A MINER’S DAUGHTER

Grey River Argus, 21 March 1940, Page 9

A MINER’S DAUGHTER

BOOK REVIEW IN “REYNOLD’S”.

To-morrow Is a New Day, by Jennie Lee. (Cresset Press, Ss 6d). Jennie Lee (Mrs Aneurin Bevan)

was 24 when she went to Westminster as M.P. for North Lanark, the youngest woman yet sent to Parliament. She went there full of hope and enthusiasm. She was a miner’s daughter; brought up in a poor, but well-managed home; did well at school, got to Edinburgh University, then became a school-teacher and I.L.P. agitator (I use the word as,a compliment, not a reproach;. She believed, when she made her bow to the Speaker in 1929, that the Labour Party was going to turn Britain into a country lit for workers to live in.

How badly this needed doing she knew from sad experience. Her father had suffered more than most miners in the shameful attack on them by the coal-owners and (he Baldwin Government in 1926. He was “marked” on account of his political views. He was not allowed to continue at his usual fairly light work. He was told off to do casual labour.

“To a man of his delicate physique it was crucifixion We watched him each day trailing his limbs homeward. Our mother was more than usually careful to see that hot i was ready for him to wash, and that a light milk pudding with the white of an egg whisked on top was waiting to tempt him to eat He could not digest anything more solid until later in the evening after he had rested.... He was nojt able to walk upstairs to bed. He had to hold on by the banisters and drag himself up step by step.” All around her home in Fifeshire, all through her constituency, Jennie Lee saw “poverty, atrocious working conditions, intimidation, victimisation, exile; yet there was no such thing, I was told, as a class war.... Then what, I wanted to know, were they doing to our people? I wanted to get to the bottom of this.” So she took her place in Parliament, eager, earnest, devoted to the cause of “our people,” and in a short time, as she relates in this book, her illusions were knocked all to b,L.

Inertia In House.

From the beginning she noticed that “the faces of a number %of Scottish Miner M.’sP. curdled up like a bowl of sour milk whenever we accidentally collided.” She could not understand why. ’ Then she was horrified by the inertia of "the solid rows of decent, well-intentioned, unpretentious Labour backbenchers.” Nothing could rouse them. They believed in MacDonald. Nothing else seemed to them to matter. And there were others or the Labour M.’sP. (don’t we all know them) “whose cynicism chilled eve.ything they touched with the stale atmosphere of decay.” Socialism lost its meaning for hqr when Labour professed belief in it “and at the same time in Royalty, and knighthoods for Labour leaders and full compensation, even for mil honaires with shares in any nationalises industry.” Labour policy was a policy for'calm weather, in which every day the world was to become better and better, not a policy for a permanent state of crisis.

Still Has Hope.

Beaten in 1931, Jennie would have got back in 1935. if an official Labour candidate had not been put up to throw the seat away. The Tory- got 22,000, the total Labour poll was 24,000. But 6,000 of it went to the official nominee. Jennie with 17,000 was beaten again. Yet she still has hope, fed by such incidents as the 1 giving away by British soldiers of large parts of their rations to starving Germans in the occupied territory after the last war. “If only Europe in the past -d years had been governed in the spirit of these rank-and-file sol-

dicrs. M There’ is noble emotion in the book, quiet reflection, honest thinking. Thanks, Jennie Le, for them all. H. A. M