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MARGARET (‘Peggy’) Herbison arrived within the Home of Commons in 1945, delighted to be a part of Clement Attlee’s Labour landslide however figuring out there was a lot work to be completed. Principally, she knew, in housing.
Extreme shortages of labour and supplies had resulted in fewer than 15,000 houses being constructed throughout the UK that 12 months. Two-thirds of them had been pre-fabricated houses.
On Wednesday, October 17, 1945, Herbison, a coal-miner’s daughter who had latterly taught English and historical past at Allan Glen’s Faculty in Glasgow, advised the Commons in her maiden speech that throughout the parliamentary recess she had surveyed housing circumstances within the mining village of Shotts, the place she lived.
“I knew beforehand that our housing circumstances have been very dangerous, nevertheless it was not till I made the survey that I discovered that these circumstances have been as dreadful as they might probably be,” she mentioned.
“We have now individuals who have been dwelling in a room in someone else’s home for 14 years—dwelling, consuming, sleeping, bearing and rearing kids in a single room that’s not even their very own room. These circumstances fairly often result in unhappiness and to ill-health among the many kids.
“Till a number of weeks in the past, in a miners’ row, there was a room and kitchen with no trendy conveniences, and a miner and his household lived within the kitchen, and one other miner and his household lived within the room. A person, lady and 5 kids lived within the room, the partitions of which have been frequently dripping with damp. At night time the mom needed to roll out mattresses on the ground for her kids to sleep on.
“In lots of components of my constituency and, I count on, in lots of components of Nice Britain”, she added, “there are individuals dwelling in homes through which the Minister of Well being or the Minister of Agriculture wouldn’t permit cattle to reside. They’d say, ‘You have to not home your cattle in them; in case you do, we received’t be keen to just accept the milk for the kids’.” It was a forceful maiden speech by the MP for North Lanarkshire.
Herbison would go on to develop into an Below-Secretary for Scotland beneath Attlee and, beneath Harold Wilson within the Sixties, she was Minister of Pensions and Minister for Social Safety.
She resigned from the entrance bench in 1967 on a degree of precept, extensively believed to be over her failure to power by means of will increase in pensions and little one advantages.
In June 1970 readers of the Night Instances voted her their Scotswoman of the 12 months. She was unable to attend the ceremony as she was giving the Queen a report of her week as Lord Excessive Commissioner to the Basic Meeting of the Church of Scotland.
Like many MPs earlier than and since, Herbison was involved to enhance the lives of individuals. She was at all times conscious of the particular challenges that confronted girls. “Troublesome instances at all times hit girls more durable than males”, she mentioned in 1951.
“There’s no five-day week for girls, and when there’s procuring to do on a moist Saturday – and the kids are cross, after which on high of all of it the grocery store says, ‘Halfpenny up on this’ or ‘Penny up on that’ – properly, it generally appears nearly insufferable, doesn’t it?”
When Herbison died, aged 89, in December 1996, George Robertson, the then Shadow Scottish Secretary, described her as “one of many towering figures of the Labour Social gathering this century’’. To Tony Blair she was “probably the most vital figures in Labour politics this century.’’
It’s price allowing for that it was solely in 1918 that girls have been in a position to stand for Parliament. The primary lady to be elected to the Commons was Dame Constance Markievicz, within the normal election of that 12 months. As a member of Sinn Fein she didn’t take her seat (she was, in any occasion, in Holloway jail when elected); the primary feminine MP to take a seat within the chamber was Nancy Astor (Viscountess Astor), after a by-election in December 1919.
Within the many years that adopted, many notable, principled, outspoken Scots girls got here to signify Scottish seats. It’s a prolonged and distinguished listing: Winnie Ewing, Margo MacDonald, Margaret Ewing, Helen McElhone, Anna McCurley, Maria Fyfe, Ray Michie, Irene Adams, Helen Liddell and Roseanna Cunningham amongst them.
Jennie Lee is one other. Lochgelly-born, she received a by-election in North Lanark in March 1929 on the age of simply 24. She turned the youngest MP within the Home.
An excellent crowd greeted her exterior the County Buildings in Glasgow, the place the rely had taken place. Addressing her ecstatic supporters, she mentioned: “I hope you’ll take this assembly right here as a declaration of struggle on poverty”. She retained her seat on the subsequent normal election however was defeated on the next-again one, two years later.
Lee went on to marry the nice Labour determine, Aneurin Bevin, and to signify the Cannock seat from 1945 till 1970. She was an lively Minister for the Arts beneath Harold Wilson and was one of many co-founders of the Open College. When she died, aged 84, in 1988, Neil Kinnock spoke of her as ‘’a lady of brilliance and imaginative and prescient, an important socialist, who impressed so many”.
Glasgow’s pioneering feminine MPs have included Agnes Hardie, the primary lady to signify a Glasgow seat (Springburn), in 1937. She “deserves to be remembered as a champion of the unvoiced”, says Anne McGuire in The Honourable Girls Quantity 1, a group of profiles of lady MPs.
Labour’s Alice Cullen championed her Gorbals constituency from 1948 till her dying in Might 1969. “Gorbals has misplaced an important pal”, lamented one native councillor. “Many, many individuals within the constituency owe an important deal to Mrs Cullen”. Jean Mann, for her half, was first elected to Parliament in 1945, for Coatbridge, later Coatbridge and Airdrie.
She was, writes Ayesha Hazarika in that very same array of profiles, an distinctive politician for a lot of causes, having been elected at a time when there have been only a few feminine politicians.
Mann’s political actions had begun with the Impartial Labour Social gathering throughout the First World Struggle in Rothesay and Glasgow.
She turned a Glasgow councillor in 1931 and went on to take pleasure in a “energetic and sometimes controversial profession”, which included chairing the housing committee, earlier than changing into getting into the Commons.
Her particular topics included housing and city planning, and in Parliament she raised anomalies in widows’ pensions and the care of foster kids, amongst different points.
When she died in March 1964 Harold Wilson described her as “an incredible fighter, above all on social circumstances and housing”.
There have been so many different girls MPs. Betty Harvie Anderson, who represented East Renfrewshire for the Conservatives from 1959 to 1979, was the primary lady to occupy the Speaker’s Chair.
Dame Judith Hart, MP for first Lanark after which Clydesdale, was a key determine within the Labour administrations of the Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Seventies, and held such posts as Minister for Social Safety, Paymaster Basic and Minister for Abroad Improvement.
As for Peggy Herbison, she continued to have a excessive profile after retiring from Parliament.
She by no means gave up her political work solely. In 1994 she might be seen pounding the streets of Airdrie with a loudhailer throughout the by-election for Monklands East following the premature dying of Labour chief John Smith. Sometimes, maybe, she even succeeded in upstaging Tony Blair when he spoke in Airdrie after the by-election.
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