Meeting a Homerton Hero in the archive
Leah Perrett, second from left, in a Homerton student group 1906-08
Homerton College Archive
Dame Leah Manning, DBE JP MP
Cambridgeshire Collection/Ramsay-Muspratt
Just over a century ago women were allowed for the first time to stand for election to the British parliament, and among the early women to take a seat in the House of Commons was Homerton alumna Leah Manning.
In January this year we celebrated her life by sponsoring a new Blue Plaque in Cambridge, erected on the building where she launched her remarkable career on leaving Homerton in 1908. New Street Ragged School, now the Music Therapy department of Anglia Ruskin University, served a deprived community in Barnwell, an industrial corner of the city.
These plaques - the oldest naming the first Principal to preside over Homerton in its Cambridge incarnation, John Horobin; and the second celebrating the College’s activist alumna Leah Manning, now sit alongside each other in Young Street, off East Road, in Cambridge
The non-denominational charity school at New Street had been renovated with financial support from Homerton College and its Principal, John Horobin. Manning had grown up with Christian Socialist ideals, now reinforced by her indignation at the poverty and malnutrition she witnessed daily amongst the children in her classroom.
She was outspoken in campaigning for provision of milk and meals, energetic in organising after-school activities, recruiting help from university students. She went on to take a leading role in the local Labour Party, and fought hard for women’s rights. In 1920 she helped found a birth control clinic, and the same year was appointed one of Cambridge’s first female magistrates.
Active in the National Union of Teachers, she was one of the first women to be elected President of the NUT in 1930. In the following year she fought and won a parliamentary election, to represent the people of East Islington as their MP.
Her heroic role in evacuating nearly 4,000 refugee children from Bilbao in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, bringing many to Cambridge and East Anglia, has been commemorated in long and warm relations between the UK Basque Children’s Association and Homerton College. It has also been recognised in a recent research project conducted at Anglia Ruskin University.
A wonderful short film (10 mins) produced by Gogora in tribute to Homerton’s Dame Leah Manning, for her role in saving nearly 4,000 children in the Spanish Civil War
In 2018, our 250th anniversary year, the College hosted a celebration of Leah Manning and we were honoured to be joined by Carmen Kilner of the UK Basque Children’s Association, by Gotzone Sagardui Goikoetxea, Deputy Mayor of Bilbao, and Aintzane Ezenarro Egurbide, director of Gogora, The Institute for Remembrance, Coexistence and Human Rights in Bilbao - and especially by two of the evacuees whom Leah Manning saved: Herminio Martinez (who died, aged 89, at the end of the following year) and Ma Luisa Toole.
In comparison to her role in Spain, her extensive contribution over many years to children’s welfare in the UK - Cambridge in particular - both before and after the Spanish Civil War has received less attention. But Homerton, as well as sponsoring a Blue Plaque to publicly mark her work in this city, has increased its archive collection of significant items related to this aspect of Manning’s life over the last few years. These include two records of personal testimony and a little known but significant official publication, all three items recently acquired and accessioned.
Radio transcript
Fifty years after her experience at New Street, Manning gave a talk on national radio and BBC archives hold the script. A transcript of the half-hour broadcast, now accessioned by the college archive, includes this moving detail:
“Our children were out late at night selling papers on the streets; up early in the morning delivering milk; then back at school all day with red, running noses, blue, chilblained fingers and toes poking out of mildewed shoes. I tried to get milk for my necessitous children. But, believe it or not, the school doctor had to verify that the child was actually suffering from malnutrition before he was eligible for school milk. One of my children died – his death hastened by malnutrition. In my outspoken way, I denounced the Committee’s policy – in public – and was only saved by the intervention of my Union. Then I’d made lots of friends in the town as a result of my outburst. University students helped me to start an evening Play Centre. A small fund established by my colleagues enabled us to give the children a mug of cocoa on cold mornings.”
2. Pupil’s testimony
Twenty years on, in 1981, Homerton history lecturer the late Sallie Purkis set an oral history project for students to research school experiences of the 1920s, and her papers too were recently donated to the college archive. One interviewee in her seventies, ‘Mrs C.’, grew up with her three sisters in a tiny two-bedroom house in Barnwell. She entered the Ragged School in 1915.
“It was a very poor school, there were kids who went with hardly any shoes on their feet. I remember one dirty boy who smelt who sat next to me. But I used to love Mrs Manning, she took the top class, which I was in. She had lovely reddy auburn hair and a big bust, which as children we laughed at. … The teachers used to take such a personal interest in you, in the family: I have known Mrs Manning to visit anyone who was ill, she went round to the house to see that they were looked after. … They used to run a play centre and we used to go back at six o’clock. Mrs Manning helped organise quite a lot and the teachers use to be there to look after us. We used to play all sorts of games like Dominoes and Ludo and Snakes and Ladders. … You could read, sometimes they would let you bring a book home, if you were extra interested, to finish reading it. They were very good over things like that. Mrs Manning even used to cut our hair … because it was sixpence to have your hair cut and that was a lot of money. She used to cut it after school hours or in the playtime. ”
3. Blueprint for primary school development
Finally, in 1945 Leah Manning was re-elected as an MP. The post-war Labour government introduce a huge programme of school reforms, aimed at social reconstruction. With the kind of experiences described above, it is no surprise she was commissioned to write a pamphlet explaining for parents and families the needs of young children’s development and how the government aimed to provide these in the new primary schools. A copy of the pamphlet, too has now been acquired by the archive.
