Clara Rackham
[1] She was a pioneering magistrate, Poor Law Guardian, educator, anti-poverty campaigner and penal reformer in Cambridge where she was a long-serving city and county councillor.
She was a prominent supporter of the Liberal Party in the Newnham College Political Society, a proficient long-distance cyclist, swam regularly in the River Cam, and was captain of the hockey team.
In 1923 Rackham served on the birth control subcommittee of the Standing Joint Committee of Industrial Women's Organizations (SJCIWO) and by 1930 had become chairman of the organisation.
[4] In Cambridge she worked with her friend, the Homerton College-trained Leah Manning[5] (President of the National Union of Teachers in 1930, elected as the Labour MP for Islington East in 1928 and then for Epping in 1945).
Both women were associated with the ragged school set up in a building in Young Street which is now the site of Anglia Ruskin University Music Therapy Department.
[8] Rackham objection to the legislation was that it removed the right of women to be elected by local voters to their existing roles and made them reliant on the consent of other members of boards rather than a direct mandate from the people.
Her experiences with poor relief for the Castle End ward of Cambridge (1904–15) reinforced her conviction that it was essential for women to have the vote if things were to change.
[9] This was a branch of the constitutional, non-militant National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), the President of which was the veteran suffragist, Millicent Garrett Fawcett.
Rackham proved to be a first-class organiser, giving rousing speeches, and touring the surrounding villages to drum up support for women's suffrage.
Rackham steered the national organisation through its most turbulent period in 1915 with considerable tact and skill when Millicent Fawcett's qualified support for women's involvement in the war effort was opposed by a majority of the NUWSS committee who tendered their resignations and by large sections of the membership who were either pacifists or primarily interested in ending the war by securing a negotiated peace with Germany.
After women over 30 were enfranchised under the Representation of the People Act 1918, the NUWSS dissolved itself and was succeeded by the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship in 1919.
At the end of the First World War Rackham joined the Labour Party though she stood as an Independent representing the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC) in the Cambridge Borough Council election of March 1919.
Rackham stood for Parliament twice with no success: she was defeated in Chelmsford (1922) and lost heavily to a rising star in the Conservative Party, the sitting MP, R. A. Butler, in Saffron Walden (1935).
She fought innumerable battles to improve living conditions for the working-class communities in the north and east of the city, lobbying hard for the indoor heated swimming pool on the corner of Parker's Piece and Mill Road.
[10] She joined the Howard League and worked with Clara Martineau of Birmingham City Council as part of a group reporting on child sexual abuse to Parliament in 1925.
However, she never fully embraced the Labour Party's post-war support for comprehensive education, believing that small selective grammar schools were of more benefit to working-class children.
Like many former suffragists, Rackham placed her hopes for peace in the League of Nations between the wars and she attended meetings of the local Cambridge branch whenever she could.
[23] Rackham became a well-known figure in Cambridge in her later years, riding everywhere on her bicycle, doing voluntary work in the community, enjoying her contact with young and old alike, adjusting with indomitable good humour to her own loss of hearing, and reading aloud to the partially sighted.
In 1993 Joyce Bellamy and Eileen Price, who wrote the entry on Rackham in The Dictionary of Labour Biography, recalled how overwhelmed they had been by the public response to a letter requesting information about her life and work which they had sent to The Cambridge Evening News in 1980.
Rackham died in Langdon House in 1966 after enjoying her 90th birthday celebrations, which were attended by friends and well-wishers representing over twenty local organisations, charities, and voluntary groups which she had supported over the years.
A tribute written in the Newnham College Roll Letter in 1967 reads:Anyone who studies the social reforms of the century in Cambridge will see how much they owe to Mrs Rackham's devoted and unstinting championship of the under-privileged.
The civic ceremony in which the blue plaque was unveiled by Stella Manzie, who spoke about Rackham's pioneering achievements in local government, took place at Newnham College on 20 November 2018.
[26] Mary talks about Rackham's time at Newnham, her relationship with Harris, and her support of the Labour Party, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and NUWSS.
Lucy's interview includes details about Rackham's home life as well as her work as a borough and county councillor, and as a Poor Law guardian.
