On 31st December 1929 Madeline made a broadcast entitled Women in the North on the BBC’s Manchester station (2ZY Manchester). The script has survived and in October 2020 I was able to obtain a copy from the BBC Written Archives.
The life of women in the North has been clouded all through the year by unemployment. The official figures for the whole country include about a quarter of a million unemployed women and girls – which means, of course, those who should normally be working and are anxious to find work – and, of course, the larger proportion live in the northern counties and are the victims of bad trade in factories and mills. But this is only one aspect of the unemployment tragedy. Like most other tragedies – wars, famine, strikes and so on – it manages to aim one blow at men and two at women. Women have their own lack of work to contend with and they have the heart-breaking business of keeping homes and families in something approaching health and comfort when the husbands’ wages have ceased. In considering the miseries of unemployment, it has to be remembered that in the background of every man waiting in queues outside Labour exchanges or hawking bootlaces and notepaper from door to door, there is some woman with children to be fed and clothed and a house to be maintained in spite of a growing menace of debt. The sufferings of the woman who is out of work are, as a rule, concentrated on herself. The man’s fall with at least equal force on his wife. That is what I mean by the double blow.
The optimistic talk about silver linings and in this cloud that hangs over the women of the North there are at any rate two – not very large, perhaps, but certainly interesting. One concerns domestic services. Towards the end of the Victorian era, the respectable girl who would formerly have gone straight from her board school to a situation as a maid servant, began to develop other ideas. Instead of a bedroom in the attic, with the water cistern gurgling in the corner, and a kitchen in the basement, with sixteen-hour days spent in tense and quivering expectancy of her mistress’s bell, she turned her thoughts to work in factories. Then the war, with the lure, both patriotic and financial, of munition work, gave domestic service a blow which seemed likely to be its death. Now there is another change. With the mills closing to them, young women are once more considering the advantages of work as “domestic helps” – a more popular description, at any rate with them, than “servants”. They realise that conditions have immensely improved. Attic bedrooms and basements have gone, and no mistress bothers to ring her bell when, for six nights out of seven, it would sound only in an empty kitchen whose occupant is at the cinema or her dancing class. So, out of the unemployment, is coming help for the hard driven women of the middle classes. Unfortunately for the housekeepers of the North, most of this pious pilgrimage into domesticity has London for its Mecca. There the influx of many hundreds of friendless girls – most of them from the mining areas and utterly ignorant of city life – is creating its own problems, but these do not at the moment concern us. Before passing on, however, it is worth noticing that in Manchester there is a proposal to form a local branch of the Household Service League, which aims at better co-operation between mistress and maid.
The other fragment of silver lining is the revival of the quilting industry in Durham. Durham is one of the mining districts officially scheduled as “distressed” a phrase which takes our thoughts uncomfortably back to the months immediately after the War and the famine areas of Central Europe. Quilting is a type of work which was for centuries traditional in Durham , as well as in South Wales, and was allowed to be pushed on one side in the rush and crowd of modern life. It is always sad that the lovely old handicrafts of more leisurely days should be lost, and there is perhaps some moral to be dug out of the fact that, when the coal mines and complexities of present-day industry have failed them, the women of Durham are turning once again to the peaceful art of their grandfathers. The work that they do is very beautiful, mainly in the feather and shell quilting designs which are characteristic in that county. They make bed covers, cushions, dressing-gowns, bags and so on. Some of their products have been bought by the Royal Family and an exhibition of them was held a week or two ago in London.
The great event of the year was, of course, the General Election in May when, for the first time, women voted on equal terms with men. Their vote was therefore so important, and was popularly believed to be so much shrouded in mystery, that many modest and self-effacing women felt a little overwhelmed by the flattering attentions offered to them by candidates and canvassers. In seaside towns, such as Southport, Scarborough, Morecambe and Rhyl, largely populated by landladies and leisured spinsters, the feminine vote considerably outnumbered the male. In the divisions where a woman stood for election, the interest was especially keen and some notable people were returned. Blackburn elected Mrs. Mary Agnes Hamilton, Labour candidate, the literary critic and novelist, and Middlesbrough remained faithful to Miss Ellen Wilkinson, also Labour, who has one of those vivid and dominating personalities that always keep their owners in the forefront of the news. A third Labour candidate, Dr. Marion Phillips, scientist and editor of “The Labour Woman” , was returned by Sunderland. One of her good works since her election has been the designing of a frock for women members to wear in the House of Commons. She has not yet persuaded them to adopt it. For the Liberal party, Miss Megan Lloyd George, described as the perfect daughter for a great politician, won at Anglesey. Most satisfactory of all, perhaps, was the election of Miss Eleanor Rathbone, an Independent candidate, for the Combined English Universities. On the casualty side, the narrowest margin of the whole election was the defeat of four votes which lost Northwich for the Labour party and Mrs. Barbara Ayrton Gould.
While I am on the subject of Parliament, it seems appropriate to mention the great conference of the National Council of Women, held in Manchester in October. This Council, sometimes described by the newspapers which like to devise popular labels as the Women’s Parliament, contains 143 affiliated societies, dealing with every aspect of women’s life and interests. The President for this year’s conference was Lady Emmott, of Oldham. Seven hundred delegates attended and the public meetings and debates aroused much local and national interest. It was a very great occasion, both for those who took an active part in it and all the thousands of unknown and inarticulate women who will benefit from its endeavours on their behalf.
A General Election is apt to have a temporary clogging effect on progress and reform. It centres so much attention on itself that earlier movements are numbed and overshadowed by it. But in spite of this, several good signs of the emancipation of women in the North have managed to wriggle through and show lively growth. For instance, the first woman Inspector of Taxes has been appointed. She is a Manchester woman, Miss Marjorie Rogers, who trained at Rochdale now watches the tax-payers of Bath. Salford, lucky in owning a progressive Chief Constable, now has its four police matrons supervised by woman instead of a man. Liverpool is considering the appointment of women police. This proposal is warmly supported by Miss Margaret Beavan, ex-Lord Mayor of Liverpool, who served on the Royal Commission which inquired into police questions and knows as well as anyone the need for fully attested women police officers to deal with cases in which women and children are involved. The appointment of women in police forces increases much too slowly to please most of us.
Another widening branch of work is the house property managership. In the northern area, woman managers are employed by the town councils of Chester, Rotherham, Chesterfield, Scarborough and Stockton-on-Tees, besides those working for private housing enterprises. This is still a fairly new sphere for women and in every case they have proved very successful. It is surely sound commonsense that the best person to tackle the problems of other women’s houses is the woman with the highly trained skill of the Octavia Hill scheme backing her natural sympathy and interest.
An urgent matter which has been arousing interest in the North is the maternal mortality rate. This still remains as high as it was at the beginning of the century – a tragic and obstinate rock in the stream of medical progress. Over the whole area, one mother out of every 250 dies in childbirth. The average is slightly less in towns, such as Manchester, Bradford and so on, which have ante-natal clinics , and greater districts. Anglesey, for instance, has the highest of all.
It is difficult to give a survey of women’s activities without mentioning that familiar conversational stand-by – the weather. This is, after all, the background of all our doings, the common bond of interest between members of Parliament, policewomen, miners’ wives and the ordinary women who hope for sunshine and a strong wind on washing days and no rain on the afternoon when the man of the house plays golf. Here in the North, the year’s weather seems to have centred around the domestic water supply. It began with intense cold and frozen pipes. In all the northern towns, the lakes of the municipal parks were thronged with skaters and at weekends thousands of people went, in cars or specially run excursion trains, to walk on the icy expanse of Windermere. For two or three weeks whole streets in city suburbs and in villages were almost entirely without water in the houses and certainly no plumber’s wife had a right to speak of hard times. Then came the drought of the summer and the water supply failed again. Nearly every place restricted its use and in many cases it was cut off altogether for twelve hours out of the twenty four. Some villages in Lancashire and Yorkshire had to buy their water and walk long distances to fetch it. It was considered very bad citizenship to water the garden or wash a car and some ingenious devices were adopted to siphon the water from baths and sinks into receptacles where it could be saved to serve some second use.
We all anxiously watched the feeble pulse of the reservoirs, while our dry gardens cracked in the heat and the grass withered into brown. The winter brought floods and abundant water in the wrong places. We had little to complain of in the North, compared with the homeless people of Somerset, or the Thame Valley going to its work in punts and pulling up baskets of food through the bedroom windows. We are, perhaps, less spectacular in our weather reports or our rivers are more restrained. There were plenty of floods in the North, in the flat-dipped meadows of Cheshire, for instance, and in Northumberland, but only the farmers had any cause for lamentation.
M.A.L: the writing and journalism of Madeline Linford, 1916 to 1965: the first woman on the editorial board of the Manchester Guardian 