Bessie Braddock
Elizabeth Margaret Braddock was a British Labour Party politician who served as Member of Parliament for the Liverpool Exchange division from 1945 to 1970. She was a member of Liverpool County Borough Council from 1930 to 1961. Although she never held office in government, she won a national reputation for her forthright campaigns in connection with housing, public health and other social issues.
Braddock inherited much of her campaigning spirit from her mother, Mary Bamber, an early socialist and trade union activist. After some years in the Independent Labour Party, Braddock joined the Communist Party of Great Britain on its foundation in 1920, but quickly became disillusioned with the party's dictatorial tendencies. She left the CPGB in 1924 and later joined the Labour Party. Before the Second World War, alongside her husband Jack Braddock she established a reputation as a crusading left-wing councillor, frequently at odds with her party while pursuing an agenda of social reform. During the war she worked in Liverpool's ambulance service, before winning the Exchange division for Labour in the 1945 general election. Braddock was a pugnacious presence in parliament, and a supporter of the 1945–51 Attlee ministry's reform agenda, particularly the establishment of the National Health Service in 1948.
She served on Labour's National Executive Committee between 1947 and 1969. Her combative style led to a brief suspension from parliament in 1952. For most of her parliamentary career she remained a member of Liverpool's council, and was a central figure in the controversy that arose in the 1950s over the city's decision to acquire and flood Capel Celyn in a valley along Afon Tryweryn in Wales for the construction of the Llyn Celyn reservoir. Between 1953 and 1957 Braddock served on the Royal Commission for Mental Health which led to the Mental Health Act 1959. From the early 1950s she moved steadily to the right wing of her party, and was increasingly acerbic in her judgements of her former colleagues on the left. When Labour won the 1964 general election she refused office on the grounds of age and health; thereafter her parliamentary contributions dwindled as her health worsened. Towards the end of her life she became Liverpool's first woman freeman. After her death in 1970 her Guardian obituarist hailed her as "one of the most distinctive political personalities of the century".
Early life
Childhood
Elizabeth Bamber was born on 24 September 1899 at 23 Zante Street, in the Everton area of Liverpool, the eldest daughter of Hugh Bamber, a bookbinder, and his wife Mary, née Little. Mary had come to Liverpool as a child when her father, a well-to-do Edinburgh lawyer, abandoned his family after his descent into alcoholism and poverty. Liverpool in the late 19th century suffered extremes of deprivation, and had the highest infant mortality rate in the country. Mary became a trade union organiser and campaigner against deplorable social conditions, and established a reputation as an outstanding platform speaker. She was the dominant early influence on her daughter Elizabeth, who formed a lifelong determination to represent and fight for the disadvantaged.In 1902 the Bamber family relocated to Smollett Street in nearby Bootle, one of several moves that caused Elizabeth's formal education to be divided among different schools. Alongside her normal schooling, her political education began at the Marmaduke Street Socialist Sunday School, and through the medium of her mother's campaigning activities. One of Elizabeth's early memories was of the soup kitchen for the destitute which Mary helped to run on St George's Plateau: "I remember the faces of the unemployed when the soup ran out ... I remember blank, hopeless stares, day after day, week after week, all through the hard winter of 1906–07".
At the age of eleven Elizabeth left the Sunday School and joined the youth section of the Independent Labour Party, where she studied socialism alongside a busy programme of social activities. She later described herself at this time as "strong, agile, fond of walking and eating". By this time Mary Bamber was working as an organiser for the Warehouse Workers' Union; Elizabeth assisted her mother, sometimes acting as a steward at meetings. Mother and daughter were both present at St George's Plateau on 13 August 1911, when a baton charge by police and troops broke up a rally in support of Liverpool's striking transport workers. Hundreds were injured, and in the disturbances that followed, two demonstrators were shot dead. The day became enshrined in Liverpool's working-class history as "Bloody Sunday".
ILP years
Elizabeth left school in 1913, and began work filling seed packets for five shillings a week. The job was too monotonous to engage her for long, and after a few months she found a post in the drapery department of the Walton Road Co-operative store. At her mother's insistence she became a member of the Shopworkers' Union. Meanwhile, she attended classes run by the Workers' Educational Association and the Plebs' League: "They told me how the capitalists controlled money, business and the land, and ... hung on to them".Within the group of young socialists who gathered regularly at the ILP's local headquarters, there were three Elizabeths. To avoid confusion, lots were drawn to decide who should be known respectively as Elizabeth, Betty, or Bessie. By this means Elizabeth Bamber took the name Bessie, which she retained for the rest of her life. Among the other ILP activists at Kensington was Sydney Silverman, four years older than Bessie, the son of a poor draper. Silverman was a considerable influence on the youthful Bessie; he would be her future colleague, both in the Liverpool council chamber and the House of Commons. When the First World War began in August 1914, the ILP opposed it as "an appalling crime upon the nations" who had been "stampeded by fear and panic". On the introduction of conscription in 1916, Silverman and others adopted positions of uncompromising pacifism, and were imprisoned. The ILP welcomed news of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and vigorously opposed allied intervention in the civil war that followed it. Bessie played a leading role in a TUC "Hands Off Russia" rally in Liverpool's Sheil Park, where she and others resisted the efforts of the British Empire Union to capture the ILP's red flag.
At the end of the war in 1918, Bessie left the Co-op and took a clerical post with the Warehouse Workers' Union. In the course of her ILP activities she had met and befriended John "Jack" Braddock, a wagon builder and union activist with a reputation as a firebrand. He had arrived in Liverpool from Dewsbury in 1915, hoping to emigrate to Canada, but had stayed in the port and immersed himself in left-wing politics and the fight to improve working conditions. He and Bessie became very close; in 1919 they helped Mary Bamber to fight for a Liverpool council seat, as the ILP's candidate in the Everton district. The election campaign was bitter and at times violent, but resulted in Bamber's victory by the slim margin of 13 votes.
Early politics
Communist activist
By 1920 Mary Bamber, Bessie and Jack Braddock had become disillusioned with the ILP, which seemed to them to lack the necessary radicalism to march with the times. At the time, Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers' Socialist Federation, the British Socialist Party and other socialist organisations were increasingly coordinating their activities, and in 1920 merged to form the Communist Party of Great Britain. Under Mary Bamber's influence, both Bessie and Jack Braddock left the ILP to become members of the new party. Within the CPGB the young couple became acquainted with Wal Hannington, leader of the National Unemployed Workers Committee Movement. They joined his "work or maintenance" campaign which aimed to raise the levels of Poor Law relief to what they considered a proper subsistence level. The couple did not endear themselves to the CPGB hierarchy when, on egalitarian grounds, they opposed the levels of salary which the party wanted to pay to its full-time officials.In the joint autobiography written with Jack, The Braddocks, Bessie cites the formative experience of police violence on "Bloody Sunday" in 1911 as a motivating factor for her CPGB activities. On 12 September 1921, again at St George's Plateau, she attended a rally for the city's jobless, organised by the Liverpool Unemployed Workers' Committee. Again there was police intervention; Jack and Mary Bamber were charged with unlawful assembly and received a token one day's imprisonment. In 1922 Bessie and other party members provided comfort and shelter to Hannington's hunger marchers, as the columns of unemployed passed through Lancashire on their way to London. Bessie combined her party roles—she was treasurer of the Liverpool branch—with her full-time union post; Jack, meanwhile, was only intermittently in work, as his incendiary reputation meant that employers were reluctant to give him a job. He had been living for some time at the Bambers' home when, in February 1922, the couple were married at Brougham Terrace registry office, during the course of a working day. After a brief reception they returned to their respective duties—Bessie to her union job and Jack to his volunteer work for the CPGB.
The Braddocks were not comfortable as CPGB members. They objected to the lack of autonomy afforded to local branches by the party's central "Political Bureau", and to what they perceived as the leadership's unquestioning subservience to the Soviet Union. Mary Bamber, after a visit to Russia, opined that there were as many true communists in Liverpool as in Moscow. In 1924, increasingly convinced that communist rule would lead to the enslavement rather than the liberation of workers, the entire leadership of the Liverpool CPGB branch, including both Braddocks, resigned from the party.