BBC Radio Shetland

Women with a Past

Factual: Life Stories

Factual: History

Series exploring the stories of women from the past.

Women with a Past: Series 2

Women with a Past: Series 2: Episode 3: Helen Crawfurd

Helen Crawfurd

Episode 3

Episode 3: Helen Crawfurd

Series 2

BBC Radio Scotland - Women with a Past, Series 2, Helen Crawfurd

Exploring the life of minister's wife, suffragette and communist Helen Crawfurd.

Susan Morrison explores the life of Helen Crawfurd - minister's wife, suffragette, Red Clydeside activist, anti-WW1 peace campaigner and communist.

Helen Crawfurd (later Anderson), the minister's wife and aspiring missionary who turned communist and who was smuggled out of Norway in a fishing boat to meet Lenin, left a fascinating unpublished autobiography charting her conversion from the manse to Marx. She was born in 1877 in the Gorbals, and at the age of 21 she married an elderly Church of Scotland minister nearly fifty years older than herself and then embarked on a course of reading and radicalisation. First she became a militant suffragette: going to jail, hunger-striking and body-guarding for Mrs Pankhurst, but when Pankhurst turned to patriotic fervour and dropped the struggle on the outbreak of WW1, Helen refused to give up. She became active in the Red Clydeside rent strikes, the ILP and the anti-war and anti-conscription peace movement. But it was the Bolshevik revolution which gave her a life-long cause. She made her daring pilgrimage to the Soviet Union in 1920, joined the infant British communist party and a few years later became a member of its central executive committee. 

Her autobiography follows an uncompromising Stalinist line but there were whispers that this wasn't her whole view on things... What was a convinced communist doing, far from the struggle, becoming in 1945 the first woman councillor in douce respectable Dunoon? Susan Morrison, who co-incidentally comes from Dunoon herself, goes on Helen's trail.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

Women with a Past

Series 2

Episode 3: Helen Crawfurd

Genres

Brand

Series

BBC Radio Shetland

About BBC Radio Scotland