Edith Summerskill (1901-80)

Edith Summerskill original David Low caricature portrait artwork. 

Edith Summerskill’s childhood experiences of accompanying her father on home visits exposed her to the reality of poverty and ill health and galvanised her to study medicine. She was an early member of the Socialist Medical Association. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, she put forward the case for a socialised health service, and it was she who came up with the idea of organising social events both to raise money and to attract publicity to the organisation.??Such middle-class professionals, and especially women, were relatively rare in the Labour Party at this time, dominated as it was by male trade unionists. In 1934 she won a by-election to Middlesex County Council and she represented the working-class Green Lanes division of Tottenham until 1941. In 1944 she became a member of Labour's national executive committee, a sign of her rising status, and served on it until 1958; she was party chairman in 1954-5.??After the 1945 general election Summerskill, a great admirer of Clement Attlee, received her first major post as parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Food. In 1950, and a further sign of Attlee's confidence in her, Summerskill became minister of national insurance. She had little time to settle in this post, however, before Labour's defeat at the 1951 general election. From 1951 until 1959 she served on Labour's shadow cabinet. In the late 1940s and 1950s she implacably opposed Aneurin Bevan and his supporters. During the election campaign in 1951 Summerskill told an election rally that Bevan was not the architect of the National Health Service, only its midwife, and that credit for the service should be given to those, such as herself, who had campaigned for socialised medicine since the 1930s.??In February 1961 Summerskill was made a life peeress. 

Size 30cm x 41cm

Medium Pencil on paper

Publication Low's Company

Published 1952