Minnie Pallister: The Voice of a Rebel
Alun Burge
Parthian Books, £20

AN ADOPTED daughter of Wales, a dimly remembered heroine of the labour and peace movement, and a renowned broadcaster and journalist makes for the fascinating tale of the life of Minnie Pallister. Alan Burge’s biography of Pallister is a story of the labour movement itself.

One of three daughters born to Durham coal miner William Pallister, who became a Wesleyan Methodist minister and took his young family to live in Haverford West in Pembrokeshire in 1899. The young Minnie was the middle daughter and became a confirmed socialist and pacifist and campaigned against the Great War alongside her friends Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald.

Not only did she campaign against the slaughter in WWI, she also opposed WWII, but spent time in Nazi Germany before war broke out trying to rescue Jewish families from the regime.

Burge’s book painstakingly sifts the evidence to give us a tale of one of the early modern feminists who campaigned for women’s issues beyond seeking the vote for women over 30 years old.

Pallister’s early life, as she becomes a skilled orator pressing the case against war, is in support of the Independent Labour Party and for women’s rights in society and within the labour and trades union movement, and sees an inexorable rise within the movement.

In the early 1920s, Pallister defended Russia from British capitalist interests and advocated diplomatic recognition for the fledgeling Bolshevik government.

On the brink of becoming a Labour MP in 1926, Pallister’s health broke down as she crisscrossed the country speaking at events to continue support for the miners after the TUC had called off the general strike. In one week alone, Pallister is recorded as speaking at 16 open-air meetings. Fenner Brockway described her as “one of the most brilliant speakers our movement has ever had.”

But with her health in tatters, Pallister had to resign from the Labour Party’s national executive before she took her seat and turned away from a political career as a putative Labour MP. The health issues Pallister suffered from meant she could not speak at meetings and was confined to bed for months at a time. She moved in with her retired mother and sister to be looked after.

With an active political and organising life finished Minnie began to turn her hand to journalism and writing books.

The second half of Burge’s biography chronicles Pallister’s attempts to forge a career as a journalist and then broadcaster for the BBC. As a regular and beloved member of the Women’s Hour team, Pallister battled the corporation and its built-in MI5 operatives to include radical feminist ideas and pacifism in her broadcasts.

This is a fascinating book about one of the early pioneers of the women’s movement and of the early days of the Labour Party and its roots in industrial areas.