Clara Rackham

Clara (centre front), with her father Henry and mother Emma, sister Margaret and brother Francis

Clara Dorothea Rackham (3 December 1875 – March 11, 1966) was an English politician active in the women's suffrage, co-operative, peace, adult education, and labour movements.[1] She was a social reformer, magistrate, Poor Law Guardian, factory Inspector, educator, and penal reformer, who represented the people of Cambridge and the surrounding areas as a long-serving city and county councillor and was the vice-chairman of Cambridge County Council from 1956-1958.

Family and early life

Clara Rackham (known as Dorothea to her family) was born in Notting Hill, the daughter of Henry Tabor, a gentleman farmer from a non-conformist family based in Bocking in Essex and Emma Tabor (née Woodcock) who came from Wigan.[1] She was educated at Notting Hill High School, St Leonards School (1892–3), Bedford College in 1894, and like her older sister, Margaret, attended Newnham College, Cambridge.[1]

At Newnham College (1895–8) Clara studied classics but much of her time was taken up with outdoor pursuits and with politics. She was a prominent supporter of the Liberal Party in the Newnham College Political Society, a proficient long-distance cyclist, swam regularly in the river Cam, and was captain of the university women's hockey team. Clara left with the equivalent of a third-class degree (women were not officially allowed to graduate from Cambridge University until 1948). However, she had made a lifelong friend in another Newnham College student, Susan Lawrence, one of the first three women to be elected to parliament as Labour MPs,and had also met her future husband, Harris Rackham, a lecturer in classics at Newnham college from 1893.[2] Harris, a brother of Arthur Rackham, best-known as the illustrator of The Wind in the Willows, became a Senior Fellow at Christ's College in 1899. The couple married in 1901 and lived in Grange Road before setting up home in a georgian house in Park Terrace with a pleasant view overlooking Parker's Piece in 1925.The marriage was a happy one and lasted until Harris's death in 1944. Clara remained in the house until 1957.

Clara established the Cambridge branch of the Co-operative Women's Guild]] and became its president, remaining active in her local group for over twenty years, writing on the value of co-operative ideals in Cambridge: A Brief Study in Social Questions (1906) edited by Eglantyne Jebb. Jebb founded the Save the Children Fund in 1919 to raise money for German and Austrian children. In 1923 Clara served on the birth control subcommittee of the Standing Joint Committee of Industrial Women's Organizations (SJCIWO) and by 1930 had become chairman of the organisation.[3] Clara chaired the National Conference of Labour Women at the Kingsway Hall in London where SJCIWO put forward two reports for discussion; on abolition of the marriage bar, and on equal pay for equal work.[4] In Cambridge she worked closely with her good friend, the Homerton College-trained Leah Manning[5] (President of the National Union of Teachers in 1930, elected as the Labour MP for Islington in 1928 and then for Epping in 1945). Manning was involved with Clara in a school for disadvantaged children in one of the poorer areas of Cambridge in a building in Young Street which is now the site of Anglia Ruskin University Music Therapy Department. In the 1930s Clara supported Manning's initiatives in parliament to welcome Basque children to Britain who were seeking refuge during the Spanish Civil War and some were given homes in Cambridge

The Liberal Party

The youthful Clara was an admirer of William Gladstone and joined the Liberal Party in the early 1900s. She was the leader of the college Liberal group at Newnham College and spoke persuasively in student debates. When Gladstone died in 1898 on the day before she was due to begin part one of the Classical Tripos she was not told the news in case she were to do badly.[6] Clara is first listed as a host of a public meeting in an advertisement that appeared on 24 October 1902 in The Cambridge Independent Press.[7] Her attendance is reported at the public meeting on 29 October 1902 held at the old Sturton Hall. The Liberal Party were protesting against the Education Bill which would have excluded women from their role on school boards.[8] Clara's objection to the legislation was that it removed the right of women to be elected by local voters to their existing roles and made them reliant on the consent of other members of boards rather than a direct mandate from the people.[9]

Leading suffragist

Like other suffragists from a privileged background Clara was brought into direct contact with the plight of the poor and disadvantaged through her work as a Poor Law Guardian and was shocked by what she saw. Her experiences with poor relief for the Castle End ward of Cambridge (1904–15) reinforced her conviction that it was necessary for women to have the vote.[10] Adela Adam, a classicist at Girton College and mother of Barbara Wootton (later Baroness Wootton of Abinger), persuaded Clara to join the Cambridge Women's Suffrage Association.[9] This was a branch of the constitutional, non-militant National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies. the president of which was the veteran suffragist, Millicent Garrett Fawcett. Clara proved to be a first-class organiser, giving rousing speeches, and touring the surrounding villages to drum up support. Cambridge sent a sizeable contingent of law abiding suffragists to the Great Pilgrimage that converged on Hyde Park in 1913. Clara joined the procession to London at Burwell. She was elected to the executive committee of the Eastern Federation of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies in 1910 and to the executive committee of the NUWSS which she chaired from 1909-1915. Clara steered the national organisation through its most turbulent period in 1915 with tact and skill when Millicent Fawcett's qualified support for women's involvement in the war effort was opposed by a majority of the NUWSS committee, and by large sections of the membership who were either pacifists in sympathy or interested in ending the war by securing a negotiated peace with Germany.

Clara managed to combine her deep personal loyalty to Fawcett with her own principled opposition to the war by the advocacy of a compromise whereby the NUWSS would agree to support women's war work in principle but individual members would be permitted to pursue whatever activities they wished either in support of the women's war effort or to bring about peace. Clara's proposal was accepted as NUWSS policy thereby averting the very real danger of the organisation falling apart. Clara had no formal legal training but from 1923-1931 she edited, and often wrote, a legal column for The Women's Leader, the journal of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, the body that succeeded the NUWSS in 1919 after women over thirty had received the vote in 1918.

Factory inspector

During The First World War Clara worked as a factory inspector for the Home Office resigning from the executive committee of the NUWSS in 1915 order to do so; one of four women appointed to temporary positions on 25 October 1915 and working alongside Annette Tawney, wife of the philosopher R. H. Tawney.[11] She was deployed initially in Lancashire and then in the London area. The post meant that she had to turn down the offer of an academic position at Bedford College in the University of London, which was founded as a women's college, because she could not be spared.[12] She also worked voluntarily in the University of Liverpool Settlement.[13]

From 1930 to 1932 Clara served on the Royal Commission on Unemployment Insurance where she clashed with the cotton industry administrator Raymond Streat who thought unemployment benefits (the dole) too high, and wrongly assumed this was the consensus on the Commission.[14] Clara was a signatory to a Minority Report by the Labour Party members on the Commission in 1933. She later published a short book in which she demonstrated her own expertise on factory conditions, Factory Law in 1938. She was an early advocate of the 40 hour week.

    Labour Party politician in Cambridge

    At the end of the First World War Clara joined the Labour Party though she stood as an Independent representing the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC) in the Cambridge town council election of March 1919.[15] Clara developed a close relationship with Hugh Dalton, who was to become Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Attlee ministry of 1945, and campaigned for Dalton when he contested the Cambridge By-election in 1922. Dalton was defeated and for personal and political reasons, their friendship was broken off.[16]

    Clara held numerous elected positions in Cambridge. Such was the respect with which she was held by all who worked with her that she was made an Alderman by both the City and the County Council. She was first elected as a councillor for West Chesterton in north Cambridge (1919-22) and was later returned for Romsey, a solidly working-class area of the city on the unfashionable side of the railway bridge in which many of the families of local railway workers lived in 1929. Leah Manning remembered that, during the General Strike of 1926, the Cambridge strike headquarters was in the Rackham's basement kitchen.[17]

    Clara stood for parliament twice with no success: she was defeated in Chelmsford (1922) and lost heavily to a rising star in the Conservative Party, the sitting MP, R. A. Butler, in Saffron Walden (1935).[10][12] Her reputation is therefore inextricable linked to the fortunes of the city which she loved, and, with exception of the few years in which she worked as a factory inspector, the city which she never left. The civic history of Cambridge in the early twentieth-century is marked by the prominence of an unusually large number of gifted women with a strong social conscience who had had close personal connections to Cambridge University. The names of Clara Rackham, Eva Hartree, Florence Ada Keynes, and others became synonymous with tireless public service for the good of the wider community. The indomitable commitment to the ordinary people of the city that they demonstrated throws the opposition between 'town' and 'gown' which is widely reproduced in the familiar histories of Cambridge into question. Clara fought innumerable battles to improve living conditions for the working-class communities in the north and east of the city, lobbying hard for the indoor heated swimming pool on a site in Cambridge she knew well and could see from her drawing room window; the corner of Parker's Piece and Mill Road. Today's light and airy glass pool remains as one of her lasting achievements. She opened the Rock Road public library and also helped to finance, and was one of the driving forces behind, the construction of the Labour Club on Mill Road which was built by voluntary labour in the 1920s. Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister, laid the foundation stone in 1926 and Clara spoke at the opening ceremony in 1928.

    Magistrate and penal reformer

    Clara became a magistrate in 1920, and, with Flora Ada Keynes (mother of the economist, John Maynard Keynes) and Edith Bethune Baker, was one of the first women in Cambridge to serve on the bench. The work of the criminal justice system, and, in particular, the way in which the law dealt with juvenile offenders, became a central concern for her throughout her life. Margery Fry, director of the Howard League for Penal Reform from its inception in 1921, and another JP, was a good friend.[10] Clara joined the Howard League and worked with Clara Martineau of Birmingham City Council as part of a group reporting on child sexual abuse to parliament in 1925.[18] Clara was also a founder-member of the Magistrates' Association in 1927 and an advocate of probation, and opponent of corporal punishment.[10] ln 1933 she wrote to The Manchester Guardian regarding the recent Children and Young Persons Act and drew attention to the range of options made available to magistrates when dealing with children in need of care or protection while criticising aspects of the legislation for not going far enough.[19] In 1933 she argued that no young person under the age of 17 should be sent to prison. At the time the age limit was 14.[19] She resigned as a magistrate in 1950, and from her other committees when she became aware that loss of hearing had made it virtually impossible for her to carry on.[20]

    Pioneering broadcaster

    Clara was a pioneering broadcaster in the early days of BBC radio in the 1920s and one of the first women to be heard on the airwaves. She gave talks on the work of a magistrate, and on legal matters.[21] A series How we Manage Our Affairs in 1929 began with a talk "How we Elect our Councillors".[22]

    Education

    Clara was chair of the Cambridge County Council Education Committee from 1945 to 1957 and took a strong interest in nursery education and in education in the early years. She was a personal friend of Henry Morris, the innovative Director of Education for Cambridgeshire from 1922, and shared his visionary ideal of the 'village college'. Village colleges combined secondary education with community and adult education and were set up in Sawston, Bottisham, Bassingbourn, Comberton, Impington, Linton and elsewhere in the countryside surrounding Cambridge. However, she never fully embraced the Labour Party's post-war support for comprehensive education believing that small selective grammar schools were of more benefit to working-class children.[4] She served with Lilian Mary Hart Clark on the governing body of the Cambridge School of Arts, Crafts and Technology, which was renamed the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology in 1958, and Anglia Ruskin University in 2005. A large modern building containing laboratories and teaching rooms was erected on the Cambridge campus in 1972 and named Rackham in her honour. This was demolished in 2009. She had a lifelong interest in the education of working people, was a part-time lecturer in social history and local government for the Workers' Educational Association, and elected Chairman of the WEA Eastern District. She always valued and retained her links with Newnham College where she organised a summer school for working women and was on the college's governing body from 1920 to 1940 and on the Newnham College council from 1924-1931.

    The Peace Movement

    Like many former suffragists Rackham placed her hopes for peace in the League of Nations between the wars and she attended meetings of the local Cambridge branch whenever she could. At the height of the Cold War, when the country was beset with fears of a nuclear war breaking out between the Soviet Union and the United States, Clara joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament which was founded in 1958 to call for Britain to lead the world in getting rid of nuclear weapons by disarming unilaterally. She also took part in the annual CND march from Aldermaston to London, participating in her last procession in 1961, at the age of eighty-five.

    Final years

    Clara became a well-known figure in Cambridge in her later years, riding everywhere on her bicycle, doing voluntary work in the community, enjoying her contact with young and old alike, adjusting with indomitable good humour to her own loss of hearing, and reading aloud to the partially sighted. In 1962 she delivered her last speech at the Golden Jubilee of the Cambridge Branch of the National Council for Women of Great Britain. In 1993 the editors of The Dictionary of Labour Biography stated that they had been overwhelmed by the public response to a letter requesting information about Clara's life and work which they had sent toThe Cambridge Evening News in 1980.[4] Although she had been brought up as an Anglican her outlook on life became decidedly secular over the years and she eventually joined the Humanist Association. Joyce Bellamy and Eileen Price note that Clara had come to adopt the practice of waiting outside the borough council chamber until the prayers before council meetings had finished. She also refused the Mayoralty of the borough of Cambridge because she did not wish to take part in religious observances while agreeing to chair meetings of Cambridge City Council which were not preceded by prayers (1956-1958).[4] She declined the Freedom of the City of Cambridge requesting instead that a bench be placed outside the Meadowcroft retirement home on Trumpington Road for the use of the residents. She also refused to have a bust of herself displayed in Shire Hall during her lifetime but said that the council could do whatever they thought was appropriate after her death. [23] Clara died peacefully in Langdon House residential home in 1966 after enjoying her 90th birthday celebrations which were attended by scores of friends and well-wishers from the organisations in Cambridge which she had supported over the years. A tribute written in the Newnham College Roll Letter in 1967 reads:

    Anyone who studies the social reforms of the century in Cambridge will see how much they owe to Mrs Rackham's devoted and unstinting championship of the under-privileged. Her aim was to give them a better way of life. Her success is her memorial.[4]

    Publications

    • Contribution to Cambridge: A Brief Study in Social Questions (1906) by Eglantyne Jebb, on co-operation
    • Survey of Cambridge for Social Conditions in Provincial Towns (1912)) by Helen Bosanquet
    • Royal Commission on Unemployment Insurance, abridged minority report (1933, Fabian Society)
    • Factory Law (1938)
    • Lawless Youth. A Challenge to the New Europe. A Policy for the Juvenile Courts prepared by the International Committee of the Howard League for Penal Reform 1942–1945 (1947), with Margery Fry, Max Grünhut, Hermann Mannheim, and Wanda Grabinska.

    Legacy

    In 1944 Clara presented the Central Library in Cambridge with a collection of, for the most part, signed and numbered editions of Arthur Rackham's illustrated books. Rackham Close, in Arbury, Cambridge, is named after her[24] as was a room in the Alex Wood Hall in Norfolk Street, the headquarters of the Cambridge City Labour Party. A bust of Clara was commissioned but its whereabouts today is unknown.

    In 2018 Clara was designated with Leah Manning as one of Cambridge's two women's suffrage pioneers whose lives were chosen to inspire a younger generation of women to engage in public work in their local communities by the Women's Local Government Society. A celebration of Clara Rackham's life and work in words, music and theatre will take place at Anglia Ruskin University in November 2nd 2018 and the unveiling ceremony for the blue plaque at 9 Park Terrace will be held at Newnham College later in the same month.

    References

    1. 1 2 3 Harrison, Brian. "Rackham, Clara Dorothea". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/48589. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
    2. ↑ "Rackham, Harris (RKN887H)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
    3. ↑ Diana Palmer, "Women, Health and Politics, 1919– 1939: Professional and lay involvement in the Women's Health Campaign" (PDF), at p. 125
    4. 1 2 3 4 5 Joyce Bellamy and Eileen Price, Rackham, Clara Dorothea (1875-1966), Labour Alderman, Social Reformer and Educationalist, in Joyce Bellamy and John Saville (eds), Dictionary of Labour Biography (Macmillan: Basingstoke, 1993), pp. 323-238.
    5. ↑ Law (2000). Women: A Modern Political Dictionary. p. 103. ISBN 9781860645020.
    6. ↑ Harrison, Brian. New Dictionary of National Biography.
    7. ↑ "Cambridge Independent Press". 24 October 1902. Retrieved 15 April 2017.
    8. ↑ "Cambridge Independent Press". 30 October 1902. Retrieved 15 April 2017.
    9. 1 2 Ann Oakley (15 August 2011). A Critical Woman: Barbara Wootton, Social Science and Public Policy in the Twentieth Century. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 33. ISBN 978-1-84966-468-4.
    10. 1 2 3 4 Jean Spence; Sarah Aiston; Maureen M. Meikle (10 September 2009). Women, Education, and Agency, 1600–2000. Routledge. pp. 211–3. ISBN 978-1-135-85584-0.
    11. ↑ "Factory and Workshop Acts, 1901 to 1911" (PDF). The London Gazette. 29 October 1915. Retrieved 27 June 2015.
    12. 1 2 Cathy Hartley (15 April 2013). A Historical Dictionary of British Women. Routledge. p. 364. ISBN 978-1-135-35533-3.
    13. ↑ Information provided by Sarah Rackham, Clara's great-niece, April 23, 2018.
    14. ↑ Sir Raymond Streat (1987). Lancashire and Whitehall: The Diary of Sir Raymond Streat. Manchester University Press. p. 45 and note. ISBN 978-0-7190-2390-3.
    15. ↑ Cheryl Law (22 April 2000). Suffrage and Power: The Women's Movement 1918-1928. I.B. Tauris. pp. 123–4. ISBN 978-1-86064-478-8.
    16. ↑ Pimlott, Ben (1986). Hugh Dalton (Papermac ed.). London: Macmillan. pp. 116–9 and 159. ISBN 0333412516.
    17. ↑ Logan (2002), "Making women magistrates" Archived 2015-06-30 at the Wayback Machine., p. 207.
    18. ↑ Louise A. Jackson (11 January 2013). Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England. Routledge. p. 64. ISBN 978-1-134-73665-2.
    19. 1 2 "The Manchester Guardian". Letters to the Editor. 3 November 1933 – via ProQuest.
    20. ↑ Law (2000). Women: A Modern Political Dictionary. pp. 127–8. ISBN 9781860645020.
    21. ↑ Logan (2002), "Making women magistrates" Archived 2015-06-30 at the Wayback Machine., p. 235.
    22. ↑ "Mrs. C. D. Rackham: 'How we Manage Our Affairs-I, How we Elect our Councillors' - 5XX Daventry - 6 November 1929 - BBC Genome". BBC Online. Retrieved 28 June 2015.
    23. ↑ Bellamy and Price, 1993, p.236
    24. ↑ Wimhurst, Tamsin. "Cambridge Women and Work.pdf" (PDF). Cambridge and County Folk Museum. Retrieved 28 July 2018.
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