Bessie On the Liverpool City Council

Ma Bamber was disillusioned with the time she spent as a Councillor. She was only there for three years. Her daughter had a completely different attitude. In 1929 Jack stood as a candidate for Everton and was elected and the following year St Anne’s Labour Ward Association invited her to stand instead of their Councillor Mrs Hughes, a staunch Roman Catholic who quarrelled with a sizeable number of the activists in her ward.

It was to do with the large Brownlow Hill Workhouse Hospital which was closed in January 1929. This Workhouse was situated within the St Anne’s Ward. In May 1930, the Liverpool Corporation sold the huge site to the Roman Catholic Church who had the vision of building a large Cathedral on the site of the largest workhouse in the whole of Europe in the reign of Queen Victoria. In 1900 it had 4,000 inmates, but in 1928 the revision of the Poor Laws brought to an end a remarkable institution in the life of the poor of Liverpool. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese bought the nine-acre site at the corner of Brownlow Hill and Mount Pleasant for £100,000 and commissioned Sir Edwin Lutgens (1869-1944), an Anglican, as the architect for the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King.

Jack Braddock opposed the sale to the Roman Catholic Church. But he had no chance. The sale was passed by 88 votes to 27, and all the 27 were the Labour councillors. But some Labour councillors like Mrs Hughes, refused to vote against the sale in spite of the Ward Committee. They argued that the workhouse could be used for a period as a centre to house those who had nowhere to live while they knocked down the old slum houses and new houses could be built. The St Anne’s labour officers did not want the Roman Catholic Church to drop their intentions, merely to postpone for a short period. Mrs Hughes disagreed, and she was supported by W R “Billy”, Robinson, the leader of the Labour Party in Liverpool. Both were devout Roman Catholics.

St Anne’s Ward had taken Bessie to heart. When her husband due to his rheumatism could not collect the insurance dues in St Anne and Everton, Bessie would stand in. She and her mother had taken part in large number of unemployment demonstrations and the Ward needed a campaigner.

Bessie has described vividly the conditions of St Anne’s. This is what she wrote:

The houses were enormous. They had been built a hundred years before by cotton and shipping bosses. When the rich moved farther out of the city, the Irish labourers who came to Liverpool during the potato famine took over. Sometimes there were as many as twenty rooms in one house; and there were twenty families.

These families had very little privacy. There were up inside lavatories. In the yards at the back of the houses there were usually one, sometimes two lavatories, serving up to ten families each. They had no gas and in the centre of the yard you would find a running water tap. The children would have the task of filling their buckets and returning them to their one room home. Housing was a serious problem for the Liverpool Corporation and Bessie and Jack Braddock were soon campaigning for better facilities. It was one her themes in the 1930 Municipal Election. St Anne’s Ward was the heartland of the Roman Catholic Church. It was the first time in living memory for a non-Catholic politician. St Anne in other words was a Catholic Ward. A slogan was struck in the campaign – the Best Man among them is a Woman. She won. The day after the count throng of supporters came to congratulate her at her home in Freehold Street.

She had so much to do. The promised ‘houses fit for heroes’ of Lloyd George, too often as Bessie Braddock maintained when she became an MP, ‘flea-ridden, bug-ridden, rat-ridden, lousy hell-holes.’ The Braddocks had been an embarrassment to the Labour establishment in their Communist days. They still remembered how the militants had occupied the Walker Art Gallery on 12 September 1921 in the name of the Communist-inspired Unemployed Workers Movement. Fifty of the 156 arrested were brutally treated, and the leaders, including John Braddock, his future mother-in-law, Mary Bamber, Reverend Vint Laughland, and Robert Tissyman were sent for trial. The Recorder of Liverpool, E G Hemmerde, was horrified with the police tactics and sentenced the militants to a token one day’s imprisonment.

But the Braddocks came into the Council on a Labour revival. When Jack was elected in 1929 he was one of fifty-seven Labour Council members. The Conservatives had seventy-nine, the Liberals fourteen, seven Centre representatives and one Independent. One has to remember that Catholics composed over one-third of Labour Councillors in the 1930s. Jack and Bessie were on the humanist wing of the Labour Party. To many of their fellow Councillors their Catholicism came before their socialism. This was heresy to Bessie. She could not understand such a standpoint. That is why she wanted to win over Mrs Olive Hughes, especially when she decided to stand and split the Labour vote. Mrs Braddock worked hard to win. She argued for more houses and fewer priests! But the disunity in the Labour Party was obvious. While Bessie won in St Anne’s, Labour lost five seats to Conservatives, four (uncontested) to democratic Labour who had a strong base in the Great George Street and Vauxhall Wards and one to a Protestant Party councillor. The Party was soon in more turmoil, especially when the Labour group deposed its leader W A Robinson, a convert to Catholicism. The leadership of the Labour Party passed to Luke Hogan (1885-1954), the son of a poor Irish Catholic parents who lived in the north end of the city. He entered the City Council in November 1921 and became one of the most powerful debaters the Town Hall had ever heard. In 1927 the Conservatives made him an Alderman, contrary to the wishes of the Labour group – and it was inevitable that he would succeed W A Robinson. Throughout the first fifteen years of the Braddocks period as councillors, Hogan dominated Labour politics in Liverpool. The struggle between him and the Braddocks supported by Sidney Silverman were epic in their emotion and passion. Hogan was more flamboyant than Jack Braddock and he had a powerful base in the large Catholic Irish vote. Hogan could also depend on the right-wing trade unionists. The left in the 1930s was led by Jack and Bessie. About a third of the Council group belonged to the left, and Hogan was frustrated for he was never able to achieve unity within the Liverpool Labour Party.

The main contention was Hogan’s Catholicism. It was important to him, and an integral part of his Socialism. He was a Christian Socialist in the Catholic tradition, and Liverpool had a large number of politicians like him. A great example is David Logan, who followed T P O’Connor as MP for Scotland Yard Division in November 1929. Logan was an Irish Nationalist who became a Labour councillor and alderman. A Liverpudlian of Scottish-Irish origin he had lived all his life, as a child and adult in Kew Street of Scotland Road. He was to hold the seat for 35 years, but he was above all a Catholic Socialist. He had established a chapter of the Knight of St Columba, with the aim, of catholicizing the Liverpool Labour Party as some of his left wing critics maintained.

In Parliament, in his maiden speech, he had praised the ‘great religious fervour’ of his constituents and added these significant words:

To me God means everything and all things, and I feel that in this House and in the Government of this nation it is essential that we should understand what true religion means.

Logan fought had a losing battle like many Protestants in the Lord’s Day Observance Society camp, against the Sunday opening of cinemas, theatres, and concert halls. He objected in Parliament on every occasion against the money spend on information to do with birth control. A father of ten children, Logan spoke passionately in favour of the teachings of his beloved Church. He called the leaflets, ‘scurrilous literature’ and only ‘fit for the gutter. It is not fit for decent homes to have any knowledge of.’ But it would be wrong to give the impression that Logan or Hogan were only interested in the affairs and teachings of their Church. They worked hard on all fronts, housing, unemployment and health. Archbishop Downey, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in the diocese, gave wholehearted support to councillors of the calibre of Hogan and Logan, especially on sectarian schooling. The bitterness was felt in the Council Chambers. In 1934 Sidney Silverman and Bessie Braddock were both expelled from the Labour group, and only re-admitted after an appeal to the National Executive Committee in Transport House, London.

Jack Braddock was never out of controversy. He was a marked man as for as the police was concerned. In 1932 John Braddock was again arrested for inciting a riot by standing in a lorry in Islington Square urging a hostile crowd not to dispose on the command of the police. Fortunately through the friendship with Sidney Silverman John Braddock had an excellent team to defend him. Indeed he was defended by the Recorder of Liverpool, E G Hemmede, while Maxwell Fyfe was the leading barrister for the prosecution. The truth of the matter was that Jack was not there. A man named Broggan of similar physique to John Braddock, was the individual who stood on the lorry. But thirteen policemen swore on the Bible that Braddock was the guilty person. On October 29 he was sentenced to six months in prison and taken by the Black Maria to Walton Goal. A month after arriving in Walton Prison he stood as a Labour candidate in Everton. Though he never appeared at any hustings, but his wife did campaign, he was returned like she was with good majorities. Thousands of their admirers marched through inner city Liverpool in protest at his imprisonment. Bessie led the march with tears streaming down her face and the Foo-Foo-Band making a real impact on the bystander. Jack Braddock was released on November 29 to appear in the Court of Appeal in London. He was met outside Walton by Ma Bamber, Bessie, his sister-in-law Enid and the solicitor-politician, Sidney Silverman. Great crowds gathered in Lime Street and they sang with gusto the words of the Red Flag. The sentence was quashed. Forty thousand Liverpudlians came to welcome him home to the city. The bands had gathered and flowers were given to his most devoted defender, Bessie. The defence had come to the staggering sum of £700 for Sir William Jowett, defended him, in London before the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Hewart of Bury. John Braddock was carried on the backs of his supporters to the Labour Party officers where he had a wonderful opportunity of thanking the electorate of Everton and the folk of his adopted city for their loyal support. His message from Walton Prison on 31 October 1932 summed up his attitude.

I appeal to the Electors of Everton Ward not to lose hope, faith or courage. I am looking forward on Tuesday next to the Judgement of the only Jury whose Verdict I value… That of the Working Class Voters whose cause I serve.

The Braddocks were badly treated by the ruling Conservative Party in the City Council. When Sir Kingsley Wood, Minister of Health in the Coalition Government, came to open a housing estate in St Anne’s Ward she was not invited though she was a local councillor in the Ward. But it didn’t stop her turning up at the last minute and disrupting the proceedings when the local women, who idolised her, mobbed her, and in the uproar, Sir Kingsley Wood, the VIP was totally forgotten.

But the biggest insult to her was when the Prince of Wales came to open a large block of flats in Queen Anne Street in 1933. She could not turn up at the last minute on such an occasion for they had tight security for the opposite site of Queen Anne Street there was an old, decrepit three-storey building containing two-room flats with outside toilets. The women who lived there were disciples of Bessie and they invited her to stay with them the night before the visit of the handsome womaniser, Prince of Wales.

The Prince came surrounded by the invited Councillors, and as he appeared in the centre of the Square, which came to be called Unity Square, the local Socialist leader appeared on the balcony. When the inhabitants of the new flats saw her they went ecstatic. The Prince was flabbergasted and wanted to know who she was. The Conservative Party had egg on their faces in a big way and they decided that from 1932 onwards they had to invite sitting councillors of all parties on every such occasion in the future. The Braddocks were a great asset in the Council in the hungry thirties as the historian P J Waller says:

The Braddocks pertinaciously championed common people in a Council overloaded with the wealthy.

Labour gained six council seats in 1933, fifteen in 1934, and F T Richardson, of the Postmen, was made the first Labour Mayor of Liverpool. The City decided to confer Freedom of the City on one celebrity from the three main political parties, Sir Thomas White in the name of the Conservative Party, Sir Frederick Bowring as a generous Liberal and James Sexton, pioneer of Labour and Trade Unionism in the City and indeed on Merseyside. The Whip was again withdrawn from Sidney Silverman and Bessie Braddock when they criticized these well deserved honours. It seems Sidney Silverman and Bessie Braddock were opposing for the sake of opposing, and Luke Hogan protested that member’s personal and sectarian jealousies were hindering the growth of the Labour Party within the political life of the city. His complaint had substance.

Bessie Braddock clashed also with Pastor H D Longbottom (1886-1962), who looked after Protestant Reformers’ Memorial Church from 1919 until his death. He represented the Protestant Party in the Council from the early 1930s onwards and fostered as much as he could the hard line Protestant standpoint. Longbottom was joined by his wife in the Council Chamber in 1932, they represented the Protestant stronghold of St Domingo.

Longbottom’s politics were difficult to fathom. Lord Derby thought he was an ‘out and out socialist’ while Thomas White regarded him as a ‘Liberal and a Free Trader’. Bessie Braddock regarded him as an out and out Protestant bigot. She issued her first write against the Protestant fire brand, Reverend H D Longbottom for libel on what he had written on Bessie Braddock in an issue of the Protestant Times. The suggestion of Longbottom was that Bessie was a ‘loose woman’. Mr Justice Lynskey appeared for her while another well-known barrister was instructed by Longbottom. In the end the Protestant warrior had to issue a public apology and agreed with the Court suggestion that he should pay a substantial sum of damages.

Politicians were noticing this larger than life figure. The female politician, Eleanor Rathbone, who represented Liverpool University graduates as well as six other university educated folk in the Combined Universities seat said of her:’ She will be worth her weight in gold to be the party in Parliament.’

She had a determination in all she did. She became the Chairman of the Hospitals Management Committee, and for the rest of her life, she was extremely involved in the well-being of the Liverpool Hospital. She introduced a large number of useful measures, such as doing away with wooden lockers as they harboured dirt. She persuaded Sir Thomas White, Chairman of the Health Committee to come with her and visit on speck the kitchens of Liverpool hospitals. She introduced one uniform for each grade of staff throughout all the city hospitals.

By 1933 she was extremely interested not only in local politics but also in parliamentary politics, especially in January 1933 when her great friend Sidney Silverman contested the Exchange Constituency following the death of the sitting M P James Philip Reynolds (1865-1932), a cotton broker and a staunch Catholic. He was appointed Privy Chamberlain to the Pope in 1929.

Sir Thomas White was surprised at the Exchange Labour Party selecting Sydney Silverman as it was a constituency where the Catholic Church had strong support. He called it a ‘blunder of the first magnitude’ for Labour to ignore the large Catholic vote by selecting a Jew who had left wing views! The Conservatives selected Colonel John Joseph Shute, a bachelor, and a partner and great friend of Reynolds as well as an eminent Roman Catholic layperson. He was friendly with the Democratic Labour Party, which occupied Great George Street and Vauxhall wards, and in the main they preferred Shute to the fully fledge socialism of Silverman. Shute kept the seat though the Labour vote increased from 10,894 in 1931 to 12,412 in 1933. In Sir Thomas White’s opinion Shute’s victory was personal rather than political, while Silverman gave a different explanation. Sectarianism, he maintained, had triumphed over socialism.

When the General Election was held in 1935 Colonel Shute increased his majority to 4,412. His opponent in the by-election Sidney Silverman won Nelson and Colne in the Lancashire textile heartland and Simon Mahon, was Labour’s candidate. John Braddock had turned down an invitation to contest Everton, which he represented on City Council. It was a tough call and he did not want to risk his comfortable job. But if he had stood he would have won. The Labour candidate Bertie Victor Kirby (1887-1957), a councillor from 1924 and deputy leader of the Labour Council group in the early 1930s won the seat with a tiny majority of 177 votes. But he was a lucky politician. He served as the Labour MP for Everton for 15 years. John Braddocks could have had a similar long period in Parliament.

Bessie was however chosen as the Parliamentary Candidate for the Exchange Division from a short list of six. One of the six was the Liverpool based John Reginald Bevins, and a Labour councillor. When he failed to get the nomination he was greatly disappointed and within two years he left the Labour Party for the Conservative Party, and became in 1950 Tory MP for Liverpool Toxteth and an influential Postmaster-General in the Macmillan Government. Mary Bamber predicted that Bessie would win the Exchange Seat. But she didn’t live to see the Election or the victory for her daughter.

Ma Bamber was devastated by the death of her great friend and housekeeper, Rose Parson, who was knocked down and killed as she got off a bus. It was the beginning of the end for the great campaigner. Her physical decline began when she was called as Millie Toole said, ‘when she was called to the mortuary to identify Parny’, that is Rose Parsons. She had problems in walking. Two months before she died Bill Sharp took her to her last political meeting. She could resist the call of the platform and spoke as she always did with conviction. For above all she was a Conviction politician.

Her daughters and her sons-in-law were devastated when she died. Enid said ‘It was the end of the world when she died’ in June, 1938. She had made her own arrangements for the funeral. There would be no mourning, no flowers, no prayers for the Socialist pioneer. Her life had been a long and hard witness, and the coffin was draped in a red flag and the cortege was led by Liverpool members of the International Brigade who had been brave soldiers in Spain carrying red flags draped with black ribbon.

Sydney Silverman, the MP, presided at the simple service of farewell. He summed up her life in one sentence:

She worked for a world in which there were no barriers of sex, class, race or colour, no privileges and no conflicts, and in which men and women could live together in comradeship and brotherhood.

The singing of the Red Flag completed the simple service in Anfield Crematorium. The ordinary women of Liverpool mourned her passing as did all those who knew of her commitment and endeavours. She was only 63. Tough and tender, she had deserved the title of Mother of Liverpool.