In a letter written shortly before her death
she wrote that her life “started with an arrival, inauspicious, at the LSE. She had been discovered by Professor Harold
Laski after she had invited him to talk at the Ealing branch of the Labour
League of Youth of which she was chairwoman (or “charwoman” as Laski pronounced
it). Laski invited her to come and work at the LSE in order to go to lectures
and study for her university entrance examination. She worked in the Machine
Room as a secretary to the Statistics Department for two years and in 1948 she
was summoned before Laski and admitted to the School under the tutorship of
Professor Kingsley Smellie. She was by
then assistant secretary of the Ealing Labour Party.
While
Laski’s desire “to share what is most dignified in human nature” was the reason Mum had
arrived at LSE, one of her own observations once there was that “it is not the
case that the elite possess the works, but that the works possess the elite…
The elite as I met it at LSE was at my service; there would have been no
‘beauties’ of Plato, Rousseau, Hobbes for me to have ‘a sight’ of, if
generations of individuals whom these writers had come to ‘possess’ had not
submitted to serve and to keep these works in tact and ever re-creative and
re-created.”
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