“Secretaries meeting. No Hockey,” wrote 15-year-old Joan MacDonald in her diary on January 22, 1924. “Daddy sworn in.”
Whatever huge, historic events were going on around her, life seemed to go on as usual for Joan. Her entry for the following day of January 23, 1924, written in her little black Girls Guide diary, said: “Drawing. Toffee bag. Geography room.”
However, as the days pass, little clues become apparent about the great shift in British political life that she was living through exactly 100 years ago.
“Jan 27 Sun (3rd after Epiphany): Sunday School. Visited Downing Street and Foreign Office.”
“Feb 1 Fri: 1st visit to Chequers. Arrived 1 o’clock after Pilgrim’s dinner. Hockey. Won 5-2.
“Feb 2 Sat (Candlemas): Went round house. Photographers. Walk to Cimbline’s Hill.”
As Joan noted in her diary, before she walked to Cymberline’s Castle, which is an ancient hill overlooking the Prime Minister’s country residence of Chequers near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, a photographer took a set of pictures of her in the rooms and gardens of the stately home along with her father, Ramsay MacDonald, who, 100 years ago on Monday, became Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister.
The diary and the pictures are now with Joan’s daughter, Victoria Bagshaw, in Hurworth, just outside Darlington, where Victoria has lived since the early 1980s when her husband, Ian, became the village GP.
“She loved Chequers and they went there nearly every weekend,” says Victoria. “She found it quite exciting being driven in a car, as they didn’t have one.”
MacDonald came from very humble beginnings in Lossiemouth in the north of Scotland – The Northern Echo’s front page (see below) from 100 years ago says that “at the age of 12 he was at work picking potatoes”. He was illegitimate and was brought up by his mother and grandmother, but his impressive schoolwork led to him going to London to continue his studies, fortified by oatmeal sent from home because he couldn’t afford food. He also immersed himself in fledgling Labour politics.
In 1895, he stood for Keir Hardie’s Independent Labour Party in Southampton, but came bottom of the poll. During campaigning, though, he made Margaret Gladstone, a feminist who was the daughter of a chemistry professor.
“She was a Liberal first and was distantly related to WE Gladstone,” says Victoria. “She went to a public lecture Ramsay was giving as she idolised him, and then met him later. She had been left a bit of money because her mother died when she was born and so she was able to support Ramsay who had nothing.”
They married, set up home in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London, and had six children. They were a devoted couple – a student has written a PhD on their love letters – and so when Margaret died aged only 41 in 1911, MacDonald was devastated. He designed a monument to her that stands near their home in recognition of her campaigning on behalf of women and children.
When MacDonald made it to Downing Street, he had to employ a housekeeper at his own expense.
“No 10 was not really a family home because it was so busy,” says Victoria. “My mother and her sister had a bedroom that was just off the main dining room and visitors nipped through it to get to the lift and the kitchen.
“Ramsay employed a Dutch housekeeper who was very strict – boiled eggs were only for the Prime Minister’s breakfast – so she had a frugal life, but she went out of the front door of Downing Street to walk to school every morning, and she was allowed to bring friends home to Downing Street after school.
“Ramsay also knew people like JM Barrie, Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin and so she knew them from afar.”
One hundred years ago, The Northern Echo devoted its front page (above) to the make-up of MacDonald’s cabinet. The Home Secretary was Arthur Henderson, who had been mayor of Darlington in 1903 when he’d been elected as the Labour MP for Barnard Castle, and the paper’s editorial concluded: “On the whole it is a collection of capable men. If the policy pursued be kept on sound progressive lines, there will be a genuine desire all round the give the new government a fair chance.”
By contrast, the Echo’s sister paper, the Conservative Darlington & Stockton, was pretty aghast at the advent of a Labour government, and in its editorial said: “The presence of three peers in Mr Ramsay MacDonald’s first Socialist Cabinet gives it an unexpectedly solid air of respectability, and serves to some extent to dull the natural apprehensions of the average citizen.”
Perhaps to the relief of the D&S Times, that first Labour government only lasted 10 months and in October 1924 MacDonald had to ask the king – with whom he became surprisingly friendly – for a dissolution. That led to the December 1924 election, which Labour lost (Macmillan in Stockton was among the Conservative victors). The party was out of office until 1929 when MacDonald was returned to Downing Street for a second term.
By then, Joan was studying botany at Edinburgh university and so this time she did not call Downing Street her home.
Against an appalling economic backdrop and with his health in serious decline, MacDonald remained as prime minister until 1935, and he passed away in 1937.
“He died a good five years before I was born but I was always aware that my grandfather had been Prime Minister,” says Victoria. “My mother and the family were all terribly proud of him.”
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In his first term, MacDonald introduced several measures on benefits and housing that improved the lot of the working man, and his work rebuilding Europe after the First World War was especially praised, but he could never live up to the weight of expectations of being the first Labour Prime Minister elected so soon after the first women had got the vote. Perhaps his greatest achievement was in proving cynics, who expected a red revolution any day, wrong by governing responsibly. Because of this, the moment that Joan lived through 100 years ago this week was a massive turning of the political tide of history: the Liberals were eclipsed by MacDonald’s Labour setting up the blue versus red electoral battles that we all know, and love, even a century later.
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