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A socialist heroine
DAVID NICHOLSON is fascinated by one of the early pioneers of the women’s movement and of the early days of the Labour Party
bolsheviks

Minnie Pallister: The Voice of a Rebel
Alun Burge
Parthian Books, £20

 

AN ADOPTED daughter of Wales, a dimly remembered heroine of the labour and peace movement, and a renowned broadcaster and journalist makes for the fascinating tale of the life of Minnie Pallister. Alan Burge’s biography of Pallister is a story of the labour movement itself.

One of three daughters born to Durham coal miner William Pallister, who became a Wesleyan Methodist minister and took his young family to live in Haverford West in Pembrokeshire in 1899. The young Minnie was the middle daughter and became a confirmed socialist and pacifist and campaigned against the Great War alongside her friends Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald.

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