Castle, Barbara ___ 1910-2002 ___ British ___ politician

BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
Barbara Betts, the daughter of a tax inspector, was born in Bradford, educated at St Hugh's College, Oxford, and elected for the Labour Party to St Pancras Borough in 1937. With Michael Foot and others, she launched the influential and radical weekly magazine 'The Tribune'. During the war, she wrote for the 'Daily Mirror' about housing, and then, at the 1943 Labour Party Conference, she made a name for herself by criticising the leadership's ineffectual approach towards the Beveridge Report. The following year, she married the journalist Ted Castle. She was elected MP for Blackburn in 1945, and, soon after, was taken on by the minister of trade, Stafford Cripps, as an aide. She was elected chairperson of the Labour Party in 1958-1959. In 1964, the new Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, appointed her first as Minister of Overseas Development, then as Minister of Transport, then as Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity. After the Conservative's term of office in the first half of the 1970s, Labour returned to power, and Castle became Secretary of State for Social Services until 1976 when Jim Callaghan took over from Wilson. Castle then sat in the European Parliament for ten years until 1989, before joining the House of Lords in 1990. Castle began to keep her diary soon after her appointment to the cabinet by Wilson. They are considered an important historical source concerning British politics in the 1960s and 1970s.
A biography link
Wikipedia bio

DIARY DATES, CONTENT DESCRIPTORS
1964-1976 ___ political transport people historyeye

WEB TEXT LINKS
about
some citations

ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT LINKS
University of Bradford

SOME PUBLISHED TITLES
The Castle Diaries 1964-70
The Castle Diaries 1974-76
 

May 2005. September 2008, March 2013
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IMPORTANT NOTES AND CAUTIONS: 1) The first line of basic information may be incomplete in several ways: some historical figures have different names (titles, pen-names); their birth and death dates may be unknown or uncertain (g - guess, c - circa); similarly, their occupations may be unknown, or they may have had other jobs; and, for early diarists, I've used 'British' a bit too freely. 2) The biographical summary may not be accurate. It was compiled quickly from various sources, mostly on the internet, and the facts were not checked anywhere near as rigorously as they would have been if they'd been intended for publication in a printed form. 3) The journal dates and descriptors (which are in no particular order) must be treated with caution: since I have not examined the diaries myself, the descriptors are only guesses based on bibliographies, anthologies and internet biographies. 4) For the biography and etext links, I have ignored any sites with charges, and I have avoided, wherever possible, those with pop-ups or too much advertising. I have limited myself to providing three etext links where there is some variety between them. 5) For the original manuscript links, I have limited myself to providing a maximum of two (although, for a few diarists, their original diaries are held in more than two places). 6) I have provided the titles - chosen randomly - for up to three printed editions of the diaries.