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.

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.

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.

1. 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:

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.

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.