Alice Bacon was Yorkshire’s first female MP. According to her obituary;
“Alice Bacon can claim to be one of the most significant figures in the British Labour Movement for over 25 years: from the wartime 1940s to the last years of the Wilson government.”
During her time in the Houses of Parliament she focused on pay and workplace conditions, housing, education and social issues. As someone that can call Yorkshire my home county, I thought it only right to look at Alice’s life for this month’s post.
Born 10th September, 1909, Alice grew up in a Labour-supporting Yorkshire mining family and her father was the secretary of the Whitwood branch of the National Union of Mineworkers. Together she and her family joined in local campaigns to alleviate poverty and at the age of 16, Alice joined the Labour party, later in 1941, she was elected to the women’s section of Labour’s National Executive. She was barely 30; she was up until her death in the early 1990s, one of the youngest to have reached such a key position within the Labour Movement.
In her working life before becoming an MP, Alice was a teacher. Like many other working-class girls she saw teaching as a means to further education and worked her way through school up to an external degree at London, and eventually an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from Leeds becoming an active member of the National Union of Teachers and became president of its West Yorkshire county association in 1944.
In 1945 she was elected as MP for Leeds, North-East, the first female MP elected in Yorkshire. She served her constituency, being transferred to Leeds South East Constituency when boundaries were revised for the 1955 general election, until Labour lost the general election in 1970.
Her potential was quickly recognised by her party and Herbert Morrison, who played a leading role in London local government for 25 years and was a prominent member of the coalition government in the Second World War and of the post-war Labour governments, took her under his wing.
During her time in Parliament, Alice focused on pay and workplace conditions, housing, education and social issues. In a moving speech on the 1947 National Assistance Bill Alice spoke of her hope not only to “abolish poverty, but also the feeling of pauperism”. This bill helped Alice usher in the modern welfare state.
Further to her focus on social issues, Alice also had a long-standing interest in the integration of disabled people into mainstream education and society. And she was an early supporter of the abolition of the death penalty, introducing the Bill against capital punishment in 1956.
In 1964 Harold Wilson appointed Alice as Minister of State at the Home Office, and then at Education and Science, a role in which she served for 3 years. She was a staunch supporter of comprehensive education and played a major role in its implementation while at Education, arguing it would make “a grammar school type of education…available for far more children than ever before.”
In 1970 Labour was defeated by a surprise victory of the Conservative Party. At this point Alice was almost 60 years old, a woman’s retirement age. She took a life peerage becoming Baroness Bacon of the City of Leeds and of Normanton in the West Riding of Yorkshire, but she became more and more remote from politics. She didn’t seem to fit into the House of Lords. Her friend Charlie Pannell (Labour MP for Leeds West from 1949 to his retirement), who had accompanied her to the House of Lords also didn’t fit in but when he died Alice liked the Lords even less.
Hugh Gaitskell’s successor in Leeds, Merlyn Rees, the Northern Ireland Secretary, managed to spark Alice’s interest in women’s charities in Northern Ireland, across the religious divide, this and other charities soon took up her time, and she raised money with carol concerts, and events including celebrities and minor royalty.
In the early 1980s Alice confided that the Labour Party was not like the one that she had joined at the age of 16.She,did not defect to the Social Democrat Party (created in 1981 by 4 leading Labour figures), but was sympathetic towards those who did.
In 2019 Labour MP Rachel Reeves published Alice in Westminster: The Political Life of Alice Bacon a biography of Alice’s life. Rachel said that Alice
“was a pioneer in the world of education and politics whose success was founded on her determination to stay true to her working-class roots and the people she came into politics to serve”.
Rachel also unveiled a Leeds Civic Trust Blue Plaque in the Leeds Corn Exchange in 2019 in honour of Alice.
You can listen to an interview with Alice from 1966e here – https://digitalfilmarchive.net/media/interview-with-alice-bacon-mp-5291
Author: Emily Brown
Sources:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-baroness-bacon-1500698.html
Thornton, David (2021). Leeds: A Biographical Dictionary. Beecroft Publications. p. 15.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Herbert-Stanley-Morrison-Baron-Morrison-of-Lambeth
Sagas of She 