(1899 – 1980)
Evelyn Emmet was a long-serving councillor and Conservative activist, who was elected Chairman of the Conservative Women’s National Advisory Committee 1951-54 and Chairman of the National Union 1955-56. She chaired the Party Conference in October 1955. Elected as MP for East Grinstead in1955, she held the seat until December 1964. Although she was influential behind the scenes, she was not a good speaker. Her political courage, however, was never in question. Not only did she vote in 1956 for the abolition of capital punishment, but she braved the Women’s Conference to defend her views. She also voted in favour of legalizing homosexuality. She proved a staunch supporter of British entry into the European Economic Community. Her interest in women’s issues lay behind a great many of her parliamentary interventions. She had produced for the Conservative Political Centre in1949 The Women's Point of View: some Subjects for Discussion by Women's Meetings and Groups and she was a tireless advocate of equal rights. She supported equal pay between men and women, improvements in widows' pensions, separate taxation of married women if they so wished, and the admission of women peers to the House of Lords. She constantly pushed the party to include issues of interest to women in General Election manifestos, and urged them to increase the number of Conservative women in parliament. But her interests were not confined to women. Her hands-on knowledge of local government enabled her to contribute to debates on issues that mattered to her fellow councillors and her knowledge of international affairs brought her the joint Vice Chairmanship of the Conservative back-bench foreign affairs committee in November 1963, the first woman to be elected to the post. Elevated to the Lords as a life peer in 1964, she achieved another first three years later, serving as deputy speaker and a deputy chairman of committees in the House of Lords from 1968 until 1977, the first woman to sit on the woolsack.
Evelyn Violet Elizabeth Rodd was the elder daughter of a distinguished diplomat, James Rennell Rodd, first Baron Rennell of Rodd (1858–1941) and his wife, Lilias Georgina Guthrie (d. 1951). In all there were four sons and two daughters; and her elder brother Francis (1895-1978) succeeded to the title. She was born at Qasr al-Dubara in Cairo on 18 March 1899 and was educated at St Margaret’s School, Bushey. During the First World War she acted in a secretarial capacity for her father when he was ambassador in Rome, but in 1917 she went up to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She took a third in literae humaniores in 1920. Further education in Sweden, Germany, France, Switzerland, and Italy, gave her a fair knowledge of those countries and meant that she spoke Italian, French, and German fluently; she was later to lecture for the Foreign Office. She subsequently attended the London School of Economics and worked for a year at Toynbee Hall.
She married Thomas Addis Emmet at the Roman Catholic church of St James, Spanish Place in Marylebone on 9 June 1923. He was the son of Major Robert Emmet of Moreton Paddox, Moreton Murrell, and had served in the Royal Navy. Lieutenant Geoffrey Rodd RN acted as his best man. The bridegroom was an artist possessed of independent means and they made their home at Amberley Castle. They had four children, two boys and two girls. Thomas Emmet died in London, after a brief illness, on 3 June 1934, and was buried at Arundel. Evelyn never remarried.
She was elected on to the London County Council as one of the two Municipal Reform Councillors for Hackney North in 1925. She chaired several committees, including the supplies committee and the Hackney Hospital Committee which looked after the affairs of a 2000 bed Board of Guardians hospital. She lost her seat as a result of Labour’s sweeping victory in the LCC elections in 1934, but subsequently became a co-opted member. Despite being a widow with four young children to bring up, her energy seemed boundless. After her husband's death, she bred Jersey and Dexter cattle and did much to restore Amberley Castle. She served as chair of the children's court and matrimonial court in West Sussex from 1935 to 1944 and in1936 became a Justice of the Peace. She was chosen to be a Justice of the Peace in 1936. From 1938 to 1945 she was the County Organiser for the WVS and in that capacity campaigned before the war broke out for women to be trained, particularly for the Land Army. As late as 1941 she remained critical of the government for its reluctance to recognise the value of women to the war effort. Apart from the work done by the St John’s Ambulance and the Red Cross, she was responsible for the war work done by women in Sussex. From 1945 she was chair of the Sussex county probation advisory committee. In 1946 she was elected on to the West Sussex County Council, serving as an Alderman from 1952 until 1967 and again chairing a number of committees. . Nationally, she was a member of the Home Office probation advisory committee and of the Home Office special commission on the cinema and the child in 1950. In 1952 and 1953 she served as one of the British delegates to the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1952 and 1953, the first woman without a parliamentary seat so to serve. In July 1954 she had Mrs Pandit to stay for the weekend at Amberley castle and took her to visit the Churchills at Chartwell.
She had sought a seat in Parliament since 1945, arguing that the leadership would welcome more Conservative women MPs to ease the workload on the only two elected in 1945. But she was not successful and had to concentrate her efforts on the voluntary side of the party, where she was elected to the National Union Executive in 1948 and for a three year term as chair of the Women’s National Advisory Committee in 1951. She was finally selected on 26 September 1953 to fight the safe Conservative seat of East Grinstead in succession to Colonel Ralph Stevenson Clarke, who had indicated his decision to stand down at the next election and in May 1955 was elected with 28,450 votes (61.5%) and a majority of 16,700 over her Labour opponent with the Liberal party trailing in third place. 1959 saw her vote increase to 31,759 (62.3%) and her majority to 21,655, but in the 1964 General Election with the Liberals overtaking Labour to move into a comfortable second place, both her vote at 29,094 (53.2%) and majority of 14,341 were down by a not insubstantial amount. In the course of an otherwise unmemorable contribution to the debate on the address on 8 November 1957, she had noted with pleasure that life peerages were to be open to women as well as men, a remark that she may have recalled when on 31 December 1964 she stood down from the Commons in the knowledge that she was to be given a life peerage in the New Year’s Honours list.
Her maiden speech in the Commons was made on 21 November 1955 was devoted to the problems service widows with children had when forced to seek accommodation on losing their place in married quarters. When Heathcoat Amory brought in legislation on the health safety and welfare of agricultural workers in February 1956, she was opposed to enforcing it through a new inspectorate, preferring to leave the task to local authorities, and was no doubt somewhat dismayed when the Government preferred to double the number of wages inspectors and give them the job. She served on the Select committee to consider changes to the 14 day rule. She voted for abolition of capital punishment and defended her action vigorously at the Women’s Conference in ? June even though her speech was almost drowned out at the end by boos. She had established to her own satisfaction that juries were less likely to convict because death was the penalty and felt that her fellow women were letting their emotions rule their intellect. On 9 December 1957 she gave warm support to the Government’s local government legislation and the principle of the block grant based on needs, although not without pressing for the recognition of a rapidly rising population – she had Crawley very much in mind.
Her interest in Europe led her to chair annual lunches for the British Section of the European Union of Women, latterly at the House of Lords, and to take on the Vice Chairmanship of the Anglo-Italian Parliamentary Group. In April 1960 she attended the German Christian Democratic Party’s conference in April 1960, where her assertions that the press exaggerated Anglo-German differences and that “blood was thicker than water” were received with loud applause. She took a considerable interest through the Commonwealth Parliamentary Union in the affairs of both Pakistan and India and was also elected on to the executive of the Inter-Parliamentary Union in 1962.In the mid ’60s she chaired the Conservative Party’s Overseas Bureau. In 1971 she was play some small part in the European Movement’s campaign in support of Heath’s bid for British entry into the EEC.
Elevated to the House of Lords as a life peer in the Dissolution Honours list on 1 December 1964, she subsequently relinquished her Aldermanic seat on West Sussex County Council in 1967. Her son, Christopher, had served on the Council with her and she was later to champion his candidature for the Arundel and Shoreham seat in 1971 – but in vain.
She served as chairman of the Lord Chancellor's legal aid advisory committee from 1966 to 1972 and was a member of Lady Tweedsmuir's select committee on the European Community from 1974 to 1977. From 1968 to 1977, she served as a deputy speaker of the House of Lords and a deputy chairman of committees. One debate that she inaugurated on 9 April 1975 was far-sighted: she pressed the case for fish farming, but the Government did not pay any heed to a peculiarly well–informed discussion. She returned to the charge as late as December 1979, only to learn that the Conservative government had yet to decide on recommendations made by the NFU more than a year earlier.
Baroness Emmet died at Amberley Castle on 10 October 1980. A memorial service was held at St Margaret’s Westminster on 10 December 1980.
Her papers can be found in the Bodleian Library at Oxford and insights into her life are to be found in P.Brookes: Women at Westminster: an account of women in the British Parliament 1918-66; S.McCowan: Widening Horizons. Women and the Conservative Party; and G.E.McGuire: Conservative Women. McGuire also wrote a brief sketch of her life for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in 2004.