Death of a Champion

Last week brought another kind of shock to Britain's plain people and to its Laborite Ministers. Ellen Wilkinson, the fiery, tiny (4 ft. 10 in.) Minister of Education, was dead. To her colleagues in the Cabinet, many of whom were tired or ailing, her death at 55 was more than the loss of an able and courageous fighter for the Party's causes: it was also a solemn warning. She had been in a hospital for 24 hours with bronchitis; there her fatigued heart had collapsed.

Ellen Cicely Wilkinson's life had been almost all work and fierce fighting. A child of Manchester's slums, she put herself through Manchester University, championed woman suffrage and union organization. She was elected as a Communist to Manchester's City Council, then switched to the Labor Party, which elected her to Parliament in 1924. There, shrill-voiced but quick-witted, she was in frequent clashes with such debating stalwarts as Winston Churchill, Lady Astor, Lord Woolton (once her schoolteacher).

During World War II she organized and bossed about 5,000,000 women fire wardens. She was out in every air raid, inspecting shelters (three times her own lodgings were blitzed during her absence).

She plunged with unsparing effort into her postwar job as Education Minister. She said her aim was to educate young Britons for the atomic age: "It's a race between education and extinction." In recent weeks she had worried about herself, told some friends that she was "done for." But she still dashed about the country to local school meetings, kept four secretaries busy, wangled money, materials and manpower to build more schools.

Her death was a particularly hard blow to Deputy Prime Minister Herbert Morrison, whose parliamentary secretary she had been when Morrison was Minister of Home Security in the War Cabinet. Prime Minister Clement Attlee brought the news to him in a hospital where Morrison has lain for three weeks waiting for a blood clot in his leg to dissolve. Said Attlee: "This will just make everything a hell of a lot more difficult."

The pace of work had begun to tell on other Ministers. John Strachey (Food) had been down with flu. Sir Stafford Cripps (Trade) had been out with a chill. Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin was nursing his high blood pressure. At a cocktail party a friend told him that he looked well. Said Bevin: "I feel worse than I look." Clem Attlee, an early riser, toiled to the Churchillian hour of 2:30 a.m. to handle the extra work.

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