Although she ended up as one of the best-known figures on the right-wing of the labour movement, Liverpool MP Bessie Braddock (1899-1970) had a radical youth. She could hardly avoid it – her mother was the legendary rebel Ma Bamber.
Mary “Ma” Bamber (1874-1938) lived the middle-class dream in childhood, the privileged daughter of an Edinburgh lawyer. That lasted until the day her drunken dad left home; Mary, her five siblings, and her mother never saw him again. Suddenly poverty-stricken, Mary’s mother took up charring and managed to keep the family afloat long enough for her eldest son to get a job in the print. They all moved to Liverpool to be with him, and that was the start of Bamber’s political life.
Alongside her practical solidarity work, in soup kitchens and the like, she quickly became a widely admired orator. (Bessie Braddock always said she’d attended her first political rally, where her mother was one of the speakers, at the age of three weeks). But her most important work was as a trade union organiser, principally for warehouse workers; predominantly female, they were amongst the worst paid, worst treated, most viciously exploited people in the whole city.
In 1919 Mary won a council seat in the staunchly Protestant ward of Everton. Her majority was small, but it was surprising she had one at all, given that she was a woman, and standing as a communist (albeit on a Labour ticket).
She – and her daughter – took part in a famous Liverpool event, the “rushing” of the Walker Art Gallery in September 1921. Mary was a leading member of the National Unemployed Workers’ Committee Movement, which demanded that the vast numbers of post-war unemployed should be given either jobs or welfare. After one rally in the city centre, Ma Bamber and her comrades proposed that everyone should “go and have a look at the pictures” in the public Gallery; occupy it, in other words.
The reaction of the police was efficient, and brutal. Instead of trying to clear the occupiers out, the law locked them in – and proceeded to batter them senseless with their batons. A good number ended up in hospital, or arrested, or both. There was blood everywhere, while gallery staff and people who’d been merely visiting the place were also caught up in the violence.
Ma Bamber continued her work all her life; her last public oration took place just a couple of weeks before her death.
Meanwhile, her daughter Bessie had left school at 14 and taken work filling seed packets. As a young woman, her politics were similar to her mother’s. She attended socialist Sunday school, became a member of the Independent Labour Party, left that for the Communist Party, and finally joined the Labour Party. She married Jack Braddock in 1922, and they became the most famous couple in Merseyside politics. He was leader of Liverpool City Council from 1955-61, and again in 1963, the year of his death. She was a city councillor from 1930-61, and a member of parliament for Liverpool Exchange from 1945 until a few months before her death in 1970 (she made her last Commons speech on this date).
If her victory in that Tory seat was a shock, it was nothing compared to her arrival in the Commons. She was a large woman physically, and even larger in personality. “Battling Bessie” became the first woman to be excluded from the chamber for misbehaviour. The usual euphemism about “not suffering fools gladly” would have to be extended in Braddock’s case, because she didn’t suffer anyone gladly, fool or genius, who was unwise enough to disagree with her. In post-WW2 Britain, Bessie – who had driven an ambulance throughout the war, an extremely dangerous job which cost the lives of many of her colleagues - became one of the most famous women in the country, her unmistakeable outline treasured by cartoonists. Her political life, irrespective of where she stood at any given time on the left-right spectrum, was always devoted to fighting poverty in her native city. For that reason she never sought, or accepted, high office (if you don’t count her Honorary Presidency of the Professional Boxers’ Association – she was a huge fight fan), and that’s also perhaps why she is remembered today mainly as a larger-than-life character rather than as the pioneering politician she was.
Her party leader, Harold Wilson, told her funeral that “she was born to fight for the people of the docks, of the slums, of the factories and in every part of the city where people needed help.” But her drift rightwards undermined her popularity locally; in the 1950s her local party voted to drop her as its candidate. The move was overruled by the party nationally, with Braddock blaming it on Communist infiltrators and Bevanites.
In Liverpool today there is a rather lovely mosaic statue to Ma Bamber – though it’s notable that the tribute stresses Bamber’s campaigns for women’s equality (an acceptable, sanitised, incorporated ideology) and not her main life’s work, fighting for class equality and socialism (ideas even less respectable now than they were in her day). A great many socialist women from the 19th and 20th centuries are hidden today behind the retrospectively respectable mask of the suffragette. Revolutionary women are rebranded as “before-their-time” reformists.
The city’s statue of her daughter is plainer, though no less impressive for that. It shows Battling Bessie in her characteristic overcoat and hat, holding in one hand a handbag and in the other (for reasons I’ll leave you to look up) an egg.
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Sources:
https://grahamstevenson.me.uk/2011/06/11/bamber-mary/
History Today March 2022
www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/artifact/mary-bamber-revolutionary-woman
https://inspidered.wordpress.com/2011/05/30/the-storming-of-the-walker-art-gallery/
https://heritage.humanists.uk/bessie-braddock/
www.wcml.org.uk/our-collections/activists/bessie-braddock/
www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/citys-iconic-first-woman-mp-20101788