AT Glasgow’s Mitchell Library, until November 30, is an exhibition about Jennie Lee, a miner’s daughter, one of the first female MPs, Britain’s first-ever arts minister, and a key figure in the establishment of the Open University. The O.U. exhibition of photographs and personal items transfers on December 6 to the Lochgelly Centre, in Fife. Lochgelly was where Lee was born, on November 3, 1904.

She graduated from Edinburgh University, where she was “up to my eyebrows” in student politics, and was involved in the socialist movement in Lochgelly. She was greatly affected by the General Strike, especially when it ended so quickly. “All the excitement, all the believing that a new day was dawning, crumbled into bitter resentment and disillusionment,” she later wrote. “It was the struggles in the coalfields in 1926 that shaped the whole of my after-life experience more than any other experience”.

She was a relief teacher in Lochgelly for two years. “I did not believe that there was any good reason why either the children or myself should come to terms with life as we found it in that bleak mining village,’’ she wrote in her memoirs. “Most of the misery I saw around me in school, in the streets, and in private homes, had its roots in the poverty of the place. I did not see how, within the four walls of a classroom, I could ever hope to change any of that.’’

In March 1929 she won the North Lanark seat for the Independent Labour Party, and immediately pledged a “war on poverty”, She retained the seat at that October’s general election, but was defeated at the 1931 election. “All along “, she confided in a letter to a friend, “I have been mentally & emotionally adjusted to defeat in North Lanark… I am terribly, terribly sorry about those stalwarts who worked... through all the rain, and for the moment are simply broken.”

She renounced the official Labour Party when the ILP disaffiliated from it in 1932. She rejoined the official Party in 1944 and was elected MP for Cannock, Staffordshire in 1945. In the meantime she had met and, in 1934, married Nye Bevan, a key figure in the post-war Attlee government, being largely responsible for the creation of a free NHS. Bevan died in 1960.

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Jennie was appointed Minister for the Arts by Harold Wilson in 1964 and the following year launched the first White Paper on the Arts, arguing for greater public access to the arts. Wilson’s dream of a ‘University of the Air’ was given to her to develop; thanks to her ceaseless efforts, the Open University received its royal charter in 1969.

Jennie is seen here (above) at Glasgow University in 1961 (with a young Donald Dewar on the left) and (main image) in 1981. She became Baroness Lee of Asheridge in 1970, a title she held until her death on November 16, 1988. During her time in the Lords she kept a keen eye on the progress of the O.U. A digital version of the exhibition is at www.bit.ly/OUjennielee