Background, childhood and education Early years Ellen Wilkinson was born on 8 October 1891, at 41 Coral Street in the Manchester district of
Chorlton-on-Medlock. She was the third child and second daughter of Richard Wilkinson, a cotton worker who became an insurance agent, and his wife, Ellen, née Wood. Richard Wilkinson was a pillar of his local
Wesleyan Methodist church, and combined a strong sense of social justice with forthright views on self-help; rather than espousing working-class solidarity his view, according to Ellen, was: "I have pulled myself out of the gutter, why can't they?" Entirely self-educated, he ensured that his children received the best schooling available, encouraged them to read widely, and inculcated strong Christian principles. At the age of six Ellen began attending what she described as "a filthy elementary school with the five classes in one room". A series of childhood illnesses kept her at home for two years, but she used the time learning to read. On her return to school she made rapid progress, and at the age of 11 won a scholarship to Ardwick Higher Elementary Grade School. Outspoken and often rebellious, after two years she transferred to Stretford Road Secondary School for Girls, an experience she later remembered as "horrid and unmanageable". She made up for the school's shortcomings by reading, with her father's encouragement, the works of
Haeckel,
Thomas Huxley and
Darwin. Teaching was one of the few careers then open to educated working-class girls, and in 1906 Ellen won a bursary of £25 that enabled her to begin her training. For half the week she attended the Manchester Day Training College, and during the other half taught at Oswald Road Elementary School. Her classroom approach—she sought to interest her pupils, rather than impose learning by rote—led to frequent clashes with her superiors, and convinced her that her future did not lie in teaching. At the college, where she was encouraged to read more widely and to engage with the issues of the day, she discovered socialism through the works of
Robert Blatchford. By this time she was impatient with religion; socialism provided a timely and attractive substitute. At 16 she joined the Longsight branch of the
Independent Labour Party (ILP), and at one of her first branch meetings encountered
Katherine Bruce Glasier, whose crusading brand of socialism made a deep impact. After meeting the suffragist
Hannah Mitchell, Wilkinson took up the cause of
women's suffrage, the major women's rights issue of the day. Although initially engaged in everyday tasks such as distributing leaflets and putting up posters,
University Determined to carve a career for herself outside teaching, in 1910 Wilkinson sat for and won the Jones Open History Scholarship, which gave her a place at
Manchester University. There, she found many opportunities to extend her political activities. She joined the university's branch of the
Fabian Society, and eventually became its joint secretary. She continued her suffragist work by joining the Manchester Society for Women's Suffrage. There, she impressed
Margaret Ashton — the first woman to be elected to Manchester City Council — with her efforts in the North Manchester and Gorton constituencies. Through these and other campaigning activities Wilkinson met many of the contemporary leaders of the radical left—the veteran campaigner
Charlotte Despard, the ILP leader
William Crawford Anderson, and
Beatrice and
Sidney Webb among others. She also came under the influence of
Walton Newbold, an older student who later became the United Kingdom's first Communist MP. The two were briefly engaged, and although this was soon broken off, they remained close political associates for many years. In her final year at university Wilkinson was co-opted to the executive committee of the University Socialist Federation (USF), an inter-institutional organisation formed to bring together socialist-minded students from all over the country. This brought her new contacts, who would typically meet at Fabian summer schools to hear lectures by ILP leaders such as
Ramsay MacDonald and
Arthur Henderson, and trade union activists such as
Ben Tillett and
Margaret Bondfield. Amid these distractions she continued to study hard, and won several prizes. In the summer of 1913 she sat her finals and was awarded her BA degree—not the
First Class honours that her tutors had predicted, but an Upper Second. Wilkinson rationalised thus: "I deliberately sacrificed my First ... to devote my spare time to a strike raging in Manchester".
Early career Trade union organiser On leaving university in June 1913, Wilkinson became a paid worker for the
National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). She helped to organise the
Suffrage Pilgrimage of July 1913, when more than 50,000 women marched from all over the country to a mass rally in
Hyde Park, London. She began to develop a fuller understanding of the mechanics of politics and campaigning, and became an accomplished speaker, able to hold her own even in the most hostile public meetings. When the
First World War began in August 1914, Wilkinson, like many in the Labour movement, condemned it as an imperialist exercise that would result in the deaths of millions of workers. Nevertheless, she took the role of honorary secretary of the Manchester branch of the
Women's Emergency Corps (WEC), a body which found suitable war work for women volunteers. With the advent of war the NUWSS became divided between pro-war and pro-peace factions. They ultimately separated, the peacemongers (including Wilkinson's Manchester branch) eventually aligning themselves with the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WIL), and included
Agnes Harben. With little suffrage activity to organise, Wilkinson looked for another job, and in July 1915 was appointed as a national organiser for the
Amalgamated Union of Co-operative Employees (AUCE), with particular responsibility for the recruitment of women into the union. In this post she fought for equal pay for equal work, and for the rights of unskilled and lower-paid workers when these interests conflicted with those of the higher-paid craft unions. She organised a series of strikes to attain these goals with notable successes in Carlisle, Coatbridge, Glasgow and Grangemouth. She was less successful in managing a lengthy dispute at the Longsight print works in Manchester, in the summer of 1918, where opponents described her tactics as "unreasonable guerrilla warfare". As a result of her actions Wilkinson briefly lost her job at the union, only to be swiftly reinstated after protests by members and after apologising for her role in the strike. From 1918 she served as her union's nominee on several Trade Boards—national consultative bodies which attempted to set minimum wage rates for low-paid workers. In 1921 AUCE amalgamated with the National Union of Warehouse and General Workers to form the
National Union of Distributive and Allied Workers (NUDAW). Wilkinson's work for the union brought new alliances, and useful new friendships—including one with
John Jagger, the union's future president. She remained an active Fabian, and after the Fabian Research Department became the Labour Research Department in 1917, served on the new body's executive committee. Through these connections she became a member of the
National Guilds League (NGL), an organisation that promoted industrial democracy, workers' control and producer associations in a national system of guilds. She maintained her connection with the WIL, whose 1919 conference adopted a non-pacifist stance that justified armed struggle as a means of defeating capitalism. After visiting Ireland for the WIL in 1920 she became an outspoken critic of the British government's actions there, in particular its use of the "
Black and Tans" as a paramilitary force. She gave evidence about the conduct of British forces in Ireland at the Congressional Committee of Investigation in Washington in December of that year. She called for an immediate truce and the release of republican prisoners.
Communism {{Quote box|width=350px|bgcolor=#E0E6F8|align=left|quote= "[We] read with incredulous eyes that the Russian
people, the workers, the soldiers, and peasants, had really risen and cast out the Tsar and his government ... we did no work at all in the office, we danced around tables and sang ... Everyone with an ounce of liberalism in his composition rejoiced that tyranny had fallen". Along with many others in the Labour movement, Wilkinson's attitudes were radicalised by the
Russian Revolution of 1917. She saw communism as the shape of the future, and when the
Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was formed in the summer of 1920, Wilkinson was one of a group of ILP members with
Marxist leanings who became founder members. For the next few years the CPGB was the main focus of her political activity, although she kept her membership in the Labour Party, which at the time accepted dual CPGB/Labour memberships. In 1921 Wilkinson attended the Red International of Labour Unions Congress and the Second Congress of Communist Women in Moscow, where she met several Russian communist leaders, including the Defence Minister
Leon Trotsky, and
Nadezhda Krupskaya, the educationist who was
Lenin's wife; Wilkinson considered Krupskaya's speech the best at the Congress. At home, although she failed to persuade her union, NUDAW, to affiliate to the Profintern. However, Wilkinson found herself increasingly at odds with communists in Manchester, over the party's industrial and wider international strategies.
Seeking elective office Wilkinson was an early and lifetime supporter of the
National Council of Labour Colleges, established in 1921 with NUDAW backing with the aim of educating working-class students in working-class principles. She became a NUDAW-sponsored parliamentary candidate, and in 1923, while still a CPGB member, sought nomination as the Labour Party's parliamentary candidate for the
Gorton constituency. In her short council career—she served only until 1926 In a three-way contest she came third, behind the
Conservative and the
Liberal candidate. The general election resulted in a
hung parliament, and a
minority Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald took office. During its short term in power, the Labour Party proscribed the Communist Party and outlawed dual membership. After this, she was selected as Labour's candidate for the constituency of
Middlesbrough East.
Middlesbrough MP In opposition, 1924–29 On 8 October 1924 MacDonald's Labour government resigned, after losing a confidence vote in the House of Commons. The latter stages of the
ensuing general election were dominated by the controversy surrounding the
Zinoviev letter, which generated a "Red Scare" shortly before polling day and contributed to a massive Conservative victory. Labour's representation in the House of Commons fell to 152, against the Conservatives' 415; Wilkinson was the only woman elected in the Labour ranks, winning Middlesbrough East with a majority of 927 over her Conservative opponent. Wilkinson's arrival in the House of Commons attracted considerable press comment, much of it related to her bright red hair and the vivid colours of her clothing. She informed MPs: "I happen to represent in this House one of the heaviest iron and steel producing areas in the world—I know I do not look like it, but I do". The ''Woman's Leader'' described her as a "vigorous, uncompromising feminist and an exceedingly tenacious, forcible and hard-headed politician". A policeman once attempted to prevent Wilkinson from entering the House of Commons' smoking room based on her sex; Wilkinson responded, "I am not a lady - I am a Member of Parliament." As an unofficial spokesperson for women's rights, In March 1926, she combined with
Lady Astor from the Conservative benches to attack the government's proposed decrease in expenditure on women's training centres. The same month Wilkinson was elected President of the Manchester District branch of the
Electrical Association for Women, Astor was the national president. Wilkinson's
ODNB biographer,
Brian Harrison, acknowledges that while "women's issues" were often to the fore in her speeches, she was primarily a socialist rather than a feminist, and if forced to decide between them would have chosen the former. Wilkinson's reflections on the strike were recorded in ''A Workers' History of the Great Strike
(1927), which she co-authored with Raymond Postgate and Frank Horrabin, and in a semi-autobiographical novel, Clash'', which she published in 1929. She also visited the United States in August 1926 to raise financial support for the miners, provoking criticism from the Conservative prime minister Baldwin who denied that the lockout was causing hardship. Throughout her career Wilkinson was an opponent of imperialism. In February 1927 she attended the Founding Congress of the
League Against Imperialism in Brussels, where she met and befriended the Indian nationalist leader
Jawaharlal Nehru. In 1927 she was elected to the Labour Party's National Executive, which gave her a voice in the formulation of party policy. Her advance was noted with approval by Beatrice Webb, who saw in her a future candidate for high office—ahead of more senior Labour women such as Margaret Bondfield and
Susan Lawrence. A tireless campaigner for women's equality, she challenged the caricature of voteless younger women as 'flappers'. On 29 March 1928 Wilkinson voted in the House of Commons for the bill that became the
Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928, granting the vote to all women aged 21 or over. During the debate she said: "[W]e are doing at last a great act of justice to the women of the country ... just as we have [previously] opened the door to the older women, tonight we are opening it to those who are just entering on the threshold of life and in whose hands is the new life of the future country that we are going to build".
In government, 1929–31 In May 1929 Baldwin called a
general election. As a member of Labour's National Executive, Wilkinson helped to draft her party's manifesto, although her preference for a list of specific policy proposals was overruled in favour of a lengthy statement of ideals and objectives. In Middlesbrough she was re-elected with an increased majority over her Conservative and Liberal opponents. Almost from its inception the second MacDonald administration was overwhelmed by the twin crises of rising unemployment and the world trade recession that followed the financial crash in the latter part of 1929. The Labour Party was divided; the
Chancellor,
Philip Snowden, favoured a strict curb on public expenditure, while others, including Wilkinson, believed that the problem was not over-production, but under-consumption. The solution, she argued, lay in increasing, not squeezing, the spending power of the poorest in society. On the issue of unemployment, Wilkinson supported
Oswald Mosley's "Memorandum", a plan for
economic reconstruction and public works that was rejected by the government on the grounds of cost; Mosley resigned from the government in protest. With Wilkinson's assistance, the
Mental Treatment Act 1930 received the
Royal Assent on 30 June 1930. In the same year she co-sponsored a bill to limit shopworkers' hours to 48 a week, and poured scorn on Conservatives opposing the measure who seemed, she said, to think that all shop work was carried out in the "soothing atmosphere" and "exquisite scents" of
Jermyn Street and
Bond Street. The bill was referred to a parliamentary committee, but got no further. The divisions in the Labour Party became more acute during 1931, as the government struggled to meet the
May Report's recommended expenditure cuts of £97 million, the majority (£67 million) to be found from reductions in unemployment costs. The government collapsed on 23 August 1931. To implement the required cuts, MacDonald and a small number of Labour MPs formed a
National Government with the Conservatives and Liberals, while the bulk of the Labour Party, including Wilkinson, went into opposition. In the
general election that followed in October the Labour Party was utterly routed, retaining only 52 of its parliamentary seats. In a less serious vein she published
Peep at Politicians, a collection of humorous pen-portraits of parliamentary colleagues and opponents. She wrote that
Winston Churchill was "cheerfully indifferent as to whether any new [ideas] he acquires match the collection he already possesses", and described
Clement Attlee as "too fastidious for intrigue, and too modest for over-ambition". Her second novel,
The Division Bell Mystery, set in the House of Commons, was published in 1932; Paula Bartley, Wilkinson's biographer, acknowledges that Wilkinson was not a first-class novelist, but "the autobiographical topicality of [her] books made them very appealing". During the three-month visit she met
Gandhi, then in prison, and became convinced that his co-operation was essential to any prospect of peace in the subcontinent. On her return home she delivered her conclusions in an uncompromising report,
The Condition of India, published in 1934. She visited Germany shortly after
Hitler came to power in 1933, and published a pamphlet,
The Terror in Germany, that documented early incidents of
Nazi outrage. She collaborated with a refugee from Hitler's Germany,
Edward Conze, to produce a major book,
Why Fascism?, which condemned the Labour Party's gradualism and focus upon parliament as well as the failure of communist strategy, arguing for the need for grassroots workers' unity and revolution to check the threat of fascism across Europe. Meanwhile, her parliamentary prospects had been revived by her selection as Labour candidate for
Jarrow, a
Tyneside shipbuilding town. Jarrow had been devastated early in the 1930s by the run-down and closure of
Palmers shipyard, the town's main source of employment. Early in 1934 Wilkinson led a deputation of Jarrow's unemployed to meet the prime minister, MacDonald, in his nearby
Seaham constituency, and received sympathy but no positive action.
Jarrow MP Jarrow March and Palmer Statue, starting point for the Jarrow March, 5 October 1936 (2007 photograph) In the
November 1935 general election the National Government, led by Baldwin since MacDonald's retirement earlier that year, won convincingly, although Labour increased its House of Commons representation to 158. However, the scheme was opposed by the steelmasters represented by the
British Iron and Steel Federation (BISF), who thought that any increase in steel production should be handled by expanding their existing facilities. On 30 June 1936 Wilkinson asked
Walter Runciman, the responsible minister, "to induce the Iron and Steel Federation to pursue a less selfish policy than it is pursuing at present". Her request was ignored, and the matter delayed indefinitely by the appointment of a committee to consider the general development of the iron and steel industry—a committee, a
Times letter-writer noted, dominated by BISF members. A deputation from Jarrow's town council met Runciman to protest against the decision, but were told that "Jarrow must find its own salvation." According to Wilkinson, Runciman's dismissive phrase "kindled the town". Marches of the unemployed, generally termed "hunger marches", had been taking place since the early 1920s, often under the auspices of the communist-led
National Unemployed Workers' Movement. This political dimension had associated such marches in the public mind with far-left propaganda. The Jarrow council determined to organise its march free of political connotations, and with the backing of every section of the town. Even within the Labour Party, Wilkinson found the leadership's attitude lukewarm, fearful of possible association with revolutionary socialism. On 5 October 1936 a selected group of 200 set out from
Jarrow Town Hall on the 282-mile march, Wilkinson did not march all the way, but joined whenever her various commitments allowed. At that year's Labour Party conference, held in Edinburgh, she hoped to rouse enthusiasm but instead heard herself condemned for "sending hungry and ill-clad men across the country". This negative attitude was mirrored by some of the local parties on the route of the march; in such areas, Wilkinson recorded with irony, the Conservatives and Liberals saw to the marchers' needs. On 31 October the marchers reached London, but Baldwin refused to see them. On 4 November, Wilkinson presented the town's petition to the House of Commons. Signed by 11,000 citizens of Jarrow, it concluded: "The town cannot be left derelict, and therefore your Petitioners humbly pray that His Majesty's Government and this honourable House should realise the urgent need that work should be provided for the town without further delay." In the brief discussion that followed, Runciman opined that "the unemployment position at Jarrow, while still far from satisfactory, has improved during recent months". In reply, a Labour backbencher commented that "the Government's complacency is regarded throughout the country as an affront to the national conscience". The marchers returned to Jarrow by train, to find their unemployment benefit reduced because they had been "unavailable for work" had any vacancies arisen. The historians Malcolm Pearce and Geoffrey Stewart suggest that the success of the Jarrow march lay in the future; it "helped to shape [post-Second World War] perceptions of the 1930s", and thus paved the way to social reform. According to Vernon, it planted the idea of social justice into the minds of the middle classes. "Ironically and tragically," Vernon says, "it was not peaceful crusading, but the impetus of rearmament which brought industrial activity back to Jarrow". Wilkinson published an account of Jarrow's travails in her final book,
The Town that was Murdered (1939). "Jarrow's plight", she wrote, "is not a local problem. It is the symptom of a national evil".
International and domestic concerns In November 1934, as a representative of the Relief Committee for the Victims of Fascism, Wilkinson visited the northern Spanish province of
Asturias to report on the crushing of the
Oviedo miners' uprising. She was forcibly ejected from the country. Despite being banned from Germany as an undesirable, Wilkinson continued to visit the country covertly, and as a correspondent for the
Sunday Referee was the first to report Hitler's intention to
march into the Rhineland, in March 1936. Spain, however, came to occupy a special place in her opposition to the spread of fascism. When a section of the Spanish army under General
Francisco Franco attacked the elected
Popular Front coalition government to precipitate the
Spanish Civil War, Wilkinson set up the Spanish Medical Aid Committee and the
National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief. She later argued in parliament against the British government's non-intervention policies which, she insisted, "worked on the side of General Franco". She returned to Spain in April 1937 as a member of an all-women delegation led by the
Duchess of Atholl, and afterwards wrote of feeling "a helpless, choking rage", as she witnessed the effects of aerial bombing on undefended villages. On a further visit, in December 1937, she was accompanied by Attlee, now leader of the Labour Party, and
Philip Noel-Baker, a fellow Labour MP. Having observed the near-starvation of schoolchildren in Madrid, on her return to Britain she set up a "Milk for Spain" fund, together with other humanitarian initiatives. Although she had long broken her formal ties with the British Communist Party, Wilkinson retained strong links with other communist organisations at home and abroad. Her association with leading communists such as
Willi Münzenberg and
Otto Katz is revealed in British intelligence files held on her. However, she was not prepared to risk losing her parliamentary seat, and thus kept her rebellious behaviour within bounds. In 1937, Wilkinson was one of a group of Labour figures—
Aneurin Bevan,
Harold Laski and
Stafford Cripps were others—who founded the left-wing magazine
Tribune; in the first issue she wrote of the need to fight unemployment, poverty, malnutrition and inadequate housing. Mindful of the dependence of many low-income families on credit, she introduced a bill to regulate
hire purchase agreements, at the time a subject of frequent abuse, and with all-party support she secured the passage of the Hire Purchase Act 1938. Wilkinson was a strong opponent of the National Government's
appeasement policies towards the European dictators. In the House of Commons on 6 October 1938 she condemned the actions of the prime minister,
Neville Chamberlain, in signing the
Munich Agreement: "Only by throwing away practically everything for which this country cared and stood could he rescue us from the results of his own policy". On 24 August 1939, as parliament considered the recently signed
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Wilkinson attacked Chamberlain's failure to ally with Russia in a common front against Hitler. "Time after time", she told the Commons, "we have had the prime minister ... putting the narrow interests of his class and of the rich, before the national interest".
Second World War Wilkinson supported Britain's declaration of war on Germany, on 3 September 1939, although she was critical of Chamberlain's conduct of the war. In May 1940, when
Churchill's all-party coalition replaced Chamberlain's National Government, Wilkinson was appointed Parliamentary Secretary at the
Ministry of Pensions. She transferred to the
Ministry of Home Security in October 1940, as one of
Herbert Morrison's three Parliamentary Secretaries, with responsibilities for air raid shelters and
civil defence. When aerial bombardment of British cities began in the summer of 1940, many Londoners used
Underground stations as improvised shelters, often living there for days in conditions of increasing squalor. By the end of 1941 Wilkinson had supervised the distribution of more than half a million indoor
"Morrison shelters"—reinforced steel tables with wire mesh sides, under which a family could sleep at home. Dubbed the "shelter queen" by the press, Wilkinson toured the bombed cities frequently, to share hardships and raise morale. More controversially, she approved the conscription of women into the
Auxiliary Fire Service for fire-watching duty, a policy that provoked considerable opposition from women, who felt that their domestic duties were a sufficient burden. Even Wilkinson's own union, NUDAW, disapproved of the measure, but Wilkinson stood firm. The discipline of working in a ministerial post, together with the influence of Morrison and her alienation from communism, turned Wilkinson away from many of her former left-wing stances. She supported Morrison's decision in January 1941 to suppress the communist newspaper
The Daily Worker on the grounds of its anti-British propaganda, and voted for the wartime legislation that banned strikes in key industries. In the
1945 New Year Honours she was appointed a
Privy Counsellor, only the third woman (after
Margaret Bondfield and
Lady Astor) to receive this honour. In April 1945, she was part of a parliamentary delegation that travelled to San Francisco to begin work on the establishment of the United Nations.
Postwar career Leadership manoeuvres Wilkinson had formed a close relationship with Morrison, personally and politically, before and during their wartime ministerial association. In 1945, Morrison informed Attlee that he intended to seek the leadership "in the interests of party unity". In the
general election held in July that year Labour won a landslide victory, with 393 seats against the Conservatives' 213. This did not prevent Wilkinson and others from continuing to press for a change of leader, but Attlee forestalled further action by quickly accepting
the King's invitation to form a government. He showed no resentment towards either Morrison or Wilkinson; the former was appointed
Lord President of the Council and deputy prime minister, while Wilkinson was made
Minister of Education, with a seat in the cabinet.
Emmanuel Shinwell, who became
Minister of Fuel and Power, later commented that "it is not bad tactics to make one's enemies one's servants".
Minister of education Wilkinson was the second woman, after Margaret Bondfield, to achieve a place in the British cabinet. As Minister of Education she saw as her main task the implementation of the
Education Act 1944 passed by the wartime coalition. This Act provided universal free secondary education, and raised the minimum school leaving age from 14 to 15 with effect from 1947. It said nothing about how secondary education should be organised; Labour's education specialist,
James Chuter Ede, who had put the Act through Parliament along with
Rab Butler, felt this should be decided at a local authority level. Many experts felt that children should take an examination — the
"11-plus" — which would determine whether their secondary education would be in a grammar (academic), technical or "modern" school. However, many in the Labour Party saw this tripartite arrangement as perpetuating elitism, and wanted a scheme based on "multilateral" schools, or what later became known as the "
comprehensive" system; Chuter Ede preferred this, but Attlee had felt it necessary to appoint him as
Home Secretary, so he had less influence over education. The system envisaged large schools under a single roof, each with a range of appropriate courses of study for different levels of ability, and flexible movement between courses as children's aptitudes changed. Wilkinson believed, however, that such a major reconstruction was unachievable at that time, and limited herself to more attainable reforms. Wilkinson, however, was persuaded to the view that selection at 11 would allow all those with higher IQs, irrespective of class background, to obtain a grammar school education. Wilkinson made her first priority the raising of the school leaving age. This required the recruitment and training of thousands of extra teachers, and creating classroom space for almost 400,000 extra children. Under the Emergency Training Scheme (ETS), ex-servicemen and women were given grants to train as teachers on an accelerated one-year programme; more than 37,000 had been or were being trained by the end of 1946. The rapid expansion of school premises was achieved by the erection of temporary huts—some of which became long-term features of schools. Final cabinet approval to honour the April date was given on 16 January 1947. Other reforms during Wilkinson's tenure as minister included free school milk, improvements in the school meals service, an increase in university scholarships, In October 1945 she went to Germany to report on how the destroyed German education system could best be reactivated. She was astonished by the speed with which, five months after its defeat, the country's schools and universities were reopening. Other trips included visits to Gibraltar, Malta and Czechoslovakia. In November 1945 she chaired an international conference in London that led to the establishment, a year later, of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (
UNESCO).
Illness and death Wilkinson suffered for most of her life from
bronchial asthma, which she aggravated over the years by heavy smoking and overwork. and had collapsed during a visit to
Prague in 1946. On 25 January 1947 she attended the opening of the
Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. The winter of 1946–47 was exceptionally cold, and the ceremony was held out of doors. Shortly afterward, Wilkinson developed pneumonia; Wilkinson had been taking a combination of drugs for several months, to combat both her asthma and insomnia; the coroner believed she had inadvertently taken an overdose of barbiturates. With no evidence to indicate that the overdose was deliberate, he recorded a verdict of accidental death. Despite this, speculation that Wilkinson had committed suicide has persisted, the reasons cited being the failure of her personal relationship with Herbert Morrison and her likely fate in a rumoured cabinet reshuffle. In their 1973 biography of Morrison,
Bernard Donoughue and
G. W. Jones suggest that, given Wilkinson's poor health, the burdens of her ministerial office became too much for her. However, the lack of conclusive evidence divides historians about Wilkinson's intention to take her own life. ==Appraisal and legacy==