Chapter One
Roots
What is this the sound and rumour? What is this that all men hear?
Like the wind in hollow valleys when the storm is drawing near,
Like the rolling on of ocean in the eventide of fear?
'Tis the people marching on.
William Morris
Shortly before 1 a.m. on a cold starry night on 18 February 1949, a crowd of 3,000 cheering people heard the Mayor of Batley declare the results of the town's parliamentary by-election. Many had waited for two hours and Mum and I were among them. She had toiled in the mill all day and I had come from the office where I worked as a secretary. My brief ambition to be a professional dancer on the West End stage was long over. I was on the point of becoming totally committed to politics.
Batley was a short bus ride away from our home in the West Riding of Yorkshire and we had campaigned for Labour's man, Dr A. D. D. Broughton.
I did not know what his initials stood for until I caught up with him in the House of Commons a few years later. But that did not matter. They gave his supporters the homespun slogan: 'ADD Broughton to Labour's majority at Westminster!' which was what the good folk of Batley and Morley duly did, with a thumping turnout of 82 per cent.
There were no spin-doctors to advise us how to win votes but we managed well enough without them. We had enthusiasm and energy and faith in what Mr Attlee's Government was doing to make life better for working people, and that is what we were in my family.
When Dr Broughton's victory was announced, Mum and I joined other party supporters in singing the first and last verses of the Red Flag, after which we walked home because the buses had stopped. I was nineteen and this was the perfect ending to an experience that would influence everything that followed. I had loved every minute of the election - the comradeship, the hustle and bustle in the party committee rooms where we were told which streets to canvass, and the fascination of meeting the people who opened their doors to us. Above all, there was the fun of meeting other youngsters in the Labour League of Youth, which became my passport to a lifetime in politics and public service.
No conversion to a cause was required to make me what I became. What followed confirmed everything I had known since childhood. The Labour Party defined our inborn convictions and outward hopes. It was social as much as political. I graduated as a campaigner during years of accompanying my mother to weekly meetings of the Labour women's section in Ben Riley Hall, Dewsbury, where everyone enjoyed each other's company over tea and biscuits as they embroidered pillowcases and tray-covers to raise funds for the party at Christmas bazaars.
Nothing could have been more natural than my becoming an active party member. My route was only unusual because my teenage ambition was to entertain people and help them forget their worries, not to transform their lives through political action.
In March, Mum and I canvassed to save another Labour seat in nearby Sowerby, after the resignation of John Belcher, a junior Minister in the Attlee Government who was questioned about allegations of corruption by the Lynskey Tribunal. Labour held on but the Tory vote surged and went on rising in the Leeds West by-election in July, where we worked to get Charlie Pannell elected. Attlee called a general election in the following February and scraped back at the head of an exhausted and soon to be divided party.
But that did not deter me. I had found my real vocation. I wanted to work for the Labour Party and one day, maybe, become an MP myself.
We lived at 24 Marriott Street, Dewsbury, a back-to-back stone house in the heavy textile area of Yorkshire. I was born there on 8 October 1929, three years after the General Strike and three weeks before the Wall Street Crash. My parents were Archibald and Mary Boothroyd. He was forty-three and she was twenty-seven, and I was their only child. My arrival, seven months after their wedding, delighted them both, but especially Dad, who had thought he would never be a father.
He wanted to call me Hannah, but Mum thought otherwise and I was duly named Betty. She may have objected to Hannah because it was the name of Dad's first wife, who had died two years previously, as well as his mother's name. At any rate, I am glad Mum had her way. Betty suited me fine.
I suppose we were what people call a house-proud family, even though we had few amenities. Mum and I took it in turns to wash our front steps and the flagstones on either side. I was very good at it, and neighbours gave me tuppence pocket money for doing theirs on Friday nights and Saturday mornings. We rubbed the edges of the black steps with a white pebble we got from the beach at Bridlington. That showed each step clearly when we were going in and out. Then we ruddled or reddened the flagstones nearest the wall on each side of the steps to make the front of the house look nice. We bought the ruddling stone from a tinkerman who came round on a horse and cart, selling pots and pans and the like. Everybody in our street did it. It was an old Yorkshire custom. We also scrubbed the front windowsill, where we grew nasturtiums in a windowbox, sharing the seeds with our neighbours. Our life revolved around a regular routine: good preparation for the disciplines of my later years.
Everything in our house was done methodically. Dad lit the boiler on Mondays to provide hot water to wash our clothes, and again on Fridays for bathtime in a zinc tub in front of the open fire. The black-leaded fireplace sparkled from our polishing. Dad scattered wet tea leaves on the carpets to draw out the dust, which he then swept up with a bristle hand-brush, on his hands and knees. Monday nights were washnights, Tuesday nights were spent ironing, Wednesday nights were for cleaning the bedrooms, Thursday nights for cleaning the rest of the house. On Friday nights Mum did the weekend baking. Some of the best Yorkshire puddings ever tasted came out of the side oven of the fireplace.
Mum served her puddings separately with onion gravy, at Sunday dinner. During the hard-up 1930s this was a commonplace means of reducing our appetite for meat and saving money. Vegetables were boiled on a gas ring and other dishes on the fire, where a kettle of hot water was always on hand.
We lived in a part of Dewsbury called Eastborough, a close-knit community in which people shared their problems and looked out for each other. Our front door opened directly on to the terraced street and our house was joined to those on either side and at the rear - hence the term back-to-back. Such houses had no gardens or even a yard. The density of population, some 700-1,000 people packed into rows of small houses that have long since been demolished, is now a folk memory in the North of England. But it was not all bad. There was no crime, and children could play safely and wander at will.
We were better off than many. Dad had earned good money when he was younger and bought some high-quality furniture when he was first married. He and Hannah Boothroyd lived a few doors away from where I was later born. The houses were all rented and people moved from one to another, as we did, with little formality.
Dad was a proud, independent man, who put family life first and my welfare before anything else. My arrival gave his life new meaning at a time when he most needed it. For him, as for millions of others, the Great Depression between the wars led to long stretches of unemployment. But he was neither bitter nor dejected, and stressed the importance of maintaining high personal standards. He and Mum were a remarkable partnership of loving, practical and hard-working people who poured all their ambitions into me. And being an only child meant that I was at the undisputed centre of their lives. No matter how fierce the gales outside, I was always watched over.
Mum found work easier to get than Dad did, for the simple reason that women's wages were much lower than men's, a fact she drilled into me. So while she worked in the woollen mills, he spent his time on the dole busying himself with household chores behind drawn curtains so that the neighbours could not see him. He and Mum met in a local mill where he was a weftman and she was a weaver. As weftman, he had a lot of responsibility: he was the warehouse stockman who checked that the count, size and colour of the yarn were correct before it was supplied to a particular loom. Mum married late for those times, probably because of family responsibilities.
My first real memory is of Dad standing by the fireplace when I was small and of feeling totally loved. He was my earliest playmate and I was never lonely or bored. I had no need of expensive playthings, for he taught me rhymes as soon as I could talk and made rough toys for me with bits of wood and leather. He was wonderfully inventive and full of fun. He put wheels on a box and pushed me around the house as if I were a lady in a chauffeur-driven car. When it snowed, he made me a sledge. Hard winters were doubly appreciated because he found work shovelling snow for the Town Corporation.
But Eastborough was undeniably grim. Washing hung on lines across the street and there were passages every six houses or so, called ginnels, through which children ran from street to street. However, we had enough to eat and our neighbours took me into their homes as if I was one of their own. There was a huge sense of community in my home town - and much the same spirit exists there still. That strong feeling of belonging is something I've always found in the North of England and even now, if asked, I say that my home is in the West Riding of Yorkshire. It's often hard to explain to outsiders exactly where such feelings come from, but I believe that local papers play a big part in capturing the essence of their communities, and the Dewsbury Reporter has always had a key role in our town's life. Weekly markets, too, are a feature of country-town communities, especially in the North, and I for one miss the bustle and excitement we used to feel every market day. Supermarkets just aren't the same!
We've been lucky in Dewsbury, too, that the rows of old terraced houses in which I was brought up haven't been replaced by tower blocks. New, clean, low-rise public housing has allowed our town to retain a sense of neighbourliness and a pride in itself that I don't see in the high-rise developments of the big cities.
The boundaries of my childhood were marked by Caulms Wood, a hilly area at the end of our street, a school and two churches on the road to the town centre. I was christened in one of them, St Philip's Church of England, and went to Brownies at the other, the Baptist chapel. I have been ecumenically minded ever since.
Our house had a good-sized living room, carpeted with a linoleum surround, and a kitchen area in one corner, served by a cold-water tap. Food was stored on stone slabs in the cellar, where we kept the bread fresh in a large stone jar. We had two bedrooms. My parents had a mirrored wardrobe in theirs, where we hung all our clothes. My room contained a bamboo table and a whatnot in the corner.
Three popular prints hung on the walls. There was The Laughing Cavalier, Cromwell's Roundheads asking the Royalist boy when he last saw his father, and The Boyhood of Raleigh, in which young Walter points out to sea as he talks excitedly to two old worthies. Dewsbury was a long way from the open seas, but this picture appealed to my romantic instincts. The seaside meant a lot to working people in the old West Riding of Yorkshire, situated halfway between the Irish Sea (across the Pennines) and the North Sea (across the Yorkshire Dales).
Visiting the town centre on Saturday afternoons was a great treat too. Mum dressed me up and a ten-minute walk brought us to the covered market place, where thousands of shoppers poured in from the surrounding towns. Dewsbury's confident Victorian character had a huge influence on my adolescent years. We could do little about the Depression that was blighting the whole of industrial Britain, but we could make our own fun and we did so with panache.
Dewsbury was blessed with its own theatre, the Empire Palace, built in 1901 and offering escapism, drama, glamour and popular entertainment in large doses. It was one of the best-loved theatres in the provinces and I found its appeal irresistible. Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel played on the same bill there before leaving to make their names in Hollywood. Top stars could attract audiences of 1,600 sitting, with another 1,300 standing. The crush was so great that the balcony's metal girder buckled once under the strain.
George Formby, Vera Lynn, the young Anthony Newley and the Irish tenor Josef Locke all appeared at the Empire. Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise starred there in pantomime before they won the nation's hearts on television. Eric was born nearby, at Ardsley, and Ernie bought his wife's engagement ring in Dewsbury. I was thrilled when Ernie and his wife Doreen attended the ceremony to make me a Freeman of the City of London in 1993 and we recalled the Empire with great affection. Sadly, it closed in 1955, a victim of television. But to us it was a special place, where working people could exchange the rigours of their daily lives for the opulence of upholstered seating, velvet curtains and an eight-hundredweight chandelier.
My family's antecedents are something of a blur and I never knew my grandparents. Dad's father, Walter Boothroyd, was described on my parents' marriage certificate as a chemical worker; Mum's father, Harry Butterfield, as a blanket finisher. Her own mother died soon after giving birth to Mum, who was brought up by Grandad Butterfield. He lived with us for a while before moving in with Aunty Sarah, another of his daughters, who had a bigger house. Poor people who could no longer look after themselves were often forced to live in the municipal workhouse, where married couples were separated. None of my family suffered that, thank God. We would not have allowed it to happen. But we did not escape the low life-expectancy that cut a swathe through many working-class families in the first decades of the twentieth century.
One aspect of our family's history did register with me. Mum and Dad had different religions; she was a Catholic and he, in so far as he was anything, was a Protestant. The Butterfields were presumably Catholics, because Grandad Butterfield sent Mum and her sister Sarah to St Paulinus RC School in Dewsbury. It was not a happy experience for Mum. She was left-handed when the conventional theory was that children ought to be right-handed, and this made her a disciplinary target for the nuns, who decided to cure what they regarded as an impediment. They rapped her knuckles whenever they saw her writing with her left hand and finally forced her into submission. It was a cruel but common punishment for left-handers and meant that her handwriting was barely legible for the rest of her life.
As a right-hander, I didn't have this particular problem, but in general Mum was determined that I would be spared such a rigid regime. Her wedding at St Ignatius Catholic Church in Ossett was her final act as a Catholic. Dad must have promised that any child would be raised a Catholic - and I was already on the way. But he reneged and I was not, even though the nuns regularly tried to take me to church and to the local Catholic school. This led to doorstep rows, during which Dad refused to back down. He ignored the nuns' protests and sent them angrily away.
Mum hated rows and hid during these confrontations, but she must have been a willing party to the breach. None of this was explained to me at the time and I did not enquire about it. She was content for me to go with my playmates to the Church of England, where I sang in the choir. I enjoyed it, but was never confirmed.
When I became Speaker, I cherished my links with St Margaret's, Parliament's parish church. But I have never been a regular church-goer. I am happy to pray with anybody and to meet people of any denomination - be they a cardinal, rabbi, Muslim elder or Salvation Army captain.
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