Younger comrades, surveying the smart suited opportunists that make up New Labour might be forgiven for assuming that the party was always like that. In fact, the Labour Party was built over the first fifty years of the last century by working class people who would at best be patronised and ignored by today’s leadership or at worst not allowed to join at all; people to who the word socialism meant something real and concrete (though not necessarily what we would agree with).

One such was Elizabeth Andrews, (1882-1960). Born in a miner’s family in the Rhondda, she became active in the Womens’ Sufferage movement, then in the Co-operative and Labour movement. She served as Labour Party Womens organiser from 1919 to 1947 at a time when serving meant just that, long cold journeys by public transport to speak in draughty halls to handfuls of people for very little pay or expenses and carrying out office work and producing leaflets with none of the modern conveniences we take for granted.
“A Woman’s Work is Never Done’ is a republished collection comprising a short autobiography written in 1957 and pieces she wrote for the Colliery Workers Magazine (South Wales Miners Federation monthly), The Rhondda Clarion (Rhondda Labour Party paper) and Labour Woman (Labour Party womens’ magazine).

The biography is plain – almost like the a labour movement meeting or conference report. All the way through it is necessary to see the struggle and agony behind her plain factual statements of her upbringing..

“ I was born on December 15th 1882 at Hirwaen, Breconshire near Aberdare, one of a family of eleven children…I was the third child. One baby sister died when a few weeks old and one brother died in his teenage….”
“….My mother Charlotte was one of five sisters left motherless so the girls had to go out to domestic service at an early age for little more than their keep…”
“….My father died at the age of fifty seven from silicosis, known in those days as ‘miners asthma’ and I have lost two brothers since then from the same disease.”
“ ,,,,I commenced school when I was about four years old and I remember taking my two pennies every Monday to pay for it….”
“….I had to leave school at twelve because of our large family and the coming ninth baby. The baby died and I had the chance to return to school for another year….”

Elizabeth Andrews learned about politics from an early age - the politics of the old Welsh Labour Party which in Morgan Phillips’ phrase “owed more to Methodism than to Marx”. Her first experience was of the Womens’ Sufferage Movement (“non-militant”), then as a founder member of the Independent Labour Party and the Co-operative Womens Guild in the Rhondda.
After the constitution of the Labour Party in 1918 she was appointed the first Womens Organiser covering Wales. She was involved in all the campaigns in the coalfields, especially for the provision of pithead baths and leading up to the vicious lock out on the South Wales coalfield following the 1926 General Strike. In the ‘30s she was part of the agitation for nursery schools and for the Welfare State.
The reader is left aching to know the reality that lay behind her brief almost brisk sentences. For example, what were the arguments put up among miners against pithead baths, and how were the Misses Davies of Gregynog persuaded to build the first ones at the Ocean Colliery? What were her differences with the Communist Party Councillors of Rhondda Council?
And why did she not mention major events such as the Spanish Civil War, the hunger marches, the movement against the Means Test in the middle ‘30s? Was this because of her strong opposition to the CP which played a major role?

What comes over is the memoir of a life-long Labour loyalist not willing to wash any dirty linen in public or go against the party line. (Though given the leaking, spinning and whispering campaigns of todays New Labour functionaries, maybe this doesn’t seem such a bad thing).
Following the autobiography, the reprints of her articles from the 1920s and ‘30s, show a completely different side. Powerful, impassioned agitational material, still packing a punch, these show Elizabeth Andrews’ wholehearted commitment to the cause of Labour politics and womens’ emancipation. Perhaps they should be read first.

The book has a foreward by Lady Kinnock whose main point seems to be to explain that she has campaigned ‘for many years’ to have the book republished. One would have thought, given the resources and contacts of the noble Lord and Lady that it would not have been too difficult for her to sponsor publication.

An introduction by the editor, Ursula Masson is more useful. Although excessively ‘academic’, it puts some flesh on the bare bones of the narrative and mentions some interesting points such as the arguments in the party in the 1920s over free birth control information in municipal clinics.

This book shows Elizabeth Andrews as the best type of old-style labour loyalist. No revolutionary, but utterly dedicated to ‘the cause’; practically acquainted with the suffering and hardship of working people and pragmatically working to alleviate it. Her autobiography, written in 1957 breathes the confidence that the Welfare State brought in by Labour between 1945 and 1951 had to a great extent alleviated that suffering. Fortunate, perhaps, that she did not live the dismantling of the Welfare State and the deliquescence of the party for which she worked all her life.