Farewell, Our Barbara

But if No.10 Downing Street was never to be her home, she was no stranger there. Four times a Cabinet minister in the Harold Wilson years, she remains the second most eminent woman politician of the century.

Though she earned this epitaph on the national and world stage, for the voters in Blackburn, where she was MP for 34 years after being swept into office in the Labour landslide of 1945, she was just plain "Our Barbara."

A career politician, determined to wield top-level influence and undaunted by the workload that high office brought, she remained a diligent constituency MP -- as evidenced by the countless cases of ordinary Blackburn people whose causes she fought and won.

It was, however, on the stump -- in the era before TV coverage had begun to reduce election fights to staccato "soundbite" wars -- that her "Battling Barbara" charisma was at its most brilliant.

Every sentiment from indignation to mockery and every device from wit to hard fact was packed into her platform performances as, with a wagging finger, a toss of her red hair and frown and then a smile, she worked her way to a standing ovation.

Old-style electioneering lost one of its stars and the House of Commons a firebrand when Barbara gave up her seat in 1979, to be succeeded by her protg, Jack Straw.

She had departed from Westminster as a mere back-bencher, her glittering ministerial career ended by Prime Minister Jim Callaghan when he succeeded Harold Wilson in 1976.

She did not have the same sort of relationship with Big Jim as she had with Wilson and one suspicion was that her loss of high office -- she was minister in charge of health and social services at the time -- was a price she paid for having supported Callaghan's major rival, Michael Foot, for the Labour leadership.

With Wilson, it was far different. After a petrol advertisement of the time, he called her the "tiger in his tank" and described her as the "best 'man' in my Cabinet."

It was under Wilson -- "more pro-woman than any other person I know," she said - that her career thrived. The pair had been colleagues since 1951 when, after first being appointed as parliamentary private secretary to Sir Stafford Cripps, President of the Board of Trade, soon after entering the Commons, she became PPS to the man destined to be twice Prime Minister.

When Wilson first entered No.10 in 1964, he made Barbara Minister of Overseas Development, with a seat in the Cabinet; the following year she was promoted to Transport -- an office she marked, as a non-driver, with the introduction of breathalyser tests and as the first woman in the post.

From 1968, until Labour's defeat two year's later, she was Minister of Employment and Productivity, a post in which she suffered one of her worst setbacks in politics -- the collapse of her In Place of Strife White Paper, the first major change in trade union law in 60 years, aimed at curbing industrial unrest, but drawing the fire of Labour's union allies for the restraints it would have put on them and virtually splitting them from the party. And, tellingly, it was a measure on which Jim Callaghan had fought with her in Labour's national executive and in the Cabinet.

It has been said that if she had won through with the Bill, Labour might have won the 1970 general election, but loss of office was perhaps tempered for her by the failure of the Heath government's attempt to deal with the nation's strikes problem -- when its Industrial Relations Act was quickly rendered almost a dead letter by trade union resistance.

With the return of a Labour government in 1974 -- and after her tenth, and largest, poll victory in Blackburn -- she became Minister for Social Services, taking charge of a health service only then only recently re-organised by her Tory predecessors. Here, too, lay ultimate disappointment as loss of office two years later eclipsed her efforts, hotly contested by many doctors, to curb private medicine and phase out private beds from NHS hospitals -- a situation that was an anathema to her left-wing socialist principles which had matured early in her parliamentary career in the camp of Aneurin Bevan, the ministerial "father" of the National Health Service.

But if there were reverses during those days in high office, they were outnumbered by achievements which, at the time, strengthened the notion that Barbara Castle might reach the pinnacle of power. Of these, she was most proud of her Equal Pay Bill which meant that, by 1975, women workers -- some six million -- were entitled to the same wages as men on the same job. Child benefit -- another measure helping women managing a family budget -- was also her creation. And the once-controversial breathalyser also brought her the thanks of many wives anxious about their husband's drinking. And her campaigning against entry-turnstiles in women's public toilets was another instance of her championing women's issues.

In the male-dominated world of politics, Barbara's attractiveness may have assisted her over the career barriers placed in the way of most of the outnumbered women MPs of her era, but she was also clever, articulate, capable and determined.

She was no stranger to controversy, battling not only with the doctors and confronting trade union power, but creating upsets with such things as her criticisms of the Coronation festivities in 1953 and a huge political storm over her remarks in 1958 about the behaviour of British troops in Cyprus during the terrorism-marked years of Greek Cypriot struggle for union with Greece which presaged the compromise-solution -- which Barbara helped to deliver -- of independence for the island.

Her strong political opinions had been first formed at her father's knee. Born in Chesterfield in October, 1910, she was brought up in a home where political discussion was encouraged by her Income tax inspector father, Frank Betts, a man of powerful Left-wing views. From Bradford Girls' Grammar School, she went on a scholarship to Oxford where she read economics and, reportedly, was to dislike the dominant male influence on university life.

Afterwards, she joined a local newspaper in Hyde, near Manchester, only to find it was closing down -- a victim of the 1930s' depression -- after she had been there only a week. In her next job -- as a sales demonstrator in Manchester stores of items such as tins of coffee and crystallised fruits -- that experience of the insecurity of shop girls' working conditions reinforced her socialism.

She turned to London, journalism and politics, becoming the youngest member of St Pancras Borough Council in 1937 while working as assistant editor of a local government journal. Appointed by Herbert Morrison, the future deputy PM in the post-war Labour government, as London County Council representative on the Metropolitan Water Board in 1940, she also spent the mid-war years as an administrative officer at the Ministry of Food before joining the Daily Mirror in 1944, the year she married her husband, Ted, a former journalist on the staff and later editor of Picture Post magazine.

At the Mirror, Barbara was a housing correspondent and writer of a column, Question Time in the Mess, an advice service for the millions then in forces' uniform. But it was a career soon ended by the one that was to dominate her life -- full-time politics.

It may be said that, from then on, she had no other life. She and Ted had no children; her only interests outside politics were listed as poetry and walking. It is not surprising then that, on giving up the House of Commons in 1979, after Callaghan had blocked her ministerial career and reduced a former power-player to a mere backbench MP, that she was unable, though well into retirement age, to abandon politics at stroke -- even if it meant a new career in the European Parliament, despite her having been a fierce critic of the Common Market.

Perhaps, as Manny Shinwell, the veteran far-Left Labour MP who went to a House of Lords he formerly railed against, once explained, it was a case of "having nowhere else to go." But a peerage was not an alternative for Barbara -- at least, not then. She had turned down Callaghan's consolation offer of a title and had deliberately distanced herself from the Upper House by refusing to be known as Lady Castle when her husband went to the Lords in 1974 as a Labour baron.

Even so, Barbara's move to Europe -- as MEP for Greater Manchester North from 1979 to 1984 and for Greater Manchester West for the next five years -- was seen as something of a political somersault though she explained that her aim was to put her own views against the European Community from the inside.

From 1979 -- the year Blackburn gave her the Freedom of the Borough in recognition of her long years as MP -- to 1985 she was leader of the British Labour group in Europe.

Yet, to the Lords she did go in 1990, as Baroness Castle of Blackburn, nominated by then Labour leader Neil Kinnock in recognition of her work in politics, and, as with her attitude on Europe, pledging to be a reformer of the institution on the inside. And bereft of the companionship of her husband, Ted, who had died in 1979 and with few interests outside the hurly-burly of politics, she had, perhaps, a good excuse in her own mind for remaining active inside an institution she once branded as a place for "deadbeats.'

Certainly, even in her 80th year, she possessed one of the liveliest minds in the House and her entry there was typical of her of the battling style she maintained throughout her years at Westminster - with her refusing to wear her cocked hat on her formal entry to the Lords because it would ruin her hair-do and refusing to kneel to the Lord Chancellor. She kept up a rebellious stance even when Tony Blair led Labour back to power, battling with the government over its failure to restore the state pension's link with wages and criticising New Labour's style of leadership, by accusing it of intolerance and stifling dissent.

It was a fiery sunset of a famous career that was eclipsed by only one other woman in politics. And, but for that trip-up on the high hurdle in the late 1960s when she was the Labour minister who crossed swords with the then-mighty unions, her place in political history might never have been overshadowed a decade later by Margaret Thatcher.