The Times Great Women's Lives

by Sue Corbett

Unfortunately her self-confessed inability to resist a challenge means that she will be remembered also for her brave but forlorn bid to reform the trade unions, a move which almost ended her career and at one time endangered the position of her ally and patron, Harold Wilson. Her plan in 1969 to modernise the unions and stop unofficial strikes caused alarm even among her traditional friends on the Left. Opposition in the Parliamentary Labour Party, mobilised by James Callaghan and the late Douglas Houghton, proved too strong: the vital elements of her scheme were abandoned when the Chief Whip, Robert Mellish, told the Cabinet her Bill would never get through the Commons. That failure cost Castle any chance she might have had of becoming the first woman Prime Minister.

  This was one of her few misjudgments about her party: her ministerial career was almost entirely successful. Although she was a woman operating in what was largely a male environment she hated being credited with a masculine mind. She managed to dominate most of her civil servants and colleagues without losing her essential femininity. She demanded to be taken for what she was and not for what she was born, though she was not above tears when all else had failed.

  She was a socialist from childhood. Her father, Frank Betts, a tax inspector, was an enthusiastic propagandist for the ILP and it was not surprising that her first election address, written when she was six, consisted of a ten-word promise: “Dear citizens, vote for me, I will give you houses.”

  Betts was an unusual tax inspector. He was a voracious reader and Castle maintained that she was brought up in an aura of Greek plays, Irish ballads, medieval romances and Icelandic sagas — with Betts teaching himself various foreign languages at the breakfast table. His wife, Annie, was in the same mould. She was a milliner who became a William Morris socialist and Castle’s early memories included dancing round the maypole every spring in her family’s series of neglected gardens.

  The gardens were numerous because of her father’s profession. The Inland Revenue believed in keeping tax inspectors on the move and, though Castle was born in Chesterfield, her father was soon posted to Hull and on to Pontefract before moving to Bradford, where Castle went to Bradford Girls’ Grammar School and won a scholarship to St Hugh’s College, Oxford.

  She fell in love with Oxford, but then began to hate it. She thought her college dull and stifling. She went up to read French but soon switched to philosophy, politics and economics, as she had decided her future lay in journalism or politics. She found Oxford in the early 1930s a mixture of sexual discrimination and sexual frustration. She found a welcome lack of discrimination in the Labour Club, where she became a leading figure, to the neglect of her studies. Her general unhappiness was reflected in her degree. She went down with a third.

  By then her family had moved on to Hyde in Cheshire. She had no money and no prospects. The only job she could find was selling crystallised fruits in a Manchester department store, dressed improbably as Little Nell. She was considered bright enough to be transferred to the store’s London headquarters; but there her ideas were thought too bright altogether, and she was sacked. She was saved from despair by the great love of her life, William Mellor, a former Editor of the Daily Herald.

  She had met Mellor through the Socialist League. The attraction was immediate. Mellor, married, with a child, was in no position to marry her immediately and made this clear. Frank Betts told Barbara appreciatively: “I never expected a man to come and tell me his intentions towards my daughter were strictly dishonourable.”

  Mellor, 22 years older than she was, dominated their relationship. He launched a local government magazine and she became its secretary. Then, in 1937, he became Editor of a new magazine. It was called Tribune. The magazine was the brainchild of George Strauss, Aneurin Bevan and Sir Stafford Cripps — who provided most of its finance. Castle wrote a column for it in conjunction with a new friend, Michael Foot. But Mellor soon ceased to be Editor and in 1942 he died from a duodenal ulcer. Castle was desolate but next year she went as a delegate to her first Labour Party conference. The conference changed her life. It brought her fame, a job and a husband.

  She spoke on the Beveridge Report and her speech was a sensation. The next day her picture was on the front page of the Daily Mirror and she was hailed as “The Voice of Youth” (she was actually 32). The paper immediately appointed her its housing correspondent. The night editor who made the all-important decision to make her the Mirror’s main story was Ted Castle. His first marriage had broken up and they began meeting regularly. He was also a left-winger and they shared speaking engagements. In July 1944, with the V1s falling on London, they were married. Nye Bevan and Jennie Lee were two of the four guests at their wedding breakfast at the Savoy.

  The marriage lasted until Ted Castle’s death 34 years later. In one way, their partnership was difficult. Ted Castle was a talented journalist who longed to be a politician but his only successful bid to get a constituency to fight ended in 1953 in a by-election defeat. He had to be content with a local government aldermanship, an appointment as Member of the European Parliament and a belated life peerage. This was probably just as well. In the Commons he would never have been more than a run-of-the-mill backbencher, while his wife — with many of the characteristics of a leading actress — always seemed destined to be a star. It nevertheless proved to be a successful marriage, despite their failure to have children, which Barbara Castle always described as the greatest sorrow of her life. Ted Castle’s death in 1979 was an event from which she never fully recovered.

  He was at her side during her triumphs and occasional disasters and never more so than during the 1945 general election. Her Mirror column and more platform successes brought her the chance to fight one of the two Blackburn seats, where she was selected after the constituency’s women revolted against an all-male list. Her husband chauffeured and encouraged her throughout an exhilarating but exhausting campaign which she duly won.

  In the Commons she lined up automatically with the Left. She was one of the Labour MPs who supported Dick Crossman’s 1947 amendment calling on the Attlee Government to recast its foreign policy. She backed the new Keep Left Group. None of this prevented her political advancement. Cripps appointed her his PPS at the Board of Trade and his successor, Harold Wilson, retained her in the post and began an association which lasted 40 years.

  In 1950 she was elected to the women’s section of her party’s national executive. Showing considerable courage, she decided to stand the next year for one of the seven seats in the constituency section. To her astonishment, she came second, only Bevan being ahead of her. The following year the left-wingers won six of the seven seats and the Bevanite movement became a reality.

  The Bevanites were a curious organisation: despite right-wing allegations, they never truly developed into a party within a party. They were not tightly knit. Most of them mistrusted each other. Bevan himself, with a tendency to indolence, had no talent for conspiracy, unlike his front man, Ian Mikardo. Castle once summed up her leader: “Bevan wanted Bevanism without the Bevanites. He hated teamwork.” But while Bevanism may have helped Castle’s popularity with party members, it did not appear to have helped her in her constituency, where she scraped in at the 1955 election by just over 500 votes.

  The next Parliament was not her happiest. She spoke largely on colonial affairs, concentrating on apartheid in South Africa, the Hola camp massacre in Kenya and the struggle for Enosis in Cyprus. It was a visit to Cyprus, where she was interpreted as having been critical of British troops, that got her into trouble with the right-wing press. She even launched a libel action against Christopher Chataway (which she lost), but she rode the storm, increasing her majority at Blackburn in 1959.

  Then, in 1960, Wilson stood against Gaitskell for the party leadership and Castle nominated him. Predictably, Wilson lost and, just as predictably, Gaitskell dropped Castle from her post as front-bench spokesman on Ministry of Works affairs. But, when Gaitskell died in 1963, Wilson replaced him and Castle’s star rose again. Once Labour won
the 1964 election, Wilson made her Minister of Overseas Development. After nearly 20 years spent almost entirely on the back benches, Castle was in the Cabinet.

  Office gave her the fulfilment her restless spirit demanded. Her civil servants appreciated the battles she won to obtain aid for developing countries. Even her enemies, who were plentiful by this time, were forced to admire the burning social conscience which caused the Cabinet and the Treasury to give more to her department than they ever intended.

  Promotion came soon. Wilson appointed her Minister of Transport in 1965, using an advertising slogan of the time to flatter her by saying that he needed “a tiger in the tank”. But at first her appointment was ridiculed as she had never held a driving licence, though this was not for want of effort. Michael Foot had once given her lessons, but after a series of near disasters, including being expelled from the Regent’s Park circuit as a danger to other road users, both decided that regard for each other’s safety demanded an end to the experiment.

  She took advantage of preparatory work done by Tom Fraser, her predecessor, and produced no fewer than four White Papers before introducing her Transport Bill. This set up three new state bodies — the National Freight Corporation, the National Bus Company and the Scottish Transport Group. The Bill was an impressive achievement, though it failed in her original hope of solving the problem of the railways, where it soon became clear that there was no core of profitable lines and that continuing and increasing subsidies would be needed.

  Her most spectacular act was the introduction of the Breathalyser. She was denounced by sections of the liquor trade, but fewer road deaths, reliably attributed to the consequent change in driving habits, made it one of the most beneficial acts of her career. At the time, she was against random breath-testing, but later, as a backbencher, she reversed her position.

  Her time at Transport was a golden period. No section of new motorway was opened without a photograph of her. In 1967 she was voted the best-known member of the Cabinet after Wilson, and people began to talk of her, with some reason, as Wilson’s successor. When she was promoted in 1968 to become Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity, with the rank and additional title of First Secretary, she seemed the Prime Minister’s closest colleague.

  But her new post, which carried such promise, always contained the possibility of disaster. Ray Gunter had famously described the old Ministry of Labour — before Castle renamed and reshaped it — as “the bed of nails”. On the night of her appointment she wrote in her diary: “I am under no illusion that I may be committing political suicide.” In her case she was nearly right.

  Castle’s first inheritance was a Prices and Incomes Bill about which she had reservations. She believed in the policy as a whole but her trouble was that large sections of the Labour movement did not. At the 1968 party conference a resolution to abandon the policy was carried by five million votes to just over a million. Castle ignored the warning. She came top of the voting for the executive’s constituency section and, encouraged by this, she returned to London determined to do something about the unions.

  Wilson, harried by unofficial strikes, had set up a royal commission under Lord Donovan in an effort to find a solution. The report was on Castle’s desk. She accepted the general tenor of the report, which was fairly acceptable to the unions, but she went well beyond it. With her advisers she produced her own plan to delay and possibly defuse unofficial strikes. It called for pre-strike ballots, a 28-day conciliation period and settlements to be imposed where unofficial action came from inter-union disputes. It also proposed penalties — the hated penal clauses — if the new rules were breached.

  At her husband’s suggestion, she called the White Paper outlining her proposals In Place of Strife, an obvious echo of the title of Aneurin Bevan’s book In Place of Fear. If she hoped by this to gain left-wing support, she failed. Her proposals produced more strife in her party than anything since the dispute over nuclear disarmament.

  But Wilson was captivated by her plan. He saw it as a vote-winner and believed it could get through the Commons. He was soon disabused. In the spring of 1969, when it was debated in the House, 55 Labour MPs voted against it and some 40 abstained. Worse was to come.

  Three weeks later, at a meeting of the national executive, James Callaghan, then Home Secretary, opposed the scheme. With the active help of Douglas Houghton, his old colleague from the tax officers’ union who was now chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, he worked diligently to organise opposition. By this he risked being sacked from the Cabinet, but Wilson, fearful of union reaction, held back. Castle realised the danger, calling Callaghan “the snake lurking in the grass”. They had been old opponents when on different wings of the party. Now they became outright enemies and remained so for the rest of their careers.

  Wilson, who had hoped for a short, quick Bill, found himself bogged down. His Cabinet was divided. He began to display irritation, petulance and, it was said, some evidence of fear at Cabinet meetings. His position seemed in genuine danger, and supporters of Callaghan and Jenkins began seriously to weigh up their chances for the succession. But they could never combine and Wilson scraped through.

  But the plan to tackle the unions did not. Robert Mellish, the new Chief Whip, announced it would never get through the Commons. Castle’s original backers, including Peter Shore, Wilson’s particular protégé, and Roy Jenkins, the Chancellor, withdrew their support. Wilson and Castle were isolated. The Prime Minister railed against the deserters, calling them “the weak sisters”. The decisive meeting with the TUC ended with the unions offering “a solemn and binding undertaking” — later a much derided phrase — to intervene in unofficial strikes.

  In fact, the unions kept to the agreement pretty well and unofficial strikes were reduced. But that was not the way Parliament, the press and the public saw it. The next day many papers carried the headline “Surrender”. And that was the impression which remained at the 1970 general election.

  Castle was shattered by the experience. There was some consolation soon afterwards when her Equal Pay Bill got through Parliament, but her defeat by the unions haunted her. Eventually there was grudging admission by some of her opponents that perhaps they would have done better to accept the reforms proposed by Castle rather than wait for the swingeing limitations imposed by Margaret Thatcher. But this acknowledgement came too late to revive any chance she might have had of becoming the first woman Prime Minister or even the first woman Foreign Secretary. She was even voted out of the Shadow Cabinet.

  Wilson, somewhat to his surprise, won a narrow victory in the first election of 1974 and Castle, equally to her surprise, was recalled to Government as Secretary of State for Health and Social Security. It was Wilson’s tribute to her loyalty as well as testimony to her undiminished energy.

  She repaid his confidence by showing all her old spirit in her new post. She launched an ambitious pensions plan and fought a series of battles with the hospital consultants in a bid to phase out pay-beds. She considered that her main achievement was the introduction of the Child Benefit Act, switching the male tax allowance for children directly to the mothers. This was in its final stages in 1976 when Wilson resigned. Callaghan sent for her almost immediately and said he wanted her post in order to make way for younger people. She said she was tempted to say: “Why not start with yourself?” She was 66; he was 64.

  Barbara Castle: an “astute, accomplished combative and controversial” minister

  She had realised her Commons career was coming to end but wanted to see her Child Benefit Act through its final stages. She was devastated by her sudden dismissal. She felt she had been “discarded like a piece of old junk”.

  She sat out the rest of the Parliament and then, to general surprise, she left Westminster in 1979 and was elected to the European Parliament. She had been a consistent opponent of entry into what was then still called the Common Market and had campaigned in the 1975 referendum for Britain to leave. Now she came to w
ork in Strasbourg herself. Though she could never be described as communautaire, she gradually relaxed her outright opposition.

  While she continued to maintain that Britain had entered on the wrong terms, she now believed that her country should try to change the European Union from within. She became quite a figure at Strasbourg, leading the British Labour MPs and becoming vice-chairman of the Socialist Group. When she retired from the Parliament in 1989 she moved almost immediately to another — to the House of Lords as Baroness Castle of Blackburn.

  Although she spoke occasionally in the Upper House her activities tended to diminish. Her eyesight was failing and so was a little of her spirit — which made the cruel caricature of her in David Hare’s play The Absence of War (1993) all the more hurtful. Despite voting for John Prescott in the 1994 leadership election, she initially became reconciled to the prospect of a Blair Government.

  But before long she grew restive under the regime of new Labour. Although Tony Blair had put in an appreciated appearance at her 85th birthday party at Brighton in 1995, her attitude towards the leadership had by the following year become distinctly more critical. Just as in 1943 she had seized the headlines with a fiery speech calling on her leaders to show boldness in introducing the welfare state, so more than half a century later at Blackpool in 1996 she repeated the performance with another firework display that the party leadership could well have done without.

  Within a few days of her 86th birthday, she had to be helped to the rostrum. But she soon proved that she knew how to use her frailty to her own advantage. She achieved what must have been a record for a speaker from the floor. She not only gained a standing ovation at the end of her speech but she also received one before she even reached the microphone.

  In the early days of the Blair leadership she had been careful to support it — “anything for a Labour Government, dear” was the view she expressed in private — but she became increasingly anxious about the way new Labour was developing. Her apprehensions surfaced at the 1995 conference when she pleaded eloquently for more money to be spent on pensions. She savaged Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman as effectively as she had assailed other leaders in the past. It was a Bevanite speech from one of the last survivors of the Bevanites.