Meet Miss Wilkinson

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 75, 29 November 1940, Page 5

Meet Miss Wilkinson

WITH Ministerial changes in the British Cabinet : in 1940 came a Secretaryship for Ellen Wilkinson. I had my first glimpse of her in the House of Commons in 1930, when I heard her speak. She’s tiny, but when she rises to attack she is four feet 10 inches of concentrated energy, and you almost look for sparks to rise from that electrically charged battery, her mass of shining copper hair. The next time I came under the spell of her vivid personality was at a luncheon, where she was the principal guest. She is a brilliant speaker, and though at times her tongue is like a lash, she has a fine sense of humour

and that day she kept us convulsed with her witticisms and jokes. The daughter of a mill hand at Manchester, Ellen had her first training for a political life in school debates, generally being cast as the Socialist candidate. For a while, after leaving school, she was a school teacher, but was soon absorbed into the trade union movement when she was appointed secretary of the Distributive Workers’ Union. She says that her absorbing passion is. always has been and always will be, politics. In 1923 she was elected to the Manchester Council, and the following year she entered the House of Commons as Member for Middlesex. After she lost her seat in 1931 she spent some time on the Continent where she did some valuable international work. In her book, "Why Fascism?" is the kind of. writing one would expect of her- frank, unequivocal and somewhat fierce. She is one of the most competent book reviewers in England, and her latest work, "The Town That Was Murdered," came close to being a best seller-(Mrs. Vivienne Newson, "Some Remarkable Women I Have Met," 2YA, November 2.)