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December 06, 2005
Mary Barbour
As I mentioned before I have been religiously following Ian Hislop’s programme, Not Forgotten (Channel 4, Sundays 8pm) where he spends his time scanning war memorials and piecing together the stories of some of the forgotten soldiers of WW1. So as you can imagine I was filled with glee when this week he dealt with the women.
I’m usually the first to complain about female heroines becoming shoved into obscurity but one thing that this programme has highlighted so far is that in the case of the First World War, despite all our smug poppy wearing and parading about on Remembrance Sunday, many of the individual stories of the men have been buried too. In the first of the series it was gutting to see them trying to piece together the names from a memorial that had been discovered trashed in a skip and another that had been obscured by graffiti. So I guess on Sunday’s episode I wasn’t at all surprised when they couldn’t find one Glaswegian (of any generation) who had heard of Mary Barbour, although I couldn’t help feeling immensely peeved. So I thought that I’d spend the next couple of weeks showcasing some of the women featured and finding some humble space for them here at Purple Elephant‘s Corner. Feel free to jump in if you have any helpful links or books where we can find out more about these women.
First up Mary Barbour who was born on 22nd. of February 1875 in Kilbarchan, Scotland. In 1887 her parents took Mary and her six siblings to live in Elderslie where she worked as a thread twister and a carpet printer. She married a shipyard engineer in 1896 and eventually settled in the Govan district of Glasgow where her political activism was born as a member of the Kinning Park Co-operative Guild and the Independent Labour Party.
Many landlords took advantage of the war to put into action steep rent increases that were near on impossible to pay by the mainly working class housewives. Consequently in 1915 following the lead of ILP councillor Andrew McBride and Women's Labour League president Mary Laird who had already formed the Glasgow Women's Housing Association, Mary Barbour set in motion the South Govan Women's Housing Association, arranging tenant committees and encouraging the housewives to resist evictions and drive out the sheriff's officers.
The rent strike gained momentum and on 17 November 1915 on the sheriff's courts in the centre of Glasgow, culminated in one of the largest demonstrations witnessed by the city. Thousands of rent striking housewives nicknamed ‘Mary Barbour’s Army’ and the Glasgow ship workers gathered together in solidarity. The result was that Lloyd-George rushed through the Rent Restrictions Act of 1915 which improved the situation of working class tenants throughout Great Britain.
Mary tirelessly continued her work after the war, in 1920 she became the first Labour woman councillor presenting Fairfield ward on Glasgow Town Council. From 1924 until 1927 she served as the first woman bailie on Glasgow Corporation and was appointed one of Glasgow's first women magistrates, gaining distinction with her work on children's panels. She did not retire from council until 1931. During her time she continued to campaign on housing issues but also covered birth control, municipal banks, wash-houses, laundries and baths; child welfare centres and play areas, home helps, and pensions for mothers and free milk for schoolchildren.
Even after her retirement Mary was unrelenting in her campaigns and was instrumental in organising seaside outings for the poor children of Glasgow.
Mary Barbour died on 2 April 1958 aged 83, her funeral was held at Craigton crematorium in Govan.
Shamelessly gleaned mainly from;
http://www.gcal.ac.uk/radicalglasgow/chapters/mary_barbour.html
http://gdl.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/redclyde/redclypeobyebar.htm
http://sites.scran.ac.uk/redclyde/redclyde/rc092.htm
The Channel 4 Lost Generation site is also quite good.
Posted by purple elephant at December 6, 2005 09:32 PM