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Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm.

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. And we're delighted to welcome into the Parliament Matters studio, Nan Sloane, who's a historian and author, and who's just produced a biography of an almost unknown political figure, Margaret Bondfield, Britain's first female cabinet minister.

Ruth Fox: Well, we'll come on to Margaret in a moment, Mark. But I think, I think to describe Nan as just a political historian is to rather understate things. I mean, I've known Nan for many, many years now and she's got a long history of activism in the Labour Party. She was a regional director of the Yorkshire Labour [00:01:00] Party for many years.

But more importantly, I think she has run training for women candidates in the Labour movement for years. And I think probably single-handedly is more responsible than anyone for getting more women MPs into the parliamentary Labour party and also runs, I think, Nan this is right, you run the training program under the Jo Cox Memorial Program.

Nan Sloane: I lead a team on it, yeah.

Ruth Fox: Yes. Lead a team on it. Modesty itself. Welcome to the podcast.

Nan Sloane: Thank you.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, we are talking today about one of the pioneers for women in the House of Commons, a very appropriate subject. Margaret Bondfield was not only one of the early women MPs, but the first woman cabinet minister, and it's a bit of a mystery to me, Nan, why she's not better known.

I mean, everybody knows, who knows anything about Parliament, that Nancy Astor was the first woman MP to take her seat, everybody who does pub quizzes knows that Constance Markievicz was actually the first woman to be elected to the House of Commons, [00:02:00] even though, as an Irish Republican, she didn't take her seat.

But Margaret Bondfield is almost invisible in that history. Why is that?

Nan Sloane: Well, I think it's a combination of reasons. There's the obvious one of her involvement in the 1929 to 31 Labour government, which ended in, as I'm sure we'll touch on later, a bit of a disaster and tainted the reputation of everybody involved in it.

But I think there is a lot more than that. She was never involved with the suffrage, the female suffrage, movement. And we tend to view the history of women in the late 19th and early 20th century almost entirely through that prism. Either the very narrow prism of the suffragette movement or the broader one of the wider suffrage movement.

And she was not involved in that. And more than that, she was actively hostile to it, not because she [00:03:00] didn't think women should have votes, but because she thought everyone over the age of 21 should have a vote. And she wasn't prepared to campaign for votes for middle class women if she couldn't also secure them for working class women and working class men.

And as a consequence, some elements of the suffrage movement were very hostile to her. So when they came to writing their histories of it, either left her out altogether or were very critical of her.

The route she came through into politics was almost entirely male. So she came through the trade union movement. There were very few women in the trade union movement. She was almost always the only woman present at lots and lots of things. And so she was, everyone knows if you're the only woman in a room, it's much harder to get your voice heard, much harder to get yourself on the record, as it were. I also don't think she was thinking that much about posterity at the [00:04:00] time. She just wanted to get the job done.

Mark D'Arcy: She's not one of these people who left behind a well-ordered archive with a biographers start here somewhere.

Nan Sloane: There's an archive. Well-ordered is not necessarily the word I would use. So yes, I think between all these different things, and also she was not young and exciting and romantic. When you read about people like Ellen Wilkinson who are the next generation on, you know, a lot of sorts of speculation about her clothes and all the rest of it, which we might deplore, but at the time was, whereas Margaret Bondfield was older, she didn't get into Parliament till she was 50, and so there was much less, it was a different kind of interest that people had in her.

Ruth Fox: You've traveled all over the UK and and to America, to Vassar College to look at her papers. What was the one single thing that stood out to you when you are looking through all of this mass of material and you thought, well.

Nan Sloane: Well, I would say there are two things.

Ruth Fox: I'll give you two.

Nan Sloane: I would say that there are two things.[00:05:00]

One actually is the series of letters written by Ethel Bentham, who was a doctor and subsequently a Labour MP in 1929, but who was Margaret Bondfield's doctor who, on one occasion when Margaret Bondfield had quite a serious breakdown, the woman I think was Margaret Bondfield's partner was trying to send her to a male psychiatrist, and Ethel Bentham was writing saying on no account should you do this because this was 1910, on no account should you do this because A, it's a really bad idea. B, I don't like the psychiatrist you've chosen, C it is offensive to me that you are doing this yourself and not asking me for a reference, it's unprofessional and if you do this, her reputation will be irretrievably damaged because it will get out and she doesn't specify what the it is, [00:06:00] but it's clear from the context of the letters, and that series of letters is one of the few letters that she's preserved as original. So there are a lot of letters that are typed copy of destroyed originals. So you wonder what's missing from them on these. She has kept the original. So it is Ethel Bentham's angry scrawl that you read. And so that that was quite striking both for the content, but also because they were original.

And I think the other thing that I thought was particularly striking was the photograph that is in the book of her as a child with her brother and sister because I've never seen that before or had any idea it existed. There's just something about her face on that, that is,

Mark D'Arcy: it's a very solem little face, isnt it?

Nan Sloane: It's a solemn little face. And that's a child who is already living not [00:07:00] with her parents, and then, over the page from that there's her at 14. Also, very, not only solemn, but pretty annoyed, which if you were 14 and were put into that corset, you would be.

Yeah. But I'd seen that picture, whereas the one of her as a child was quite, it just struck me as, I don't know what the word is, but it was just stricking.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. Window on a not entirely happy childhood.

Nan Sloane: Yes. But which she later represented as having been very happy. And also not.

Ruth Fox: Give us a pen portrait of her. What was she like? What have you learned about her as a sort of a personality, as you say, she's older, but what was she like?

Nan Sloane: Well, she was clearly from what people say at the time, she was very charming. She was very able, she was very bright, obviously. She left school at 13 and was very conscious all the time of her lack of formal education. But [00:08:00] that didn't mean she wasn't intelligent.

She was very good at friendship. She had a huge circle of friends who were very loyal to her and stayed with her even when things were very bad, which she always says something.

But she was also very stubborn. She could be very opinionated. She didn't like being wrong, and she, I think, didn't tolerate fools very well. And so there was a mix of views about her. Broadly speaking, though, people tended to want her involved in what they were doing and to think that she was an asset to the party and to the trade union movement. It's very difficult, isn't it, to project back into what a personality would have been like.

But historically I would think if the people you like, like the person you're writing about, it's possible that they were as you [00:09:00] would hope they were. But I think you have to be realistic that we're all a mixture of good and bad and charming and infuriating, and she was no different.

Mark D'Arcy: I suppose it's a bit indelicate really, but it is one of the questions that people ask about Margaret Bondfield.

She never married. She never came close to marrying. She didn't seem to have many close male friendships. Was she a lesbian?

Nan Sloane: I think almost certainly she was. People usually like to frame this as, because she says something herself about deciding early on that she didn't want to get married and her life was in the unions and the love of comrades and things, and I think that's capable of more than one interpretation.

I think that the pattern of her life suggests certainly that all her close emotional relationships were with women. She certainly had at least one woman [00:10:00] with whom she had a long lasting relationship, and they lived together for a number of years and remained close for the rest of their lives. She, as you say, never married but never had any inclination to marry, and I think was a lesbian and I think suffered considerably from the need to conceal that because at the time, obviously homosexuality was, or homosexual acts were, illegal, but lesbianism was not, but it was considered a form of arrested development and that if you were a lesbian, your emotional and intellectual development was arrested at about the age of 14 or 15 when you had crushes on other women. And it was all very girlish and you know, immature.

And obviously for somebody who was a serious [00:11:00] person and had had aspirations, that was not a perception of her that she would've wanted people to have. For middle class women, I think it was easier. But when you were already a working class woman in environments in which class was an issue, to add sexuality to that was going to be difficult. And she was prone to breakdowns all her life, sometimes prolonged, sometimes not. And I think the pressure of having to appear to have no emotional life at all, at the same time as she clearly was, from the bits of her diary that survive, very emotional and very sometimes overwhelmed by what she felt, it was incredibly difficult.

And I think we owe it to her to recognize that that was part of the challenge. [00:12:00] Even if she did not have sexual relationships, the fact that her emotional impulses were towards other women would have been considered immature and unacceptable in somebody running a country.

Mark D'Arcy: And was this one of the reasons why so little of her personal papers survived? Did she consciously set out to expunge the evidence?

Nan Sloane: Yes. And it is noticeable in the archive that what is missing is that dimension of her life. And I think that's very sad. Whether I'm right or not about her sexuality, I think it's very sad that she felt the need to conceal it.

Mark D'Arcy: The story starts with her growing up in around Chard In Somerset?

Nan Sloane: Yes.

Mark D'Arcy: In a family that is pretty poorly off. They have a little bit of land. It's okay when the parents are in work and the wider family's got jobs, but when people die and problems occur, then there's a very rapid plunge into something much closer to outright [00:13:00] poverty.

Nan Sloane: Yes. I think like a lot of families at the time, and probably still, they live very close to the edge and it took very little to tip them right onto the edge. There is a difference between urban and rural poverty, and when people talk about her being brought up in poverty, people think of, you know, back streets and all that kind of thing. And in terms of physical surroundings, she was actually quite lucky. They'd got, as you say, a bit of land. There was a garden. Although Chard had a lace industry and factories where her father worked, it was a rural area and so there is much more concealed poverty. They could grow food in the garden.

Mark D'Arcy: It was picturesque poverty.

Nan Sloane: It was picturesque poverty. And people say a cottage without thinking there was no running water. There was no heat or light beyond wooden paraffin. So it sounds [00:14:00] picturesque and it is, I mean, I've been and had a look at it, it is very pretty, but you wouldn't want to bring up that number of children in it, 11 children.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. She was part of a big family.

Nan Sloane: Yeah. Everybody was.

Ruth Fox: And actually spent quite a lot of time away from her parents.

Nan Sloane: She did, which again, was not uncommon at the time. If you were, you know, aristocratic or middle class, you sent your children off to school and, if you weren't, you farmed them out in your relatives. And she was sent when she was about four and a half, five, to live with her grandmother and older sister, who had already been sent at a much earlier age to live with the grandmother and did then not go back to live permanently with her parents until she was 10 and was shipped round to, you know, brother in Brighton and so on and so forth. That sounds awful to us. we would not put an 8-year-old on a train with a label on her [00:15:00] coat and send her from Chard to Brighton on her own, would we?

Mark D'Arcy: And very rapidly, as you said, she left school at 13, she was very rapidly working in shops and that was an extremely low status employment for a young woman.

And more than that, it was incredible, I mean, I was really struck by this in the book, the working conditions were incredibly bad.

Nan Sloane: They were appalling. But it's worth saying that how she got there is a demonstration of something that runs all through her life of she took risks. So when she left school, the preferred occupation for working, bright working class girls was teaching because the 1870 Act had opened up a whole demand for teachers that they couldn't fill fast enough. And the 1880 Act, which made school attendance compulsory, opened it up even further. And so parallel to the development of all the board [00:16:00] schools, there was a development of a teacher training structure, which gave working class girls from the age of 14 what we would now consider a good secondary and first year or so of higher education, gave them a profession with decent pay and also gave them really good marriage opportunities, which was a thing at that time, of course, and less of a consideration now.

And her sister Harriet had already gone through this route and married a civil service clerk. And so her parents naturally thought, right, well, off she goes. But you couldn't actually get into that system until you were 14. So the year between leaving school and being 14 was normally spent in the local board school teaching the local children.

And she had 42 boys to teach reading and writing to small boys, but still, you know, 42 of them, [00:17:00] and at the end of it, she just said, no, not doing this, no circumstances in which this is going to be my life. And then her parents didn't know what to do with her and shipped her off again to her sister in Brighton.

And by chance, her sister's friend had an opening for an apprentice and she took it.

Mark D'Arcy: And tell us a bit about those conditions as a shop worker in that era.

Nan Sloane: Legally, you were a servant. You were classed as a domestic servant. And so shop work was outside the remit of all the industrial legislation, and in particular outside the remit of the Truck Acts, which had banned payment in kind. So shop workers were largely paid in kind in the form of accommodation, food, medical services, which most of them said they never received. So it's supposed to be a very [00:18:00] benevolent sort of environment. And in fact, of course, it was awful because employers provided the absolute least possible. Accommodation was usually a dormitory, in which you had a bed and a box for your things and nothing else, your life was controlled, absolutely, from the moment you got up to the moment you went to bed. You needed permission to leave the building. You needed, not just, you know, during working hours, and working hours were often 10 hours a day, six days a week, but if you wanted to go out on the evening, you needed permission, you would have a time at which you have to be back. And this is adult men and women. And if you didn't comply with all of these things, you would be fined and you could be fined for the smallest thing.

And my favourite example of the employers getting round regulations, the few regulations that there were was in the 1890s, a big thing about [00:19:00] shop workers having serious back and hip problems because they were standing all day every day.

And so Parliament passed an Act that said there should be one seat provided one seat provided for every three shop workers, but it didn't specify that the shop workers should be allowed to sit on them. And so the seats were provided, but the customers sat on them while the shop workers stood all day. So it was a really hard, horrible life, and it's hardly surprising that most of the women in it just wanted to marry somebody and get out.

Mark D'Arcy: I was really struck that not only were they not paid very much, but that a lot of what they were paid was clawed back in fines anyway. And that was presumably quite conscious that that was how you kept the whole bill down.

Nan Sloane: When Margaret Bondfield moved to London, she was paid 15 pounds a year. London wages obviously were higher than elsewhere. 15 pounds a year, less deductions.

Ruth Fox: This experience, she starts out as an apprentice in [00:20:00] Brighton, she starts out initially in quite a decent environment, a family shop, she's treated as a member of the family, it's a very different situation. But then the head of the family dies, her apprenticeship can't be completed and she has to go elsewhere. And she's exposed then to these terrible conditions and it really sort of drives her sense of injustice from that point on. And she gets involved in activism in sort of the trade union movement. How does she come into that?

Nan Sloane: Not in Brighton. I think the majority of shop workers had no idea there was a union or that they could join a union or would have joined a union had they known. Because shop workers tended, despite all the appalling conditions, to think of themselves as a cut above manual workers and unions were for manual workers and not for the likes of them.

When she moved to London, she must have known there were unions because her brother was active in the printers union. One of her brothers, Frank, was active in the [00:21:00] printers union, so she must have been aware that such things existed. And also she was capable of reading a newspaper but didn't think of it in terms of her. And then, at lunchtime one day, she went out and bought a bag of chips to eat for lunch because the food at the shop was so awful and it was wrapped in newspaper, and on the newspaper there was a letter from the Secretary of the Shop Workers Union saying we need people to come and join because we can do something about wages and conditions. And she thought, well, I haven't got anything to lose. I might as well do that. And so

Ruth Fox: That's how it starts. Literally.

Nan Sloane: That's literally how it starts. Chip paper.

Ruth Fox: Extraordinary.

Nan Sloane: Chip paper in Fitzroy Square. There were hardly any women in the Shop Workers Union at the time. So what they thought when she turned up knowing absolutely nothing and going, yeah, I'm up for sorting some of this out.

Mark D'Arcy: And she took quite a role in doing that. She became a kind of, not exactly mystery shopper, but mystery employee going around and working in different places [00:22:00] and detailing what went on in terms of bad employment practices. And she put all this in a series of articles under a pseudonym as well, so she was publicizing how bad it was.

Nan Sloane: She didn't write the articles. A well-known campaigning journalist wrote the articles. She supplied all of the information for the articles. So she started off in quite high-end shops and made a note of all the things that were going on there, and then either resigned or got herself fired and moved elsewhere

By the end, she was in real poor East End shops, and it was in fact a very brave thing to do because by the time she finished, she was unemployable because she'd had so many jobs in the space of two years, and her references had got worse and worse every time she moved on, and so she was then unemployed.

She knew from the outset that would be the consequence of doing it, but they thought this was [00:23:00] the only way they could get people to take any notice of the conditions of the people they were encountering every day in shops, and particularly in the high end shops.

Ruth Fox: And as you say, you know, there's this appetite for risk that would have perhaps been unusual at that time. She then goes on in terms trying to develop and build the union membership. So she's worked on the evidence base, if you like, and the publicity for the problems. But then she's trying to grow the size of the union. So she takes on a really sort of, even more a peripatetic existence traveling around the country, speaking at events and campaigning. And what was that like?

Nan Sloane: I think she thoroughly enjoyed that. She turned out to be a really gifted public speaker. Nowadays we think that was unusual in a woman. In fact, there were loads of women going round, speaking about various things. Obviously there was on both sides of the suffrage movement, but there were also the Independent Labour Party, [00:24:00] had a whole fleet of women lecturers who went round the country. Religious organisations had women, particularly the congregational church had women preachers. So it was not unusual. It was unusual in a trade union context text. And she was tiny, she was five foot, and in her youth, very slim and young looking for her age. So lots of awful comments about a tiny little slip of a girl amongst all these men. So she enjoyed that. Once she realized she could do it, she enjoyed it.

And she didn't so much like going into shops and trying to recruit people because she had to be very careful because you could be fined or sacked for any contact with a trade union. And so she had to make sure she wasn't actually getting people into more trouble. So she'd sort of sneak a leaflet in and then meet somebody outside and then organize a meeting away from the shop. But she always enjoyed travel. She [00:25:00] liked movement. She liked different places. She liked meeting people. And she liked feeling that what she was doing was making a difference. So although it must have been really wearing, she was in her twenties and you know, she was young and keen and enthusiasm took her through some of the less happy bits, I think.

Ruth Fox: You mentioned religion. Was she terribly religious?

Nan Sloane: She was religious. She was spiritual. She would consider herself Christian. She's non-conformist. But when she took up trade union work, which meant she couldn't go and sing in the choir every Sunday, the church had her in and said, you can't do both. You have to choose. Trade unions are not compatible with the church. She chose the union and didn't go to church again for 20 years. [00:26:00]

She went back in the war, in the first World War, as many people did. But, in between, the union was always her absolute priority.

Mark D'Arcy: And she was making her way higher and higher through the union movement. As she went along with a variety of paid posts as organizers for a variety of organizations. And she was able to do that even in a movement that was not, how can I put it delicately, not notably woman friendly.

Nan Sloane: Yeah. It wasn't woman friendly at all. And in fact, TUC had spent several years trying to make sure that women were banned from attending.

Mark D'Arcy: There's an occasion where she's the only delegate at full TUC.

Nan Sloane: In 1899. She's the only female delegate, and that's when the resolution to found the Labour party was moved.

So she was the only woman to speak on that particular debate. And one of the penalties of being the first, she wasn't the first woman to be a delegate to TUC, but [00:27:00] one of the penalties of being the first woman in a male dominated environment is that you become inured to it. You become accustomed to that environment.

And so the balancing out, because she was also involved in lots of women's activities, in, peace organizations, she had a whole range of things that she was working in. So in those, she was working largely with women in the union and later in the Labour party, she was working largely with men. And I think that always affects how people behave and what the norms are that you conform to because one woman can't change a culture

Mark D'Arcy: And into the middle of all this, of course, then suddenly we're in the First World War. And that put an awful lot of political causes on hold, as it were. Women's [00:28:00] suffrage was kind of suspending its campaigning during that period.

Nan Sloane: Well, yes.

Mark D'Arcy: Up to a point. The Irish question was kind of put on hold as well. So there are a whole load of things that were paused, but she was also, as you mentioned, as pacifist. And that didn't go down awfully well during the First World War. Ramsay MacDonald got into awful trouble.

Nan Sloane: He did.

Mark D'Arcy: Over this as well. So how, how did that play?

Nan Sloane: Well, it's hard to remember now that Ramsay MacDonald came out of the First World War as a hero of the left because of his stand against the war.

And he resigned the chairmanship of the parliamentary Labour Party, which was effectively the leader of the party at that time in order to campaign against the party's policy from the backbenches and yet retained the whip. And so,

Mark D'Arcy: It would never happen now.

Nan Sloane: No. And so Margaret Bondfield decided that war and violence were incompatible with her values. That's one reason why obviously she was [00:29:00] not going to be involved with the suffragette element of the suffrage movement because she opposed their tactics on moral grounds as well as on tactical grounds. So when the war came, people had to decide what their position was. She and many women decided that they were against it.

There had been before the war, an international movement of women, all sorts of women's international women's suffrage societies, international women's trade organizations and so on. And there was a women's conference, huge women's conference, organised at the Hague in 1915. There was a lot of toing and froing over whether or not the government were going to allow any women, any British women to attend this, and eventually they agreed to a delegation of 12 of which Bondfield was one. And they got to Tilbury to [00:30:00] find that Churchill had closed the shipping lanes for the duration of the conference. And so they just had to sit there and wait, and then go back to London and miss the whole conference. And the only British presence were women who had already been abroad. So women who were in the United States, British women in the United States got there.

And for most of the British population, whether they agreed with the war or not, thought that it should be supported in order to support the men who were fighting it. People who opposed it were absolute anathema. In Ramsay MacDonald's case, what we would now call the tabloid press went and dug out his birth certificate and published it. And of course he didn't go around saying, I am illegitimate, but that's how most people found out. But his birth certificate was published and obviously humiliating [00:31:00] and infuriating and not at all the sort of thing that the moderns would do.

Ruth Fox: Surely not, surely not, surely not.

Nan Sloane: But it does just show there's nothing original in the way in which,

Ruth Fox: One thing that does strike me about the book and also about other, when you read biographies of other women, prominent women in this period, whether it's, as you say in the pacifist movement or the women's movement, is the sheer scale of their contacts overseas and how much international travel they do, giving speeches, lectures, and so on, attending conferences.

I'm just sort of struck when I think about politicians today. They don't seem to me to have the same number, the sheer scale of international contacts, and do the kind of international travel with sister organizations that they used to do a hundred years ago. And yet, communications and travel is so much easier. And it's a very, very odd contrast. But she had enormous contacts. I mean, you know, later in life she's traveling to America regularly, traveling to Canada, she [00:32:00] meets Eleanor Roosevelt on a regular basis. Frances Perkins, the Minister of Labour in the Roosevelt government in the Second World War. Enormous contacts.

Nan Sloane: She did. And they all did. Everybody knew everybody. There were different circles. So there was a peace movement circle. There were trade union circles. So a lot of her friends in the United States were women involved in trade unionism or grassroots organizing. All that kind of level of activism.

But she also knew, you know, people in governments. She wasn't only involved in women's organisations. She also represented either the Labour Party or the Union, or the TUC or the country at international conferences of all kinds, particularly immediately after the First World War. She knew people in revolutionary Russia. [00:33:00]

Mark D'Arcy: That was a particularly striking section of the book actually, when she goes to Lenin's Russia. The Bolsheviks are fairly newly in power. And she's

Nan Sloane: Not overly impressed.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, she's not overly impressed, largely because of the of iron fist with which Lenin is ruling and quashing any kind of dissent at all.

Nan Sloane: Yes. But then she goes into the Cheka's headquarters and says, the secret police's headquarters and says, what are you doing? Why are you killing people? So not quite what you would think of somebody like her as doing, but she was very focused. If she had a job to do, she was going to go and do that job.

But she also acquired friends while she was there who lasted. You know, for as long as possible in the circumstances. And she retained curiosity. So even when in the late thirties, she was in Mexico, one of the things she did was to go and see Trotsky just to see if [00:34:00] he, what he was now like.

Ruth Fox: But, not just go and see Trotsky, she goes and sees Trotsky at the home of Frida Kahlo, the artist, and Diego Rivera, which is like a whole different level of glamor.

Nan Sloane: I don't think she met them. I don't think they were there, like, because they'd lent the house Trotsky. But every corner you turn there is somebody that you think, oh, that person's really interesting. Perhaps I need to go and find out about them. You know, there is a much book, bigger book to be written about it, but there's also a book, I think, to be written about that whole networking that women did at that time that we just don't think of at all.

Ruth Fox: What financed it? I mean, where did the money come from?

Nan Sloane: If you were going on behalf of your organization, obviously they were going to pay. When she went, certainly the initial visits to America, they were lecture tours or more [00:35:00] standing on street corners and shouting at people to us.

She went to help trade unions there recruit, so there was a lot of meetings outside factories and so on and so forth. And you took a collection at all the meetings and that was how you got paid. So if you had a good day, you would eat and if you'd lost your voice, you wouldn't. And in the early days it was that stark.

Ruth Fox: So it's that risk element, isn't it? Yes, that you're going across and you're not quite sure how it's all gonna come together. It's quite extraordinary.

Mark D'Arcy: And the war ends and the war has broken the old Liberal party of Asquith and Lloyd George. And a political space is opening up for the Labour Party politically to take over as the opposition to the Tories. And at some point, Margaret Bondfield makes the jump from the kind of trade union track of the Labour movement to the political track and wants to become an MP. How did that happen?

Nan Sloane: I have thought about this quite a lot, and I'm still [00:36:00] not quite clear why she didn't stand in 1918 when women were first able to stand for Parliament. Her friend Mary MacArthur did, and Margaret Bondfield spent the campaign campaigning for MacArthur. A small number of other Labour women did.

And I'm perfectly, there's no record of her seeking selection anywhere or anybody, you know, but commenting on it. So she can't have wanted to do it at that stage, and I have no idea why not, because it seems such an obvious next step by 1920. But she'd obviously dealt with whatever she needed to do, and she started standing in by elections in Northampton.

There was about a by-election a week in those days because

Ruth Fox: In the good old days,

Nan Sloane: The good old days. I exaggerate slightly. If an MP got appointed to a payroll job, there had to be a by-election and lots of people got in in by elections rather than general elections. [00:37:00] She stood in Northampton in 1920. Failed against a Liberal. Stood in 1922 election. Failed. Stood in 1923 and got in. So I don't know why she didn't do it earlier, because she would certainly, for most people at that time, have been an obvious candidate and possibly where Mary MacArthur stood. She had the advantage, she stood in the constituency where the trainmakers' strike had been. So she had an obvious advantage of being known. But Margaret Bondfield was very well known by that stage. She would've been a high profile candidate.

Mark D'Arcy: And what was the mood in the Labour Party in those days? Did they see themselves as a kind of wedge trying to get into Parliament or did they see themselves as tooling up to be a party of government?

Nan Sloane: Ramsay MacDonald saw them as a party of government and he and Keir Hardie [00:38:00] before the war had always been quite clear that if they could remove the Liberal Party they would be in. And that it would be difficult, but possible. And it's a curious mindset when you think of the landslides that there were in the decades before the war to be sitting there with your tiny little party thinking, oh yeah, but we can sort this out and we'll be in, but that is what they thought. And so Ramsey McDonald always had a very clear view of what needed to happen and what the strategy should be, and when he thought it necessary, he did deals with the Liberals and when not, he fought them all away.

I think most other people just took the view of let's get some people elected and see what happens and see where we go. And I don't think that anybody, other than a handful of people [00:39:00] seriously expected them to be in government in 1924 because it's, if you think, it happened, but if you think about it, you are founded in 1900 and you're in government in 1924 is a considerable

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah it's a hell of a leap, but there she is in the tranche of people there and there's a, suddenly there's a Labour government. What's her role?

Nan Sloane: Everybody assumed that she would be in the cabinet and the papers were full of, speculation about her being Minister of Health or Health and Housing as it was then. That was a new newish ministry. It covered a lot of the issues that obviously she was interested in, but she had been very opposed to a coalition and publicly opposed to a coalition. And so I imagine the liberals said no.

Mark D'Arcy: It was [00:40:00] Ramsey MacDonald's first government. He needed at least the consent of the Liberals.

Nan Sloane: Yes, and he had Liberals in the government and I think they just said no. And so she became the Junior Minister, the Parliamentary Secretary, there were only two ministers per ministry at the time. so she became the junior minister in the Ministry of Labour, which actually played better to her skills and her knowledge because she had been involved with the development of the welfare system for want of a better phrase.

And since its inception, in the people's budget in 1910 and its development in 1911 and 12, and she was very familiar with it, she knew how it worked, she understood the principles of it, she had quite clear thoughts about how it should be reformed, which I'm sure we'll come on to. So she was a round peg in a round hole and unfortunately the [00:41:00] cabinet minister she was working for wasn't.

Ruth Fox: This is Tom Shaw.

Nan Sloane: This is Tom Shaw who had been put in and who didn't have her breadth and depth of understanding. And it became embarrassing in the end because it was so clear that she was so much better than he was at the job.

Mark D'Arcy: She's one of these ministers whose job is to follow the boss around with a bucket and spade, so to speak.

Nan Sloane: Yes, there was one point where they were trying to, the opposition were trying to cut Tom Shaw's salary, so I'm sure made his case and they got up and said, well, you should have sent Ms. Bondfield, she'd have done a better job of defending him.

Ruth Fox: Talk about the parliamentary side for a minute before we head further into the ministerial work. So she's part of a large number of new MPs, but a small number of new female MPs. What was that experience like for them? I mean, this small group of women, you know, there's basically [00:42:00] one room available for them, there's a lack of toilets, you know, just basic facilities are not there, but there's sort of the culture that they're going into. So she's not just learning the ministerial ropes, she's also got learn the parliamentary ropes.

Nan Sloane: Yes. She got elected at the beginning of December 1923 and she was made a minister in the middle of January 1924. And they weren't sworn in until January because it took a long time to sort out what was going to happen with the government. So they were all literally pitched into both jobs at the same time with no idea basically of where they were or what they were doing. And it's amazing they survived 10 months.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Nan Sloane: When you think about it. There were three Labour women, her, Susan Lawrence and Dorothy Jewson. Very different women. And then there were a handful of women from other parties. And Parliament took the view that all women were basically the same, didn't have any politics, so they had one room [00:43:00] for the ladies, and it was fairly small room opening off the terrace, not where strangers is, but along that part of the terrace, you know, there was an iron and an ironing board eventually, of course,

Mark D'Arcy: No type casting there then.

Nan Sloane: No space for secretaries or facilities to deal with correspondence or any of that. And obviously Margaret Bondfield could use the union's facilities to deal with her parliamentary correspondence and Nancy Astor had her own arrangements, but the basic tenor of Parliament was here is the inconvenience of women. Where can we put them, where we won't notice them? There were eight of them in total, I think. And they did tend to have projects that they worked on as a group, cross party group of women. There were, when they [00:44:00] first got in, there were lots of events to honor the new women MPs and little dinners and the Father of the House gave a little dinner for the ladies and there's a nice photograph of him, TP O'Connor, I think it was, standing there, very pleased, and the women sitting around him. There was a sort of recognising that there was a change of gear almost, but no idea of what to do about it. And of course the same was true in the Ministry when she got there.

Mark D'Arcy: I mean, Nancy Astor was kind of the doyen of the women MPs at the time as the first one to arrive. And she seemed to think quite highly of Margaret Bondfield.

Nan Sloane: Yes, they got on quite well, and stayed in touch long after either of them was in Parliament and, and Nancy Astor could be very difficult, and her politics was certainly nowhere near Margaret Bondfield. But because they were forced together, and this applies to all of the women, they had to [00:45:00] consider each other in a different light from the way in which the men did because they were, they were literally sharing space and could not avoid one another.

I think also on one level, people were more ideologically rooted, but on another, they were more open to one another's humanity.

Ruth Fox: And what did the media make of all of this? Because there's a sort of wonderful story right at the start where, you know, the women are arriving in Parliament, they're expected to wear hats, and they, and certainly Margaret Bondfield, takes her hat off before getting into the chamber. So she takes the oath bareheaded, and this is a bit of a media controversy. And there's quite a lot of comment early on in her parliamentary career about she's not a great speaker in the chamber, because she's used to shouting at public meetings and she has to sort of work on that.

Nan Sloane: She could make herself heard without artificial application in the Albert Hall, [00:46:00] but the Chamber of the House of Commons, it was a bit trickier.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, much smaller.

Nan Sloane: There was that. It took her a while to adjust her speaking style. I don't think she was ever a great House of Commons speaker. I think she became competent and able and not intimidated by it, but I don't think she would ever count as one of the great Commons speakers.

The press was just in a state of just the whole idea, when there was speculation about her being a cabinet minister, somebody wrote a whole piece about when cabinet ministers are sworn in as Privy Counsellors, they have to wear a court dress with white satin knee breaches. What will Miss Bondfield look like in white satin knee breaches?

Miss Bondfield is a very charming woman, but a lot of this sort of nonsense, the hats thing is a political decision and a feminist decision because the wearing [00:47:00] of a hat, the covering of the head in a religious space, which of course the House of Commons technically, as it originated in St. Stephen's Chapel, still has the layout of the nave of a church and women always wore hats. The few women that there had been there. But Nancy Astor had very early taken the view that you stand out as little as possible. So you wear a hat, which is what expected, and a dark suit and so on and so forth. And all three of the Labour women actually removed their hats at the door because they were not prepared to accept that they were inferior to the men there because they were representing the people of Britain in the same way as everybody else was.

And then there's a big ruckus about it. And Nancy Astor said, oh, this is a big mistake, you shouldn't do this. But the Duchess of Athol said, oh, if they don't, I won't, took her hat off and said exactly that. You know, I'm quite happy to be respectful [00:48:00] where it's appropriate, but I think in the House of Commons anyway, hats are heavy and I don't want to wear one. So that sort of knocked women wearing hats on the head. But she also refused to wear a hat when she was sworn in as a Privy Counsellor in 1929. There was a bit of a to and a fro between her and the palace about that.

Mark D'Arcy: And that wasn't the only controversy of its kind that was generated when she became a cabinet minister and a right honorable in 1929. This astounding memo has to be written about her gender.

Nan Sloane: The gender of the minister. Well, by law, this is not the case now 'cause we managed to change it some years ago, but by law ministers were always referred to in legislation as he. So, when she became a minister, what then do we do? We have to refer to her as he in the legislation, because we're not gonna have primary legislation to change that.

But she's not, visibly not, a he, so what do we do about [00:49:00] this? And it went to the Ministry's solicitor who then had to write a memo called the Gender of the Minister, who thought it would be positively painful, his words, not mine, to have to refer to her as she and so proposed that it should be he. And this landed on her desk for a decision. And I think she just thought, oh, for goodness sake. Mm-hmm. And therefore, she is he in all the parliamentary documents.

Mark D'Arcy: Oh yeah. I suppose we can smirk at this a hundred years on, but at the time, the arrival of women in the Boys Club of Government was really quite a shocking thing.

Nan Sloane: It did require legislation to change ministers being he, so all women ministers, I can't remember off the top of my head now when that actually was changed, but it's a lot later than you think it would be, if only because there wasn't another female cabinet minister until Ellen Wilkinson in [00:50:00] 1945.

Ruth Fox: Which is extraordinary when you think about it.

Yeah. I mean, 1924 and then again a bit later, which we'll come on to, but then you have to wait till 1945. Well, 1924, she takes office. What does she do? What's she in charge of?

Nan Sloane: She is in charge of a benefit system, which was already in difficulties and had only been existence for 11, 12 years.

So we think of it as sort of this huge juggernaut of a thing, and it was becoming that, but it was very new. There were very few people who understood how it worked. There were lots of people who had ideas about how it should work, including her. But the problem as always was money. And they were, you know, they were past the post-war boom and into the post-war difficulties, and they knew they didn't have long, if they'd lasted a year, it would've been miraculous. So they knew they couldn't do anything root and branch. So [00:51:00] the problem with that was going to be keeping it afloat basically.

Mark D'Arcy: And Margaret Bondfield's views on how the benefit system should, as it was then, should function, were to a modern eye, actually quite small c conservative. She didn't want overly generous benefits that disincentivize work, for example, and an argument that I think makes a lot of people uncomfortable in the Labour Party today.

Nan Sloane: Yes. And did then. But in the first place a very different economic situation. Secondly, she always took the view that the benefit system was a safety net, not the first port of call.

And it had been structured in such a way that it worked through a series of benefit societies, so the state didn't administer the whole of the system. Benefit societies administered the system and the unions were all benefit societies because they'd [00:52:00] all had benefit clubs of one kind or another. And so when the first national insurance schemes and so on came in, they were able to register as benefit societies and then be paid by the government to administer.

So it was much more complicated in terms of who the stakeholders, what we would now call the stakeholders, in it were than now when it's provided very differently. She also took the view that it should be on a proper insurance basis and not what we call national insurance, which actually isn't insurance, and she thought it should be put onto proper actuarial principles and, but she was, she knew she wasn't going to achieve that as a junior minister in a very short-lived government.

And she also had responsibility for industrial, post-war industrial training, particularly for women and girls. She got into trouble because she wanted to [00:53:00] train girls for domestic service on the grounds that women were always going to go into domestic service, and therefore it should be properly recognized as a skill, running a domestic setup should be regarded as a skill and people should be properly trained for it. And if they were properly trained for it, they should be properly paid for it. Middle class women's organizations went up the wall, working class women thought, oh, the training centres she set up were all oversubscribed and because of a very different view of what domestic work was, and Margaret Bondfield was certainly guilty of having a very Victorian view of motherhood and domesticity and and so on.

Ruth Fox: And yet was one of the least domestic people I can imagine, at that time.

Nan Sloane: She didn't do housework. She hated it. She couldn't cook. There's the thing, when she finally, when she was 75, and she finally decided, well, perhaps I'd better learn, very pleased with herself for having baked a [00:54:00] pie that lasted four days, but it didn't last more than a couple of weeks, the cooking, and she never did housework if she could possibly avoid it. But she always said, well, then I have more regard for people who do.

Mark D'Arcy: Now we touched on this at right at the beginning of this conversation, but she's in the cabinet, in Ramsay MacDonald's second Labour government, which comes to power just as the great crash is happening and tipping into the Great Depression.

We talk about the current government having had a pretty poor economic inheritance. Was as nothing to what the Ramsey MacDonald administration had to face, an absolutely disastrous situation that they had somehow to try and struggle to deal with. And she was the Secretary of State for Labour.

Nan Sloane: She was, and Philip Snowden described it as the worst job in government. And that's because it was.

Ruth Fox: Philip Snowden was the Chancellor of the Exchequer

Nan Sloane: At that time, sorry, yes, yes, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. And then he proceeded to make it as [00:55:00] difficult as he could.

Mark D'Arcy: Another minister with very conventional, even Victorian economic views, I suppose.

Nan Sloane: And also regarded, as you know, Philip Snowden's the economic genius of the party, and even actual economic geniuses didn't know what to do when faced with a completely unprecedented situation.

She took over at a point where the National Insurance Fund was virtually bankrupt, and then after the Wall Street Crash was actually bankrupt, so there was no money. The unions refused to entertain any cuts, the bankers and financiers refused to lend any money unless there were cuts. There were employers who thought that the way through was to abolish the whole thing and go back to charity provision. Nobody actually knew what to do. Unemployment at one [00:56:00] point was going up by a hundred thousand a month and she was in the middle trying to keep this thing afloat, unable to please anybody without any allies basically. And MacDonald just withdrew 'cause he didn't understand any of it. And you know, there's a note in his diary about we are baffled by unemployment and you are thinking, well, oh dear, that doesn't bode well.

Mark D'Arcy: And these tensions basically broke the Labour government and the Labour Party.

Nan Sloane: Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: McDonald's solution to this in the end was to let his government fall. And the national government took over.

Nan Sloane: I have a slightly different interpretation of that. There was massive public demand for a national government and a lot of pressure from the King for a national government.

And MacDonald had to choose whether or not to head it up because he was the Prime Minister at the time. And he [00:57:00] thought rightly or wrongly, that it was his duty to do that. And a tiny number of ministers followed him in that and the rest didn't. What he also promised to the party was that in the inevitable general election, there would not be a government coupon as there had been in 1918 when Lloyd George's coalition government effectively authorised candidates from different parties to be the official government candidate.

And MacDonald said he would not do that. And so on the basis of that promise, the party didn't expel him at that point because most of the individuals thought, we will get through this and then we'll all come back together again, because this has happened before the Labour Party had been sort of swirling around and splitting.

Think of McDonald and others going to the backbenches in the First World War and then leading the party [00:58:00] immediately after. They were the same generation and used to this idea of we go different in different directions and then we come back. But he reneged on that promise. And it was a coupon election.

Mark D'Arcy: There were kind of official national government candidates.

Nan Sloane: There were national government candidates.

Mark D'Arcy: Running against official Labour candidates

Nan Sloane: Running against official Labour candidates and that's at the time, that's what people felt bitterly betrayed by, because of course the electorate wanted a national government and voted for it, and Labour lost 200 seats and was reduced to pre-war levels of representation. And the inability to forgive that has got mixed up with the whole issue of the national government. And of course there were people who bitterly objected to the national government. But one of the things we have to remember from that is that the electorate sided with MacDonald. He wasn't the villain of the piece to the electorate. He may have been mistaken, and he was certainly wrong [00:59:00] to renege on that promise. But when you read Margaret Bondfield's account of that period, both in her archive and in her book, it's clear that that's the element that she was really bitter about and their national government was a series of political decisions that she understood and even empathized with, but couldn't follow, couldn't join in with.

Ruth Fox: In those last months of the government, she takes the Unemployment Insurance Bill through, which becomes known as the Anomalies Act. This is what also a lot of the criticism internally and this difference of opinion within the parties about you've got this economic crisis, you've got growing unemployment, you've got pressure on the insurance system, and she's driving through a bill to create savings on the insurance by excluding, for example, seasonal workers and married women from eligibility.

So inevitably she gets a lot of personal criticism as a result of that. I [01:00:00] was very struck, you know, in those sort of final days that the cabinet discussed 10% cuts to essentially the welfare system in an hour in cabinet. Pretty quick. But, so this is also part of the underlying issue at the heart of the government for her, as a political activist and as a trade unionist, incredibly difficult to be presiding over a welfare system that you're cutting.

Nan Sloane: Especially when you were involved in setting it up. It was soul destroying. I think it was soul destroying for all of them, but I think particularly for her, because she knew that her reputation would be very damaged by it.

She knew there wasn't, she couldn't put it right, there was no lever you could pull to use modern terminology. They could somehow magic up the money or make it different. There were a series of choices. Some of the ones she made were right. Some of the ones she made weren't, and some of them are inexplicable to us now, but not unreasonable in the situation, so the married women's [01:01:00] one that we go, what, at the time, the whole question of married women and work was still a thing. That and the unions, the manual unions in particular were still campaigning for a family wage. So in the context of time, it makes more sense than it does now. It was still a bad choice.

Mark D'Arcy: And it was a bad choice in the end that helped cost her her seat. She was one of the 200 MPs who lost.

Nan Sloane: All the women lost.

There were nine Labour women MPs by that point. They all lost. Her result was actually better than many of them. She didn't lose by a lot. She was the first, because, you know, first at almost everything, so she was the first woman to lose to another woman. It was the first election in which all the candidates were women.

She certainly lost, but it was not, when you read the correspondence around it, it was certainly not viewed [01:02:00] as hopeless. And there was an assumption that she would get it back in the next election, whenever that came, turned out to be 35, and she didn't, but certainly in 1931, there wasn't a feeling of, oh, this is terrible, this is terminal, that's the end of your career. And she then went back to working for her union, which by then was the GMB, and so even the idea that she terminally fell out with the unions is not true because she then went and worked for the GMB or NUGMW as it was then until her retirement.

Ruth Fox: She never returns to Parliament.

Nan Sloane: That's it. She never returns to Parliament. By the time she lost her seat, she was nearly 60, which nowadays is nothing, but then was different. She stood in 1935 in Wallsend, but it was an uphill struggle. She was up against a very good Tory MP who stayed there for years and years and [01:03:00] years. Obviously the 1940 election didn't happen, but she was adopted by Reading for the 1940 election cause her agent moved there and said, do you wanna seat nearer at London?

Ruth Fox: Because she did.

Nan Sloane: Basically, I think, exactly what he did. So she had every intention, but I think when that didn't happen, she wasn't that sorry. And, you know, that was the end of that. And a younger, you know, the focus had shifted, the focus was on Ellen Wilkinson and the next generation of younger women MPs coming through.

Most of her contemporaries, a number of them died during the thirties or had themselves retired. And I think with hindsight she wasn't going to get back in. But I can see why she thought she would at the time.

Mark D'Arcy: Those are the kind of aftertaste of her reputation, if you like. There she was the first woman cabinet minister. In many ways she should be a towering figure, but actually her reputation's a [01:04:00] lot more ambiguous than that.

Nan Sloane: Yes.

Mark D'Arcy: And a lot of people did not see her as an example to be emulated. Future women ministers did not want to be Margaret Bondfield.

Nan Sloane: Well, Barbara Castle did not want to be Margaret Bondfield.

Ellen Wilkinson was very generous to her and wrote when she became a cabinet minister, wrote her a very generous letter thanking her for everything she'd done for women in politics. There weren't very many other cabinet ministers to take that view until Barbara Castle. Barbara Castle was the third Labour cabinet minister.

So now Barbara Castle had been young when Margaret Bondfield was in government, and her generation took the view that Margaret Bondfield's generation had been a block to progress. And, you know, the usual generational divide that you get at points of change in political parties. And so [01:05:00] when Barbara Castle became a cabinet minister herself, obviously her first point of reference is going to be at Margaret Bondfield, but when young Barbara Castle was a member of the Labour club at Oxford, obviously followed it all intently, obviously very angry about everything that was happening and all the rest of it. However, it's also worth saying that Barbara Castles unveiled the commemorative plaque to Margaret Bondfield in Chard in the early eighties. So what her actual opinion was, I don't know. And I suspect that her experience in government, particularly with the unions and her attempt to get in place of strife through may have made her more sympathetic to the troubles that Margaret Bondfield had.

I think because it's women about [01:06:00] women, we're sort of, we tend to be very one dimensional about how we view what people say. It's also true in Margaret Bondfield's defence that historians have not served her well and where they have have been misquoted. The one that often annoys me is in the dictionary of Labour history, where Marion Miliband wrote the entry for Margaret Bondfield, and he's always quoted as saying, I can't remember the exact words, but Margaret Bondfield was out of her depth. True. But the actual sentence reads like all her cabinet colleagues, Margaret Bondfield was out of her depth.

Ruth Fox: And Margaret Bondfield acknowledged this, didn't she? Particularly after the 1924 government. She basically says we were buried under paper.

Nan Sloane: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: So much reading material, so much, you know, information and documents being produced in the department and across government. We just [01:07:00] couldn't really get on top of it. Having to learn parliamentary rules in the House of Commons, having to deal with all these sort of new issues that they'd never dealt with before. So they've got the pressures of Government, they've got pressures of House of Commons, and they've got this sort of wider international economic pressure that's on their shoulders and she acknowledges it's just incredibly difficult.

And interestingly, she basically concludes that it's a lack of, they had a lack of focus that they were trying to do too much in too short a time. And if only they'd focused on a couple of things they might have done better.

Nan Sloane: Yep.

Ruth Fox: Really fascinating.

Nan Sloane: Exactly and I think, in a way, I almost think 1924 must have been more difficult than 1929.

Because at least in 1929, they went into it with some idea of how this system worked.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Nan Sloane: Whereas in 1924, it was just, why am I here? What are we doing? How do we do it?

Ruth Fox: Yeah. But the Barbara Castle analogy is really quite interesting because when she, Barbara Castle, is offered the Ministry of Labour by Harold Wilson in [01:08:00] Cabinet, she basically says to him, oh, no, no. I don't want that. I don't want to be Margaret Bondfield, mark two. And they have this sort of an interesting conversation that's reported in the diaries about, well, perhaps we should change the name of the department. And she suggests Ministry of Labour and Productivity. And he says, well, I don't really think that's gonna work with a woman at the helm. All sorts of connotations. And that's where we get the Department for Employment emerges. But as you say, it struck me reading the book that all throughout there is this, hmm maybe Barbara Castle perhaps didn't like the reputational link, but actually there's mirrors of it in place of strife and her own personal experience.

Nan Sloane: Absolutely. The personalities in politics change. All kinds of circumstances change. But the basic thrust of what people are trying to do doesn't change. And the difficulties that people can get into are broadly similar.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Nan Sloane: For the last century [01:09:00] or so, it's variations on a theme. And it was very tempting when writing this book to draw more parallels than I have done, but they don't last, they don't wear well.

So I have refrained from doing that, but it is true that you can recognise the basic tension between the Treasury and the benefits system has existed when Lloyd George published the People's Budget in 1910 and exists now and will always exist because it would always be a major spending department and the Treasury will always want to limit spending.

Mark D'Arcy: And lots of really important lessons from the career of an unfortunately forgotten political figure. Nan Sloane, thanks very much indeed for joining Ruth and me on the pod today.

Nan Sloane: Thank you very much indeed. I've enjoyed it.

Ruth Fox: Thanks Nan. And for listeners, if you want to get Nan's book, I certainly recommend it.

It's Margaret Bondfield, The [01:10:00] Life and Times of Britain's First Female Cabinet Minister, and it's published on the 19th of February by Bloomsbury. We'll put a link in the show notes. Thanks for joining us Nan.

Nan Sloane: Thank you.

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