Tuesday 1 February 2011

Born & Bred...

What Ho... and a Tidderly Pom....

I have been looking to see if there is anything of interest on at the theatre, one of the smaller ones preferably and I found this most interesting show.

Our Bessie...                    

Showing at The Liverpool Actors Studio. 7Th - 12th February 2011.

This promise to be one hell of a show, this lady appears to be quiet a forgotten and some what unsung hero of social reform........

Elizabeth Margaret Braddock was born in Liverpool to working class parents in1899 she was known as Bessie Braddock but mainly known as “Battling Bessie”.  

Growing up Bessie was exposed to the inequality and poverty of the city (Liverpool) from an early age.
Bessie's mother Mary Bamber “Ma” was committed to social reform and helping the poor of Liverpool.
Bessie recalls in her autobiography helping her mother on the soup lines in Liverpool.

I remember the faces of the unemployed when the soup ran out. I remember their dull eyes and their thin, blue lips. I remember blank, hopeless stares, day after day, week after week, all through the hard winter of 1906-7, when I was seven years old. I saw the unemployed all over Liverpool.        

Bessie became a councillor in 1930 for St Anne's ward and in 1945 she became presendent of the Liverpool Trades Council and the Labour Party .and was an ardent and feisty campaigner, her specialist interest included maternity, child welfare and youth crime.

During WWII Bessie worked as an ambulance assistant officer and she also fought for the fashion rights of larger women, with measurements of 50”, 40”, 50” she understood their struggle to find clothes. In 1959 she took part in a London fashion show for larger than average women.

She is also famous for the following disagreement that accured between herself and Winston Churchill.

See full size imageBraddock: " Winston, you are drunk, and what's more you are disgustingly drunk."............   
Churchill:" Bessie, my dear, you are ugly, and what's more, you are disgustingly ugly..........
But tomorrow I shall be sober and you will still be disgustingly ugly."[
All in all she was one hell of a LADY... That Battling Bessie.....

TTFN x




1 comment:

  1. Wow! What a character! Thanks for this information, I'll have to look her up.

    Interestingly, Mr Churchill has a slight reseblance to the very person he is calling ugly! Ha ha!

    ReplyDelete