Leah Manning
|
Dame Leah Manning DBE |
|
|---|---|
| Member of Parliament for Epping | |
|
In office 5 July 1945 – 23 February 1950 |
|
| Prime Minister | Clement Attlee |
| Preceded by | Winston Churchill |
| Succeeded by | Nigel Davies |
| Member of Parliament for Islington East | |
|
In office 19 February 1931 – 26 October 1931 |
|
| Preceded by | Ethel Bentham |
| Succeeded by | Thelma Cazalet |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
Elizabeth Leah Perrett 28 May 1886 Droitwich Spa, Worcestershire |
| Died | 15 September 1977 (aged 91) Elstree, London |
| Nationality | British |
| Political party | Labour |
| Spouse(s) | William Henry Manning |
| Alma mater | Homerton College, Cambridge |
Dame Elizabeth Leah Manning DBE (née Perrett; 14 April 1886 – 15 September 1977) was a British educationalist, social reformer, and Labour Member of Parliament (MP) in the 1930s and 1940s. She organised the evacuation of orphaned or at risk Basque children during the Spanish Civil War.
Her parents emigrated to the United States when she was 14, but decided that she (alone among her siblings) should remain in Britain, and she was looked after by her maternal grandparents, who were Methodists.
She was educated at St John's School in Bridgwater, and at Homerton College, Cambridge. She became a teacher in Cambridge where she had met fellow undergraduate Hugh Dalton and joined the Fabian Society and the Independent Labour Party. Her school was in a poor area of the city and she pressed the city authorities to improve the health by providing free milk, using her position on Cambridge Trades Council to raise the issue.
She married William Henry Manning (1883–1952), an astronomer working for the University Solar Physics Laboratory, in 1914. They set up home together in a house on the Cambridge Observatory site. He was a pacifist and a Liberal in politics.
Manning welcomed news of the October revolution in Russia and became a member of the 1917 Club. In peacetime, she became an active speaker on behalf of Labour candidates in elections around the country. She was appointed headmistress of a new experimental Open Air School for undernourished children which Cambridge education authority had established on a farm site, and found this work exceptionally rewarding. In 1929 she served as organising secretary of the National Union of Teachers. She became its President in 1930.
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