A pioneering socialist, pacifist and women’s rights activist

Mike Phipps reviews Minnie Pallister: The Voice of a Rebel, by Alun Burge, published by Parthian.

“Even before she was identified by Keir Hardie in 1915 as a new star bursting over the political horizon, Minnie Pallister’s life was exceptional,” writes Alan Burge in the Introduction of this absorbing book. “Later, whether she was making rousing speeches from halls and hillsides, under police surveillance and twice accused of sedition for her opposition to the Great War, rescuing Jews from Nazi Germany, being banned by the BBC for her politics or likely inspiring a character of Spike Milligan in his writing of The Goon Show, she was such a compelling figure that Woman’s Hour serialised her ‘Life Story’ over five episodes in one week during her lifetime.” If she is less well remembered today, it is because she spent a decade of her life floored by a mystery illness from which she never fully recovered.

She emerged from the industrial South Wales valleys, where women had difficulty being accepted as public figures, to become one of the most important Labour women politicians from Wales in the first half of the twentieth century. A socialist, feminist and pacifist, she was an outstanding orator, perhaps the first person ever to make a political broadcast on radio, and one of the first women to stand for Parliament. Yet, on the threshold of a potentially outstanding political career, her catastrophic illness removed her from public life and brought her to the brink of penury. After years of invalidity, she recovered to reinvent herself as a journalist on the Daily Herald.

Born in 1885, Minnie was the daughter of an ex-miner turned clergyman who moved to Wales when she was 14 years old. It was a comfortable but also fairly egalitarian family environment and Minnie was something of a child prodigy. By age 15 she had delivered two recitations to large audiences on women’s rights.

Graduating from university, she became a teacher in industrial South Wales and a year later was put in charge of Brynmawr Elementary School. It was a poor area where life revolved around the colliery. Minnie became involved in the broader social life of the town, including conducting and accompanying winning juvenile and adult choirs. She became joint secretary of the Brynmawr Mutual Improvement Society and active in the teachers’ union and was introduced to the ideas of the Independent Labour Party. Its leader Keir Hardie represented Merthyr, but elsewhere in Wales the Party was weak and the Liberals still dominated.

Minnie’s view of sin “shifted from being about personal behaviours to recognising that low wages, slums, and unemployment could be the result of social and economic forces beyond an individual’s control,” Burge tell us. “She did not wrestle with her faith as much as transfer it from the Church to the ILP.”  She became one of the pioneering Labour women in Wales, travelling the country and spreading the word. Her profile rose and in 1914 she was elected President of the Monmouthshire ILP Federation, which had nineteen branches, and became an ex oficio member on the ILP’s South Wales Divisional Council. Within weeks, the Great War broke out.

In the first eight weeks, over three-quarters of a million men rushed to enlist. Labour unrest subsided and the fight for women’s suffrage was put on hold. The ILP’s opposition to the war was a distinctly minority position. Minnie’s speech at the April 1915 ILP Conference – held despite cancelled venues and delegates being abused in the street – caused a sensation, and won praise from Keir Hardie, for its criticism of the pro-war Church that  was “breathing the spirit of hatred.”

As the government introduced conscription, Minnie continued to speak out across the country, organising the No Conscription Fellowship (NCF) in Wales, while ILP offices and homes were raided by the police, and its newspapers and leaflets were seized. In April 1916, she chaired a meeting of 1,500 people in her home town of Brynmawr at which the anti-war Ramsay MacDonald spoke. She would stay in close touch with the future Prime Minister for the next twenty years.

That summer she started working in the London office of the campaign. By now, writes Burge, “Minnie was an open and independent woman, who had aspirations for her future and looked to shape her personal and professional life on her own terms.” But her return to South Wales as full-time teacher and part time secretary of the NCF entailed unglamorous hard work – “coordinating support to the approximately 900 conscientious objectors across Wales, monitoring where they were being held, visiting them in barracks, prison and military camps, acting as a friend of the defendant and a witness in military tribunals and courts martial” – and more, all amid arrests and harassment from the police and patriotic hooligans.

The Russian Revolution in 1917, which brought an amnesty for political offences and an extension of political liberties and adult suffrage, provided British pacifists with an important point of reference. Minnie was now a much sought-after speaker and worked closely with Sylvia Pankhurst, her almost exact contemporary, with whom she shared many beliefs – although these later diverged as Sylvia became a strong supporter of the Bolsheviks and Minnie began to focus more on the oppression of women and later building the Labour Party.

From the summer of 1918, Minnie was the ILP’s Welsh Division organiser, the first full-time female labour organiser in Wales. This was no office job: it entailed walking from village to village to call on sympathisers and organise meetings. She continued to integrate the struggle for women’s rights into her work: one of her talks was entitled “Woman: Slave, Rival, Comrade – Which?”

In 1920, she became Labour organiser-agent for Aberavon, helping Ramsay MacDonald win election there in 1922, the same year she was given the full front page for an article in Labour Leader. The following year, she became National Propagandist on the ILP’s ‘Now for Socialism’ campaign, travelling across the whole country on speaking tours – “probably the most impressive woman speaker in the labour movement.” She stood in unwinnable Bournemouth at the general election in 1923, getting 20% of the vote, and again in 1924, when she got 27% and came second.

Minnie worked a punishing schedule, with her diary booked with speaking events for months ahead. It was around this time that she experienced the first bout of a debilitating illness, probably exacerbated by overwork. In 1926, a specialist told her that the muscles on her face and throat were becoming paralysed and that she would have to give up public speaking and political work altogether. But it was the year of the miners’ lockout and, after addressing sixteen open-air meetings in one week, her health failed completely. She won election to Labour’s National Executive that year at her first attempt, but poor health prevented her from ever attending a meeting. She could not walk, or even reply to letters. Her political career was over.

Minnie’s account of her collapse and recovery in her 1934 autobiographical Cabbage for a Year is misleading, says Burge. “Its unreliable chronology… telescopes nearly a decade of life into one year.” By the end of the 1920s, she was still confined to bed for much of the time, but getting some articles published, which was essential as she was now quite poor.

Her situation improved when she got a regular column in the Daily Herald, which led to commissions from other national newspapers, including a column in the Daily Mirror between 1935 and 1937. As her health improved – although not her throat or voice (she was unable to speak in public again until 1941), she took over the editorship of No More War for a year in 1934 alongside other pacifist campaigning work.

From late 1937, Minnie was increasingly active in the Peace Pledge Union. She also bravely returned to Frankfurt in 1938, just after the Kristallnacht pogrom, to stay with a Jewish family she had visited two years earlier. All the male relatives whom Minnie had met in 1936 had been taken to Buchenwald Concentration Camp. “Minnie spent her time going around police stations and shipping companies in the city, trying to arrange the men’s release and obtaining passage for family members.” When she learned that “the only thing which could get anyone out of a concentration camp was an invitation to England”, as she was told, she returned to Britain to arrange permits. Peace News urged individuals to immediately invite Jews from Germany into their homes and act as surety to help overcome government objections. Visa approvals gradually trickled through and some prisoners were released and allowed to leave.

During and especially after World War Two, Minnie became a frequent BBC broadcaster. She was  a regular voice on Woman’s Hour throughout the 1950s, to which 3 to 4 million people listened regularly. Her willingness to talk about her own difficulties and problems made her popular – a rare authentic voice. With her health largely recovered, her renewed fame led to a series of spealing tours around the country. In 1954, nearing 70, she spoke at 45 places in a five-week period, often on her keystone beliefs about pacifism and the position of women in society.

After Minnie died in 1960 at the age of 75, a reader’s letter was read out on Women’s Hour from someone who said she was sure she spoke for thousands in mourning “a shining light of sanity and reason in the darkness of this world, and to stand for all that is meant by true values, in an age that appears to have forgotten them.”

Alan Burge has done a fantastic job of putting together this compelling biography about a pioneering socialist who, but for her debilitating mid-life illness, could well have been a huge figure in the mid-20th century Labour Party.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.