75 Facts About Ellen Wilkinson

Ellen Cicely Wilkinson was a British Labour Party politician who served as Minister of Education from July 1945 until her death.

Ellen Wilkinson was elected Labour MP for Middlesbrough East in 1924, and supported the 1926 General Strike.

Ellen Wilkinson made a connection with a young female member and activist Jennie Lee.

Ellen Wilkinson was a strong advocate for the Republican government in the Spanish Civil War, and made several visits to the battle zones.

Ellen Wilkinson supported Morrison's attempts to replace Clement Attlee as the Labour Party's leader; nevertheless, when he formed his postwar government, Attlee appointed Wilkinson as Minister of Education.

Ellen Wilkinson saw her main task in office as the implementation of the wartime coalition's 1944 Education Act, rather than the more radical introduction of comprehensive schools favoured by many in the Labour Party.

Ellen Wilkinson was born on 8 October 1891, at 41 Coral Street in the Manchester district of Chorlton-on-Medlock.

Ellen Wilkinson was the third child and second daughter of Richard Wilkinson, a cotton worker who became an insurance agent, and his wife, Ellen, nee Wood.

At the age of six Ellen Wilkinson began attending what she described as "a filthy elementary school with the five classes in one room".

Ellen Wilkinson made up for the school's shortcomings by reading, with her father's encouragement, the works of Haeckel, Thomas Huxley and Darwin.

Ellen Wilkinson joined the university's branch of the Fabian Society, and eventually became its joint secretary.

Ellen Wilkinson continued her suffragist work by joining the Manchester Society for Women's Suffrage, where she impressed Margaret Ashton, the first woman member of Manchester City Council, by her efforts in the North Manchester and Gorton constituencies.

Ellen Wilkinson came under the influence of Walton Newbold, an older student who later became the United Kingdom's first Communist MP.

On leaving university in June 1913, Ellen Wilkinson became a paid worker for the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies.

Ellen Wilkinson helped to organise the Suffrage Pilgrimage of July 1913, when more than 50,000 women marched from all over the country to a mass rally in Hyde Park, London.

Ellen Wilkinson began to develop a fuller understanding of the mechanics of politics and campaigning, and became an accomplished speaker, able to hold her own even in the most hostile public meetings.

Ellen Wilkinson organised a series of strikes to attain these goals with notable successes in Carlisle, Coatbridge, Glasgow and Grangemouth.

Ellen Wilkinson was less successful in managing a lengthy dispute at the Longsight print works in Manchester, in the summer of 1918, where opponents described her tactics as "unreasonable guerrilla warfare".

Ellen Wilkinson remained an active Fabian, and after the Fabian Research Department became the Labour Research Department in 1917, served on the new body's executive committee.

Ellen Wilkinson maintained her connection with the WIL, whose 1919 conference adopted a non-pacifist stance that justified armed struggle as a means of defeating capitalism.

Ellen Wilkinson called for an immediate truce and the release of republican prisoners.

Ellen Wilkinson saw communism as the shape of the future, and when the Communist Party of Great Britain was formed in the summer of 1920, Wilkinson was one of a group of ILP members with Marxist leanings who became founder members.

In 1921 Ellen Wilkinson attended the Red International of Labour Unions Congress and the Second Congress of Communist Women in Moscow, where she met several Russian communist leaders, including the Defence Minister Leon Trotsky, and Nadezhda Krupskaya, the educationist who was Lenin's wife; Ellen Wilkinson considered Krupskaya's speech the best at the Congress.

At home, although she failed to persuade her union, NUDAW, to affiliate to the Profintern, Ellen Wilkinson continued to promote Russian achievements, especially its emancipation of women workers.

In November 1922, at a meeting celebrating the fifth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Ellen Wilkinson said that the Russian people could look forward with hope, and asked whether the same could be said of the people condemned to live their lives in the slums of Manchester.

However, Ellen Wilkinson found herself increasingly at odds with communists in Manchester, over the party's industrial and wider international strategies.

Ellen Wilkinson was an early and lifetime supporter of the National Council of Labour Colleges, established in 1921 with NUDAW backing with the aim of educating working-class students in working-class principles.

Ellen Wilkinson became a NUDAW-sponsored parliamentary candidate, and in 1923, while still a CPGB member, sought nomination as the Labour Party's parliamentary candidate for the Gorton constituency.

Ellen Wilkinson was unsuccessful, but in November 1923 the Gorton ward elected her to Manchester City Council; Hannah Mitchell, her co-worker in prewar suffrage campaigns, was a fellow councillor.

Ellen Wilkinson made no secret of her Communist affiliations, stating that "we shall have only one class in this country, the working class".

Labour's representation in the House of Commons fell to 152, against the Conservatives' 415; Ellen Wilkinson was the only woman elected in the Labour ranks, winning Middlesbrough East with a majority of 927 over her Conservative opponent.

Ellen Wilkinson went on to achieve one of her first parliamentary victories in that same year, when she persuaded the government to correct anomalies affecting widows in its Pensions Bill.

Ellen Wilkinson was devastated when the Trades Union Congress called off the strike.

Ellen Wilkinson visited the United States in August 1926 to raise financial support for the miners, provoking criticism from the Conservative prime minister Baldwin who denied that the lockout was causing hardship.

On 29 March 1928 Ellen Wilkinson voted in the House of Commons for the bill that became the Representation of the People Act 1928, granting the vote to all women aged 21 or over.

Ellen Wilkinson was not given office, but was made Lawrence's Parliamentary Private Secretary, an indication that she was marked for future promotion.

The Labour Party was divided; the Chancellor, Philip Snowden, favoured a strict curb on public expenditure, while others, including Ellen Wilkinson, believed that the problem was not over-production, but under-consumption.

In Middlesbrough East Ellen Wilkinson's vote was nearly the same as her 1929 total, but against a single candidate representing the National Government she was defeated by over 6,000 votes.

Ellen Wilkinson rationalised Labour's defeat in a Daily Express article, arguing that the party had lost because it was "not socialist enough", a theme she built on in numerous radical newspaper and journal articles.

Ellen Wilkinson wrote that Winston Churchill was "cheerfully indifferent as to whether any new [ideas] he acquires match the collection he already possesses", and described Clement Attlee as "too fastidious for intrigue, and too modest for over-ambition".

In 1932 Ellen Wilkinson was invited by the India League to join a small delegation, to report on conditions in India.

Ellen Wilkinson visited Germany shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933, and published a pamphlet, The Terror in Germany, that documented early incidents of Nazi outrage.

Early in 1934 Ellen Wilkinson led a deputation of Jarrow's unemployed to meet the prime minister, MacDonald, in his nearby Seaham constituency, and received sympathy but no positive action.

Ellen Wilkinson was unimpressed by the government's Special Areas Act, passed late in 1934 and designed to assist distressed areas such as Jarrow; she thought the legislation provided inadequate funding, and benefited employers more than workers.

Ellen Wilkinson was returned at Jarrow with a majority of 2,350.

On 30 June 1936 Ellen Wilkinson asked Walter Runciman, the responsible minister, "to induce the Iron and Steel Federation to pursue a less selfish policy than it is pursuing at present".

Ellen Wilkinson published an account of Jarrow's travails in her final book, The Town that was Murdered.

In November 1934, as a representative of the Relief Committee for the Victims of Fascism, Ellen Wilkinson visited the northern Spanish province of Asturias to report on the crushing of the Oviedo miners' uprising.

Ellen Wilkinson later argued in parliament against the British government's non-intervention policies which, she insisted, "worked on the side of General Franco".

Ellen Wilkinson returned to Spain in April 1937 as a member of an all-women delegation led by the Duchess of Atholl, and afterwards wrote of feeling "a helpless, choking rage", as she witnessed the effects of aerial bombing on undefended villages.

Ellen Wilkinson was a strong opponent of the National Government's appeasement policies towards the European dictators.

Ellen Wilkinson supported Britain's declaration of war on Germany, on 3 September 1939, although she was critical of Chamberlain's conduct of the war.

In May 1940, when Churchill's all-party coalition replaced Chamberlain's National Government, Ellen Wilkinson was appointed Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Pensions.

Ellen Wilkinson transferred to the Ministry of Home Security in October 1940, as one of Herbert Morrison's three Parliamentary Secretaries, with responsibilities for air raid shelters and civil defence.

Ellen Wilkinson supported Morrison's decision in January 1941 to suppress the communist newspaper The Daily Worker on the grounds of its anti-British propaganda, and voted for the wartime legislation that banned strikes in key industries.

Ellen Wilkinson succeeded to the chair when the incumbent, George Ridley, died in January 1944.

Ellen Wilkinson had formed a close relationship with Morrison, personally and politically, before and during their wartime ministerial association.

Ellen Wilkinson thought that he, rather than the sedate Attlee, should be leading the Labour Party, and had promoted his leadership credentials in 1935 and 1939.

Ellen Wilkinson showed no resentment towards either Morrison or Wilkinson; the former was appointed Lord President of the Council and deputy prime minister, while Wilkinson was made Minister of Education, with a seat in the cabinet.

Ellen Wilkinson was the second woman, after Margaret Bondfield, to achieve a place in the British cabinet.

Ellen Wilkinson believed that such a major reconstruction was unachievable at that time, and limited herself to more attainable reforms.

Ellen Wilkinson made her first priority the raising of the school leaving age.

Ellen Wilkinson was astonished by the speed with which, five months after its defeat, the country's schools and universities were reopening.

Ellen Wilkinson prophesied that the organisation "will do great things", and urged the government to give it its full backing.

Ellen Wilkinson suffered for most of her life from bronchial asthma, which she aggravated over the years by heavy smoking and overwork.

Ellen Wilkinson had often been ill during the war, and had collapsed during a visit to Prague in 1946.

Shortly afterward, Ellen Wilkinson developed pneumonia; on 3 February she was found in her London flat in a coma, and on 6 February 1947 she died in St Mary's Hospital, Paddington.

Ellen Wilkinson had been taking a combination of drugs for several months, to combat both her asthma and insomnia; the coroner believed she had inadvertently taken an overdose of barbiturates.

Ellen Wilkinson was sometimes criticised for extending her efforts too widely; a local newspaper, the North Mail, complained in May 1937 that "Miss Ellen Wilkinson is working for too many causes to do justice to Jarrow".

Ellen Wilkinson never married, although she enjoyed numerous close friendships with men.

On 25 January 1941 Ellen Wilkinson received the freedom of the town of Jarrow, and in May 1946 was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Manchester.

The Ellen Wilkinson Building in the University of Manchester's campus houses parts of the Manchester Institute of Education and other departments.

In October 2015 Ellen Wilkinson was shortlisted by a Manchester town hall panel as one of six candidates to be the subject of the city's first female statue in over a century.

In October 2016, Ellen Wilkinson was chosen in a public vote to become the first female statue in Middlesbrough.

Ellen Wilkinson was shortlisted in 2015 for the WoManchester Statue.