Lucy Middleton: social activist and Labour MP

Lucy Middleton was a significant figure in the Labour movement in the mid-20^th century, although (as noted in a recent magazine in her home town of Keynsham), she is not as well-known as she deserves to be. Born Lucy Annie Cox on 9 May 1894, in Albert Road, Keynsham, she was educated locally and at Bristol University, and then taught in West Country schools for a decade.

As her political interests grew she joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1916, and three years later she was the secretary of its Keynsham branch. Cox was active throughout Somerset and the West Country as a Labour speaker and organiser during the early 1920s.

She was especially interested in promoting disarmament and peace, was secretary of the No More War movement for 8 years, and political adviser to Hindu minorities at the 1932 Indian London round table conference.

In 1931 Cox was adopted as the Labour candidate for the Conservative stronghold of Sevenoaks. However, for the October 1931 general election, she switched to Paddington South, where the National Government’s sweeping landslide meant that she suffered a huge defeat.

She fared little better at the 1935 election, this time at the Yorkshire seat of Pudsey and Otley, where she came third in a three-way fight.

In May 1936 she married James Middleton, Secretary of the Labour Party, with whom she had been having a relationship. The following year, she became Labour candidate for Plymouth Sutton, the seat held since 1919 by Nancy Astor, the first woman to sit in the House of Commons. The prospect of two women fighting the same seat drew media attention, which Lucy Middleton seemed to relish, even though she publicly declared that she was fighting as a socialist, not as a woman.

With any general election suspended because of the outbreak of war in 1939, Middleton abided by the national ‘electoral truce’ between the major parties, though she had to reassure the Plymouth media that she had not thereby dropped her candidature for the Sutton seat.

She did not face Nancy Astor in the July 1945 general election because Astor had earlier declared that she would not stand again. In the landslide that brought in Attlee’s Labour Government, Middleton gained the seat from the Tories. She made her maiden speech on 20 August in a debate on foreign affairs and world peace, describing this as “of all priorities the most important priority.”

In this post-war Parliament she remained active on international matters, participating in parliamentary delegations to various European countries. She also found time to raise issues more relevant to her Somerset birthplace, as in her PQ in April 1947 on the proposed Keynsham Bypass, and another PQ the following February about telegram deliveries to Keynsham. The latter arose because of a telegram she herself had sent to her husband there, which was delivered very late!

Though Middleton held on to her seat in the 1950 election, she lost it in the following year’s election, when Churchill’s Conservatives returned to power. The winning Tory was JJ Astor, Nancy’s son. She tried to regain it in 1955, but failed, and in 1956 was not re-nominated as its Labour candidate. Nevertheless she remained active for the rest of her life, including running War on Want for 10 years from 1958, until her death in London in 1983.

Let’s hope Keynsham gives its illustrious citizen the civic recognition she deserves.