"Respectable, But.. ."

In the centuries-long paring down of its once formidable powers, Britain's House of Lords has suffered many a trauma. But few came as quite such a shock as the Great Trauma of 1922. That year the Viscountess Rhondda, a doughty Welsh suffragette who went to jail once for dropping a crude incendiary bomb inside a post box, had the gall to request a writ of summons that would give her a seat alongside Their Lordships. A few of the noble lords found her petition "irresistible," but not so the grumpy Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Birkenhead. The Lord Chancellor's blunt antifeminism carried the day.

But the fight that Lady Rhondda started did not end there, though few besides her could get much worked up over belonging to a parliamentary anachronism which can delay legislation, but cannot prevent it. The leveling Labor Party wanted to abolish the House of Lords altogether. Finally, early this year, to offset Labor's objections, the Tories pushed through a bill to give the House of Lords new blood by the creation of life peers, both male and female, whose descendants would not be titled. * Their children would be addressed as "The Honorable." As for the husband of any new lady peer, it was decided, he would still be just Mr.

Nobody worried about increasing the membership beyond the present 870 or so, though the chamber seats only about 250: after all, fewer than a hundred regularly show up, and some Lords never have. Last week, after her ministers agreed on possible candidates, Queen Elizabeth named ten new male life peers and four women. The peeresses, who, with brand new titles, will take their seats in November:

P: Dame Katharine Elliot, 55, onetime delegate to the U.N., indefatigable Tory, and chairman of the Advisory Committee on Child Care for Scotland.

P: Baroness Ravensdale, 62, vice-president of the National Association of Girls' Clubs and Mixed Clubs, and daughter of the late Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, onetime Viceroy of India.

P: Stella, the Dowager Marchioness of Reading, 63, founder of the Women's Voluntary Services for Civil Defense.

P: Barbara Frances Wootton, 61, economist, former professor of social studies at the University of London, and the only Socialist in the lot.

After all the waiting, the names proved somewhat anticlimactic. "Respectable," said the London Times, rather unchivalrously, "but hardly exciting." Added the Daily Telegraph: "The list makes history --without unduly disturbing it." Absent were the expected names of sharp-tongued, Virginia-born Lady Astor, the first lady to sit in Britain's Parliament, and Lady Violet Bonham Carter, busy daughter of the late Prime Minister Sir Herbert Henry Asquith. Also missing: the Viscountess Rhondda, who died last week at 75.

* Existing nonhereditary memberships: archbishops, bishops, law lords and certain Scottish and Irish peers.

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