Trailblazer shook up UK politics
Shirley Williams Politician BORN JULY 27, 1930 – DIED APRIL 12, 2021, AGED 90
LADY Shirley Williams was one of the “Gang of Four” Labour ministers who rattled British politics in 1981 by quitting the party to found the Social Democratic Party. A voice of the centre-left, Williams was dismayed by Labour’s socialist swerve under Michael Foot.
She became the SDP’s president for five years and later Liberal Democrats leader in the House of Lords from 2001 to 2004 after it merged with the Liberal Party.
Baroness Williams of Crosby – the title bestowed upon the life peer in 1993 – was principled and forthright throughout her five decades in politics.A trailblazer for women, she was once considered a contender for Britain’s first female Prime Minister.
Serving as Education Secretary under James Callaghan from 1976 to 1979, she controversially instigated the abolishment of the 11-plus examination and the phasing out of grammar schools.
Williams also held ministerial positions under Harold Wilson before becoming his Prices and Consumer Protection Secretary.
Shirley Vivian Teresa Brittain Catlin was born in Chelsea, west London, into an intellectual, political and privileged household.
Her mother, Vera Brittain, was the noted feminist, pacifist and author of the memoir, Testament Of Youth. Her father, Sir George Catlin, was a political scientist.
Williams was educated at the Summit School in Minnesota during the Second World War and St Paul’s Girls’ School in London.
She worked as a waitress, land girl and chambermaid before studying philosophy, politics and economics at Somerville College, Oxford, becoming the first woman president of the university’s Labour Club.
As part of the Oxford University Dramatic Society, she toured the US as Cordelia in King Lear in 1950 opposite Bernard Williams, who became her first husband.
On her third Labour candidacy attempt, she was elected an MP in Hitchin in 1964 and rose quickly through the ranks.
She was the first SDP member to enter Parliament in 1981 but lost her Crosby seat two years later and failed to regain it in the 1987 election. After marrying her second husband, US academic Professor Richard Neustadt, she took up a politics professorship at Harvard University.
She died peacefully in her sleep and is survived by her daughter, Rebecca, by her first marriage, and a stepdaughter by her second marriage.