Thread by @DurhamGala

The great Jennie Lee, radical and rebel, founder of the @OpenUniversity, the youngest woman MP, and Gala speaker, was born #OnThisDay in 1904.

A miner’s daughter from Lochgelly, Fife, she graduated from Edinburgh University and became a school teacher. (1/7)

Aged 24, in March 1929 Lee became the youngest woman elected MP, representing North Lanarkshire.

In her maiden speech, she attacked the Chancellor Winston Churchill over his “cant, corruption, and incompetence”. In July that year, she spoke for the first time at the Gala. (2/7)

Lee was a leading opponent of the ‘Great Betrayal’ of 1931, when Ramsay MacDonald led sections of the Labour Party into National Government with the Tories.

When she returned to speak at the Gala the following year, she said…(3/7)

“It is a pleasant thing, especially when you are looking for votes, to say, ‘Don’t be afraid, we are not going to change very much’. I believe that from now onwards to speak like that to the working people of this country is a dishonest thing… (4/7)

"I believe that our job is to make it as clear as we can that there is going to be no improvement of social conditions for workers until the workers themselves have power and control in this country.” (5/7)

After losing her seat in Parliament, Lee remained politically active. A supporter of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, she travelled to Spain with George Orwell. She returned to parliament in 1945 as MP for the mining constituency for Cannock in Staffordshire. (6/7)

As a minister in the Labour governments of the 1960s, she secured the foundation of the The Open University. She returned to speak at the #DurhamMinersGala in 1971.

She was married to Aneurin Bevan from 1934 until his death in 1960. Jennie Lee died aged 84 in 1988. (7/7)