Margaret Llewelyn Davies - Arthur's Sister

[Peter Wynne-Willson]

Can I draw people's attention to a wonderful new biography of Margaret Llewelyn Davies, Arthur's sister, who was a remarkable woman whose story deserves to be better known.  She is slightly inaccurately billed on the website as 'co-founder of the Women's Co-operative Movement'.  She was not in fact a founder, but was for 30 years General Secretary of the Women's Cooperative Guild, and an extremely significant campaigner across a range of areas - fighting to gain a political voice for working-class women in particular.  The new book is a fascinating read - it does touch on her closeness to Arthur and differences with Sylvia, her important role in relation to her nephews, and I think helps explain the complex mixture of family loyalties around the boys during and after the deaths of their parents, but much more than that it is filling a really significant gap in the picture we have of the world they were brought up in, by giving proper weight to the achievements of another highly impressive member of the family, whom they knew well.  Published by Merlin, the book is called Margaret Llewelyn Davies - With Women for a New World, by Ruth Cohen.