Bessie Braddock, MP, by Millie Toole

[p033] Bessie Braddock, MP, by Millie Toole (Robert Hale, 18s.) DO you yearn for a cosy cup of tea in the company of Mrs Bessie Braddock? If you do (and it is not one of my ambi- tions) then Miss Millie Toole has written just the book for you. For this is the record of innumerable cups of tea and téte-a-tétes at number two Zig-Zag Road, Liverpool. Approximately 120 of its 219 pages are a sickeningly eulogis- tic account of Big Bessie’s life and works as Labour MP for the Exchange Division of Liverpool. Her kindness, her tire- lessness, her devotion to the cause—yes, even her good looks! —are all rubbed mercilessly into the reader’s protesting brain.

[p034] BOOK REVIEWS And yet there is virtue in Miss Toole’s blundering book. Its sycophancy, its repetitiveness, its misprints and grammati- cal mistakes, can all be forgiven. Forgiven for the hundred- odd pages that are NOT devoted to Bessie. Those hundred-odd pages in the early part of the book cover the rousing story of Bessie’s fighting mother, Ma Bamber, and her battles against the grinding poverty of pre- 1914 Liverpool. They record the grim history of the. Un- employed Workers’ Committee in the nineteen twenties, and tell the story of Liverpool’s amazing people, bluntly refusing to accept their lot in the city’s teeming slums. Bessie is only a pale shadow flitting among giants in this part of the book. She played her part along with hundreds of others in a class battle that has had few equals for ferocity anywhere in Britain. And Miss Toole’s galloping, breathless style is well-tuned to the telling of it. Her picture of the grim miseries of the parish-coupon poor. of the gaunt, prematurely aged Liverpool mothers meeting the arrival of more mouths to feed with ‘another cup of water in the scouse’, is angrily painted. And she can be hilariously funny in her account of how the army of unemployed workers fooled the police and affronted ‘respectable’ Liverpool citizens with demonstrations that could only have been staged with Liverpool’s brand of Irish audacity. . Those first hundred pages are genuine working-class history, and well worth the time it takes to read them. But, oh, the rest of the book! How can Miss Toole tell with such relish the outrageous details of Bessie’s rebel days—particularly her years in the newly-founded Communist Party—and still give the stamp of approval to her ruthless political orthodoxy since 1951? How can she reconcile the fact that Bessie quit the Com- munist Party because it left no room for independent thought. yet lived to invoke ‘party loyalty and discipline’ to crush the Bevanite rebellion in her own constituency? Miss Toole offers no direct answer. Yet the answer is im- plicit in her book. Those rousing early pages show where her heart lies. She should have stopped there. JOHN LAUCHLAN Child of Thermidor