Eleanor the even more magnificent...Part Two

'One Revolutionary Woman'

‘When family allowances were first mooted people on this side of the House said that it would break up the home, and the Labour Party and the Trade Unions would not have them at all. We have come a great way since then, and all because of one revolutionary woman. It is very difficult, when we look at the hon. Lady the Member for the English Universities, to think of her as a revolutionary but she is, and it is her work, and her vision and courage, that have really brought us to where we are today. ‘

Nancy Astor, House of Commons Debate, 8 March 1945

Last week I left Eleanor Rathbone taking her seat in the House of Commons in 1929 as the MP for the Combined Universities. She had determined to enter the national chamber because she had so many things to say, and she was not daunted by her new surroundings: in her first year alone she raised thirty-five Parliamentary questions, and spoke fourteen times, on issues relating mostly to housing and to the rights of women in the British colonies.

Eleanor Rathbone, by James Gunn, 1933, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

This portrait was commissioned by Eleanor’s friends and admirers in Liverpool, and was paid for by a public subscription - 270 people contributed to the fund, eighty percent of them women. Eleanor herself was very unenthusiastic about the project ‘I can foresee discussions fifty, twenty, even ten years hence as to “what is to be done with this?” “Oh, put her in some dark passage or unfrequented chamber!” I wish I could tell her that it is currently on proud display in the National Portrait Gallery.

Throughout her time as an MP, Rathbone used her status as an Independent to ask difficult questions, generally being a thorn in the side of each governing party in turn. It was, as someone commented, ‘extraordinarily hard to shut her up’. Her issues ranged from feminism, social policy, imperial policy, child slavery in India and Africa, even genital mutilation. Soon after her election, the country was plunged into the Depression of the 1930s, and Eleanor worked with other concerned MPs across both sides of the House to try to mitigate some of the worst suffering. In 1934 her alliance with disaffected Tory MPs Harold Macmillan and Bob Boothby led to the launch of the Children’s Minimum Council, with a concrete result - the introduction of a ‘milk-in-schools’ scheme which gave free milk to the poorest ten percent of pupils.

From 1932 onwards, following a visit to India, Eleanor became increasingly upset and concerned about the plight of women across the British Empire. She led the British Committee for Indian Women’s franchise, which unfortunately plunged her into controversy. Of course, Eleanor was never frightened of getting in a scrap. Most people seemed to agree that suggesting all women in India should have the vote was a non-starter, it went against both Hindu and Muslim cultures, and most women were not in a position to take part in political debate, being illiterate and subservient to their husbands. Eleanor supported a plan which would at least have given perhaps twenty percent of them a vote, based on a basic literacy test and marriage to a man who satisfied the property qualification. In 1934 she wrote a book ‘Child Marriage: The Indian Minotaur’ which primarily blamed the British colonial system for not having gripped any of the social problems which held women back on the sub-continent. She hoped that she could inspire other feminist campaigners to join the fight. If women’s organisations do not take up the question of domestic slavery, she said, ‘I don’t know who is going to do it.’

What little she was able to achieve in India paled into insignificance besides the energy she threw into the project that began to consume every waking hour - in fact, her sister believed it generated the stress that killed her. The rise to power of the Nazis in Germany filled her with horror. She was no more enthusiastic about another war than any appeaser, but she was firm in her belief that standing up to dictators was crucial. She fought for two intertwined causes; swift re-armament, combined with support for the League of Nations. As early as 1934 she was saying:

Security is in the drawing together of the free democracies of the world in defence of something which is even a greater cause than the cause of peace, the cause of the liberties and freedom of the world.

And in 1936:

If we are determined to have peace at any price…let us say so. But whether we shall secure peace even for ourselves permanently by a policy of continually truckling to dictators, yielding step by step, many of us doubt.

I have no doubt what Eleanor Rathbone would be saying to all of us today.

Her activity in the House of Commons redoubled: in 1937/8 she asked a hundred parliamentary questions, more than a quarter concerning the Government’s neutrality on the Spanish Civil War, and a third on other European issues. In 1937 together with a Conservative MP, the Duchess of Atholl, and Dorothea Layton, wife of the editor of The Economist, she toured Eastern Europe, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Prague. They followed it with a trip to Republican Spain with Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson. What she saw on the ground caused her to funnel her energies into the refugee question - and finally she had a cause on which her many years’ administrative experience, dealing with bureaucracies, could be brought to bear. Eleanor and Atholl established the National Joint Council for Spanish Refugees - they raised £100,000 which enabled them to send dozens of food ships to the starving rebel cities, and to bring out four thousand children. In December 1938, as Hitler rolled across Europe, she and three other MPs formed a ‘Parliamentary Committee on Refugees’ - it sounded official, but in fact was entirely voluntary, run out of Eleanor’s office and funded from her private resources.

Eleanor became increasingly strident in her denunciation of Neville Chamberlain’s Government of appeasement. She warned again and again that if they did nothing to support European allies, by the time Britain had to fight, it would find that it was fighting alone. She convened a Parliamentary Action Group that would become instrumental in Chamberlain’s fall and Churchill’s ascendancy. Once the War began, Eleanor again focused on feminist issues, and her ‘Woman Power Committee’ influenced both the provision of state-run nurseries so that women could join the workforce, and the fight for equal pay after the war. She also campaigned against the draconian internment of foreign nationals that had been introduced in 1939.

At the same time she continued to campaign to help refugees - her work to raise awareness of the plight of the Jews was tireless. From December 1942 onwards, Rathbone was the most significant non-Jewish campaigner for the rescue of European Jewry. She was the moving spirit behind the National Committee for Rescue from Nazi Terror. Friends noted that as the war progressed, she began to wear a haunted, tragic look. There is so much to say about her battles with bureaucracy and with Churchill’s Cabinet on this subject, but all I can do is refer you to Susan Pedersen’s excellent book which devotes many pages to her struggle.

As the war came to an end, Eleanor had one satisfaction to weigh against her guilt over all the deaths - the introduction of something she had campaigned for since the 1900s, the Family Allowance. Certainly her work on the subject in her book The Disinherited Family had influenced William Beveridge in his thinking on the Welfare State. Her campaigning in Parliament had built a cross-party consensus on the subject, and by this time she was perceived as such a wise and philanthropic politician that no-one was going to argue with her. Nevertheless the fight was not over - when the Bill was introduced in February 1945, it commanded that the allowance - five shillings a week, omitting the first child, should be paid to the father. Of course Eleanor led the charge, and it was quietly changed in committee - the mother would get the money. It was not as much money as Eleanor had hoped, and the omission of the first child was disappointing, but as Eleanor said, if you cannot have the moon, at least ‘let us have that little star, just near the horizon.

A very rare photo of a smiling Eleanor

Eleanor died suddenly at her Highgate home on 2 January 1946, while sitting with her lifelong companion Elizabeth Macadam. She was seventy-three. The bulk of her estate went into a charitable trust, which still dispenses funds, primarily to women in need in Liverpool.

Let me give the last words on the subject of the Family Allowance to its inventor and creator:

We want children and mothers to be recognised not as dependents hung around the necks of their fathers and husbands, but as human beings with their own feet on the floor of God’s earth, and their heads in the sunshine.