The day I met Barbara Castle: Inspiring Women for International Women's Day

Barbara Castle would always have been one of my inspirational figures.  I grew up in a household where being awkward and passionate were valued qualities, if not the source of numerous arguments.  A trailblazing firebrand, what exactly isn’t to like?
 I admired just about everything about her, from her politics, to her unwillingness to suffer fools, and the way she wouldn’t be bound by convention on how women should live their lives.  (The Daily Mail would have been choking itself on a daily basis over her).  Many of the policies she drove through are still impacting on and improving women and their families’ lives – the introduction of the breathalyser, the seatbelt, equal pay, pensions reform, free family planning clinics, and child benefit – critically, and pioneeringly, paid to women.

But in my early twenties something happened that cemented her influence on my life in a way that I could never have predicted and which would never leave me.  I emerged from my degree mid-recession, and was faced with the realisation that a politics degree from a very average university was not going to bag me the nice little newspaper research job I had been anticipating.  Mid-panic I wrote to an MP I admired offering my services voluntarily (this was in the days when the Jobcentre encouraged this sort of thing).  It was a long shot, but amazingly he bit, and even more amazingly he gave me an open remit to research the history of the labour movement in his consistency.  This turned out to have the most fascinating links to the communist party, wartime peace movements, volunteers for the International Brigade, and just incredible levels of community solidarity during the Miners’ Strike.  I literally couldn’t have predicted it would be any more interesting.  I spent a wonderful summer immersed in the archives of the South Wales Miners’ Library, wading through transcripts, minutes, photographs, clippings.  The library was this big old house; there were rabbits bounding past the windows.  I felt like I was in Brideshead Revisited.  And it was here that I discovered that I loved the puzzle, the peace, the urgency and suspense of research.   It also gave me the idea for my PhD; there was not one part of the experience that I wouldn’t recommend.  By the time I’d finished writing about it all a year or so later, the MP secured a bit of money to publish it a local history booklet, and he wanted to organise a Party event to publicise it.  He asked if I had any ideas about who to invite as the honorary speaker, and before I could answer, asked how I would feel about Barbara Castle?  How I would feel??  There aren’t really any words for that kind of wonderful unpredictability.  And so proceeded the most surreal experience of my life. It still doesn’t seem real now, like it happened to someone else.

The night Barbara Castle swept into the local town hall from that glamorous London, she was presented with a sherry and a plastic chair, and looked for all the world like a film star.  She was in her 80s at the time, and her presence took your breath away.  She was the most peerlessly charismatic person I’ve ever met.  And she took time to talk to people as individuals - not working the room in that contrived way, but unhurried, interested conversations.  Everyone wanted her ear, and she gave it willingly.  She asked me if I was nervous to be talking tonight, and I replied that I was (although not so much as I was to be meeting my heroine).  She replied that her dad would take her out campaigning as a young woman, and the advice he gave her was that if people didn’t like your performance then you just got back up again and tried again.  And again, and again, until they listened.  I can’t think of a single modern politician who would have bothered to engage in a more than cursory acknowledgement with pond life like me. 

Obviously her speech was captivating, as they always were.   Afterwards she stayed and talked and talked to the packed hall that had amassed to see her.   I’ve thought about what she said to me a lot over the years, words that came and went in an instant, but it’s a message that’s stayed with me.  That some things are too important to give up on.  Sometimes you have to drop your ego and be prepared look a bit stupid to be in it for the long haul. 

“I will fight for what I believe in until I drop dead. And that's what keeps you alive.”

                                      Barbara Castle in The Guardian, 14 January 1998 (1910-2002)



Oh and I know this blog is supposed to be about the anonymity, but this is all SO long ago that I'm pretty sure my own mother wouldn't recognise me now.  My children didn't!