Betty Boothroyd obituary: First woman speaker of the House of Commons famed for her warmth and wit

Born: October 8th, 1929

Died: February 26th, 2023

Betty Boothroyd, who has died aged 93, overturned more than 700 years of British parliamentary tradition in 1992 when she became the first woman to be elected speaker of the House of Commons. She was a successful and popular speaker who acquired international fame for her brisk, good-humoured style and for the warmth and wit she exuded, along with a whiff of glamour.

Boothroyd was the Labour MP for West Bromwich from 1973 and for West Bromwich West – when the seat was split in two the following year – until her retirement in 2000. She played a leading part behind the scenes as a rightwing party loyalist in the power struggles within the party during the 1970s and 1980s. She was a shrewd political tactician, as was shown by her success in winning the speakership. She was only the third Labour MP ever to take the chair and she did so by defeating the Conservative candidate, Peter Brooke, by 372 votes to 238 in the first contested election for speaker in more than 40 years.

‘I wouldn’t wish it on anyone’: What to know and do about shingles

---

The rationale for moving from Dublin to commuter counties has never been stronger

---

Michael Palin on the loss of his wife of 57 years: ‘you feel you’ll never have a friend as close as that’

---

Extreme male grooming: Why are young men embracing damaging beauty ideals?

---

Boothroyd had a down-to-earth, no-nonsense manner. She was, famously, a former member of the Tiller Girls dancing troupe but she was also a working-class northerner, born and raised in the Yorkshire mill town of Dewsbury, the only child of parents who had both started work at the age of 13. She failed the 11-plus and became a shop assistant and then a shorthand typist. Barbara Castle, for whom Boothroyd once worked as a secretary, wrote that the moral of Boothroyd’s career was: “You never know what people are capable of until you give them the opportunity to show it.”

She had a tough fight, even to enter the Commons. She was elected at a byelection on her fifth attempt to become an MP – and used to joke that if she had not won on that occasion she would have slit her throat.

Boothroyd was an early political activist. Her parents, Archibald and Mary, were members of the Labour party and the Textile Workers’ Union on which they relied for the protection of their jobs in the heavy woollen industry in the old West Riding. They did not always have work, although Mary, a weaver, was more often employed than her husband – because her wages, as a woman, were less.

Their lives were hard and Boothroyd never romanticised her past: taking it in turns with her mother to scrub the front steps, the zinc bath on Fridays in front of the fire, sitting talking in the evening by firelight in order to save on the electricity.

The Boothroyd family was agreed that education was the political key and while young Betty was not academic she had been good at essays. When she was ill at home for a fortnight, her father used his lunch hour to walk to her school every day to collect her homework. The happiest day of her parents’ lives, she would say, was when at the age of 13 she won a scholarship to Dewsbury Technical College, where she could learn the skills to earn her living.

The only problem was that she also liked dancing and nearly broke her father’s heart by trying to turn professional when she was 17.

She had been a singer and dancer “hoofing it” with a teenage jazz band, the Swing Stars, entertaining servicemen under the auspices of Ensa, when she successfully auditioned for the Tiller Girls in London. She spent the freezing winter of 1946, miserably unhappy, incredibly cold, in her lodgings at the Theatre Girls’ Club in Greek Street and then, after a short spell at the London Palladium, was sent to perform in Luton in Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

She limped home with a foot infection and a bruised ego – “I wasn’t much good at it actually” – and it was another 30 years before she would at last appear, like the Tiller Girls, on the stage of the Blackpool Winter Gardens, but now as a member of the Labour party’s national executive committee.

Back in Dewsbury, chastened by the debacle of her show business career, she took a job as secretary to the Road Haulage Association.

On her return to London in 1952, she joined the research department at the Labour party’s headquarters, Transport House, as a secretary. She then worked as a secretary in the Commons for Castle and Geoffrey de Freitas, as secretary to a US Congressman in Washington DC for two years (1960-1962) and for one of the first Labour peers, Lord (Harry) Walston, until she entered parliament.

After her election as an MP, Boothroyd made a feisty maiden speech, ignoring what had previously been the convention to avoid controversy when first contributing to a parliamentary debate. She claimed to be able to speak for “ordinary working people” and attacked the then Conservative government for its failure to alleviate the injustice of the two-tier society that existed in the UK.

She became the first woman to be made a Labour government whip when appointed assistant whip for the West Midlands after the October 1974 election. The then chief whip, Bob Mellish, reportedly told her: “Keep your trap shut, girl, and you will get on” but instead she resigned the post the following year to serve as an appointed member of the European Assembly, in the era before direct elections took place.

Boothroyd was not an innovative speaker. She opposed the changes in parliamentary hours that were subsequently introduced after her term of office and she suffered some criticism for failing, in the opinion of some radical MPs, to help the Commons update its role – notably by refusing to allow women MPs to breastfeed in the chamber during debates.

She believed that it was up to MPs to make changes in the way business was done, rather than the occupant of the chair, but she did complain vociferously in public and in private at the growing practice of ministers choosing to bypass the House of Commons and make important political pronouncements on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme instead. This became a particular issue after the election of Tony Blair in 1997.

However, she ruled the Commons with good humour and considerable charm. “To err is human, but Erskine May is divine”, she once said in response to a recalcitrant MP who was challenging the parliamentary rule book. When members spoke for too long she had a habit of clumsily stifling a yawn as a signal of her displeasure and at the end of prime minister’s questions she inadvertently introduced what would become her catchphrase by declaring after one of her first sessions in the chair: “Time’s up!” She revelled in the comparison it earned her with a barmaid from a television soap.

Boothroyd took her seat as a cross-bench peer in 2001 when she retired from the speakership. Honours and honorary degrees were heaped upon her, by universities including Oxford, Cambridge, London and St Andrews, but her personal interests centred on her role as chancellor of the Open University. It was a post she was invited to accept because of her support for the universal right to adult education.

She did not marry, despite receiving a number of offers – at least three of which were serious – saying that they always came at the wrong time. She was sad never to have had children, but she was brilliant with other people’s and had an instinctive touch for treating them as if they were grown-ups. It was possibly the secret of her success as speaker. – Guardian