Mavis Tate was one of the most influential women MPs in the 1930-40s, at a time when there were very few in the House of Commons. From 1935 to 1945, she was Conservative MP for Frome.
She was born on 17 August 1893 on St Helena, where her father was sheriff, and married her second husband, Henry Tate (of the sugar family) in 1925. She helped her cousin, Douglas Hogg (later Viscount Hailsham) in his elections at St Marylebone. She won the Willesden West seat from Labour at the 1931 general election, and at the 1935 general election she switched to the safer seat of Frome, but held it only with a rather small majority of under 1,000.
She had told her Frome adoption meeting that women MPs should not only represent ‘women’s interests’, as she did not believe there were such things as ‘women’s questions’. Although not originally a feminist in the modern sense, she had developed broad interests, which she put to good use in her parliamentary career.
Unusually for her time, she was a qualified pilot. In May 1936 she participated in a rather bizarre race against 166 racing pigeons between Tamworth and Radstock, during which she flew by plane between Castle Bromwich and Frome! In Parliament she championed the growing civil aviation sector, even denouncing ministers, in March 1945, for their complacency over what she described as “an entirely new age, the age of the air…”
Tate fought relentlessly for gender equality, and her two main wartime campaigns were for equal compensation for injured female civilians, and for equal pay. On the former, she persuaded 95 MPs to vote for her amendment in the King’s Speech debate in November 1942, highly unusual during the wartime party truce. This led to a select committee, which supported her, and the Government was forced to accept its recommendations.
She was just as tenacious on equal pay, forcing a vote on teachers’ pay in March 1944, inflicting the wartime Coalition Government’s only defeat. The PM, Churchill, was so enraged he forced a vote of confidence the next day which overturned the vote, but a Royal Commission was set up to look at the whole question.
In the final days of the War, Tate was the only woman in the 10-person Parliamentary delegation which briefly visited the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp. Like them all, Tate was greatly affected by the horrors she saw, and shortly after was taken ill. This latest bout of ill-health came just as a general election loomed.
Shortly before war broke out in 1939, Tate had said that, because of the great expense of representing a large constituency, she would not contest the next election, then expected shortly. However, once war was declared, and any election deferred, she agreed to continue as Frome’s MP ‘for the duration’, and in November 1944, she agreed to stand again, provided a suitable election fund was organised to assist her. But, despite a spirited campaign, she was swept away in the July 1945 general election by the national Labour landslide victory.
She agreed, in March 1946, to be re-adopted as prospective candidate for Frome, and was politically active in the following months. However, her troubled personal life (including two divorces) and persistent ill-health led to a tragic end when she was found dead at her London home on 5 June 1947, aged 53. She left a note to her brother: “As I have no one dependent on me it seems to me the wiser thing to do to end my life. An invalid is only a national liability today, and I cannot endure the extensive and constant pain in my head and practically no sleep at all week after week.” The coroner’s verdict was that she died of coal gas poisoning self-administered, at a time when the balance of her mind was disturbed by ill-health.
Tate had been an assiduous constituency MP, pursuing issues of particular concern to rural communities such as housing, education and transport. In Parliament she raised issues such as school lighting in Pensford; the wartime ‘British Restaurant’ in Frome; the water supply in Timsbury, and wartime nursery provision in the county. A Western Daily Press front-page obituary of her claimed that “No Member of Parliament ever worked harder for constituents than Mrs Tate did while she represented the Frome division … Mrs Tate never asked whether a constituent was Tory, Labour or Liberal.”
The Somerset Football Association named a trophy after her “because of her local connection and contribution to political history.” The Mavis Tate Inter League Cup is a knockout competition open to adult male leagues affiliated to the SFA. After the War, the Frome Agricultural Show also had a Mavis Tate Cup, a silver challenge cup donated by Tate and awarded for the best local dairy cow. However, there seem to be no memorials to her in Frome itself, which may be something that community could rectify to commemorate this remarkable person.
© JB Seatrobe (Barry K Winetrobe & Janet Seaton) 2018. A version of this article was published originally in the Dec 2017 issue of the Somerset Leveller, #32.