She graduated in 1968 with a third, having spent most of her last year on the picket lines supporting striking building workers at the Barbican Centre in London.

She got a first and remained at Birkbeck to study for a PhD, supervised by Eric Hobsbawm, on the subject of the British Communist Party and the trade unions between 1933 and 1945.

[1] In 1980 she was a supporter of Neil Kinnock, advocating a greater reliance on trade unionism in a televised debate on divisions in the Labour Party.

[2] She gained a teaching job at Harrow College of Higher Education, which merged with the Polytechnic of Central London in 1990.

[3] She spent the last decade of her life researching a biography of Arthur Horner, general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers from 1946 to 1959.