“Red Fanny” is, and probably always was, a slightly startling nickname, but Fanny Deakin’s life story turns out to be even more memorable than her monicker.
She was born on this date to a poor farming family in a mining village near Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire. She worked on the farm after leaving school, and at some point became involved in municipal politics. Sources vary on the dates, but certainly by the mid-1920s she was the first woman to sit on the local Urban District Council, and in time she was also a town and a county councillor. She went on to be the first Communist alderman (sort of a lordship for councillors) in the whole country.
Fanny seems to have been elected in 1923 as Labour, and then four years later as a Communist. In-between these two dates, of course, fell the 1926 general strike, in which Fanny was heavily involved as a speaker and protestor. Many militants were disappointed by the degree of support given to the strikers by the leaders of the official labour movement.
In 1927 she was part of a women’s visit to the Soviet Union, funded by collections, to study how the new workers’ state was dealing with matters like childcare and the rights of mothers. Clearly impressed by what she found, Fanny was back in the USSR in 1930. She must have made plenty of contacts over there, because it was the mail she subsequently received bearing Soviet stamps that led to the nickname Red Fanny. (I rather like the idea of having a nickname assigned by the postie; I never realised that was part of their remit.)
Fanny’s politics came directly from her personal experiences, from the poverty all around her in her childhood, and the industrial struggles of the miners who were her neighbours. And there were two other elements in her own life that were lasting influences on her politically.
She’d married a miner called Noah, in 1901 and of their five children only one lived to adulthood. That wasn’t unusual; in the days before the NHS, child mortality rates were very high among poor people. In 1931, Noah was injured at work and lived the remaining years of his life in pain and illness. Workers’ compensation, and the welfare of mothers and children, became Red Fanny’s two great causes. “I’m fighting for the mothers” was her often-repeated motto.
Fanny had to devote much of her time to nursing her husband in the months following his accident – a devotion which was unavoidably interrupted when she was jailed for nine months for perjury; a comrade had been charged with incitement to riot, and Fanny provided an alibi. Being banged up meant she had to resign her council seat - but of course she won it back on her release. The people knew who their champion was, and where she belonged.
Her tireless campaigning for mothers and kids brought at least two major results. In 1931 Fanny was the only woman on an unemployed men’s delegation to the prime minister. She used the opportunity to persuade the government to grant a ration of free milk to all children under five and pregnant women. Then, after the war and at the dawn of socialised medicine, a state-of-the-art maternity hospital was opened in Chesterton by the Welfare Committee which she chaired.
It was called, naturally and properly, the Fanny Deakin Maternity Home, and is remembered locally to this day. (How the posties referred to it is not recorded).
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Sources:
www.wcml.org.uk/our-collections/activists/fanny-deakin/
www.communistparty.org.uk/fanny-deakin/
www.stokesentinel.co.uk/news/history/fanny-deakin-medical-children-potteries-4344778
www.newcastle-staffs.gov.uk/newcastle-lyme-850th-anniversary/themes-people/9