Battling Bessie

Her figure is stout, her bust formidable, her manner blunt. Among the urbane Oxford and Cambridge tones of the House of Commons, her voice sounds rough and raucous as a Liverpool fishwife's. In the mannered cut-and-thrust of debate, her points are as emphatic as the slap of a wet cod across a face. Newspapers poke sly fun at her, other M.P.s snicker at her, county squires snort: "She's a disgrace to public life." But among her constituents in Liverpool's grimy dockland, Mrs. Bessie Braddock, M.P., is a beloved and admired champion.

For 210-lb. Bessie Braddock is a character in Liverpool--as salty as its docks, as fierce as its wind, as biting as its rain. Bessie was born 55 years ago in its working-class district, where one cold-water tap in the courtyard often served a whole block of houses. Her mother was a Labor Party worker and a social worker, ladling out soup from "St. George's Plateau (atop the steps of a Liverpool concert hall), and one of Bessie's earliest memories is the look on hungry faces when the soup ran out. When she went to her first job at 15, she remembers her mother calling after her: ". . . And don't come home until you join the union!" Bessie early dedicated herself to getting Liverpool's vermin-ridden, shivering, shawl-clad women and gaunt men out of their slums and into decent dwelling places.

The Ratcatcher. Bessie's heart matched her massive frame (50-in. bust, 40-in. waist, 50-in. hips). But "I've no time to be sympathetic," she says. "There'd be no time to do anything here if you wasted time in sob stuff." Elected as a Laborite to Liverpool's city council at 30, she was rough, tough, uninhibited and unintimidated. "I wish I had a machine gun on the lot of you!" she yelled at the Tory councilmen in her broad Lancashire accent. "We have a Corporation ratcatcher, but he goes for the wrong sort." Once she took a two-foot megaphone into the chamber to help make herself heard. Another time she called a Tory opponent a "deliberate liar," and cheerfully accepted a police escort from the chamber rather than take it back.

In her ten years in the House of Commons, Bessie Braddock has irritated, amused and disgusted other M.P.s, but has ended by winning a grudging admiration from most. "Our people are living in flea-ridden, bug-ridden, rat-ridden, lousy hellholes," she told them. "I will continue to agitate and kick up a row until we get rid of these evils." When the Tories walked out to protest one Labor bill, Bessie (in the words of one reporter) "rose from her seat and made a few steps forward, then a few steps backward. She then arched her body and minced across the floor of the House with one hand on her hip." "A sorry degradation of democracy," one newspaper called it. But Bessie churned on.

Trouble on the Left. Recently, Bessie found herself in trouble--and not from the Tories. Back home in her constituency a small group of Bevanites and far-left-wingers captured control of the local committee, and dropped Bessie as Labor candidate for the next election. A sturdy right-winger, Bessie has no use for Bevan, and says so--loudly. She is even more emphatic about the Communist Party, to which she once belonged. "The Communist Party is rotten through and through," she says. "Don't worry, luv," she told a friend, "those Communists and neoCommunists won't get me out of Parliament. I'll show them what's what. I don't give a tuppenny clout for them."

Bessie was right. Last week, threatened with expulsion by the national party executive and under heavy pressure from the formidable Bessie herself, the local committeemen meekly reversed themselves and declared that Mrs. Braddock would again be the official Labor candidate for Liverpool's Exchange division. Barring a Tory upset on May 26, Bessie would be safely back on the Labor benches in the House of Commons next session, raising her raucous voice for her Liverpudlians.

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