Jennie Lee

Jennie Lee (1904-1988), British Labour Party politician, the first Minister for the Arts in the United Kingdom, in which capacity she was instrumental in the establishment of the Open University. Born in Lochgelly, Fife, she was the daughter of a miner, who, as chairman of the local branch of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), was a trade union activist during the General Strike of 1926.

Lee attended Edinburgh University on a bursary from the Carnegie Trust, graduating with a degree in education and law, before becoming a teacher in Cowdenbeath. Selected as ILP candidate for North Lanark to fight a by-election in February 1929, she entered the House of Commons at the age of 24, at that time the youngest Member of Parliament (MP). She swiftly established her socialist credentials, attacking the 1929 budget of Winston Churchill in her maiden speech. Opposed to the National Government of Ramsay MacDonald, she lost her seat in 1931. In 1934 she married the left-wing Labour MP Aneurin Bevan.

A persuasive speaker, Lee spent the early 1930s on lecture tours, and became especially active in attempting to form a Popular Front across Europe to stem the rise of fascism. In 1940 she became a journalist for the Daily Mirror, before returning to Parliament in 1945 as MP for Cannock. Eventually, in the first government of Harold Wilson in 1964, Lee was appointed Minister for the Arts, and was also responsible for Wilson’s personal project for a “University of the Air”. Originally envisaged as a consortium of existing universities, Lee aimed to create an autonomous, independent university, overcoming the scepticism of the education establishment to create the Open University, which finally enrolled its first students in 1971. In her time at the ministry, Lee also oversaw the doubling of government funding of the arts. She served as Chairman of the Labour Party in 1968.

Losing her seat in the 1970 general election, Lee entered the House of Lords as a newly created life peer. She wrote two autobiographies: Tomorrow is a New Day (1939) and My Life with Nye (1980).