‘Red Ellen’ Wilkinson: Her ideas, movements and world

By Matt Perry

Unearthing new evidence to provide a richer understanding of her life, this study, now available in paperback, delves beyond the familiar image of Ellen Wilkinson on the Jarrow Crusade. From a humble background, she ascended to the rank of minister in the 1945 Labour government. Yet she was much more than a conventional Labour politician. She wrote journalism, political theory and novels. She was both a socialist and a feminist; at times, she described herself as a revolutionary. She experienced Soviet Russia, the Indian civil disobedience campaign, the Spanish Civil War and the Third Reich. This study deploys transnational and social movement theory perspectives to grapple with the complex itinerary of her ideas. Interest in Wilkinson remains strong among academic and non-academic audiences alike. This is in part because her principal concerns – working-class representation, the status of women, capitalist crisis, war, anti-fascism – remain central to contentious politics today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780719098482

Matt Perry

Matt Perry is Reader in Labour History at Newcastle University

Book preview

Introduction

Ellen Wilkinson left a profound impression upon the collective imagination. She has reappeared in all manner of representations: plays, paintings, union banners and various acts of commemoration. Housing estates, blocks of flats, beers, a metro train, miners’ lodge banners, offices in Labour Party Headquarters all bear her name. Subsequent campaigns, protests and movements against the closures of the steelworks, mines and shipyards of the north-east (sometimes carrying the very banner under which she walked) invoke Wilkinson’s memory. Several Labour women or north-east MPs summon her name as inspiration.¹ At the same time, pressures have moulded the social memory of Wilkinson into a more conventional simplified shape. Biographer David Reid complained after a BBC documentary in 1983 about the programme’s misrepresentation of her as ‘a Labour Party worthy’, which, he argued, was wide of the mark. The programme omitted her early commitment to the Independent Labour Party’s (ILP) brand of socialism, her work in the suffrage campaign, her Wesleyan Methodism, her revolutionary commitment, her campaigns for India, Spain and anti-fascism and her love affairs.² Perhaps, the most remarkable effort to appropriate Wilkinson for mainstream Labourism is Graham Dale’s God’s Politicians (2000). Concerned with the influence of religion on her politics, he assimilated her into a teleology of Christian socialist values that has culminated with Tony Blair and his ‘modernising’ New Labour agenda.³ A more plausible recent Labourist assessment identified the specificity of her ‘socialism with a northern accent’ (the ILP, Victor Grayson, the Clarion Clubs and so on), which was marshalled to make the case for regional assemblies and greater devolved powers to the north.⁴

For a woman born in Victorian Ardwick (Manchester), Wilkinson’s career is remarkable. From a humble background, she became one of the first female MPs. Indeed, of her nineteen years at the House of Commons, four were as Labour’s solitary female MP.⁵ Kenneth O. Morgan claimed that she was ‘arguably Britain’s most important woman politician’ who ‘made the role of women in high politics credible and effective as no other had done before, with powerful consequences for her sex and her class’.⁶

Ellen Cicely Wilkinson was born on 8 October 1891 at 41 Coral Street, Ardwick. With its textile revolution and global connections of trade, investment and migration, the city stood at the epicentre of industrial modernity offering a pioneering experience in many aspects of the modern life. Two months into her time as Minister of Education, Wilkinson reflected for the BBC upon what it meant to be Lancashire ‘born and bred’.⁷ She imagined a Manchester Monday morning of steamy rain, evoking the smell of wet mackintoshes and shawls inside a tram. Soot mixed with rain, producing a ‘soul-destroying ugliness’. Nineteenth-century Lancashire had developed to the rhythms of capitalist prosperity and penury; the hungry 1840s and the cotton famine during the American Civil War left their toll of hardship in folk memories. Like many others, her diminutive stature resulted from ‘generations of Lancashire mothers who have worked in the mills till a few days before their babies were born, and went back the moment they could get about again’. In her dialect, to ‘clem’ meant to starve and was enunciated with a special bitterness nourished by generations of impoverishment. Her BBC talk also revealed her abiding talent of offering to her audience intimate glimpses of herself, or at least the illusion thereof. If this evocation of her background helps to explain her character, such appearances also deceive. Wilkinson was playing the ‘Lancashire lass’. However, this ‘homesick northern daughter’ would retreat at weekends to a home she and her sister had set up in the sleepy Buckinghamshire village of Penn; and indeed, this was her last resting place. ‘Our Ellen’ – as she was known – represented a familiar identity that disarmed critics and reassured those who felt threatened by a woman in high office with a radical reputation.⁸

Wilkinson possessed a long curriculum vitae as a political activist. She joined the ILP at the age of 16. After university, she became in 1913 Manchester organiser of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and then in 1915 was appointed a national organiser of the Amalgamated Union of Co-operative Employees (AUCE, which became the National Union of Distributive and Allied Workers in 1921, NUDAW, and then Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers, USDAW, in 1947). Sympathetic to the Russian Revolution, she visited the Soviet Union in 1921 and a portrait of Lenin looked down over her bed.⁹ When she was first elected to the Commons in October 1924, Wilkinson was one of only four women MPs. With an expanded female franchise at the coming election of 1929, she started a two-year stint (1927–29) on the Labour Party National Executive Committee (NEC). Losing her Middlesbrough East seat in 1931, Wilkinson then worked for NUDAW until her electoral victory in Jarrow in 1935. Her career blossomed after the Jarrow Crusade of 1936, returning to the Labour Party NEC in 1937. In 1940, as the Labour Party entered Churchill’s coalition government, she became Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Pensions and then Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Home Security from 1940 to 1945. Her parliamentary career’s high point was becoming Minister of Education during the Labour government of 1945, being responsible for the implementation of the 1944 Education Act and introducing secondary education for all.

When examining Wilkinson’s life, the paucity of materials imposes uncertainties and constraints. Wilkinson’s brother burned her personal papers shortly after her death in 1947. He did the same with the personal notes of their sister Annie.¹⁰ Furthermore, her MI5 file PF42136 was destroyed in 1946 (apparently Wilkinson was told on requesting to see her file, that it had been burned that morning).¹¹ For years, the Wilkinson family opposed the idea of a biography.¹² This makes determining personality and deeper motivation difficult. One apparent solution – reconstructing Wilkinson’s personality from her autobiographical accounts in Myself When Young or on the BBC – is problematic because she developed a narrative of her formative moments in a selective and present-minded manner.¹³

By all accounts, Wilkinson had a remarkable character. As one commentator put it, ‘in her short life, she has carried through a hundred battles her dashing courage, her quick temper, and her glowing idealism. It is not inappropriate that the heroine of her recently published first novel should be a versatile and ardent young woman, an able organiser, a passionate and impulsive speaker, and – a minx.’¹⁴ Yet, there are dangers when confronted with such tributes. Anthony Masters casually observed that Wilkinson suffered from manic depression based on his reading of the Astor–Wilkinson correspondence.¹⁵ Wishing to dispel the myth of her universal popularity, Lady Juliette Huxley recalled a malicious nickname used behind her back of ‘virago intacta’.¹⁶ Wilkinson’s secretary Diana Hubback observed that her employer was rumoured to be a ‘philanderer and had broken many hearts’.¹⁷ A gap exists between the public persona that ‘Red Ellen’ cultivated and performed and a private Wilkinson revealed only in glimpses to friends. Her love life is another aspect of her personal domain discretely kept from public view. She was briefly engaged to Walton Newbold. Wright Robinson alluded to the ‘strange undefined relation’ of Wilkinson and John Jagger (NUDAW President) which neither ‘find it expedient to proclaim or defend it’.¹⁸ Stella Davies hinted that Frank Horrabin was the love of her life, with whom she had an affair during the later 1920s.¹⁹ A similar uncertainty surrounded her intimate relationship with Herbert Morrison: his biographers denied that it had a sexual dimension.²⁰ The possibility that she may have taken her own life has also animated a related controversy among historians.²¹

Historiographical interest has waxed and waned. Betty Vernon’s biography of Wilkinson published in 1982 prompted considerable debate. While this book was generally welcomed, Andy Croft deemed it to be insufficiently analytical, particularly in relation to Wilkinson’s evolving political philosophy.²² Barbara Blaszak wanted Wilkinson’s ‘feminist consciousness’ to be more fully explored.²³ Moreover, David Reid – who was undertaking a doctoral study of Wilkinson – sharply disagreed with Vernon’s assessment. In particular, Vernon downplayed Wilkinson’s time in the Communist Party which was for Reid ‘in the most profound sense, the making of Wilkinson.’ He rejected the interpretation of Wilkinson as a Labourist or feminist, charting an evolution from Blatchford’s ethical socialism, via guild socialism to Communism, with a break in 1926, after which she adopted ‘an amalgam of parliamentary socialism and electoral activity.’²⁴

Wilkinson’s time in the 1945 Labour government as the Minister of Education has drawn keen scrutiny.²⁵ A conference at Ruskin College in 1978 initiated a debate about her time at the Ministry of Education. David Rubinstein highlighted Wilkinson’s failure to embrace comprehensive education as symptomatic of the 1945 government’s record and the limited mark made by the Labour left on that government. This perhaps posed the question of Wilkinson’s ministerial achievements rather too narrowly. This first historical judgement drew rejoinders that broadened the debate and were more or less appreciative of her record from Billy Hughes, David Reid, Caroline Benn and D.W. Dean. Those more sympathetic to Wilkinson, such as Henry Pelling, have focused on her brave decision to push for the increase to school leaving age.²⁶ Brian Harrison believed that the criticism of Wilkinson for her failure to promote comprehensives as ‘doubly anachronistic’, misunderstanding Labour’s attachment to equality of opportunity under the existing arrangements and the battle for resources within Cabinet.²⁷

Ellen Wilkinson’s novel The Clash (1929) has prompted more scholarly interest than any other aspect of her career. To appreciate its deeper meaning, Maroula Joannou locates the novel as part of a socialist-feminist cultural tradition.²⁸ Sharing this concern, Ian Haywood focuses upon Wilkinson’s gendered re-interpretation of 1926.²⁹ Shifting to the personal realm of emotion, Pamela Fox’s study of the British working-class novel, including The Clash, attempts to reconceptualise working-class resistance as a form of refusal of dominant culture with class shame as the principal contested terrain.³⁰ For Fox, The Clash concerns the autobiographical heroine Joan’s anguished choice between individual romantic fulfilment and collective class obligations; she opts for the latter. Alternately, for Laura Beers (who also considers Wilkinson’s second novel Division Bell Mystery), Joan epitomises a modern (rather than a working-class) woman choosing career over romance.³¹ Considering the relationship between public and private realms, Nicola Wilson viewed the home as the ‘primary site’ where a gendered class consciousness formed, focusing on passages set in the homes of Maud Meddowes and miners’ wives.³² Yet, it is the mobility of urban modernity’s public spaces that informs Wendy Parkin’s view of The Clash, in which Joan renounces romance for the exciting new civil arena of politics.³³ Thus, from different starting points, both Beers and Parkin stress the ‘modern woman’ and this was certainly a conceptual motif of Wilkinson’s thinking on gender. Shifting the debate onto the novel’s intellectual and political underpinnings, Roberto del Valle Alcalá read The Clash as Wilkinson’s effort to reconcile socialism and feminism in a revolutionary synthesis, when others stressed her reformist socialism.³⁴

Despite these rich insights, the literary approach can refract understandings of Wilkinson’s gender politics. There is a failure in some of this literature to historicise these texts sufficiently. Ian Haywood finds a feminist Wilkinson opening up the ‘conspicuous faultlines in the workerist mythology of the General Strike’. This is problematic as it neglects her contribution to A Worker’s History of the General Strike, which is plainly written in a workerist idiom. Moreover, its authors – not least Wilkinson – believed that, rather than being a romantic myth, the strike determined the political atmosphere in the Labour movement and hence its analysis was crucial. More than anything, in debunking mode, she was contesting MacDonald and Thomas’s hegemonic ‘never again’ interpretation of the strike. The culturalist gaze also presents other problems. Overly concerned with a neat socialist-feminist genealogy, Wilkinson has been misleadingly presented as a suffragette and supporter of Sylvia Pankhurst, though their paths barely crossed.³⁵ Her death has been romanticised (stressing overwork, illness and relative youth, thereby obscuring the possibility of suicide).³⁶ Key elements of the historical context of her novel have been overlooked. Thus, Wilkinson chose not to include the campaign for equalisation of the franchise which coincided exactly with the timeframe of The Clash and in which Wilkinson and Rhondda (on whom Meddowes was based) were heavily involved. Moreover, while Joannou discusses birth control in The Clash, she presented Wilkinson as a supporter of the Workers’ Birth Control Group, though Wilkinson opposed their campaign when she was on the Labour Party NEC. The overall effect of this literary route to understanding Wilkinson’s gender politics is to simplify Wilkinson’s complex fluid ideas that were drawn into the field of force of a dynamic social movement. While Wilkinson described herself as a socialist and a feminist, the socialist-feminist label, though true in a sense, may be misleadingly static. This is not to suggest, as Reid did (drawing on Wilkinson’s description of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst as ‘feminine fascists’), that Wilkinson was not a feminist. Rather, her visions of socialism and feminism changed over time, diverged and intersected in different ways. Her ideas and practice were a dialogue between movements in changing institutional settings.

Her novels have not been the only route into an examination of Wilkinson’s gender politics and her relation with feminism. Brian Harrison considered Wilkinson in relation to inter-war feminists or those he called the ‘prudent revolutionaries’. He adopted a more conventionally historical (and less theorised) approach to Wilkinson. While her socialism was stronger than her feminism, she was willing to collaborate with middle-class feminists to a greater extent than any other woman Labour MP.³⁷ Pam Graves’s study of inter-war Labour women highlighted the contradictions of women’s status within the party. Their invisibility belied the party’s reliance upon their activism and their disproportionate contribution to the welfarist agenda that triumphed in 1945. Wilkinson was one of the exceptions to the pattern because of her visibility, her continued relationship with ‘middle-class feminists’ and her equivocation over family allowances and birth control.³⁸ David Howell’s MacDonald’s Party (2002) scrutinised the party’s ideal of womanhood, the ‘Labour woman’. Wilkinson certainly did not eschew this ideal but she also transcended it. While rejecting certain contemporary ideals of womanhood, she saw herself as a ‘new’, ‘modern’, ‘intelligent’ as well as a working-class woman who had been offered emancipatory opportunities through political action. Laura Beers has contextualised Wilkinson in terms of gender representations in the inter-war British press in which women MPs were treated as stars and their politics trivialised.³⁹

New evidence, new approaches

Deeper evidentiary foundations can be excavated to reconstruct Wilkinson’s life.⁴⁰ Wilkinson was a prolific journalist and material from Labour Leader, New Leader, All Power, The Nation, Lilliput, The Strand and Student Outlook adds to our understanding. Her journalism needs to be handled with care: editors and formats afforded different degrees of political latitude. Thus, Wilkinson observed that while she usually exercised self-restraint, Time and Tide allowed her to ‘luxuriate in saying what I want even if it means inflicting on the readers. . .what no other editor in London would dream of allowing me to write’.⁴¹ Wilkinson understood how to write for particular audiences, shifting between formal and vernacular registers, adopting various modes of address: as a political commentator, parliamentary savant, industrial relations expert, woman’s advocate and foreign correspondent. Vestiges also appear in the personal papers of her acquaintances (such as J.F. Horrabin, Jawaharlal Nehru, Ove Arup, Nancy Astor, Leon Trotsky, Louis Fischer, Dick Sheppard, George Catlin, Winifred Holtby, Adam von Trott). Institutional collections furnish additional material: USDAW’s Manchester headquarters, the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom (WILPF) at the LSE, the International Peace Council (IPC) and the League against Imperialism (LAI) at the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam), the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and the Labour Party (People’s History Museum and the Working Class Movement Library, Manchester), Electrical Association of Women (EAW) at the Institution of Engineering and Technology, London, the TUC Library and the Women’s Library. The National Archives hold key collections such as the reports on revolutionary organisations, the MI5 files about her Communist associates as well as Cabinet, Home Office and Education records. Moreover, I have accessed a collection of fifty interviews conducted in the 1970s with Wilkinson’s acquaintances, the product of David Reid’s abandoned biography. It includes those with Jennie Lee, Joe Symonds, Margaret Cole, Fenner Brockway, Ivor Montagu, Earl Listowel, J.P.M. Millar, G.R. Strauss and Isabel Brown. The nature of the samples of oral history may reinforce particular narratives of Wilkinson’s life be they Labourist, British, high political, trade union or feminist ones. For instance, those who were involved in her transnational campaigning are significantly absent. Methodological care is needed with these interviews, being shaped as they were not only by the filters and illusions of memory but also by the transaction between Reid’s and the interviewees’ agendas.

From a methodological viewpoint, this biography aims to survey the triad of Wilkinson’s ideas, movements and world. The conceptual toolbox needed for this is drawn from intellectual history, the study of social movements and transnational history. This approach will subject these aspects of Wilkinson’s life to greater scrutiny than has hitherto been the case and will allow a distinctive understanding of her intellectual trajectory. This book challenges the two-dimensional heroic ‘Red Ellen’ apparent in British political culture whose ideas and personality remained essentially constant over time. Equally, other facets of her life will consequently receive less emphasis: her youth, her work in the Commons, and in government. My underlying assumption is that Wilkinson’s ideas evolved in dialogue with transnational movements subject to cycles of contention and that she was constrained within a changing institutional conjuncture. This starting point has shaped the structure of the biography which is not a single chronological sweep but is instead divided into movements (socialism/Communism, women, anti-imperialism, anti-fascism, Spain), Labour institutions (union and Parliamentary Labour Party) and finally government. These are taken in the chronological order of her first encounter with these subjects. Each of these constitutes a specific strand of her entangled thought requiring consideration in its own right. There are particular reasons why Wilkinson, more than other politicians, should be viewed from a transnational standpoint. Being an avowed internationalist, she travelled widely and developed strong transnational affinities through her political engagements with Germany, Spain, France, India, Ireland, Bulgaria, the USA and the USSR.⁴² This transnational perspective is not simply a matter of revealing a fuller account of Wilkinson’s life: these practices helped to shape and define her ideas.

Social movement theory provides important insights. Charles Tilly reminds us that modernity has spelt ‘five centuries of revolution’, a particularly significant observation given Wilkinson’s own attachment to revolution and her political reorientations consequent upon revolutions and counter-revolutions in Russia, Germany and Spain.⁴³ Tilly’s work opens the field to the structural characteristics of social movements more generally, and their interactions with regimes, which has particular significance for Wilkinson. Though on first sight unconducive to biographical inquiry, such an approach can valorise her agency and popular action more generally. The memory of Red Ellen on the public platform of the movements – her vivid red hair, her tiny frame, her powerful northern accent, her distinctive toss of the head to emphasise a point – remained with many who witnessed this.⁴⁴ Understanding Wilkinson’s transnationalism also requires an engagement with social movement perspectives. Scholars have grappled with the transnational diffusion of protest: its activist networks, its collective action frames, its repertoires and its cycles of protest.⁴⁵ She acted as a transnational ‘broker’ connecting different sites of contention between the British left, via the League against Imperialism, and the Indian nationalist movement. Wilkinson took advantage of train, passenger liner and air to travel with the money scraped together from her job, her friends and her journalism, all of which meant that she was in a rare position to gain wide-ranging insights into her world. New technologies were revolutionising the possibilities for travel and communication, opening new avenues to spread protest and build movements. She was also involved in ‘domestication’ when conflicts external to the domestic political agenda are introduced and become the object of collective action, such as her work over the Reichstag Fire Trial Campaign or over the government’s attitude to the Spanish Republic. Furthermore, Wilkinson performed a prominent role in the process of ‘externalisation’ wherein movements become active supranationally participating in conferences to establish organisations concerning imperialism (the League against Imperialism), peace (International Peace Congress), fascism and war (the Amsterdam–Pleyel movement, Relief Committee for the Victims of German Fascism and the Women’s Committee against Fascism and War). Wilkinson devoted a considerable part of her energies to ‘transnational collective action’ and its conjunctural attributes (environmental change, cognitive change and relational change) offer insights into her political practice. Her contacts, acquaintances and friends who would provide insider knowledge or assistance or introduction to third parties, developed into what social movement theorists Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink have called the ‘transnational advocacy networks’. According to their definition, actors working on a particular issue are bound together by shared values and discourses resulting in dense exchanges of information and services.⁴⁶ Thus, these networks are partly constitutive of the political journeys of their participants like Wilkinson.

Social movement scholars have also probed the vicissitudes of participation in collective action and protest. These are conceived of as cyclical in nature and this cyclicality affords insight into Wilkinson’s shifting perceptions, outlook and general state of mind. Particularly valuable in this literature are the recent efforts to understand participation in social movements as a fluid amalgam of reason and emotion.⁴⁷ The reader glimpses beyond ostensibly indefatigable Wilkinson in the opening of her first novel The Clash. The autobiographical character Joan Craig was having one of her ‘crises’ of exhaustion and despair. Private correspondence with Astor and Dalton also reveals this inversion of Wilkinson’s public persona. Her shifts of mood highlight the emotional cycle of participation in movements that can enthuse with the exhilarating optimism associated with the opening horizons of possibility or depress with emotional exhaustion of narrowing prospects. Social movement theory casts another long-standing historiographical question in new light through the notion of the ‘political opportunity structure’.⁴⁸ This opens the troublesome matter of causal relation between the goals of social movements and political change. Political opportunity for participation in social protest depended for Wilkinson crucially on institutional constraints and disciplinary boundaries.

Wilkinson’s intellectual itinerary was not ‘uniform in political colour’.⁴⁹ Her ideas and political activity were entangled in complex ways, making it necessary to uncover her participation in and experience of waves of industrial unrest (1915–20, 1926, 1936–37) and cycles of social protest (suffrage movement, unemployed protest, anti-fascism, solidarity with the Spanish republic). As Wilkinson’s contemporary Victor Serge put it, mass movements ‘transform individuals, impel them into unpredictable courses of development, and mould their convictions. . . .[T]he ebb-tide of events carries men [sic] away just as surely as the flood-tide brings them in.’⁵⁰ Wilkinson’s political outlook took as a persistent point of reference past participation in the great movements for women’s suffrage and the strike waves of the war. Time and again, she articulated the significance of the emotional dimension – ‘old spirit’ – of these movements in order to re-energise her renowned optimism. Her rhetoric and symbolism was drawn from and directed towards the emotional level. Where labour history restored the rationality to worker protest, previously dismissed as resistant to progress, or a vehicle to animalistic mob psychology, certain social movement theorists have re-emphasised the centrality of the emotional process to cycles of mobilisation.⁵¹ Thus, both labour history and social movement theory can reconceptualise human agency in terms of a dialectic of reason and emotion. As such, Wilkinson’s public political persona – ‘fiery’, ‘passionate’ – symbiotically emerged in relation to these moments of great struggle and made her an ideal voice for protest. Red Ellen’s indefatigable hope and passion were symptomatic of the opening up of social movements sustained through personal willpower and self-denial at times when they were not shared by others. Wilkinson conjured into the imagination moral shocks (or what social movement theorists call ‘injustice frames’) transgressing deeply held rules and norms that she shared with her audiences: a town ‘murdered’ by the steel industry and the banks, Madrid’s children bombed in their sleep, co-operative society committee members acting like capitalists, brownshirt thugs whipping socialist women with steel rods. Her use of metaphor reveals a compulsion that drew her to some of the most intense moments of inter-war contention: the ‘storm centre’ of Oviedo at the time of the Asturian miners’ insurrection, ‘dashing off into the vortex of’ the Flint Fischer body plant during the epic battle with General Motors.⁵² A bitter opponent observed that she would suddenly arrive in ‘whichever country happens to be having a revolution’.⁵³

It is a fallacy to assume that historical actors necessary have stable or consistent political views. Methodological individualism, common-sense idealism and the transgenerational reproduction of political traditions reinforces this illusion. Critical events precipitated and shaped Wilkinson’s political engagement. She mapped her intellectual bearings from the suffrage movement, the Great War, the Russian Revolution, Hitler’s accession to power and the Spanish Civil War. Such events did not make people react in predictable ways. Responses might be immediate, delayed or anticipate events. Some might reject their old assumptions, others deny the need to change. Events might precipitate political engagement or disengaged withdrawal. In such circumstances, a coherent, unfaltering political outlook was not the norm. As she reflected in a letter written in early 1941: ‘To finish up one of the supporters of Mr Wilkie [pro-war US Republican leader] seems to me quite extraordinary as the rest of things in this extraordinary time.’⁵⁴ She had previously observed the process in others, disapproving of politicians who ‘were the reddest revolutionaries in their youth’ but repressed social discontent in older age.⁵⁵ French historians have developed persuasive explanations of such biographical or cohort ‘itineraries’. With this approach, historians have tried to go beyond the demarcations of political philosophy to explain the real intellectual journeys at the micro-level.⁵⁶

To conceptualise Wilkinson’s intellectual odyssey, some first principles ought to be outlined. Temporal considerations highlight both dynamism and persistence in her thought. Two rapid and pivotal transitions took place: her conversion to socialism in 1907 and her turn to the right in 1939–40. Beyond the threshold of 1940, she assimilated into mainstream Labourism and became an establishment politician of Cabinet and Privy Council. Ideologically, in a radical departure, she accepted Fabianism, the public corporation model of nationalisation, Keynesianism, liberal internationalism, the monarchy and the Empire, all of which she had sharply criticised for twenty years. From the viewpoints of the movements, she retained aspects of movement-building rhetoric, sought where she perceived the opportunity to effect reforms from above, but often found herself in conflict with grassroots activists. The Churchill and Attlee governments used, and she traded on, the radical image of Red Ellen in the face of popular discontent. This explains not only her stance on shelter policy, shop stewards, Mosley’s release and comprehensive schools but also her apparent press gaffes over bread rationing or clothing vouchers.

A rough chronology of her political ideas can be established. Between 1907 and 1940, her patterns of thought changed at an uneven pace with two radicalisations when she explicitly embraced revolution (the phase of war and Russian Revolution and the phase of militant anti-fascism). There were subsequent reversals or drifts into a reformist socialism (the late 1920s and the late 1930s). Verbal markers of her radicalisation such as class struggle and revolution appear during these specific militant periods in response to conjunctures of events, protest cycles and her institutional positions. Other signifiers such as the ‘practical politician’ (associated with a pragmatic turn) signaled her deradicalisation.

Crucial to her phases of deradicalisation were institutions – parliament, the CPGB, the Labour Party, NUDAW and Cabinet – that constrained her political practice and public expression of ideas. This constraint at times assumed a coercive character with dismissal (from NUDAW), public apologies (in the Commons and in The Communist), and the treat of expulsion (from the Labour Party). This disciplinary process cut her off from the movements. As she complained in the Clarion, ‘if one links up with anything that seems to be getting a move on, like a Hunger March, or the Anti-War crowd, or the German Relief Committee, one is told that this is a banned activity’.⁵⁷ Constraint also operated more subtly through accommodation to these institutions, adapting her behaviours, practices and languages to suit. Hence her undisclosed frustration during her first spell on the NEC can be detected in her novel The Clash. One passage both tentatively justifies the NEC’s (and therefore her public) opposition to the dissemination of information about birth control, as well as powerfully putting the case of working women who sought the right to determine their own future.⁵⁸ Familiarity and insider knowledge socialised her in unacknowledged ways as a pragmatic Wilkinson learned how to get things done in the Commons or on the NEC. Her unconventional, but successful, career path can only be understood as a precarious balancing act of commitments to parliamentarianism and to extra-parliamentary causes, the latter being the source of her charismatic affinity with Labour’s grassroots and her greatest political asset. Wilkinson’s social movement activism and ascent within political institutions of party, government and ultimately global governance pose an interesting analytical opportunity. It is perhaps redolent of Rudi Dutschke’s injunction to 1960s activists to set off on the ‘long march through the institutions’.⁵⁹

Yet a simple chronology of her ideas is inadequate. The boundaries between these periods are not always neat because Wilkinson’s thought defies reduction to a singular linear course. Despite its evident utility, the itinerary metaphor breaks down after a certain point. One cannot board two trains at the same time but ideas and travellers have different properties. Comparison of Wilkinson’s two most radical phases exposes the multiple strands of her consciousness. During her time in the CPGB, her gender and socialist politics fused in the summer of 1921 around admiration for Kollontai and the gender policy of the Soviet Union. Unlike the confluence of her first radicalisation, her ideas of the early 1930s had different sources and addressed separate audiences. For a time, her gender politics stressed male conspiracy and sex struggle in response to the contemporary backlash against women and thus diverged from her anti-imperialism and socialism. She dealt with this by separating off these two aspects of her political life. Ultimately, however, these divergent radicalisations of socialism and feminism intersected and partially synthesised in a revolutionary anti-fascism and the rhetoric of male conspiracy fell from her vocabulary.

It would be wrong to assume a consistency and homogeneity to her thought. Partly this was due to the compartmentalised character of her life, somewhat akin to Antonio Gramsci’s concept of split or contradictory consciousness. She adapted to very different arenas: separate movements (feminism, the Labour movement, anti-imperialism, pacifism) as well as diverse social milieux (working-class Middlesbrough, Manchester or Jarrow; bohemian-feminist-literary Bloomsbury, the high political realm of Westminster, ministry or Cabinet).⁶⁰ Some of her situations appear to be mutually exclusive. How can one simultaneously be a student activist and a trade union official, or a guild socialist and an industrial unionist, or a feminist and a Labour politician? The Clash articulated the frustrations, dilemmas, transgressions and intersections of these political compartments. Thus, for instance, intellectually she largely maintained a separation between her politics and her religion (and hence the description of her as a Christian socialist is misplaced). This distinction broke down on specific occasions, with her atheistic Bolshevik turn or socialist sermons consequent upon her frustrations with the second Labour government.

This compartmentalisation has an intellectual–practical fault line as well. Over time, elements of her thought and practice diverged and converged. With the question of war and imperialism during the 1930s, she recognised the gap between her political analysis and the outlook of movements (such as the Peace Pledge Union) with which she collaborated. Her commitment to anti-war movements outweighed her objections to absolutist pacifism and she wanted to argue her case within the mass movement. In this instance, she externalised the contradiction: ‘muddled’ thinking belonged to pacifists. With the relationship between anti-fascism and war, she took time to recognise her own inconsistency, eventually her internal ‘muddle’ was a sign of ‘grim’ objective times. She drifted during the later 1930s, trying to answer this conundrum. The Spanish Civil War provided the crucible for its resolution. Moreover, her personal and political judgements often did not match. She befriended Sir John Anderson, the Governor of Bengal, despite her militant commitment to anti-imperialism; Lord Halifax, despite her hostility to appeasement; and Morrison, despite his crusade against her fellow-travelling allies. Personal loyalties complicated her response to events.

Such a disaggregated understanding of her ideas affords the possibility of exploring her relationships to different networks and movements that possessed unsynchronised cycles of protest and structures of political opportunity. This is not to abandon efforts to understand Wilkinson’s ideas as a whole but, rather, to confront the complexity of her thought, activism and world. The aim is not to present a fragmentary account of Wilkinson revealing ill-fitting inconsistencies and distortions but rather to demonstrate the unity of these disparate components via a picture in motion. By way of analogy, the artist Marcel Duchamp achieved this in Nude Descending a Staircase, no. 2 (1912) with its sense of elements moving in different directions but forming parts of a fluid whole.

Notes

1     Early Day Motion, 1237, 1990–91, proposed by Marjorie Mowlam on 14 October 1991 commemorating Ellen Wilkinson. www.edms.org.uk/1990-91/1237.htm#sthash.nbZLtsxW.dpuf, accessed 20 June 2013. Mowlam’s maiden speech, House of Commons Debates (hereafter HC Deb), 9 July 1987, col. 560. Pat Glass MP in Morning Star, 30 May 2012. Emma Lewell-Buck MP for South Shields, Shields Gazette, 11 April 2013.

2     Newcastle University Special Collections (NUSC), T.D.W. Reid Collection (hereafter TDWR), Reid to Editor of The Listener, 20 March 1983.

3     Symptomatic of the distorted image of Wilkinson is the error that she left the Communist Party within a year of joining it. Graham Dale, God’s Politicians: the Christian Contribution to 100 Years of Labour, London, 2000, pp. 120–121. Being cited in ‘where we stand’ for the Christian Socialist Movement, www.thecsm.org.uk/Groups/87274/Christian_Socialist_Movement/About_CSM/What_we_stand/What_we_stand.aspx, accessed 18 June 2013.

4     Paul Salveson, Socialism with a Northern Accent: Radical Traditions for Modern Times, London, 2012. For a civic appropriation, T.A. Lockett, Three Lives: It Happened Round Manchester, London, 1968, pp. 46–61.

5     For the years 1924–26 and 1935–37, being an MP 1924–31 and 1935–45.

6     Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour People: Leaders and Lieutenants, Hardie to Kinnock, Oxford, 1987, p. 101.

7     The Listener, 29 November 1945.

8     Ibid. Countess of Oxford and Asquith (ed.), Myself When Young: by Famous Women of To-day, London, 1938, p. 399.

9     John Sleight, Women on the March: the Story of the Struggle for Political Power and Equality for Women in the North-East from 1920 to 1970, Newcastle, 1986, p. 29; Communist Review, November 1921.

10    Newcastle University Special Collections T.D.W. Reid Collection (hereafter NUSC TDWR) G.C.L. Hazelhurst to Reid, 21 June 1971.

11    The National Archives (hereafter TNA) KV 2 598 35B Superintendant Canning, Special Branch note, 30 June 1933. This document like many others indicated that Wilkinson’s file was PF42136 and a handwritten note stated ‘destroyed 1946.’

12    NUSC TDWR Jo Camp to Reid, 29 June 1974.

13    BBC Written Archive (hereafter BBCWA) NO T650 script for Wilkinson, Born and Bred, 27 October 1945.

14    Sunday Times, 9 June 1929.

15    Anthony Masters, Nancy Astor, London, 1981, p. 136.

16    NUSC TDWR Lady Huxley to Reid, 13 August 1975.

17    Balliol College Special Collections Adam von Trott papers (BCSC AvT) III V H313 Hubback to von Trott, 20 January 1936.

18    Manchester Central Library M284 Wright Robinson, Diary 1921–26, p. 108. She also had a relationship with Frank Horrabin.

19    Reid interviews: Stella Davies.

20    And arguing that she committed suicide, Bernard Donoughue and G.W. Jones, Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician, London, 1973, p. 392.

21    Against suicide, Betty D. Vernon, Ellen Wilkinson, 1891–1947, London, 1982, pp. 234–235. Vernon, as well as Donoghue and G.W. Jones use evidence from interviews to justify their conclusions. Maeve Denby, ‘Women in Parliament and Government’, in Lucy Middleton (ed.), Women in the Labour Movement: The British Experience, London, 1977, pp. 175–190. Committing suicide because of a sense of failure, Daily Telegraph, 5 January 2006.

22    Andy Croft, ‘Reviews: Clash, by Wilkinson’, Labour History Review, 56, 1 (1991), pp. 76–77.

23    Barbara J. Blaszak, ‘Review: Betty D. Vernon. Wilkinson, 1891–1947’, American Historical Review, 88, 1 (1983), p. 120.

24    T.D.W. Reid, ‘Wilkinson: Revolutionary Politics and Ideology, 1917–1926’, unpublished thesis without award, Hull University, October 1984, p. 20.

25    Billy Hughes, ‘In Defence of Wilkinson’, History Workshop Journal, 7 (1979), pp. 157–160 and David Rubinstein, ‘Wilkinson Re-considered’, History Workshop Journal, 7 (1979), pp. 161–169. R. Fieldhouse, ‘The Labour Government’s Further Education Policy 1945–51’, History of Education, 23, 1 (1994), pp. 287–299. D.W. Dean, ‘Planning for a Postwar Generation: Wilkinson and George Tomlinson at the Ministry of Education’, History of Education, 15, 2 (1986), pp. 95–117. David Reid letter, History Workshop Journal, 8 (1979), p. 194; Caroline Benn, ‘Comprehensive School Reform and the 1945 Labour Government’, History Workshop Journal, 10 (1980), pp. 197–204. Douglas Bourn, ‘Equality of Opportunity? The Labour Government and Schools’, in Jim Fyrth (ed.), Labour’s Promised Land?: Culture and Society in Labour Britain, London, 1995, pp. 163–180. Mystified that the 1944 act be seen as bold and egalitarian, Kenneth O. Morgan, The People’s Peace: British History Since 1945, Oxford, 1999, p. 19.

26    Henry Pelling, The Labour Governments: 1945–51, Basingstoke, 1985.

27    Brian Harrison, ‘Wilkinson, Ellen Cicely (1891–1947)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/36902.

28    Maroula Joannou, ‘Reclaiming the Romance: Ellen Wilkinson’s Clash and the Cultural Legacy of Socialist Feminism’, in David Margolies and Maroula Joannou (eds), Heart of the Heartless World: Essays in Cultural Resistance in Memory of Margot Heinemann, London, 1995, pp. 148–160.

29    Ian Haywood, ‘Never Again?’: Ellen Wilkinson’s Clash and the Feminization of the General Strike’, Literature & History, 8 (1999), p. 34

30    Pamela Fox, Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890–1945, Durham, 1994.

31    Laura Beers, ‘Feminism and Sexuality in Ellen Wilkinson’s Fiction’, Parliamentary Affairs, 64, 2 (2011), pp. 248–262.

32    Nicola Wilson, ‘Politicising the Home in Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s This Slavery (1925) and Ellen Wilkinson’s Clash (1929)’, Key Words, 5 (2007–08), pp.26–42.

33    Wendy Parkin, ‘Women on the Streets: Gender and Mobility in The Convert and Clash’, AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Modern Language Association, 108 (2007), pp. 65–93.

34    Roberto Del Valle Alcalá, ‘En-gendering The Clash: Ellen Wilkinson and Interwar Socialist Feminism’, Philologia, 7 (2009), pp. 127–134

35    Mary Joannou and Ian Haywood, ‘Introduction’ in Ellen Wilkinson, The Clash, Nottingham, 2004, pp. vii–xxv.

36    Wilson, ‘Politicising’, p. 35.

37    Brian Harrison, Prudent Revolutionaries: Portraits of British Feminists between the Wars, Oxford, 1987.

38    Pamela M. Graves, Labour Women: Women in British Working-class Politics 1918–1939, Cambridge, 1994.

39    Laura Beers, ‘A Timid Disbelief in the Equality to Which Lip-Serivce is Constantly Paid: Gender, Politics and the Press Between the Wars’, in Laura Beers and Geraint Thomas, Brave New World: Imperial and Democratic Nation Building in Britain between the Wars, London, 2011, pp.129–148.

40    On the paucity of materials, Cameron Hazlehurst, Sally Whitehead, A Guide to the Papers of British Cabinet Ministers, 1900–1964, Cambridge, 1997, p. 377.

41    Time and Tide, 14 July 1934.

42    Matt Perry, ‘In Search of Red Ellen Wilkinson Beyond Frontiers and Beyond the Nation State’, International Review of Social History, 58, 2 (2013), pp. 219–246.

43    Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992, Oxford, 1993, p. 242. On counter-revolution, Arno J. Mayer, Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870–1956: an Analytic Framework, New York, 1971.

44    NUSC TDWR Graham Hutton to Reid, 14 July 1975.

45    Donatella della Porta and Sidney Tarrow, ‘Introduction: Transnational Processes and Social Activism’, in Donatella della Porta and Sidney Tarrow (eds), Transnational Protest and Global Activism: People, Passion and Power, Lanham, MD, 2005, pp. 1–17.

46    Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY, 1998), pp. 8–10, 14.

47    Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper and Francesca Polletta, ‘The Return of the Repressed: the Fall and Rise of Emotions in Social Movement Theory’, Mobilization: An International Journal, 5, 1 (2000), pp. 65–83.

48    Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action, and Politics, Cambridge, 1994. Doug McAdam, ‘Conceptual Origins, Current Problems, Future Directions’, in Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald (eds), Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 23–40.

49    As her honorary degree citation from Manchester University suggested. Appending the citation (15 May 1946), NUSC TDWR Georgina Miller to Reid, 3 September 1974.

50    Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, London, 1984, p. 144.

51    Gustav Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, New Brunswick, 1982. George Rudé, The Crowd in History: a Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848, London, 1981.

52    Student Outlook, February 1935. Time and Tide, 13 February 1937. William A. Gamson, Bruce Fireman, and Steven Rytina, Encounters with Unjust Authority, Belmont, CA, 1982.

53    Action, 20 February 1937. Similarly, Action, 17 September 1934.

54    McMaster University George Catlin Papers 205 Wilkinson to Catlin, 7 January 1941.

55    When discussing Reynaud’s trajectory from right to left of French politics in comparison to Briand, Clemenceau and Millerand, Time and Tide, 20 March 1940.

56    Christophe Charle, La Naissance des ‘Intellectuels’ 1880–1900, Paris, 1990. Gisèle Sapiro, La Guerre des écrivains 1940–53, Paris, 1999. Gilles Heuré, Gustave Hervé: Itinéraire d’un Provocateur, Paris, 1997. Gilbert G. Allardyce, ‘The Political Transition of Jacques Doriot’, Journal of Contemporary History, 1, 1 (1966), pp. 56–74. Frédéric Monier, ‘Les obsessions d’Henri Béraud’, Vingtième Siècle, 40 (1993), pp. 62–74.

57    Clarion, 2 June 1934.

58    Wilkinson, Clash, pp. 245–250.

59    Rudi Dutschke, ‘On Anti-Authoritarianism’, The New Left Reader, New York, 1969, p. 249.

60    Highlighting this problem of categorising Wilkinson, a letter from Walton Newbold condemning a nest of ‘intellectuals’ including Wilkinson tricking trade union officials in the allocation of parliamentary seats, Catholic Herald, 28 June 1940. She was both an intellectual and trade union official.

1

Socialist ideas and movements

Wilkinson’s relationship with socialism and Communism has divided contemporary and historical opinion. For Betty Vernon, while not denying her ideas, Wilkinson was largely a pragmatist who passed through apprenticeships in the suffrage movement, in the CPGB (briefly) and in her trade union before maturing as a campaigning, but reformist, socialist. Stressing continuities and gradualism, Vernon’s account fits with Labourist narratives of Wilkinson.¹ Accordingly, Wilkinson quit the CPGB alongside intellectuals such as Frank Horrabin, Jagger, William Mellor and Raymond Postgate as a consequence of the ‘Bolshevisation’ of the party.² Vernon also implies that she followed her one-time fiancé Walton Newbold into the party and both associations were equally superficial, impetuous and ill-considered.³ Influenced by Vernon’s interpretation, attempting to reconstruct Wilkinson as an iconic Christian socialist, Graham Dale stated erroneously that she left within a year.⁴ Conversely, David Reid emphasised Wilkinson’s ideological evolutions from ethical socialism, to guild socialism, to Communism. For him, Wilkinson’s CPGB membership was a formative experience. However, after 1926, she adopted ‘an amalgam of parliamentary socialism and electoral activity’.⁵ While veteran Communists pointed to her lack of principles, Isabel Brown believed that in spirit Wilkinson never really left.⁶ Neither Bolshevisation nor careerism adequately capture her reasons for leaving or her relationship with the CPGB. Consideration of Wilkinson’s membership of the CPGB also intersects with the historiographical efforts of historians like Karen Hunt and Matthew Worley to engender the CPGB’s early history. As with the Social Democratic Federation and the ILP beforehand, women had a distinctly minority status within the CPGB. This research has stressed the ‘reluctance to give significant amounts of energy either to the woman question or to the development of an effective strategy to recruit and retain women as Communists.’⁷

Becoming a socialist

The 1901 census enumerated the occupants of 17 Everton Road in St Stephen’s parish of South Manchester: Richard Wilkinson aged 44 years, an insurance agent for a burial society; Ellen Wilkinson, his wife, three years his senior; Annie E. Wilkinson, aged 20 years; Richard A. Wilkinson, 17 years, an apprentice Cabinet maker; Ellen C. Wilkinson, 9 years; and, finally, the one-year-old infant, Harold Wilkinson. In 1938, Ellen Wilkinson sketched her family background. Her mother struggled with ill health and family hardship when her husband was out of work. The daughter described her mother as ‘advanced’, flouting the codes of domestic feminine convention. Ellen Wilkinson’s paternal grandfather was a hard-drinking Irish Catholic immigrant and her father started his working life in the cotton mills. After intermittent unemployment, he became an insurance agent. She remembered him talking bitterly about tramping from one mill to another to try to find work during his wife’s pregnancy. Religion was central to the household. Church attendance was regular and her father was a non-conformist lay preacher at the Wesleyan chapel in Grosvenor Street. He had begun preaching at the age of 15.⁸ The chapel was his means of education, of self-expression and nurtured his sense of morality. Ellen Wilkinson rationalised a connection between her father’s religious sense of the human brotherhood and her generation’s belief in socialism. Politically, despite being blacklisted for his trade unionism in the mills, her father was a Tory, believing firmly in the Smilesian philosophy of self-improvement. He even campaigned for Conservative Arthur James Balfour in his Manchester East constituency (where Balfour sat as MP between 1885 and 1906; he was also Prime Minister 1902–1905).

She described her first school – Ardwick Elementary School – as a ‘filthy elementary school. . .with five classes in one room’.⁹ She contracted a serious illness during an epidemic that hit such ‘crowded and insanitary’ schools and had to remain at home between the age of six and eight. Thus, it was her ‘devoted and intelligent’ mother who taught Wilkinson to read. Yet she was a very bright pupil, who enjoyed reading and received excellent grades. She was far from a model student, being bored and ill-behaved in class. In the large classes of those days, she completed tasks well before others, and as she later observed herself: ‘What else was there to do but organise mischief, and take the consequences?’ Her experience was of being a ‘little sausage in the vast educational sausage machine’. Receiving little encouragement, she hated and defied school discipline. In later life, she would recall instances of unjust punishment of her peers to confirm the persistence of the odium for the ‘loathed school atmosphere’. This extended to her experience as a pupil teacher where the ‘grey-haired and spinsterish’ assistant head – ‘a vindictive old cat’ – slapped a frightened youngster so hard that Wilkinson wanted to retaliate on his behalf. Indeed, she commented how, as a Manchester councillor and an MP with official duties that might include a school visit, she had to tackle her phobia of returning to an elementary school.¹⁰ At the age of eleven, she won her first scholarship and secured the rest of her education right through to the completion of her university degree on the same basis. Wilkinson endured ‘two horrid unmanageable years’ at Stretford Road Secondary School for Girls. She described its headmistress as a prim Victorian lady. The only point in its favour was the sympathetic glint in the eye of her French teacher ‘Dear Miss Allen.’¹¹

At the age of 16, Wilkinson attended Princess Street Pupil Teacher Centre (PTC), spending half of her week there and half at Mansfield Street School as a pupil teacher. At the school, she despised the headmaster who had a condescending aversion to younger teachers. After they had clashed over her teaching style, she received a visit and reprimand from a school inspector. Wilkinson recalled venting all her ‘surging hate of all the silly punishment I had endured in my own schooldays’. In contrast, the PTC was ‘pure joy’ mainly due to her French teacher, who encouraged reading rather than grammar drills and W.E. Elliot, who prompted her to stand in the school election. Wilkinson narrated her conversion to socialism using this incident.¹² Wilkinson stood as a socialist, though ‘socialism was a word I had barely heard’. Borrowing Robert Blatchford’s books, she learnt the basics, discovering ‘the answer to the chaotic rebellion of my school years’.¹³ Socialism explained her mother’s ill health, the market’s inefficiency and its juxtaposition of waste, wealth and poverty. Blatchford’s ‘sheer simplicity’ convinced her. As her adage ‘what is morally wrong, cannot be politically right’ illustrates, the residue of Blatchford’s ethical socialism lingered in her thought.¹⁴ Desiring to enter ‘the magic sphere of politics’, Wilkinson attended an acronym-ridden Longsight ILP branch meeting. Rescuing her from this uninspiring initiation, a Jewish socialist colleague took Wilkinson to see Katharine Bruce Glasier at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall. Wilkinson pointed to this event as her epiphany and her admiration for ‘this dear saint of the women’s movement’ persisted.¹⁵ Glasier was able to conjure away social injustice and embody Wilkinson’s secret dreams and hopes. She resolved to abandon teaching for politics. For this reason, Wilkinson applied to the nationwide Jones Open History Scholarship, which she won in late May 1910, allowing her to read History at Manchester University.¹⁶ This opened up a new world that Wilkinson had dreamed of: ‘books unlimited, lots of friends, interesting lectures, stimulus of team work’.

The University Socialist Federation (USF) and guild socialism

At university, Wilkinson was active in student politics via the Fabian Society, acquainting her with notable British socialists including the Webbs, the Coles, Mary MacArthur and the Glasiers. The Fabian Society held regular lectures and summer schools, providing a forum for new ideas. Although the Fabian mainstream espoused a gradualist state socialism, there were Fabian lectures, reviews and pamphlets on syndicalism and the industrial unrest.¹⁷ At the 1912 Fabian summer school, Beatrice Webb lectured on syndicalism and trade union leader Mary MacArthur spoke on women’s trade unions.¹⁸ A space also existed within the Fabian Society for women’s groups and activity in favour of the franchise.

Manchester University was a notable centre of Fabian activity. For instance, on 6 May 1911, Manchester hosted the Northern Fabian Conference.¹⁹ In August 1912, Fabian News noted the rapid growth of the Manchester University Fabian Society (MUFS) and its busy programme. It and the Cambridge University Fabian Society were the prime movers in the USF’s formation.²⁰ By December 1912, Wilkinson was the joint MUFS secretary.²¹ She participated in the preliminary USF conference in 1912 as well as the following one in Barrow House, Derwentwater. Through the USF, Wilkinson met Page, J. Walton Newbold (to whom she was briefly engaged), Rajani Palme Dutt, William Mellor and Clifford Allen. She remained involved in the USF until its last important conference in Oxford, in 1921.²²

In the left’s debates between collectivists, syndicalists and guild socialists, Wilkinson advocated the last.²³ Guild socialism mixed William Morris’s ideas, syndicalism and Fabianism. The principal guild socialist thinkers were S.G. Hobson, A.J. Penty, A.R. Orage (editor of the influential New Age) and G.D.H. Cole, who founded the National Guilds League (NGL) in 1915.²⁴ Wilkinson became the Manchester group secretary in 1917 or 1918 until early 1919.²⁵ Wilkinson probably met Cole in 1914, later sitting with him on the Labour Research Department (LRD) and supported his Right Moment Campaign to revise the Fabian Society constitution in 1915.²⁶ Guild socialism proposed industrial democracy through abolition of the wages system, workers’ control and producer associations in a system of national guilds. It thereby challenged the modern worker’s alienating loss of control over production under capitalism and provided an anti-statist model of socialism, with pluralism and democracy at its heart. On 5 December 1915, Wilkinson addressed the Manchester ILP branch on guild socialism, arguing for workers’ control of production through national guilds, eviction of the employers and an end to the profit system.²⁷ Within the socialist student movement under the pull of international revolution and war, Kingsley Martin reflected ‘most. . .socialist undergraduates’ adopted these ideas. Wilkinson led the left of the Guild movement. By 1919, she strongly criticised Cole for accepting secretaryship of the Industrial Commission.²⁸ She spoke with such ‘revolutionary eloquence’ at the 1921 Fabian Summer School that an elderly