were in London and many were at schools. Between 1962 and 1967, Edith spoke at St Paul’s Girls’ School and Camden School for Girls, amongst many others. She also spoke to a number of public bodies such as the Public Health Lay Administrators as well as a host of Labour movement organizations. Edith, it seemed, intended to remain active and engaged for as long as she possibly could. As the 1960s drew to a close and Edith approached her seventieth birthday, her behaviour started to become slightly erratic. Her grandson Ben tells of an incident in the late 1960s when he was staying with his grandparents in

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Highgate. Pond House was fairly close to Hampstead Pond and its neighbouring council housing estate. When out walking one day, Edith came across a boy from the council estate fishing in the pond. She then took it upon herself to not only invite the boy back to Pond House for tea but also to telephone the boy’s family to let them know what she was doing. Edith apparently thought it would be good for Ben, who was staying with Edith and Jeffrey at the time, to meet council estate children. Ben, recounting this story as an adult, viewed the incident as very odd.35 Ben Sumerskill has other telling stories about his grandmother during the 1960s and 1970s. Edith, it would appear, wanted her grandson to become politically active and according to Ben she encouraged him to think he could change the world. In 1973, Jonathan Dimbleby, then editor of the ITV current affairs programme World in Action, showed a film about the war and famine in Biafra in the Palace of Westminster. Dr Edith took the twelve-year-old Ben with her to see the film, causing one of the ITV female staff to express concern that Ben would be distressed. Edith’s reply was, ‘Of course not, that’s why I brought him here.’36 Although Ben and Edith generally got on well, there was one occasion when her grandson became very annoyed with her. It concerned the results of his Eleven Plus, the examination taken at the time to decide children’s fate as to whether or not they would go to a grammar school. At the time the results were due, Edith was having lunch with the Lord Gardiner, the Attorney General, at Pond House. Ben, again staying at Pond House, wanted to go and collect his results. Edith apparently dismissed this most anxious of requests, saying to Ben, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, of course you’re going to pass.’37 Edith could, on occasion, be brusque and unfeeling. She did, however, according to Ben, talk to young people as if they were adults and her equal. Dr Edith’s memoirs, A Woman’s World, came out in 1967. The publication of the book was marked by a star-studded literary luncheon at Foyles bookshop in Charing Cross Road, central London, on Thursday, 13 April.38 The event, attended by 200 guests, was chaired by Maurice Edelman MP, while the top table included distinguished mothers and daughters – Vera Brittain and Shirley Williams, Margaret Lockwood and Toots Lockwood, Baroness Phillips and Gwyneth Dunwoody together with Mary Hayley Bell and Juliet Mills. Edith and no doubt her publishers had made sure she had a glamorous, celebrity-filled launch for her book. As part of the publicity for the book, she

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was interviewed on 17 March for the BBC Woman’s Hour series ‘Twentieth Century Women’.39 Not content with one celebration, Edith attended another lunch, this time in the House of Lords, organized by the Married Women’s Association on 19 April. There were two reasons for this party – the book and Edith’s sixty-sixth birthday. The star of the House of Lords show was Clement Attlee, by now very frail and in a wheelchair. The actress Sybil Thorndike and Lords Willis and Moyle were also present together with Jeffrey and Shirley.40 Both the Foyles and the House of Lords lunches were a tribute to how far Edith had come and how much she had achieved. The book itself inevitably generated considerable interest. It was reviewed extensively in the national and local press, while Edith herself was interviewed on the BBC by Kenneth Allsop for the World of Books programme.41 Some reviewers, such as Ivan Yates of The Observer, were harsh: ‘Her [Edith Summerskill’s] autobiography is, like herself, full of herself. Anecdotes jostle with opinion.’42 On the other hand, Lena Jeger MP wrote a fulsome review in the Guardian, praising Edith for her many achievements.43 On 27 March 1968 the Status of Women Committee chaired by the Conservative MP Dame Joan Vickers organized a rally for the golden jubilee of votes for women. As one of the speakers, Edith found herself in illustrious company on the top table: Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, the Leader of the Opposition, and the Liberal Leader Jeremy Thorpe led the proceedings followed by an array of prominent women, including Grace Roe, President of the Suffrage Society, as well as Margaret Thatcher and Shirley Williams. The brochure for the event included a message from the Queen: ‘I feel sure that the example of the last 50 years will be an inspiration to all women now and in the generations that follow to give what lies within their own power to the service of their fellow citizens.’44 Women had, indeed, come a long way during the preceding 50 years. Celebrations such as those to launch her memoirs and to mark women gaining the vote only served to encourage Dr Edith in her work. She maintained a strong presence in the House of Lords until 1976, four years before her death in 1980. In 1970, Dr Edith raised her concerns about the low number of women attending medical school, asking the then Labour Government whether medical schools which limit the admission of women students to a small percentage of the total intake were contravening the Sex Disqualification

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Removal Act. The government’s reply was less than satisfactory, stating that any recourse under the Sex Disqualification Removal Act would have to be by a civil injunction from the aggrieved woman.45 Dr Edith did not let this go and during the following year she obtained evidence from the Association of Headmistresses that there was discrimination against girls entering medical school. Dr Edith subsequently wrote to Leeds and University College London medical schools on the subject.46 These replies were also less than satisfactory, but Edith had at least drawn attention to the issue. Following a general election in June 1970, the Conservatives came to power and further progress proved problematic. Dr Edith had always had an interest in sex education, and by 1971 she was becoming concerned that pornographic films were being produced in the guise of sex education, putting down a question to this effect in the House of Lords.47 She was again dismissed by the government spokesperson who unhelpfully stated that the government did not exercise any censorship over the production of films. Later in the same year, Edith came back to one of her special interests, women and work and how to combine the two, summing the matter up thus: ‘Like a man, a woman has certain physiological functions; but at the same time she has a brain which can either be stimulated or left to decay . . . a woman who is denied any stimulation to the brain is half an individual, and we are now talking about the physical, mental and spiritual needs of half the adult population of this country.’48 Edith clearly still maintained her campaigning zeal even at the age of seventy. Dr Edith remained active in the House of Lords until 1976, when she reached the age of seventy-five, opposing, amongst other things, nuclear weapons and the American war in Vietnam. During her last years, Edith returned, as she had many times before, to matters she had taken up in her earlier years. Always the doctor and forever the young medic who had championed the establishment of a state medical service in the 1930s, she remained interested in the running and administration of the NHS. At the end of 1972, Edith took part in the debate in the Lords on the NHS Reorganisation Bill, designed to create a more logical structure and improve the way the NHS operated. Edith again raised the issue of quotas for female medical students, and her pleas were again rebuffed. Following a brief intervention in a Lords debate the next year on nuclear fallout, again one of Edith’s long-standing

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concerns, she returned to one of the issues which had brought her into politics – rickets in children. Edith put down a short but punchy question: ‘To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they propose to take to combat the increasing incidence of rickets in children.’49 During her final active year, Edith spoke about both sex education and maternity services. It is a tribute to her commitment and determination that she was raising these matters in public until her last years. Edith entered politics to do what she could for the poor, the sick and for women and she never gave up. Dr Edith, in addition, served from 1967 to 1976 on the Political Honours Scrutiny Committee, which oversaw the system of honours in the United Kingdom. The public silence observed by the committee was shattered in May 1977, a year after Edith had stood down, following the publication of his resignation honours list by the outgoing Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. Dr Edith Summerskill had a letter published in The Times stating that the members of the committee ‘were astounded when we read the list of proposed honours. We told the civil servant that we could not approve of at least half of the list, and would he see this was conveyed to the Prime Minister.’50 The letter went on the say that the committee was later astonished to find that, with one exception, the original list of recipients had been published unchanged. The committee had been presented with a fait accompli which it had no power to reverse. By the late 1970s, Edith and Jeffrey’s two children were into their forties. Michael, despite strong encouragement to take up medicine, had become a lawyer specializing in maritime issues. A prolific author, he published a book on oil rigs and the law. Michael also wrote about politics, producing, amongst other things, a dictionary of politics with his wife, Florence Elliott, in 1957, and a work on the Chinese during the First World War with the academic Brian Brivati. Michael and Florence later divorced and Michael remarried. He never appears to have been as close to his mother as Shirley and always seemed less willing to agree with Edith’s point of view. Many of Edith’s views were summed up in her volume of letters to Shirley, Letters to My Daughter, published in 1957 and written to Shirley while she was a student. Intriguingly, as with the Edmond Naim correspondence, only Edith’s side of the exchange is shown. Nonetheless, the letters provide a valuable insight into not only Edith’s views on women, politics and what she considered

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the important matters in life, but also her relationship with her daughter. The tone of the letters is confident, sent from a woman who knew her own mind and was convinced that she was right. Shirley may or may not have seen it that way. Although she followed her mother’s career path, Shirley sadly did not have the same happy marriage or family life. Letters to My Daughter falls into the same category as Edith’s small book Babies Without Tears, published in 1941, in that it sets out Edith’s views in a clear and uncompromising manner and has every appearance of being aimed at a wider audience than simply Shirley Summerskill. The first letter in the collection, sent to Shirley at Somerville College between 1951 and 1955, stated, ‘The real truth is that there is no biological difference in the sexes which could account for the control, or otherwise, of the emotions.’51 Edith continued by saying that men and women were trained differently from an early age about how to handle their emotions, and, since men were not supposed to show their feelings, they may well demonstrate exhibitionist behaviour. Some of the young men Shirley had met at university may well do this, and she should not worry unduly. The letters continued in a similar vein. Edith later talked about married women’s desire for work outside the home and for the intellectual stimulation this would bring: The insistent demand of women for recognition in spheres of work outside the home, which has quietly but unremittingly been advanced in the course of the last hundred years, has grudgingly been conceded. As a doctor and a Member of Parliament I am fully conscious of the fact that the doors of both the medical schools and of the House of Commons had to be forced by furious and frustrated women . . .52

Much of the later part of the book was taken up with questions of equality, between women and men and also racial equality, the latter becoming an increasingly important national matter from the late 1950s onwards. Edith stated that, ‘A political philosophy can only be fully satisfying if the goal at which you are aiming is morally right.’53 In later letters, Edith talked about the similarities between racial prejudice and prejudice against women: ‘It is as illogical to discriminate against people whose skins have become permanently pigmented through exposure to strong sunlight over a million years, as it is to bar people whose ductless glands do not conform to the male pattern.’54 Edith’s tour de force occurred near the end of her book of letters to Shirley:

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Over the centuries girls have been reared against [a] backdrop of suppression and subjugation. The stories of the male composers of music and poetry do not lead us to believe that they were tough, thrusting individuals, but highly sensitive creatures . . . A young girl with the same temperament and equal genius, denied encouragement, probably ridiculed and admonished for her efforts, stood little chance of developing her capabilities to the full . . . There is, of course, a most powerful force which takes her off the course, namely the biological urge to have a family . . . the physical exhaustion entailed in caring for a home makes her quite unable to undertake any creative work unless she can secure some domestic help. On the other hand a man can separate his work from his family responsibilities . . . the work which men are enabled to do outside the home is in great measure due to the willingness of women to serve and support them unselfishly.55

Edith’s philosophy may have been straightforward, but its roots were to be found in a complicated and sometimes troubled home life when she was a young girl. Rt Hon. Baroness Dr Edith Summerskill PC, CH transformed that legacy into a life generally well lived in both public and private, an immensely successful life which changed those of many others, especially women, for the better. Edith died on 4 February 1980, aged seventy-eight, of cardiac failure and coronary artery disease following a Stokes-Adams collapse at her home, Pond House, Millfield Lane, Highgate. Her worsening osteoarthritis was a contributing factor. Jeffrey and Shirley were present, and it fell to her daughter to register the death. Jeffrey was completely bereft, living for only three more years. In 1954 the New Statesman and Nation had described Dr Edith Summerskill as the most successful of contemporary women politicians. From the Second World War until the 1960s, newspapers wrote about her and she was regularly on the wireless. Edith’s gained her national profile to a large extent because she was different. She was also able and articulate – a winning combination. Her direct manner was not, however, to everyone’s taste. Throughout her public career, Edith faced prejudice and misogyny. While a man could make a range of comments and be as disparaging and impassioned as he wished, similar words coming from a woman had quite a different effect. She became harsh, a harridan and unfeminine while the man was strong and principled. Edith was the first Member of Parliament to make the feminist cause her top priority. It was not until the early 1980s that Harriet Harman, another

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female Labour MP, assumed the mantle. As a woman and a feminist, Edith faced continual opprobrium from men in politics, not only the opposition Conservatives but Labour as well. ‘Amazon’, ‘gorgon’ and ‘numbskull’ were three of the hostile names applied to her. Edith was, however, committed to standing up for what she believed in and seemingly ignored the abuse. Edith was unusual amongst women campaigners in the 1930s and 1940s in fighting for both equality and welfare. It was generally a choice between one or other of these subjects. A founder of the Married Women’s Association, established to fight on behalf of married women and housewives, Edith was for many years the driving force behind attempts to provide wives, widows and divorcees with equal rights to the matrimonial home and its contents. Her efforts culminated in the Married Women’s Property Act and the Matrimonial Homes Act. Before entering Parliament, Edith, a doctor in general practice in a poor part of north London, ran a clinic providing birth control advice, thereby championing a woman’s right to limit the number children she had. When Edith fell foul of Roman Catholic priests in Bury, the seat she fought in the 1935 general election, she did not capitulate but maintained her stance on contraception. Later in the House of Lords, Edith supported the 1967 Abortion Act. For Edith, choice about family size and a good standard of maternal and child welfare went together. Her booklet Babies Without Tears, published in 1941, advocated analgesia in childbirth as part of a wider aim to respect mothers and provide adequate maternity care. During the war, Edith was one of the leaders of a successful fight for women to receive compensation for war injuries equal to the amount received by men. She was, at the same time, an influential voice on woman power, the campaign in Parliament and the country to allow women, as part of the war effort, to undertake jobs not previously open to them. She also championed nurseries to look after the children while their mothers were at work. Edith, in addition, made strenuous efforts to allow women to participate in the Home Guard on the same basis as men. Following Labour’s landslide victory in 1945, Edith’s appointment as Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Food gave her scope to look at the nation’s diet and nutrition. With the distribution of food effectively under government control, one of the main outcomes of rationing was to equalize

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the nation’s diet; the poor ate better and more nutritious food while those who were well off went without some of their accustomed luxuries. She was also responsible during this period for legislation to eradicate tuberculosis from the milk supply, a major and much needed public health measure. The 1950s saw Edith campaign against boxing on medical grounds, setting out her argument in the short book The Ignoble Art. Edith never stopped working and continued the fight for equal pay, amongst many other issues, when in the House of Lords. The obituary in The Times, published the day after Edith passed away, provided a fitting tribute to ‘this lively and public-spirited woman . . . who will rank high among women pioneers of the Labour Party’. Furthermore, ‘In all that she did Edith Summerskill was supremely efficient and if people sometimes winced at the sharpness of her tongue they were soon conscious of the warm humanity behind the public image of the ardent feminist.’56

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Notes Chapter 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

London, London School of Economics (LSE) Library, file Summerskill 1/22. LSE, Summerskill 1/22. LSE, Summerskill 1/22. Edith Summerskill, A Woman’s World: Her Memoirs (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1967), 6. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 4. Vaccine Knowledge Project University of Oxford & Oxford Vaccine Group, vk.ovg.ox.ac.uk. Birmingham Gazette, 7 October 1949. LSE, Summerskill 1/41. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 15. The Times, 27 July 1918. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 7. LSE, Summerskill 1/22. LSE, Summerskill 1/28. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 19. www.elthamhill.com. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 24. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 26. LSE, Summerskill 1/28. LSE, Summerskill 1/28. LSE, Summerskill 1/28. LSE, Summerskill 1/28. LSE Summerskill 1/28. LSE, Summerskill 1/28 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 30. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 31. LSE, Summerskill 1/28 LSE, Summerskill 1/25. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 32. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 32. 225

226 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

Notes to pages 19–36

LSE, Summerskill 1/25. LSE Summerskill 1/25. LSE, Summerskill 1/25. LSE, Summerskill 1/25. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 35. LSE, Summerskill 1/25 LSE, Summerskill 1/41. LSE, Summerskill 1/41. Juliet Gardner, The Thirties: An Intimate History (London: HarperPress, 2011), 351. LSE Summerskill 1/41. LSE, Summerskill 1/31. LSE, Summerskill 1/28. LSE, Summerskill 1/46. Transcript of an interview with Ian Mikado by Michael Summerskill.

Chapter 2 1 Edith Summerskill, A Woman’s World: Her Memoirs (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1967), 36. 2 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 36. 3 Edith Summerskill, Why I am a Socialist (Party Political Broadcast), Listener, 8 April 1948. 4 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 41. 5 Hornsey Journal, 5 June 1936. 6 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 43. 7 South Tottenham Citizen, December 1936. 8 Hornsey Journal, 5 June 1936. 9 London School of Economics Library, file Summerskill 1/38. 10 LSE, Summerskill 1/60. 11 Government Memorandum 152/MCW 1931. 12 LSE, Summerskill 1/60. 13 Report of the National Conference of Labour Women 1936, quoted in Pamela M. Graves, Labour Women: Women in British Working Class Politics 1918–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 195. 14 Hull History Centre: Archives of the Socialist Health Association U DSM2/13d. 15 Socialist Doctor 2, no. 2 (November 1933). 16 Hull: Socialist Health Association U DSM, 1.

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17 LSE, Summerskill 1/60. 18 SJC Minutes, 16 November 1934 and 14 March 1935, quoted in Graves, Labour Women, 199. 19 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 50–1. 20 C. P. Blacker, Eugenics: Galton and After (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd, 1952), 184. 21 Wellcome Foundation Library SA/FPA/A13/44. 22 Sketch, 15 March 1933. 23 Sunday Pictorial, 23 January 1938. 24 LSE, Summerskill 1/60. 25 LSE, Summerskill 1/60. 26 David Doughan and Peter Gordon (eds), Dictionary of British Women’s Organisations, 1825–1960 (Oxford: Routledge, 2002), 91. 27 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 48. 28 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 48. 29 LSE, Summerskill 1/19. 30 Interview with News Chronicle, 14 November 1934, quoted in LSE, Summerskill 1/19. 31 LSE, Summerskill 1/19. 32 Putney Parliamentary By-Election, published by W. J. Stimpson, 4–6 High Street, Putney SW15. Printed by Twentieth Century Press (1912) Ltd, T.U., all Depts, 103 Southwark Street, London SE1. 33 Putney Parliamentary By-Election. 34 LSE, Summerskill 1/19. 35 South Western Star, 23 November 1934. 36 Evening Star (Ipswich), 20 November 1934. 37 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 49. 38 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 49. 39 LSE, Summerskill 1/19. 40 Daily Herald, 18 October 1935. 41 Daily Herald, 18 October 1935. 42 Daily Herald, 18 October 1935. 43 LSE, Summerskill 1/20. 44 Hannen Swaffer, Daily Herald, 11 November 1935. 45 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 52. 46 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 53. 47 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 53. 48 Western Mail, 16 November 1935.

228

Notes to pages 53–70

Chapter 3 1 Edith Summerskill, A Woman’s World: Her Memoirs (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1967), 58. 2 Penny Summerfield, ‘Our Amazonian Colleague, Edith Summerskill’s Reputation’, in Richard Toye and Julie Gottlieb (eds), Making Reputations, 135–50 (136) (London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2005). 3 Ivan Yates, Observer, 16 April 1967. 4 CAB 23/92 f255. 5 1935 Labour Party General Election Manifesto, www.PoliticalNews.co.uk. 6 Summerskill, A Women’s World, 59. 7 Yorkshire Post, 26 March 1938. 8 Daily Worker, 24 March 1938. 9 Daily Herald, 25 March 1938. 10 Manchester Guardian, 31 March 1938. 11 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 65. 12 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 65. 13 Nottingham Journal, 12 April 1938. 14 Hansard, HC Deb, 05 March 1942, vol. 378, cc 851. 15 Edith Summerskill, ‘Conscription of Women’, The Fortnightly, vol. C:I, New Series (March 1942), 211 quoted in Richard Toye and Julie Gottlieb (eds), Making Reputations (London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2005), 140. 16 London School of Economics Library, file Summerskill1/28. 17 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 11. 18 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 59. 19 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 59. 20 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 60. 21 LSE, Summerskill1/83. 22 Jean Mann, Woman in Parliament (Watford: Odhams, 1962), 11. 23 Summerskill, A Women’s World, 60. 24 Summerskill, A Women’s World, 34. 25 Hansard, HC Deb, 28 April 1938, vol. 335, cc 361–5. 26 Daily Herald, 29 April 1938. 27 LSE, Summerskill 1/40. 28 Sunday Times, 31 April 1938. 29 Edith Summerskill, Babies Without Tears (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1941), 12. 30 Hansard, HC Deb, 28 July 1938, vol. 338, cc 3401. 31 Hansard, HC Deb, 28 July 1938, vol. 338, cc 3403–4. 32 Hansard, HC Deb, 16 February 1939, vol. 343, cc 1891.

Notes to pages 70–82 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

229

Hansard, HC Deb, 12 December 1938, vol. 335, cc 1703. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 66. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 67. Brian Harrison, ‘Women in a Men’s House, the women MPs 1919–45’, Historical Journal 29, no. 3 (1 February 2009): 623–54. www.reading.ac.uk/centaur, https://doi.org/10.20506/rst.36.1.2614. Hansard, HC Deb, 05 October 1939, vol. 351, cc 2087–8. Hansard, HC Deb, 02 November 1938, vol. 340, cc 296. LSE, Summerskill 1/35. LSE, Summerskill1/35. Hansard, HC Deb, 27 July 1938, vol. 338, cc 3113W. Hansard, HC Deb, 02 November 1938, vol. 340, cc 297. Wandsworth Borough News, 5 August 1938. LSE, Summerskill 1/60. LSE, Summerskill 1/35. LSE, Summerskill 1/60. LSE, Summerskill 1/60. LSE, Summerskill 1/60. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 83.

Chapter 4 1 Birmingham Gazette, 29 April 1939. 2 West London Observer, 5 July 1940. 3 Edith Summerskill, Women Fall In: A Guide to Women’s Work in War-time (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1941), 7. 4 Daily Mirror, 4 August 1943 5 Hansard, HC Deb, 02 July 1940, vol. 362, cc 646. 6 NA, WO, 32/9423, Grigg to Morrison, marked ‘Secret’, 22 December 1942, quoted in Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-Bird, Contesting Home Defence: Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 77. 7 NA, WO, 32/9423 16 and 18 February 1942, quoted in Summerfield and PenistonBird, Contesting Home Defence, 94. 8 Summerfield and Peniston-Bird, Contesting Home Defence, 70–1. 9 NA, WO, 32/9423, Minute by Sir Frederick Bovenschen, 22 April 1942, quoted in Summerfield and Peniston-Bird, Contesting Home Defence, 71. 10 Hansard, HC Deb, 25 June, 1942, vol. 380, cc 2135.

230

Notes to pages 84–100

11 Harold L Smith, ‘The Womanpower Problem in Britain during the Second World War’, Historical Journal 27, no. 4 (December 1984): 926. 12 Ethel Wood, Mainly for Men (London: Purnell and Sons Ltd, 1943), 120. 13 Hansard, HC Deb, 5 March 1942, vol. 378, cc 848, quoted in Rachel Reeves, Women of Westminster (London: I.B. Tauris Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 2019), 66. 14 Hansard, HC Deb, 20 March 1941, vol. 370, cc 378–9. 15 Hansard, HC Deb, 20 March 1941, vol. 370, cc 380–1. 16 Hansard, HC Deb, 20 March 1941, vol. 370, cc 381. 17 Hansard, HC Deb, 5 March 1942, vol. 378, cc 848. 18 Hansard, HC Deb, 5 March 1942, vol. 378, cc 850. 19 Edith Summerskill, A Woman’s World: Her Memoirs (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1967), 77. 20 Summerskill, Women Fall In, 47. 21 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 78. 22 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 72. 23 London, London School of Economics Library, file Summerskill 1/30. 24 LSE, Summerskill 1/30. 25 Sunday Express, 15 May 1955. 26 Hansard, HC Deb, 24 October 1939, vol. 352, cc 1260. 27 Hansard, HC Deb, 24 October 1939, vol. 352, cc 1262. 28 Hansard, HC Deb, 20 November 1940, vol. 365, cc 2009W. 29 Hansard, HC Deb, 1 May 1941, vol. 371, cc 643. 30 Select Committee on Equal Compensation, Sessional Papers 1942/43, Volume 3, 155. 31 Hansard, HC Deb, 7 April 1943, vol. 388, cc 624. 32 Western Morning News, 10 November 1939. 33 Hansard, HC Deb, 28 February 1940, vol. 357, cc 2116. 34 Hansard, HC Deb, 28 February 1940, vol. 357, cc 2116–17 35 Pat Thane, The ‘scandal’ of women’s pensions in Britain: how did it come about?, 20 March 2006, www.historyandpolicy.org. 36 Hansard, HL Deb, 12 October 1939, vol. 114, cc 1368. 37 Fulham Chronicle, 13 October 1939. 38 Hansard, HC Deb, 3 April 1940, vol. 350, cc 161. 39 Nottingham Evening Post, 15 June 1940. 40 Hansard, HC Deb, 23 January 1940, vol. 356, cc 527. 41 LSE, Summerskill 1/30. 42 Edith Summerskill, Wanted Babies: A Trenchant Examination of a Grave National Problem (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1943). 43 LSE, Summerskill 1/30. 44 Hansard, HC Deb, 07 May 1941, vol. 371, cc 838.

Notes to pages 100–114 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

231

Lancashire Daily Post, 7 May 1941. Hansard, HC Deb, 11 October 1939, vol. 352, cc 439–40. LSE, Summerskill 1/30. LSE, Summerskill 1/30. LSE, Summerskill 1/31. Report of the Committee on Amenities and Welfare Conditions in the Three Women’s Services, August 1942, Cmd 6384, 49. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 75. Hansard, HC Deb, 15 December 1942, vol. 385, cc 1808. Hansard, HC Deb, 15 December 1942, vol. 385, cc 1813. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 145. West Australian, 24 October 1944. Hansard, HC Deb, 17 March 1944, vol. 398, cc 581. Hansard, HC Deb, 17 March 1944, vol. 398, cc 585. The Labour Organiser 25, no. 279 (1945).

Chapter 5 1 Edith Summerskill, A Woman’s World Her Memoirs (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1967), 82 2 1945 Labour Party Election Manifesto, Political News .co.uk. 3 David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945–51 (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2007), 87. 4 Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 19. 5 John Bew, Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (London: riverrun Quercus Editions Limited, 2016), 395. 6 Hansard, HC Deb, 15 February 1945, vol. 408, cc 389. 7 London School of Economics Library, file Summerskill 1/77 8 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 88. 9 Liverpool Echo, 5 September 1946. 10 Belfast News Letter, 7 February 1947. 11 LSE, Summerskill 1/86. 12 LSE, Summerskill 1/86. 13 LSE, Summerskill 1/86. 14 Scotsman, 26 March 1946. 15 LSE, Summerskill 1/86. 16 LSE, Summerskill 1/86 17 Western Mail and South Wales News, 17 December 1946.

232

Notes to pages 114–123

18 Punch, 1 December 1948. 19 Sir William H. Beveridge, British Food Control, 1928, 337–8, quoted in Beveridge, Food: The Growth of Policy 1936. 20 Quoted in Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Rationing, Austerity and the Conservative Recovery after 1945’, Historical Journal 37, no.1 (March 1994): 179. 21 Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Rationing, Austerity and the Conservative Recovery after 1945’, 173–97. 22 Quoted in Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Rationing, Austerity and the Conservative Recovery after 1945’, 187. 23 C.& U.C.O, The Industrial Charter, 1947 quoted in Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Rationing, Austerity and the Conservative Recovery after 1945’, 187. 24 Daily Herald, 28 June 1947. 25 Yorkshire Post, 28 June 1947. 26 Fulham Chronicle, 28 November 1947. 27 Northern Daily Mail, 2 July 1947. 28 Hansard, HC Deb, 28 January 1948, vol. 446, cc 1008. 29 Hansard, HC Deb, 18 July 1946, vol. 425, col. 1522. 30 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 92. 31 Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Bread Rationing in Britain July 1946–July 1948’, Twentieth Century British History 4, no. 1 (1993): 57–85, https://doi.org/10.1093 /tcbh/4.1.57. 32 Hansard, HC Deb, 17 December 1945, vol. 417, cc 1036. 33 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 90. 34 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 90. 35 Daily Herald, 11 November 1946. 36 Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Rationing, Austerity and the Conservative Recovery after 1945’, 173–97. 37 People, 9 November 1947. 38 Tit-Bits, 15 April 1947. 39 Leicester Mail, 17 September 1949. 40 Hansard, HC Deb, 17 December 1947, vol. 445, cc 1705. 41 Natal Mercury, 17 December 1948, quoted in LSE, Summerskill 1/86. 42 Jean Mann quoted in Rachel Reeves, Women of Westminster: The MPs who Changed Politics (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), 92. 43 Summerskill A Women’s World, 91. 44 Manchester Guardian, 12 October 1949. 45 Fulham Chronicle, 28 January 1949. 46 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 92. 47 The Times, 28 April 1946.

Notes to pages 123–136 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

233

LSE, Summerskill 1/86. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 89. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 90. Derby Evening Telegraph, 11 October 1946. Press and Journal, 27 November 1946. Hansard, HC Deb, 18 February 1948, vol. 447, cc 1159. Hansard, HC Deb, 25 February 1947, vol. 433, cc 2018. LSE, Summerskill 1/86. Hansard, HC Deb, 06 March 1946, vol. 420, cc 337. Hansard, HC Deb, 12 February 1947, vol. 433, cc 365. LSE, Summerskill 1/86. Hansard, HC Deb, 06 March 1946, vol. 420, cc 71–2W. Hansard, HC Deb, 20 March 1946, vol. 420, cc 1867. Hansard, HC Deb, 27 November 1947, vol. 444, cc 2250. Liverpool Echo, 16 October 1946. Hansard, HC Deb, 28 November 1946, vol. 430, cc 1896.

Chapter 6 1 David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945–51 (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2007), 190. 2 Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 192. 3 Belfast Telegraph, 16 November 1949. 4 London School of Economics Library, file Summerskill 1/86. 5 Advert by Johnson’s Stores, Evening Telegraph, 26 November 1948. 6 Hansard, HC Deb, 01 July 1947, vol. 439, cc 1260–1. 7 Edith Summerskill, A Woman’s World: Her Memoirs (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1967), 91. 8 Liverpool Echo, 22 May 1946. 9 Western Morning News, 28 August 1947. 10 LSE, Summerskill 1/33. 11 LSE, Summerskill 1/86. 12 Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 98 13 Dundee Courier and Advertiser, 23 May 1949. 14 People’s History Museum, Report of the Labour Party Conference, 1947, 181–5. 15 People’s History Museum , Report of the Labour Party Conference, 1948, 184. 16 Hansard, HC Deb, 04 March 1949, vol. 462, cc 692. 17 Hansard, HC Deb, 04 March 1949, vol. 462, cc 693.

234 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Notes to pages 136–150

Hansard, HC Deb, 04 March 1949, vol. 462, cc 695. Hansard, HC Deb, 04 March 1949, vol. 462, cc 695–6. Hansard, HC Deb, 15 March 1949, vol. 462, cc 1911–12. Nottingham Journal, 12 May 1949. Hansard, HC Deb, 21 February 1949, vol. 461, cc 1604. Hansard, HC Deb, 21 February 1949, vol. 461, cc 1622. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 96. Barbara Castle, Fighting All the Way (London: Pan Macmillan Publishers Limited, 1993), 161. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 100. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 100. Hansard, HC Deb, 21 February 1951, vol. 484, cc 1378. LSE, Summerskill 1/52, letter from Sir John Walley to Michael Summerskill, 29 October 1988. LSE, Summerskill 1/52. LSE, Summerskill 1/52. Hansard, HC Deb, 17 April 1951, vol. 486, cc 1661. Hansard, HC Deb, 16 April 1951, vol. 487, cc 581. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 102. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 104. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 105. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 106. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 107. Hansard, HC Deb, 23 March 1950, vol. 472, cc 2305. Hansard, HC Deb, 20 June 1950, vol. 467, cc 1034–5. Hansard, HC Deb, 25 October 1950, vol. 478, cc 2923. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 160. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 163. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 161. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 163–4. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 164.

Chapter 7 1 2 3 4

Barbara Hosking, conversation with the author, 14 May 2018. Evening Standard, 21 June 1956. Punch, 19 January 1955. Sunday Express, 11 August 1957.

Notes to pages 151–163 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

235

Coventry Evening Telegraph, 19 February 1952. Star, 23 October 1951. Co-operative News, 25 February 1950. Daily Herald, 20 March 1952. Hansard, HC Deb, 24 April 1952, vol. 499, cc 856. Hansard, HC Deb, 05 May 1952, vol. 500, cc 49. Hansard, HC Deb, 16 May 1952, vol. 500, cc 1857. Hansard, HC Deb, 22 March 1955, vol. 538, cc 1881–6. Hansard, HC Deb, 27 March 1952, vol. 498, cc 858. Hansard, HC Deb, 06 March 1953, vol. 512, cc 762. Hansard, HC Deb, 31 May 1954, vol. 528, cc 925–6. Hansard, HC Deb, 03 November 1954, vol. 532, cc 412–13. Hansard, HC Deb, 03 November, 1955 vol. 545, cc 1238. Hansard, HC Deb, 27 April 1953, vol. 514, cc 1760. Hansard, HC Deb, 27 April 1953, vol. 514, cc 1762. H. L. Smith, ‘The politics of Conservative reform: the equal pay for equal work issue, 1945–1955’, Historical Journal 35, no. 2 (June1992): 401–15, 406. Women Demand Equal Pay!, https://ukvote100.org/2017/11/09/. People’s History Museum, Report of the Labour Party Conference, 1953, 191. Hansard, HC Deb, 16 November 1953, vol. 520, cc 1384. Elma Dangerfield, ‘Women at Strasbourg’, Atlantic and European Digest (January 1954). Barbara Hosking, conversation with the author, 14 May 2018. Ian Mikardo, Back-Bencher, 129–33, quoted in Richard Toye and Julie Gottlieb (eds), Making Reputations (London: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd, 2005), 146. Philip M. Williams, The Diary of Hugh Gaitskell, entry for 2–3 August 1956, 564, quoted in Richard Toye and Julie Gottlieb (eds), Making Reputations (London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2005),147. Janet Morgan, The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman (London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 1981), entry for 6 November 1957, 624. Morgan, Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman, entry for 14 November 1958, 723. Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds, Nye (London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2018), 185. Barbara Castle, Fighting All The Way (London: Pan Macmillan Publishers Limited, 1993), 161 London School of Economics Library, file Summerskill 1/51. Daily Mail, 10 August 1954. Edith Summerskill, A Woman’s World: Her Memoirs (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1967), 178. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 179.

236 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

Notes to pages 164–175

Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 179. Daily Herald, 11 August 1954. Daily Sketch, 12 August 1954. Evening News, 12 August 1954. Daily Dispatch, 27 September 1957. Manchester Guardian, 13 August 1954. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 184. Daily Sketch, 10 August 1954. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 177. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 192. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 203–4. News Chronicle, 10 January 1955. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 115. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 113. Edith Summerskill, The Ignoble Art (Kingswood, Surrey: Windmill Press, 1956), 2. Northern Daily Mail, 25 February 1952. Summerskill, The Ignoble Art, 74. Yorkshire Post, 12 December 1953. Summerskill, The Ignoble Art, 75. Birmingham Gazette, 25 March 1954. Summerskill, The Ignoble Art, 3. Daily Herald, 1 June 1956. Daily Mirror, 1 June 1956. Sunday Express, 9 January 1955. Fulham Gazette, 11 March 1955. LSE, Summerskill 1/46. LSE, Summerskill 1/51. Letter from A. Deakin to E. Summerskill, 14 April 1955, in LSE, Summerskill 1/84. Hansard, HC Deb, 02 March 1955, vol. 537, cc 2117–18. Brian Brivati, Hugh Gaitskell (London: Richard Cohen Books, 1996), 204. LSE, Summerskill 1/51. Michael Foot, Aneurin Bevan 1945–1960 (Frogmore, St Albans: Paladin, 1975), 470. Economist, 19 March 1955, quoted in Michael Foot, Aneurin Bevan 1945–1960 (Frogmore, St Albans: Paladin, 1975), 470. Birmingham Post, 21 March 1955. Philip Williams, Hugh Gaitskell (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1979), 344. Kathryn Perera, Labour List, 10 January 2011. LSE, Summerskill 1/51.

Notes to pages 176–191 73 74 75 76

237

History of the BBC website. Evening Standard, 12 October 1955. Daily Mirror, 12 October 1955. Star, 10 October 1955.

Chapter 8 1 Edith Summerskill, A Woman’s World: Her Memoirs (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1967), 207–8. 2 Daily Star, Lebanon, 26 January 2006. 3 London School of Economics Library, file Summerskill 1/70. 4 LSE, Summerskill 1/70, Edith Summerskill letter to Edmond Naim. 5 LSE, Summerskill 1/70, Edith Summerskill letter to Edmond Naim. 6 LSE, Summerskill 1/70, Edith Summerskill letter to Edmond Naim. 7 LSE, Summerskill 1/70, Edith Summerskill letter to Edmond Naim. 8 LSE, Summerskill 1/70, Edith Summerskill letter to Edmond Naim. 9 LSE, Summerskill 1/70, Edith Summerskill letter to Edmond Naim. 10 LSE, Summerskill 1/70, Edith Summerskill letter to Edmond Naim. 11 LSE, Summerskill 1/70, Edith Summerskill letter to Edmond Naim. 12 LSE, Summerskill 1/70, Edith Summerskill letter to Edmond Naim. 13 LSE, Summerskill 1/70, Edith Summerskill letter to Edmond Naim. 14 LSE, Summerskill 1/69. 15 LSE, Summerskill 1/69. 16 LSE, Summerskill 1/88. 17 Daily Express, 4 January 1956. 18 Hansard, HC Deb, 26 March 1956, vol. 550, cc 1768. 19 Hansard, HC Deb, 27 February 1956, vol. 549, cc 97W. 20 Hansard, HC Deb, 25 June 1956, vol. 555, cc 171–2. 21 Warrington Guardian, 24 November 1956. 22 Kent and Sussex Courier, 9 November 1956. 23 LSE, Summerskill 1/84. 24 Evening Standard, 10 January 1957. 25 Evening Standard, 10 January 1957. 26 Yorkshire Evening News, 23 January 1957. 27 Report to The Right Hon. Antony Head M.P., Minister of Defence by Sir Edwin Herbert, President of the Law Society, 19 December 1956, 28. 28 Daily Telegraph, 26 January 1957. 29 Star, 24 January 1957.

238 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Notes to pages 191–202

Hansard, HC Deb, 28 January 1957, vol. 563, cc 652. Warrington Examiner, 1 February 1957. Hansard, HC Deb, 05 February 1957, vol. 564, cc 345–6. Hansard, HC Deb, 05 February 1957, vol. 564, cc 366–7. LSE, Summerskill 1/88. Evening Standard, 4 February 1957. LSE, Summerskill 1/88. Warrington Examiner, 9 October 1957. LSE, Summerskill 1/51. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 44. LSE, Summerskill1/51. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 45. BBC, 3 October 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/the_daily_ politics/6967366.stm. LSE, Summerskill 1/51. Hansard, HC Deb, 01 March 1957, vol. 565, cc 1539. Hansard, HC Deb, 19 March 1957, vol. 567, cc 219–20. Hansard, HC Deb, 08 July 1957, vol. 476, cc 46. Hansard, HC Deb, 16 December 1957, vol. 580, cc 24–5. Hansard, HC Deb, 27 February 1958, vol. 583, cc 688–9. Hansard, HC Deb, 27 February 1958, vol. 583, cc 698. Hansard, HC Deb, 30 June 1958, vol. 590, cc 874. Hansard, HC Deb, 24 November 1958, vol. 596, cc 17–18. Daily Herald, 27 January 1959. Hansard, HC Deb, 18 June 1959, vol. 607, cc 646–7. Daily Express, 12 January 1957. Evening News and Star, 30 May 1961. Jean Mann, Woman in Parliament (London: Odhams Press Limited, 1962), 158 LSE, Summerskill 1/51.

Chapter 9 1 2 3 4 5

Ben Summerskill, interview with the author, 10 September 2019. News Chronicle, 15 March 1952. London School of Economics Library, file Summerskill 1/51. LSE, Summerskill 1/51. Edith Summerskill, A Woman’s World: Her Memoirs (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1967), 110.

Notes to pages 203–217 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Sumerskill, A Woman’s World, 111. LSE, Summerskill 1/9. Ben Summerskill, interview with the author, 10 September 2019. LSE, Summerskill 1/58. Ben Summerskill, interview with the author, 10 September 2019. LSE, Summerskill 1/51. Evening Standard, 21 March 1955. LSE, Summerskill 1/52. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 84. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 85. Hansard, HC Deb, 21 April 1966, vol. 727, cc 54. Observer, 16 April 1967. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 249. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 227. Hansard, HL Deb, 30 November 1965, vol. 270, cc 1190–4. Hansard, HL Deb, 30 November 1965, vol. 270, cc 1194. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 232. Hansard, HL Deb, 29 January 1970, vol. 307, cc 462–3. Hansard, HL Deb, 11 May 1970, vol. 310, cc 406. Hansard, HL Deb, 10 May 1962, vol. 240, cc 345–6. Hansard, HL Deb, 11 February 1963, vol. 246, cc 782. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, 240. Hansard, HL Deb, 05 July 1963, vol. 251, cc 1151. Hansard, HL Deb, 07 April 1965, vol. 265, cc 72. Hansard, HL Deb, 14 June 1966, vol. 276, cc 25–6. Hansard, HL Deb, 22 February 1967, vol. 280, cc 707–14. Hansard, HL Deb, 05 May 1970, vol 310, cc 137–8. Hansard, HL Deb, 01 July 1975, vol. 362, cc 125–9 Hansard, HL Deb, 22 March 1962, vol. 238, cc 632–3. Ben Summerskill, interview with the author, 10 September 2019. Ben Summerskill, interview with the author, 10 September 2019. Ben Summerskill interview with the author, 10 September 2019. LSE, Summerskill 1/75, Invitation and guest list. LSE, Summerskill 1/75. Hampstead and Highgate Express, 21 April 1967. LSE, Summerskill 1/75. Observer, 16 April 1967. Guardian, 21 April 1967. Votes for Women 1918–1968 Golden Jubilee Celebration, 27 March 1968.

239

240 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

Notes to pages 218–223

Hansard, HL Deb, 19 February 1970, vol. 307, cc 1286. LSE, Summerskill 1/39. Hansard, HL Deb, 12 May 1971, vol. 318, cc 1064. Hansard, HL Deb, 08 December 1971, vol. 326, cc 835–6. Hansard, HL Deb, 14 March 1973, vol. 340, cc 300. The Times, 27 May 1977. Edith Summerskill, Letters to My Daughter (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1957), 87. Summerskill, Letters to My Daughter, 143. Summerskill, Letters to My Daughter, 153. Summerskill, Letters to My Daughter, 157. Summerskill, Letters to My Daughter, 187–8. The Times, 5 February 1980.

Bibliography Books by Edith Summerskill Summerskill, Dr Edith, Babies Without Tears. London: Hutchinson & Co, 1941. Summerskill, Dr Edith, Women Fall In: A Guide to Women’s Work in War-time. London: Hutchinson & Co, 1941. Summerskill, Dr Edith, Wanted Babies: A Trenchant Examination of a Grave National Problem. London: Hutchinson & Co, 1943. Summerskill P.C. M.P., Dr Edith, The Ignoble Art. London: William Heinemann, 1956. Summerskill, Edith, Letters to My Daughter. London: William Heinemann, 1957. Summerskill, Edith, A Woman’s World: Her Memoirs. London: William Heinemann, 1967.

Memoirs and diaries Castle, Barbara, Fighting All the Way. London: McMillan 1993. Healey, Denis, The Time of My Life. London: Michael Joseph, 1989. Lee, Jennie, My Life with Nye. London: Penguin Books, 1980. Mann, Jean, Woman in Parliament. London: Oldham’s Press Limited, 1962. Morgan, Janet (ed.), The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman 1951–1963. London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 1981. Williams, Shirley, Climbing the Bookshelves: The Autobiography. London: Virago Press, 2009. Wilson, Harold, The Labour Government 1964–1970. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1971.

Other primary sources British Newspaper Archives: local and national newspapers. Hansard (HC Debs – Commons, HL Debs – Lords). 241

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Bibliography

Hull History Centre: Archives of the Socialist Health Association. London Metropolitan Archives. London School of Economics (LSE): Edith Summerskill (SUMMERSKILL). National Archives, Kew, London (TNA): Cabinet Papers (CAB). Parliamentary Archives, Westminster. People’s History Museum, Manchester (PHM). Rathbone, Eleanor, The Case for Family Allowances. London: Penguin, 1940. Wellcome Library, Euston. Wood, Ethel, Mainly for Men. London: Purnell and Sons Ltd, 1943.

Secondary sources Beers, Laura, Red Ellen: The Life of Ellen Wilkinson, Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Benton, Jill, Naomi Mitchison: A Biography. London: Pandora Press, 1980. Bew, John, Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee. London: riverrun Quercus Editions Limited, 2016. Blacker, C. P., Eugenics, Galton and After. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd, 1952. Brendon, Piers, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s. London: Jonathan Cape, 2000. Brivati, Brian, Hugh Gaitskell. London: Richard Cohen Books, 1996. Cockburn, Patricia, The Years of The Week: The Story of Claud Cockburn’s Legendary Political News-sheet which Blew the Gaff on the 30’s. London: Macdonald & Co., 1968. Coolican, Michael, No Tradesman and No Women: The Origins of the British Civil Service. London: Biteback Publishing, 2018. Doughan, David and Peter Gordon (eds), Dictionary of British Women’s Organisations, 1825–1960. Oxford: Routledge, 2002. Foot, Michael, Aneurin Bevan 1945–960. London: Paladin 1975. Fraser, Derek, The Evolution of the British Welfare State, 4th edn. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Gardner, Juliet, The Thirties: An Intimate History. London: HarperPress, 2011. Graves, Pamela M., Labour Women: Women in British Working Class Politics 1918–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Harris, Kenneth, Attlee. London: George Weidenfeld and Nicholson Ltd, 1984. Harrison, Brian, Prudent Revolutionaries: Portraits of British Feminists between the Wars. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.

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Hollis, Patricia, Jennie Lee: A Life. London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1997. Honeyball, Mary, Parliamentary Pioneers: Labour Women MPs 1918–1945. London: Urbane Publications Ltd, 2015. Jones, Mervyn, Michael Foot. London: Victor Gollancz, 1994. Kynaston, David, Austerity Britain 1945–51. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007. Lewis, Jane, Women in England 1870–1950. London: Wheatsheaf Books Ltd, reprinted 1986. Marr, Andrew, A History of Modern Britain. Basingstoke: Pan Books, 2017. Marwick, Arthur, British Society Since 1945. London: Penguin Books, 1982 McDougall, Linda, Westminster Women. London: Vintage, 1998. Middleton, Lucy (ed.), Women in the Labour Movement. London: Croom Helm Ltd, 1977. Morgan, Kenneth O., Labour in Power 1945–51. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Morgan, Kenneth O., Michael Foot: A Life. London: Harper Perennial, 2008 Mowat, Charles Loch, Britain Between the Wars 1918–1940. London: Methuen & Co Ltd, reprinted 1968. Nicholson, Virginia, Million’s Like Us: Women’s Lives in War and Peace 1939–1949. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2011. Overy, Richard, The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilisation, 1919–1939. London: Penguin Books, 2009. Pelling, Henry, The Labour Governments 1945–51. London: Macmillan Press, 1984. Phillips, Melanie, The Divided House. London: Sedgwick and Jackson Limited, 1980. Pimlott, Ben, Labour and the Left in the 1930s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Pimlott, Ben, Harold Wilson. London: HarperCollins, 1992. Pugh, Martin, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain since 1914. London: Palgrave, 2015. Reeves, Rachel, Alice in Westminster: The Political Life of Alice Bacon. London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2017. Reeves, Rachel, Women of Westminster. London: I.B. Tauris Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. Renwick, Chris, Bread For All: The Origins of the Welfare State. London: Penguin Random House, 2017. Schneer, Jonathan, Labour’s Conscience: The Labour Left, 1945–51. London: Routledge, 2019. Shore, Peter, Leading the Left. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1993 Summerfield, Penny and Corinna Peniston-Bird, Contesting Home Defence: Men and Women in the Home Guard in the Second World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.

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Index ECS=Edith Clara Summerskill abortion 34, 35, 208–9 SMA 37 Abse, Leo 211 Adamson, Jennie 64 family allowances 94 House of Commons facilities 66 Ministry of Pensions 111 war injuries compensation 92–3 womanpower debate 87 WPC 85 air pollution 155 Aitken, Max. See Beaverbrook, Lord alcohol 96–7, 126–7 Aldermaston anti-nuclear weapons marches 195–6 Aldington, Richard 23 Alice, (Princess of the UK, Countess of Althone) 39 Allsop, Kenneth 217 Althone, Countess Alice of 39 ‘Analects of Edith, The’ (Punch)150 Analgesia in Childbirth Bill 136–8 Anglo-Italian Agreement 74 Anne (Princess Royal of the UK) 140 anti-nuclear demonstrations 194–6 anti-Semitism 19 anti-Zionism 185 appeasement 55, 57 armaments 56, 67, 113, 153–4, 159, 161, 173, 177 arms race 194 Arnold-Foster, Mark 205 Askey, Arthur 175 Assheton, A. 86 Assheton, Ralph 146, 151 Astor, Nancy 64, 66, 67, 97 personal injury compensation 92–3 women’s war work 85 Atholl, Duchess of (Katherine StewartMurray) 64, 67

Attlee, Clement 55, 111, 114, 116, 139, 143 Bevan Aneurin 109, 173, 174 China/USSR trip 162, 165, 166 as life peer 209 Middle East 186 NCCL 40 relationship with ECS 76, 116, 139, 158, 160, 206, 217 United States 161, 162 austerity 108, 114, 127, 131–2, 133 Australia 104 Babies Without Tears, A (Summerskill, Edith Clara) 7, 19, 68–9, 97–8, 220, 222 Bacon, Alice 136 Baird, John 127 Baldwin, Stanley 48, 52 banquets 127–8 Bassett, Percy 124 Baxter, Beverley 192 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 210 Beaverbrook, Lord (Max Aitken) 89, 204 Bell, Mary Hayley 216 Benjamin, Elisabeth 22 Benn, Anthony Wedgwood 197 Bentham, Ethel 5 Bevan, Aneurin 109, 150, 182 childbirth, analgesia in 137 China/Hong Kong/Japan/USSR trip 162, 165 disciplinary action against 173–4 election losses 176 Gaitskell, Hugh 160, 161, 174, 182 Health Minister 109, 137 Labour Party conflict 160, 161, 173 Middle East 186 NCCL 40, 41 NHS 160

245

246

Index

nuclear disarmament 194 nuclear weapons 173 relationship with ECS 109, 140, 160, 166, 173–4 resignation 160, 161 Suez Canal crisis 188 United States 161 USSR 42 Beveridge, William 93, 99, 115 Beveridge Report 99 Bevin, Ernest 85, 86, 88, 89, 139 Egypt 147 Middle East 186 BHL (British Housewives League) 132–3 Bilbao, Tomas 73 Bing, Geoffrey 40 birth control 4–5, 30–1, 33–5, 37–9, 222 China 166 contraceptive pill 209–10 Roman Catholic church 5, 50–1, 53–4, 222 birth rate 98 Bitar, Salah 186 Black Book list 90 black market 124–5 Blacker, Carlos 38 blackout 96–7 Blackwell, Mrs 103–4 Blenkinsop, Arthur 137 Bondfield, Margaret 2 Bovenschen, Frederick 82 bovine TB 71 in milk 3, 12, 23, 71–2, 138–9 Bowles, Frank 127 boxing 168–70, 171, 187, 198, 210, 223 Boxing Bill 210 Braddock, Bessie 107, 136, 142, 155–6, 168, 199 Brains Trust, The (radio programme) 79, 101, 102 bread rationing 118–19 breastfeeding 21, 87 Bridgeman, Robert Lord 83 Bridges, Edward 145 British Asian Fellowship 182 British Board of Film Censors 40 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 210 British College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologist 19

British Housewives League (BHL) 132–3 British Medical Association 19 British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 97 British Restaurants 128 Brittain, Vera 40, 41, 90, 194, 216 Brivati, Brian 219 Brook, Charles 35–6 Brown, George 107, 159, 192 Brown, Tom 144 Brown, William 149 Burke, Wilfrid 162 Burma 166 Bury election 4–5, 23, 42, 48–52, 222 Busby, Charles John 56 Butler, Joyce 171, 194 Butler, R. A. 74, 75, 156, 176 as life peer 209 butter 122–3, 126 byssinosis 143 Caitlin, George 90 Caitlin, John 90 Callaghan, James 107 Calling All Women radio programme 101 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 194, 195 cancer 69, 70 Casti Connubii (Pius XI) 50 Castle, Barbara 2, 3, 97, 107, 136, 139, 160, 182 Bevan, Aneurin 174 equal pay 156, 214 National Insurance 142 Catholicism 5, 50–2, 53–4, 222 Catlin, George 40 Cazelet-Keir Thelma 64, 87, 93 Chamberlain, Neville 55, 77 Chapman Walker, P. J. F. 48 Charles (Prince of Wales) 140 cheese 125–6, 129 Chesney, Anne 205 childbirth analgesia in 18–19, 67, 68, 97–8, 136–8, 164, 222 cost 69–70 maternal mortality 45, 68–9 USSR 164

Index children health 11–12, 219 illegitimate 9–10, 62, 66, 102–3, 213 nurseries 79, 60, 87, 88, 110, 152, 222 China 162, 165–6 chloroform 19 Chorlton, Alan 48–9, 51 Chou En-Lai 165 Churchill, Clementine 199 Churchill, Randolph 19, 183 ‘Viking and the Vicerine, The’ 193 Churchill, Winston 65–6, 116, 149, 175 Astor, Nancy 66 rationing 117, 118 USSR 165 women’s war work 80, 89 Chuter-Ede, James 173 civic restaurants 128 Civil Service 145 class 28 Clean Air Bill 155 Clifton Brown, Douglas 147 Close Up of Dr Edith Summerskill (film) 1 clothing 96 Clynes, J. R. 48 CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) 194, 195 Cobb, Cyril 54, 55 Cockburn, Claude 40 Cold War, the 162, 177 Collins, Miss 61–2 Combined Food Board 113 communism 162, 163 confectionary 124 Conservative Party 105, 133, 149, 199 appeasement 55, 57 armament 56 food rationing 116–18, 124–5 Suez Canal crisis 187–9 women 53 world politics 55–6 Contesting Home Defence (Summerfield, Penny and Peniston-Bird, Corinna) 6–7 contraception. See birth control Cooper, Duff 100 Council of Europe 157 Cripps, Stafford 47, 58–9, 140, 159 Crookshank, Harry 202

247

cross-party alliances 88, 92 Crossman, Richard 4, 107, 159, 186 Crowther-Smith, Sylvia 40–1, 46 Cuthbertson, Ely 75 DAC (Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War) 195, 196 Dad’s Army (television programme) 80 Daily Mirror ‘Women’s Day in the House of Commons’ 79 Dalton, Hugh 140, 186 Dangerfield, Emma ‘Women at Strasbourg’ 157 Davidson, Frances Joan Viscountess 64, 87, 151 Davies, Clement 151 Davies, Herbert Henry 175 Deakin, Arthur 172, 173 Deedes, William (Bill) 111, 113–14 diet. See food Dimbleby, Jonathan 216 Dimbleby, Richard 191 Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War (DAC) 195, 196 disarmament 45, 177, 194–5 disease 138, 143–4, 147–8 divorce 152–3, 196–7, 211–13, 222 China 165 ‘Do women get a fair share in politics?’ (Summerskill, Edith Clara) 151 dollar crisis 132 Dulles, John Foster 161 Dummet, Richard 205 Dunwoody, Gwyneth 216 dust-borne diseases 143–4 economy, the 18, 114 Edelman, Maurice 216 Eden, Anthony 55, 80, 175, 176, 189, 192 Egypt 147–8, 187–93 Eire 125 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 188 elections 139, 149, 175–6, 198–9, 206, 207 Bury 4–5, 23, 42, 48–52, 222 Fulham West 5, 6, 53–9, 107, 139, 149 post-war 104, 105, 107 Putney 42–7 Roman Catholic church 5, 50–2, 53–4

248

Index

Warrington 172, 175, 198–9 women 27, 28–9, 46–7, 58 Elizabeth (The Queen Mother) 151 Elizabeth (II) (Princess, later Queen of the UK) 140, 151, 217 Elliot, Walter 70, 72, 151 Elliott, Florence 203, 219 Elliott, Sydney 203–4 Ellis, Havelock 40 EPCC (Equal Pay Campaign Committee) 156 equal pay 152, 156, 214 Equal Pay Act 214 Equal Pay Campaign Committee (EPCC) 156 eugenics 37–8 Eugenics Society 37, 38 evacuation 72, 89–90 Extended Employment of Women Agreement 85 Fabian, Edward 35 family allowances 65, 94, 98–9, 140 Family Allowances Act 65 Farouk I (King of Egypt) 148, 187 fascism 40, 44, 47, 49, 56, 77–8 fats 122–3, 126, 129 feminism 2–3, 60, 64–5 see also women Astor, Nancy 66 maiden names 43–4, 58–9 Malenkov, Georgy 164 Rathbone, Eleanor 1, 64–5 Finch, Harold 144 First World War 78 food 134, 222–3 alcohol 96–7, 126–7 banquets 127–8 black market 124–5 butter/margarine 122–3, 126 cheese 125–6, 129 confectionary 124 equality 133 fats 122–3, 126, 129 Idris lemonade 124 meat 125, 128–9, 132 milk 3, 12, 23, 71–2, 138–9, 155, 223 personal points rationing 130 points rationing 130 preservation 127, 129–30

prices 175 radioactivity 198 rationing 3, 96, 108, 113, 114–21, 124–5, 126, 127, 128–30, 131, 132, 133, 136, 222–3 restaurants 128 school meals 197 snoek 121–2 soap rationing 126, 129 state control 114–15, 124 subsidies 121 sugar 95, 126, 129–30 supply 113, 114–15, 117–18, 120, 132, 133 tea 126, 130 Food and Agricultural Organization 133 Food consumption levels in the United Kingdom White Paper 120 ‘Food Facts’ (Ministry of Food) 118 Foort, Reginald 21 Foot, Dingle 40 Foot, Michael 41, 173, 204 footwear 95–6 For You Madam radio programme 102 Ford, Patricia 155–6, 214 ‘What a Baptism’ 155 foreign policy 55–7 Forster, E. M. 40 Foster, Venetia 81 France 188, 189 Frances, Juanita 41, 98, 99 Freeman, John 160 Freemantle, Francis 95 fuel crisis 132 Fulham West elections 5, 6, 53–9, 107, 139, 149 merge with Fulham East 170–1 Gaitskell, Hugh 107, 194 Bevan, Aneurin 160, 161, 174, 182 Chancellor of the Exchequer 142, 159–61 equal pay 156 misogyny 4, 158–9 National Insurance 142 NHS 159–60 nuclear weapons 196 relationship with ECS 158–9, 160, 161 Suez Canal crisis 189

Index Gale, G. S. 164–5 George VI (King of the UK) 134–5, 151 Germany Anti-Comintern Pact 55 fascism 40 food supply 113 Morgenthau Plan 113 Rome-Berlin Axis 55 Ghazzi, Said 186 Gollancz, Victor 40, 112 Gomme-Duncan, Alan 192–3 Gorky, Maxim 163 Gottlieb, Juliet and Toye, Richard Making Reputations 6 Griffiths, Jim 159, 167 Grigg, James 80, 82, 83 Guest, haden 133 Gwynne-Vaughan, Helen 81–2 Haden Guest, Leslie 40 Haden Guest, Muriel 40 Halifax, Edward Lord 55 Hamilton, Hamish 73 Hancock, Henry 145 Hardie, Agnes 58, 59, 63, 64 family allowances 94 war injuries 93 WPC 85, 87 Hardie, George 64 Harman, Harriet 1, 221–2 Hastings, Somerville 36, 138 Hayter, William 163 Headlam, Cuthbert 108 health 11–12, 109 see also NHS boxing 168 cancer 69, 70 childbirth, analgesia in 18–19, 67, 68, 97–8, 136–8, 164, 222 cost 31, 32, 69–70, 136–8 disease 138, 147–8 dust-borne diseases 143–4 mental health 197, 198 milk, TB in 3, 12, 23, 71–2, 138–9 midwifery 10–11, 18–19, 69 miners, lung diseases 3, 143–4 proprietary drugs 197 radiation 154, 194–5 radioactivity 198 rickets 219

249

smoking 186, 198 TB 3, 12, 23, 71–2, 138–9, 223 venereal disease 103 women’s 10–11, 18–19, 31, 33–5, 45, 68–71, 87, 97–8, 102–3, 136–7, 207–9, 215, 222 Heath, Edward 217 Herbert, A. P. 40 Herbert, Edwin 190, 192 Herbison, Margaret 136 Hilton, Alfred 21–2 Hitler, Adolf 40, 55, 77, 90 Hodson, Charles Lord 211 Hogg, Quentin 101 Home Guard 79–83, 222 Honeyball, Mary 2 Parliamentary Pioneers, Labour Women MPs 1918–1945 2 Hong Kong 166 honours list 219 Hoover, Herbert 113 Horsburgh, Florence 64, 86–7, 151 Hosking, Barbara 150, 158 Houghton, Douglas 142 House of Commons 146–7 facilities 66–7 House of Lords 208–9 human rights 39–40 Hussein, Ahmed 147 Hussein, Taha 147 Huxley, Aldous 101 Huxley, Julian 38, 40 hydrogen bomb 153–4, 173, 177, 194 Ignoble Art, The (Summerskill, Edith Clara) 7, 168, 170, 184–5, 187, 223 Idris lemonade 124 illegitimacy 9–10, 62, 66, 102–3, 213 Ince, Lily 212 India 189 industrial accidents compensation 141 infectious illnesses 11 International Birth Control Movement 39 Ireland 125 Israel 166–7, 179, 185, 188, 189 Italy 55 Anglo-Italian Agreement 74 Anti-Comintern Pact 55 Italian-Abyssinian dispute 48, 49

250 Rome-Berlin Axis 55 Spanish Civil War 74–5 Janet, Jessie 99 Japan 55, 166 Anti-Comintern Pact 55 Jeger, Lena 217 Jenkins, Roy 207 Jennings, Ivor 40 Joad, Cyril 101 Johnson, Donald 49, 52 Jordan 167, 180–1, 182 Katz, Otto 73 Keynes, John Maynard 38, 108 Khrushchev, Nikita 163 Kidd, Ronald 40–1, 46 Kitchen Front radio programme 101–2 Kynaston, David 108 La Guardia, Fiorello 75 Labour Party 28, 107–8, 139, 149, 175–6, 196 abortion 34, 37 armament 56, 161, 173, 177, 194, 195, 196 backbenchers 143 class 28 conflict 159–61, 173–74, 175–6 disillusionment with 131–2 election losses 176–7 fascism 44, 47, 49, 56, 77–8 feminism 3, 4, 60 food 133 health 36 Labour’s Immediate Programme 56 Lehmann, John 131–2 Let Us Face the Future 107 Margate conference (1955) 176–7 Middle East 185–6 misogyny 158 National Executive Committee (NEC) 3, 47, 135–6, 156–7, 162, 173, 174 National Service for Health, A 104 nuclear weapons 173, 177, 194, 195, 196 pacifism 44, 77, 188 policies 198–9 post-war support 105, 107–8

Index Suez Canal crisis 188 women 34–5, 53, 85–6, 105 WPC 85–6 Labour Woman 34 Labour’s Immediate Programme (Labour Party) 56 LaMotta, Jake 168 Lansbury, George 48, 49 Lascelles, Alan (Tommy) 140 Laski, Frida 35, 40 Laski, Harold 40, 112 Lawder, John 43 LDV (Local Defence Volunteers) 80 League of Nations 44, 49, 55, 56 Lebanon 179, 182–3 Lee, Jennie 2, 3, 42, 101, 139, 174 Legge-Bourke, Harry 125 Legh, Peter. See Newton, Lord Lehmann, John 131 Lend-Lease agreement 108 Let Us Face the Future (Labour Party) 107 Letters to my Daughter (Summerskill, Edith Clara) 7, 204, 219–21 Liberal Party 28, 44, 57 life peers 209 Lloyd George, David 44, 57, 105 Lloyd George, Megan 64, 86, 87, 93, 136 Local Defence Volunteers (LDV) 80 Lockwood, Margaret 216 Lockwood, Toots 216 Lucas, Jocelyn 89 McAdden, Stephen 191 McArthur, Mary 44 McCardie, Henry 39 MacColl, Rene 186 Macdonald, Ramsay 44 Macleod, Iain 154 Macmillan, Harold 198, 199 McNeil, Hector 163 Macpherson, Niall 127 maiden names 43–4, 58–9 Maill, Leonard 176 Mainly for Men (Wood, Ethel) 85 Maintenance Orders (Attachment of Income) Bill (1957) 196–7 Making Reputations (Toye, Richard and Gottlieb, Juliet) 6 Maksoud, Clovis 182

Index Malenkov, Georgy 162, 163–4 Malthus, Thomas 39 Mander, Miles 42–3 March of Marcus, The 42–3 To My Son – In Confidence 42 Mann, Jean 66, 121–2, 139, 200 Woman in Parliament 139 Manning, Leah 136 Manson, Malcolm 27 March of Marcus, The (Mander, Miles) 42–3 Marciano, Rocky 168 margarine 122–3, 126 Margesson, David Viscount 80, 82 marriage 152, 211–13, 222 see also divorce China 166 to foreigners 97 Married Women’s Association (MWA) 41–2, 77, 135, 152, 212 Married Women’s Property Act 212, 222 Married Women’s Savings Bill 211 Martin, Kingsley 40 maternal mortality 45, 68–9 Matrimonial Causes and Reconciliation Bill 211 Matrimonial Clauses Act 211 Matrimonial Homes Bill/Act 212–13, 221 means testing 32 meat 125, 128–9, 132 Mellish, Bob 206 Mellor, John 146 mental health 197, 198 Mental Health Bill 198 Menzies, Robert 78 Messer, Fred 28 Middle East 147–8, 166–7, 179–83, 185–6, 187–93 midwifery 10–11, 18–19, 69 Mikardo, Ian 4, 26, 158, 187 Mikoyan, Anastas 163 milk 155 TB 3, 12, 23, 71–2, 138–9, 223 Milk (Special Designations) Bill 72, 138–9 Mills, Juliet 216 miners, lung diseases 3, 143–4 Ministry of Food 111–13, 114–19 ‘Food Facts’ 118 snoek 121–2 Ministry of Health 109

251

Ministry of Information 100–1 Ministry of National Insurance 139–46 Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance 145 misogyny 4, 59, 65–6, 112, 137, 151, 158–9, 172, 205, 222 see also sexism Mitchison, Val 205 Modesto, Juan 73 Molotov, Vyacheslav 163 Monckton, Walter Lord 190 Monday Night at Eight (radio programme) 79 Montagu, Ivor 40 morale 131 Moray, Ann (Summerskill, Edith Clara) 39 Morgan, H. B. W. 172 Morgenthau, Henry, Jr. 113 Morgenthau Plan 113 Morrison, Herbert 81, 140, 141, 173 Middle East 186 Morrison, William 156 Moseley, Oliver 112 Mostly for Women radio programme 102 motherhood 98 Mountbatten, Edwina Lady 193 Moyle, Arthur Lord 217 Mussolini, Benito 55mussolini MWA (Married Women’s Association) 41–2, 77, 135, 152, 212 Naim, Edmond 179–85, 193 Nana (Wakeford, Agnes Robson) 20, 21, 76 Second World War 89–90 Nasser, Abdel 187–8, 190, 193 National Conference of Labour Women 34–5 National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) 39–41 National Council for the Abolition of Nuclear Test 194 National Council for the Single Woman and her dependants 213 National Government 44, 52, 55–6 National Health Service (NHS). See NHS National Health Service, A White Paper 104 National Hunger March 40 National Insurance Act (1946) 141–2 National Insurance benefits 157 does 94–5

252

Index

National Insurance Bill 141–3 National mark 44 National Service for Health, A (Labour Party) 104 National Service (No 2) Act 80, 89 National Spinsters’ Association 95 nationalization 134 NCCL (National Council for Civil Liberties) 39–41 ‘Never Again’ Association 133 Newton, Lord (Peter Legh) 215 NHS 104, 109, 135–6, 154–5, 187, 218 charges 159–60 childbirth, analgesia in 136–8 Gaitskell, Hugh 159–60 state medical service 70, 98 Noel-Baker, Francis 134 Northern Ireland 90 nuclear weapons 153–4, 173, 177, 194 nurseries 79, 60, 87, 88, 110, 152, 222 nutrition. See food Oliver, G. H. 151 Osborne, Cyril 146 OUIDA (Oxford University Intercollegiate Debating Association) 205 Owen, Lilian 124 Oxford University 201–3, 205 Oxford University Intercollegiate Debating Association (OUIDA) 205 Paget, Bernard 82–3 Panorama television programme 191 Parker, John 98 Parliamentary Committee on Amenities and Welfare Conditions in the Three Women’s Services 102–3 Parliamentary Pioneers, Labour Women MPs 1918–1945 (Honeyball, Mary) 2 Patterson, Floyd 168 Peake, Oswald 141, 157 Peniston-Bird, Corinna and Summerfield, Penny Contesting Home Defence 6–7 pensions 94–5 People’s Health, The 36 personal injury compensation 79, 92–4, 105, 141, 143–4, 222

personal points rationing 130 Phillips, Morgan 162, 174, 176 Phillips, Norah Baroness 216 Phillips, Tom 170 Pius XI (Pope) Casti Connubii 50 Plimston, David 193 Plowden, Edwin Lord 209 Plymouth Bachelors’ Association 77 pneumoconiosis 143 Pneumoconiosis and Byssinosis Bill 141, 143–4 Points of View television programme 205 points rationing 130 Political Honours Scrutiny Committee 219 Poor Law procedure 70 Popova, Madame 163 Porter-Brown, Reginald 21 post-war credits 99 potato rationing 119 poverty 30–1 Powell, Robert 201 pregnancy 87, 102 Prestige, Colin 123 Pritt, D. N. 41 proprietary drugs 197 prostitution 103, 166 protest groups 132–3 Punch ‘Analects of Edith, The’ 150 Putney election 42–7 racial equality 220 radiation 154, 194–5 radio 79, 101–2, 134, 217 radioactivity 198 Rathbone, Eleanor 1, 64–5, 67, 87 rationing food 3, 96, 108, 113, 114–21, 124–5, 126, 127, 128–30, 131, 132, 133, 136 personal points 130 points 130 soap 126, 129 Rees, Dorothy 144–5 Rees, Merlyn 207 refugees 167, 179, 186 Report on the Investigation into Maternal Mortality 68–9

Index restaurants 128 rickets 219 road deaths 96–7 Robeson, Paul 75 Robinson, Robert 205 Robinson, Sugar Ray 168 Roe, Grace 217 Roman Catholic church 5, 50–2, 53–4, 222 Rome-Berlin Axis 55 Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce 211–13 Russel, Bertrand 40 Russell, Dora 35 Ryman, John (son-in-law of ECS) 76, 202, 205, 206 Samuel, (Edward) Jeffrey (husband of ECS) 3, 6, 15–18, 21, 193–4, 217 alcohol 24 anti-Semitism 19 boxing 170 character 204 election support 49–50 family relationships 204, 221 as father 76 feminism 59, 90 general practice 32–3 Morgenthau Plan 113 politics 61 Second World War 77, 90, 91 SMA 35, 36 smoking 24 Samuel, Marcus 43, 44, 47, 74 Samuel, Samuel 42, 32 Sanger, Margaret 39 Sargent, Malcolm 101 Scaffardi, Michael 41 Scaffardi, Sylvia 40–1 school meals 197 Second World War 77–8, 104, 108 Black Book list 90 blackout 96–7 evacuation 72, 89–90 family allowances 94 food rationing 3, 96, 108 Home Guard 79–83, 222 invasion 82, 91 Lend-Lease agreement 108 marriage to foreigners 97

253

propaganda 100–1 road deaths 96–7 war injuries 93 WCC 86, 89 women 78–89, 93–4, 97, 102–3, 222 Women’s Home Defence (WHD) Corps 81 WPC 84–7, 89 sex discrimination 84, 85, 97, 111, 214–15, 217–18 Sex Discrimination Bill 214–15 Sex Disqualification and Removal Act 27 sex education 218 sex equality see also women sexism 100 see also misogyny Shepherd, William 43 Short, Renee 194 Shvemik, Nikola 163 Silkin, Lewis Lord 208 Silverman, Sidney 142 Simon, John 68 Simpson, James 19 SMA (Socialist Medical Association) 35–7, 40, 70, 104, 136 Smith, Ben 111, 112 Smithers, Waldron 126-7 smoking 24, 186, 198 snoek 121–2 soap rationing 126, 129 Social Insurance and Allied Services 99 social reform 98 social security 99 Socialist Doctor 36 Socialist Medical Association (SMA) 35–7, 40, 70, 104, 136 Socialist Medical Association Annual Dinner and Dance (SOMEDA) 36 Solomons, Jack 169 SOMEDA (Socialist Medical Association Annual Dinner and Dance) 36 Soskice, Frank 173, 193 South Lancashire Regiment 193 Spain 73 Spanish Civil War 36–7, 72–5 Spanish Civil War, The (Thomas, Hugh) 75 Speed, Florence 131 Spence, H. R. 124–5 Standing Joint Committee of Working Women’s Organisations 85

254

Index

Stanley, John 42 Stansfield, Frank 198 state benefits 84 state medical service 70, 98 see also NHS Status of Women Committee 217 Stevenson, W. H. 23 Stewart, Michael 171–2 Stewart-Murray, Katherine. See Atholl, Duchess of Stopes, Marie 37, 38 Strachey, John 111, 112, 113–14, 118, 120, 134 Strauss, George 42 Suez Canal crisis 187–93 sugar 95, 126, 129–30 Summerfield, Penny 54 Summerfield, Penny and Peniston-Bird, Corinna Contesting Home Defence 6–7 Summerskill, Anna (granddaughter of ECS) 204 Summerskill, Ben (grandson of ECS) 9, 204, 215–16 Summerskill, Claire (granddaughter of ECS) 204 Summerskill, Daphne (sister of ECS) 14, 23, 25 politics 61 Summerskill, Edith Clara LIFE: alcohol 24, 127; anti-Semitism 19; appearance 6, 12, 14, 17, 22, 45, 46, 50, 54, 57, 59–60, 96, 150; birth and childhood 9–14; burglaries 201; character 1, 4–5, 6, 15; 21, 26, 31, 54, 63, 73, 132, 149–50, 167, 221; courtship and marriage 15–18; death 18, 217, 221, 223; education 12, 14, 16; family 3, 9–26, 62–3, 89–91, 105, 139, 140 , 149, 201–7, 216 (see also under individual names); finance 32–3; Fitzroy Park residence 21–2, 24, 112; formality 21; genealogy 192; health 11, 12, 200, 215–16; holidays 22–3; household 18, 20–2; husband. See Samuel, (Edward) Jeffrey; legacy 4, 6–7, 150, 221–3; leisure activities 15; Naim, Edmond, relationship with 179–85, 193; obituary 223;

Oxford University 201–3; Pond House 201, 216; property 21–2, 33; smoking 24, 186; staff 20, 21–2 CAREER, MEDICAL: 1, 5, 6, 9; agony advice 39, 102; birth control 4–5, 30–1, 33–5, 222; education and training 14–17; finance 32–3; general practice 17, 18, 20, 25, 30–1, 32–3, 91, 222; media, the 205; mental health 197; Second World War 91; SMA 35, 36, 70; socialism 28; Spanish Civil War 37; surgeries 32; women’s health 18–19, 31, 33–5 CAREER, POLITICAL: 1, 2, 3, 9, 21; abortion 34, 37, 208–9, 222; administration 123; air pollution 155; alcohol 96–7; anti-nuclear demonstrations 194–6; antiZionism 185; Australia/New Zealand trip 104; BHL 132–3; birth control 4–5, 30–1, 33–5, 37–9, 209–10, 222; boxing 168–70, 171, 187, 198, 210, 223; Buckingham Palace delegation 151; Burma trip 166; Bury candidacy 4–5, 23, 42, 48–52; childbirth, analgesia in 67, 136–8, 164, 222; children’s heath 219; China trip 162, 165–6; clothing 96; Council of Europe Consultative Assembly representative 157; cross-party alliances 88, 92; defeat 170–2; divorce 196–7, 211–13, 222; economics 67–8; Egypt trips 147–8, 189–93, 199; entertaining 27–8, 36, 39, 112; equal pay 152, 156, 214; external engagements 215; family allowances 65, 94, 98–9, 140; fascism 40, 44, 47, 56, 77–8; Food and Agricultural Organization 133; footwear 96; Fulham West, MP for 5, 6, 53–9, 107, 139, 149; Home Guard 79–83; Hong Kong trip 166; House of Lords 3, 199–200, 207–14, 217–19; Ince, Lily 212; insults 4, 82, 191–3; Israel trip 166–7; Japan trip 166; Jordan trips 167, 180–1, 182; Labour Party 61, 136, 158, 196, 198; Labour Party, Chairman 158, 160, 174, 176; Labour Party, Deputy

Index Chairman 157–8, 160, 162; Labour Party NEC 3, 47, 135–6, 149, 156–8, 159, 173, 174, 176; Lebanon trips 179, 182–3; legacy 4, 6–7, 150, 221–3; libel action 193; life peeress 3, 199–200, 207–14, 217–19; as loyalist 158; luck 6; maiden name, use of 43–4, 58–9, 192; maiden speech 67–8; maintenance 196–7; Margate conference (1955) 176–7, 182; marriage 152, 165, 211–13, 222; media, the 79, 101–2, 134, 135, 175, 176, 177, 186, 191, 197–9, 206, 210, 213, 217; Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour 207; mental health 197, 198; Middle East 147–8, 166–7, 179–83, 185–6, 188–93; Middlesex County Council 28–9, 44, 91; milk 3, 12, 71–2, 138–9, 155, 223; Minister of National Insurance 3, 139, 140–8; Ministry of Information 100–1; misogyny 4, 59, 112, 151, 158–9, 172, 222; MWA 41–2, 77, 135; NCCL 39–41; networking 39, 40–1, 46; NHS 104, 135–6, 154–5, 160, 187, 218; nuclear weapons 153–4, 173, 177, 194–6, 218; nurseries 79, 60, 87, 88, 110, 152, 222; nutrition 175, 197, 222–3; opposition 77; pacificism 30, 44–5, 188; Parliamentary Committee on Amenities and Welfare Conditions in the Three Women’s Services 102–3; parliamentary questions 119–20; Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of Food 3, 72, 96, 108–9, 110, 111, 113–14, 115, 116, 117–28, 131, 132, 133–4, 222–3; pensions 94–5, 157; personal injury compensation 79, 92–4, 105, 141, 143–4, 222; Political Honours Scrutiny Committee 219; political position 45; Privy Councillor 134–5; proprietary drugs 197; prostitution 103, 166; public engagements 134; Putney candidacy 42–7; radiation 154, 194–5; radioactivity 198; refugees

255 167, 179, 186; rhyme about 199–200; royalty 134, 140, 151; Second World War 77–83, 85–9, 93, 94, 96–7, 100–1; selection failure 170–2; sex education 218; sexism 100; scientific vocabulary 60–1; Shadow Health Minister 149–58, 168, 176, 186–7, 196, 197–8; SMA 35, 36, 37, 70, 104; smoking 186, 198; social reforms 214; social services 67; socialism 5, 28, 61, 162; Spanish Civil War 73–5; Suez Canal crisis 188–93; support 46, 49–50, 57; Syria trip 182, 186; taxation 67, 95, 99, 169, 187; Television Bill 15; Thalidomide 215; USA trips 75–6, 133; USSR trip 42, 162, 163–5, 208; venereal disease 103; war injuries compensation 79, 92–3, 105, 222; Warrington, MP for 172–3, 175, 176, 193, 198–9; WCC 86; WHD 81, 82; womanpower debates 86–8; women in politics 105; Women’s Disabilities Bill 152–3; women’s health 33–5, 45, 68–71, 87, 97–8, 102–3, 136–7, 207–9, 215, 222; women’s rights 41–2, 60–6, 78–83, 85–9, 92–5, 97, 101–2, 103–5, 109–10, 145, 151–3, 156, 167, 210–15, 217–18, 221–2; Wood Green constituency 171; Wood Green UDC 27–8; working facilities 66–7; WPC 85–7; Your Life in Their Hands television programme 197–8 CAUSES/INTERESTS: abortion 34, 37, 208–9, 222; air pollution 155; birth control 4–5, 30–1, 33–5, 37–9, 50, 209–10, 222; birth rate 98; boxing 168–70, 171, 187, 198, 210, 223; breastfeeding 21, 87; childbirth, analgesia in 18–19, 67, 68, 97–8, 136–8, 164, 222; children’s heath 219; Civil Service 145; divorce 196–7, 211–13, 222; emotion 220; equal pay 152, 156, 214; eugenics 37–8; family allowances 65, 94, 98–9, 140; feminism 1–2, 3–5, 29, 221–2; food 96, 113, 116, 117–28, 133–4, 222–3; Home Guard 79–83;

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human rights 39–40; Ince, Lily 212; maintenance 196–7; marriage 152, 165, 206, 211–13, 222; mental health 197, 198; Middle East 147–8, 166–7, 179–83, 185–6, 188–93; milk 3, 12, 23, 71–2, 138–9, 223; miners, lung diseases 3, 143–4; MWA 41–2, 77, 135; nuclear weapons 153–4, 173, 177, 194–6, 218; nurseries 79, 60, 87, 88, 110, 152, 222; nursing 29–30; nutrition 96, 120–3, 126, 175, 197, 222–3; outdoor movement 23–4; pacificism 30, 44–5, 57, 188; pensions 94–5, 157; personal injury compensation 79, 92–4, 105, 141, 143–4, 222; poverty 5, 30, 32, 57; proprietary drugs 197; prostitution 103, 166; racial equality 220; radiation 154, 194–5; radioactivity 198; refugees 167, 179, 186; science 145; sex differences 220; sex education 218; smoking 186, 198; state medical service 70; Thalidomide 215; venereal disease 103; war injuries compensation 79, 92–3, 105, 222; women’s health 10–11, 18–19, 31, 33–5, 45, 67–71, 87, 97–8, 102–3, 136–7, 207–9, 215, 222; women’s rights 41–2, 60–6, 78–83, 85–9, 92–5, 97, 101–2, 103–5, 109–10, 135, 145, 151–3, 156, 167, 210–15, 218–18, 221–2 RECEPTION/LEGACY: 4, 6–7, 29, 46, 47, 52, 59–60, 68, 74, 111, 113–14, 117, 121–3, 150, 155–6, 157, 158–9, 164, 170, 171, 186, 190, 191–3, 199–200, 209, 217, 221–3 RELATIONSHIPS, PROFESSIONAL: 139; Attlee, Clement 76, 116, 139, 158, 160, 206, 217; Bevan, Aneurin 109, 140, 160, 166, 173–4; Beveridge, William 99; Bevin, Ernest 139; Castle, Barbara 139; Cripps, Stafford 140; cross-party alliances 88, 92; Dalton, Hugh 140; Gaitskell, Hugh 158–9, 160, 161; Houghton, Douglas 142; Lee, Jennie 139, 174; as loyalist 158, 196; Malenkov, Georgy 163–4; Mann,

Jean 139; Mellor, John 146; Messer, Fred 28; Mikardo, Ian 158; Morrison, Herbert 140; Naim, Edmond 179–85; Osborne, Cyril 146; Rathbone, Eleanor 67; Rees, Dorothy 144–5; Smith, Ben 112; Strachey, John 112; Wedgwood, Josiah 68; Wilkinson, Ellen 63–4; Wilson, Harold 208 WORKS: Babies Without Tears, A 7, 19, 68–9, 97–8, 220, 222; Daily Herald articles 152; ‘Do women get a fair share in politics?’ 151; Fact Sheet article 177; Ignoble Art, The 7, 168, 170, 184–5, 187, 223; Letters to my Daughter 7, 204, 219–21; Star article 191; Times, The letter 219; Wanted – Babies 90; ‘What I Stand For’ 45; Woman’s World: Her Memoirs. See Woman’s World: Her Memoirs; Women Fall in: A Guide to Women’s Work in War-time 78, 88–9 Summerskill, Edith Clara (née Wilde, mother of ECS) 9–10, 13–14, 62 death 105 family relationships 24 marriage 9–10, 17, 62 Summerskill, Eleanor (aunt of ECS) 11, 62 Summerskill, Michael (son of ECS) 9, 10, 21, 23–4 as author 219 birth 18–19 Bury election 50, 51 debating 202 education 22, 90, 91, 140, 201–3 family relationships 21, 193, 94, 201–2, 203, 204, 219 holidays 23 as lawyer 219 marriage and children 203, 204 Naim, Edmond 184 name 91 Nana 20, 23 Oxford University 140, 201–3 politics 202, 219 Second World War 77, 89–91 snoek 122 United States trip of ECS 75–6 women’s rights 202

Index Summerskill, Shirley (daughter of ECS) 7, 140, 217, 220–1 appearance 204–5 birth 22 Bury election 50 character 204 debating 205 education 22, 90, 91, 201–2, 220 family relationships 193, 204, 205–6, 207, 219–20 Halifax, MP for 206, 207 health 206 marriage 76, 205–6, 220 media, the 205 medicine 32, 201–2, 205, 206 name 59, 91, 206 Nana 20 Oxford University 205 politics 205, 206, 207 Second World War 77, 89–91 Summerskill, William Hedley (Bill, brother of ECS) 24–5, 26, 192 criticism of ECS 192 politics 61 Summerskill, William Hedley (father of ECS) 9–13 adultery 9–10, 62 conviction 13 death 105 dust-borne diseases 144 family relationships 15, 24, 25 illegitimate children 9–10, 62 medicine 10–13, 25 politics 12, 61 TB clinic 71, 138 women’s rights 11, 14, 15, 62 Summerskill family genealogy 192 Sunday Pictorial 29, 39, 102 Swaffer, Hannen 50, 101, 192 Sweden 162–3 Syria 182, 186 Tate, Mavis 64, 85, 87, 93 Tawney, R. H. 40 taxation 95, 99, 169, 187 Taylor, Bernard 144 Taylor, Charles 124 TB (tuberculosis) 3, 12, 23, 71–2, 138–9, 223

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tea 126, 130 television 176, 177, 210 Television Bill 155 Thalidomide 215 Thalmann, Ernst 40 Thatcher, Margaret 217 Theodore Goddard & Co. 193 Thomas, Hugh 75 Spanish Civil War, The 75 Thorndike, Sybil 217 Thorneycroft, Peter 136–7 Thorpe, Jeremy 217 Thurtle, Dorothy 35 Tomlinson, George 111 To My Son – In Confidence (Mander, Miles) 42 Toye, Richard and Gottlieb, Juliet Making Reputations 6 trade unions 86 Trevelyan, Charles 48, 49 Tribune 186 Truman, Harry 108 tuberculosis (TB) 3, 12, 23, 71–2, 138–9, 223 Turpin, Randy 168 Turton, R. H. 186 unemployment 31–2 United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization 133 unmarried mothers 213 USA 55, 75–6, 159, 161 Attlee, Clement 161, 162 Egypt 188 Lebanon 183 loans 108, 119 nuclear weapons 194 rationing 119 Suez Canal crisis 188 USSR 165 USSR 42, 162–5 abortion 208 nuclear weapons 194 venereal disease 103 Vickers, Joan 196, 217 ‘Viking and the Vicerine, The’ (Churchill, Randolph) 193 Vishensky, Andrey 163 votes for women golden jubilee 217

258 Wakeford, Agnes Robson. See Nana Walker-Smith, Derek 198 Walley, John 140, 141, 142 Wanted – Babies (Summerskill, Edith Clara) 90 war injuries compensation 79, 92–3, 105, 222 Ward, Irene equal pay 156, 214 NHS 187 social conditions 64 WCC 86 womanpower debate 87 WPC 85 Warrington elections 172, 175, 198–9 WBCG (Workers’ Birth Control Group) 35 WCC (Women’s Consultative Committee) 86, 89 weather 131 Webb, Beatrice 28, 42 Webb, Sidney 28, 42 Webster, Mary 213 Wedgwood, Josiah 68 Wells, H. G. 40 West, Rebecca 40, 101 ‘What a Baptism’ (Ford, Patricia) 155 ‘What I Stand For’ (Summerskill, Edith Clara) 45 WHD (Women’s Home Defence) Corps 81, 82 Whitely, William 59, 202 Wilkinson, Ellen 2, 3, 58, 59, 63–4, 67 death 111 as Education Minister 110–1 family allowances 94 Second World War 82, 94 Spanish Civil War 73 WPC 85 Williams, Everard 18–19 Williams, Shirley (née Caitlin) 90, 205, 216, 217 Williams, William Thomas 200 Willink, Henry 109, 110 Willis, Ted Lord 217 Wilson, Harold 107, 160, 175, 208, 217 election losses 176 honours list 219 Wilson, Peter 170

Index Woman in Parliament (Mann, Jean) 139 Woman Power Committee (WPC) 84–7, 89 Woman’s Hour radio programme 217 Woman’s Page radio programme 102 Woman’s World: Her Memoirs (Summerskill, Edith Clara) 7 abortion 208–9 accommodation 18 Bevin, Ernest 88 birth control 37, 51 Blackwell, Mrs 103 boxing 168, 170 Bury election 49, 51 China 162 Civil Service 145 colleagues 139–40 divorce 103 education 14, 15 family relationships 14, 15, 25, 202 Fulham selection 172 launch 76, 216–17 maiden name, use of 58–9 Member of the Order of the Companions if Honour 207 Middle East 147 midwifery 11 Minister of National Insurance 140 Naim, Edmond 184 Parliamentary Committee on Amenities and Welfare Conditions in the Three Women’s Services 102 parliamentary questions 110–20 Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of Food 118 pneumoconiosis 143 Privy Councillor 134–5 Putney election 42 USSR 163 women in politics 46–7, 64, 207 women’s rights 61–2 Wood Green UDC 27 womanpower debates 86–8 women 221 see also feminism carers 213 Civil Service 145 combat 80–3, 222 discrimination 84, 85, 97, 111, 214–15, 217–18

Index divorce 152–3, 211–13, 221 Egypt 147 elections, standing in 27, 28–9, 46–7, 58 employment 84–5, 95, 109–10, 218, 222 equal pay 152, 156, 214 family allowances 65, 94, 98–9 finances 99, 103–4, 211–13 First World War 78 footwear 96 health 10–11, 18–19, 31, 33–5, 45, 67–71, 87, 97–8, 102–3, 136–7, 207–9, 215, 222 Home Guard 79–83, 222 Israel 167 Labour Party 34–5, 53, 85–6, 105 maiden names 43–4 marriage 152, 211–13, 221 married to foreigners 97 Married Women’s Association 41–2 maternal mortality 45, 68–9 medical training 214, 217–18 misogyny 59, 65–6, 112 motherhood 98 National Council for the Single Woman and her dependants 213 nurseries 79, 60, 87, 88, 110, 152, 222 nursing 29–30 oppression 221 Oxford University 202 pensions 94–5 personal injury compensation 92–4 in politics 53, 58, 63–7, 71, 105, 151–2, 172, 187, 207 pregnancy 87, 102 prostitution 103 radio programmes 101–2 savings 99, 211–12 in the services 102 sexism 100 state benefits 84 taxation 99 unmarried mothers 213 USSR 164 vote, the 217

259

wages 84 war injuries compensation 79, 92–4, 105, 141, 143–4, 222 war work 83–9, 222 WCC 86, 89 WHD 81, 82 womanpower debates 86–8 Second World War 78–89, 93–4, 97, 100, 102–3 WPC 84–7, 89 ‘Women at Strasbourg’ (Dangerfield, Emma) 157 Women Fall in: A Guide to Women’s Work in War-time (Summerskill, Edith Clara) 78, 88–9 ‘Women for Westminster’ campaign 151 Women’s Consultative Committee (WCC) 86, 89 ‘Women’s Day in the House of Commons’ (Daily Mirror) 79 Women’s Disabilities Bill 152–3, 169 Women’s Home Defence (WHD) Corps 81, 82 Womersley, Walter 93–4 Wood, Ethel 85 Mainly for Men 85 Wood Green constituency 171 Wood Green UDC 27–8 Woodburn, Arthur 151 Wootton, Barbara Lady 209 Workers’ Birth Control Group (WBCG) 35 Workmen’s Compensation (Supplementation) Bill 141 World of Action television programme 216 World of Books radio programme 217 world politics 55–7 WPC (Woman Power Committee) 84–7, 89 Yates, Ivan 217 Your Life in Their Hands television programme 197–8 Zhou Enlai 165

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Plate 1 Edith canvassing workers in the Fulham Road when she was Labour candidate in the Fulham West by-election in April 1938. Photo by Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/ Getty Images.

Plate 2 Edith at a shooting range campaigning for women to join the Home Guard on the same terms as men during the Second World War. Edith Summerskill papers, LSE Library.

Plate 3 Six of the twenty-one Labour Party women MPs elected on 5 July 1945 meeting in London later that month. Edith is on the far right of the picture. Photo by Keystone/ Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Plate 4 Edith and Noel Mason-MacFarlane MP for Paddington North arrive at Beaver Hall in London for a Labour MP rally on 28 July 1945. Harry Shepherd/Fox Photos/ Hutton Archive/Getty Images.

Plate 5 The new Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food, Dr Edith Summerskill, in her office at the Ministry, 15 August 1945. Photo by William Vanderson/Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Plate 6 Edith leaving her house for the Ministry of Food in 1949. Photo by Staff/ Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images.

Plate 7 Edith meets a voter in Fulham West during the general election in 1950. Photo by Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Plate 8 Edith outside the Ministry of National Insurance where she served as minister from February 1950 to October 1951. Photo by Keystone/Getty Images.

Plate 9 Edith fighting the 1951 general election in her West Fulham constituency, electioneering from a caravan. Photo by Keystone/Getty Images.

Plate 10 Edith on the left with MPs Patricia Ford, Barbara Castle and Irene Ward on their way to the House of Commons with a petition demanding equal pay for women in March 1954. Photo by Terry Fincher/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Plate 11 The Labour Party delegation to China via Moscow leaving London Airport on 9 August 1954. Edith is easily recognizable as the only woman. The Labour leader Clement Attlee is next to Edith. Photo by J. Wilds/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Plate 12 Edith with her husband Dr Jeffrey Samuel and former Cabinet Minister Herbert Morrison on 9 September 1954 at the Labour Party annual conference in Scarborough. Photo by Keystone USA

Plate 13 Cartoon in the Daily Mirror on the eve of the National Executive Committee meeting in March 1955 to decide whether to expel Aneurin Bevan. Edith was Labour Party Chairman. Victor Weisz Mirror/Pix.

Plate 14 Edith, the Labour Party Conference Chairman, addresses delegates on 10 October 1955. Photo by Bela Zola/Mirrorpix/Getty Images.

Plate 15 Baroness Edith Summerskill of Kenwood, on the left, takes her seat in the House of Lords along with Elaine Burton and Barbara Wootton in 1962. Photo by Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Plate 16 Edith chats to striking woman machinists from the Ford Plant in Dagenham during an equal rights conference at Friends Meeting House, Euston Road, London on 28 June 1968. Photo by Getty Images.