page_title: Leah Manning
section_title: Politics
hierarchical_section_title: Leah Manning / Politics
caption_attribution_description: English: Spanish Medial Aid Armband on display at Army Medical Services Museum.
context_page_description: Dame Elizabeth Leah Manning DBE was a British educationalist, social reformer, and Labour Member of Parliament in the 1930s and 1940s. She organised the evacuation of orphaned or at risk Basque children during the Spanish Civil War.
  Her parents emigrated to the United States when she was 14, but decided that she should remain in Britain, and she was looked after by her maternal grandparents, who were Methodists.
context_section_description: Manning welcomed news of the October revolution in Russia, and became a member of the 1917 Club. In peacetime, she became an active speaker on behalf of Labour candidates in elections around the country. She was appointed headmistress of a new experimental Open Air School for undernourished children which Cambridge education authority had established on a farm site, and found this work exceptionally rewarding. In 1929, she served as organising secretary of the National Union of Teachers, becoming its President in 1930.
  In 1931, she was elected as MP for Islington East in a by-election on 19 February. She did not support Ramsay MacDonald's National Government and stayed in the Labour Party, losing her seat a few months later at the 1931 general election in October. She served on the Labour Party National Executive Committee from 1931 to 1932, and in the 1935 general election unsuccessfully contested Sunderland.
  She was meanwhile moving away from her previous strict pacifism towards a more active anti-fascism. At the 1936 Labour Party Conference, several party members, including Ellen Wilkinson, Stafford Cripps, Aneurin Bevan and Charles Trevelyan, argued that military help should be given to the Popular Front of Spain, which fought Francisco Franco and his fascist Nationalist Army. Despite a passionate appeal from Isabel de Palencia, the Labour Party supported the Conservative Government's policy of non-intervention.
  Manning disagreed with the official line and became Secretary of the Spanish Medical Aid Committee. In the spring of 1937, she helped to arrange the evacuation of almost 4,000 Basque children to Britain as well as around 200 adults, accompanying the children on the SS Habana. While there she witnessed the bombing of Guernica. In 1938, Manning returned to Spain, where she wrote a report on the hospitals where British doctors and nurses were working. Back in England, she continued to be involved with the Basque children, visiting them and highlighting their plight.
  Manning was selected as Labour candidate for Epping and won the seat in the 1945 general election. In Parliament, she was known for her commitment to education. Defeated in the 1950 general election, she unsuccessfully contested Epping again in 1951 and 1955.
caption: Spanish Medical Aid armband
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