THIS IS THE DIARY JUNCTION - DATA AND LINKS FOR OVER 500 HISTORICAL AND LITERARY DIARISTS
PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT ALSO TO LOOK AT KIP FENN, A MAJOR NOVEL ABOUT THE 21st CENTURY
- freely available on this site
Castle, Barbara ___ 1911-2002 ___ British
___ politician
BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
Barbara Betts, the daughter of
a tax inspector, was born in Bradford, educated at St Hugh's College, Oxford,
and elected for the Labour Party to St Pancras Borough in 1937. With Michael
Foot and others, she launched the influential and radical weekly magazine
'The Tribune'. During the war, she wrote for the 'Daily Mirror' about housing,
and then, at the 1943 Labour Party Conference, she made a name for herself
by criticising the leadership's ineffectual approach towards the Beveridge
Report. The following year, she married the journalist Ted Castle. She was
elected MP for Blackburn in 1945, and, soon after, was taken on by the minister
of trade, Stafford Cripps, as an aide. She was elected chairperson of the
Labour Party in 1958-1959. In 1964, the new Prime Minister, Harold Wilson,
appointed her first as Minister of Overseas Development, then as Minister
of Transport, then as Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity.
After the Conservative's term of office in the first half of the 1970s,
Labour returned to power, and Castle became Secretary of State for Social
Services until 1976 when Jim Callaghan took over from Wilson. Castle then
sat in the European Parliament for ten years until 1989, before joining
the House of Lords in 1990. Castle began to keep her diary soon after her
appointment to the cabinet by Wilson. They are considered an important historical
source concerning British politics in the 1960s and 1970s.
One
biography link
DIARY DATES, CONTENT DESCRIPTORS
1964-1976 ___ political transport
people historyeye
WEB TEXT LINKS
ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT LINKS
University
of Bradford
SOME PUBLISHED TITLES
The Castle Diaries 1964-70
The Castle Diaries 1974-76
May 2005
THIS IS THE DIARY JUNCTION - DATA AND LINKS FOR OVER 500 HISTORICAL AND LITERARY DIARISTS
Please
email if you have any corrections, additions or comments. |
IMPORTANT NOTES AND CAUTIONS:
1) The first line of basic information
may be incomplete in several ways: some historical figures have different
names (titles, pen-names); their birth and death dates may be unknown or
uncertain (g - guess, c - circa); similarly, their occupations may be unknown,
or they may have had other jobs; and, for early diarists, I've used 'British'
a bit too freely. 2) The biographical summary may not be accurate. It was
compiled quickly from various sources, mostly on the internet, and the facts
were not checked anywhere near as rigorously as they would have been if
they'd been intended for publication in a printed form. 3) The journal dates
and descriptors (which are in no particular order) must be treated with
caution: since I have not examined the diaries myself, the descriptors are
only guesses based on bibliographies, anthologies and internet biographies.
4) For the biography and etext links, I have ignored any sites with charges,
and I have avoided, wherever possible, those with pop-ups or too much advertising.
I have limited myself to providing three etext links where there is some
variety between them. 5) For the original manuscript links, I have limited
myself to providing a maximum of two (although, for a few diarists, their
original diaries are held in more than two places). 6) I have provided the
titles - chosen randomly - for up to three printed editions of the diaries. |