Louise Hudson

The free bottle of milk on every British school desk was put there by a 4ft 10 redhead from a Manchester slum, who was dead within 6 months of doing it. Ellen Wilkinson grew up in Ardwick in the 1890s, in a house with no bath, and caught every illness going. She got out on scholarships. By 1935 she was MP for Jarrow, a shipbuilding town where the yard had shut and 7 men in 10 had no work. She had seen what that did to the children. They were small, bow-legged and grey. In 1936 she walked with 200 of their fathers from Jarrow to London, nearly 300 miles, to hand in a petition. The Prime Minister would not see them. In 1945 she was made Minister of Education. She had one thing she wanted above the rest. The Treasury told her the country was bankrupt and it could not be afforded. In August 1946 a third of a pint of full cream milk became free for every schoolchild in Britain, every day, whatever their parents earned. That winter was the worst of the century. Her ministry had no coal. She worked in her overcoat with bronchitis, and on 6 February 1947 she was found dead in her flat, aged 55. She never saw a single class of those children grow up. They turned out the tallest and straightest generation the country had ever produced. If you drank it, warm, through a paper straw, you were her life's work.