Pioneering south Wales ILPer Minnie Pallister was one of the most important feminists, pacifists, socialists and journalists of the 20th century. But her life and legacy have been largely forgotten in recent decades.
ILP Friend and author Alun Burge has put that right in his new book, The Voice of a Rebel. Alun will be speaking about her life and work at an online ILP meeting on Monday 21 October, starting at 7.00pm.
“Pallister was to Wales what Jennie Lee was to Scotland and Ellen Wilkinson was to England,” writes Burge.
“Her pen portrait reads like a catalogue of unlikely achievements, whether confronting head-on the men of the south Wales valleys over their wives’ domestic drudgery; or as one of the earliest advocates of family allowances in the decades from 1918; or as the first full-time woman labour organiser in Wales for the ILP that year; or as Labour Party agent for Aberavon from 1920, when she was key in getting Ramsay MacDonald elected to parliament, and thus prime minister.”
She went on to become president of the Welsh ILP, an ILP parliamentary candidate, an anti-war campaigner, a prolific author and a BBC broadcaster. She was known as an outstanding orator, once hailed in parliament by Michael Foot, who said, “when Pallister spoke from a soapbox in Tredegar, it was carried across the mountain to Merthyr, like some sort of religious icon, so it could be seen there”.
When she died in March 1960, she was a household name. But the importance of this Brynmawr school teacher cum pioneering socialist has largely faded from memory – until now.
Alun’s book, Minnie Pallister: Voice of a Rebel, was published in September 2024 by Parthian Books.
You can hear Alun speak about Pallister and his new book at an open Zoom meeting on 21 October via this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82280721344?pwd=sQBqIcPqOWyaijvS6y4DykFMegebCa.1
Meeting ID: 822 8072 1344
Passcode: 920964
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Alun Burge worked in the Welsh government’s Department of Social Justice from 2002 and in local government. He was part of a group that published We, The People: The Case for Radical Federalism and Our Right: The People’s Convention in early 2021.