Ellen Wilkinson: The Fiery Reformer of Middlesbrough East

It has been some time since I was last on Eston Nab, that famed vantage point over Teesside, whose views—oh, those familiar scenes—shift and churn like the Tees itself in flood, eternally restless, rarely still.

Come with me, back to this day, 29 October, 100 years ago, 1924. The British people were trudging to the polls yet again for a General Election— the third in two years. “You’re joking—not another one!” Brenda from Bristol would have said. This election was made necessary when Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government, clutching feebly to the reins of power, was unceremoniously deposed in a motion of no confidence.

Into this scene of rather predictable upheaval strode Miss Ellen Wilkinson, standing for Labour in the Middlesbrough East constituency. A young woman with ideals positively bulging out of her pockets, she was determined to champion the downtrodden. A child of Manchester’s working-class quarters, she possessed that dangerous quality: an actual social conscience. Although briefly enticed by communism, she soon developed a sufficient level of pragmatism to endorse change within the agreeable confines of the Labour Party.

Ellen Wilkinson marching with the Jarrow Marchers

Wilkinson won that election, and thus embarked on a journey which, to the astonishment of many, made her the first female Labour MP. Oh, how the newspapers struggled to decide which was more shocking— her socialist politics or the unforgivably bright red of her hair and vibrant clothes. That this point should command such interest in the national press, rather than her ideas, only speaks to the peculiar priorities of the British mind; priorities which are still the mainstay of the media today.

Nevertheless, she persisted. She spoke in earnest on matters of women’s suffrage, tirelessly campaigned for workers’ rights, and later attained the title of Minister of Education, where she could contemplate the wondrous task of overseeing the future of British minds. Ellen Wilkinson’s legacy, one might say, provides an uplifting tale of how even in the most entrenched bastions of privilege and tradition, the determined few may carve out a place for those slighted by fortune. A testament to courage, or simply proof that even Parliament must occasionally endure a dose of common decency.