Jean Roberts
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GLASGOW’S first female Lord Provost was also the first woman to become convener of the electricity committee, first to be deputy chairman of the corporation, first to be city treasurer and the first to be leader of the Labour group. Jean Roberts, from Springburn, was a force to be reckoned with, fiercely socialist and a firm believer in equal opportunities for men and women.
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A pupil of Albert School and Whitehill School, Jean initially trained as a teacher and worked at Bishop Street Elementary School. Here she met her husband, Cameron, and both went on to become proud members of the International Labour Party.
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In 1929, Jean stood for election to Glasgow Corporation as a councillor for the Kingston Ward, an area located on the south side of the River Clyde, heavily dominated by docks. She became leader of the Labour Group on the City Council in 1955 and Lord Provost in 1960. She was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1962.
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Jean was proud of her city’s cultural scene – in 1960, she said: “I don’t think there is another city in the United Kingdom where the cultural needs of the citizens are so fully met.” She was a driving force behind the creation of a new concert hall, a replacement for St Andrew’s Hall, destroyed by fire in 1962. She welcomed several Royals to the city too – Princess Margaret in 1961, Princess Alexandra in 1963, and the Queen, whom she accompanied round the Gorbals in June 1961, enabling the monarch to see both the old and the new Gorbals.
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She died in 1988, aged 93. At the time, the Glasgow Times’s sister newspaper The Glasgow Herald reported: “Few people can have done more for Glasgow during the ‘hungry years’ of the 1920s and 30s, through the grim days of war-time to the prosperous ‘You’ve never had it so good’ era of Harold Macmillan.”