Hansard

Over the past few horrific weeks, we have witnessed dreadful images of women, young and old, carrying their few possessions, some pushing baby buggies, through the ruins of Ukraine to some kind of sanctuary. That reminds us of women’s resilience and determination in the worst of circumstances.

Although what I will describe is by no means on the same scale, I hope to illustrate how far we, as women, have come over the short period of three generations in my family, through the resilience and determination of my grandmother and mother. However, of course, there is still a long road ahead in addressing bias not only in Scotland but across the globe.

The first member of my family whom I will mention is Margaret Grahame—my paternal grandmother—who was born in 1877. The daughter of a shepherd, her childhood was peripatetic because her father had to move for work. Her education would have been sparse and disrupted. She left school at 14 and went straight into service as a lady’s maid. A trait that she kept throughout all her long life was to favour doilies, cake stands and cups and saucers from her press. She never had a mug in the house in all the time that I knew her.

There is a picture of my grandmother in her Edwardian dress with bustle and hair piled high. She was tall for her generation, and was a strong and determined woman. Having received a sum as compensation for her heart condition, she put down, with her husband Yade, a deposit on 305 Easter Road, Leith, where she lived until her death. Although she had been diagnosed with that heart condition, she fooled everybody and lived to 93.

She sent her four children, including a daughter, to the then fee-paying Leith academy. Somehow, that shepherd’s daughter managed the finances and saw education—this has been referred to by other members—as the route to improvement, as it is to this day. Despite that, her advice to me as a teenager was to become a clerkess and to marry early. I resisted the latter until my mid-20s, which was unusual for the time.

However, my grandmother’s advice about education stayed with me and was reinforced by my father, who never discriminated between boys and girls. I became the first girl in my road in the housing scheme to stay at school beyond 15, and was the first to go to university.

Another Margaret Grahame—my mother—had an even tougher life. Born in 1922, her father was a miner. Her mother died at the birth of her baby brother Anthony, when Margaret was only 15 months old. When she was six, her father died—he succumbed to a head injury that he sustained when a pit prop fell on him. On the very day of her father’s funeral, she was—this is almost Dickensian—forcibly taken by strangers, kicking and screaming, along with her young brother, to an orphanage. She was separated from her brother on the following day. My mother spent months in an orphanage, until finally becoming a ward of court and being placed, with her brother, in the care of an aunt. Those were bad years of real poverty—and tragedy; her brother Anthony, to whom she was very close, died of meningitis at just 11 years old.

At 14, Margaret—or Margie as she was known—had, like my grandmother before her, a live-in job at a vicarage, which paid four shillings weekly. Rebellious even at that age, she refused to wear the servile grey suit as ordered by the vicar’s wife and quit the job. She progressed to an enamel works at Burton upon Trent for 6 shillings a week. From there, she went to work in a factory in Church Gresley for 7 shillings and sixpence a week.

In 1940, my mother was making de-icers for war planes at the British Tyre & Rubber Co Limited, before she volunteered for the women’s land army. In March 1942, she met my father. The rest is history; that is why I am here. The war changed everything for her. Being part of what became a large extended family meant everything to her, having been deprived of that in her own life.

Those trials, sorrows and incredible hardships, including poverty, that my mother endured during her formative years, became the foundation of her indomitable spirit and of her exceptional qualities of compassion for and understanding of anyone who was troubled—particularly children and young adults. Principled to breaking point, she was fearless in defending the underdogs and attacking injustices. As I have grown older, I recognise how much influence she has had on my values.

I left school before I was 17 but—remembering the value of education—with highers in my back pocket. I first approached Ferranti, which was a major electronics company in Edinburgh at the time, to get a job, because I had science and maths qualifications. On the factory tour, I met a woman who was working in the research department. She told me that there was no future for women at Ferranti. I took her advice.

Unfortunately, I then went for a clerkess job, as my granny had suggested to me all those years previously. At that company, I saw young men being promoted over bright and able women. I packed in the job and went to university.

Why do I tell members this? The women in my family and life played fundamental parts in taking Christine Grahame from her predetermined biased destiny—leave school at 15, get engaged at 18, get married at 20 and have her first child at 22—to seeing herself as an individual who had the courage to aim beyond that clerkess job and early marriage. Those two Margarets gave me that determination. We, as individual women and men in Parliament, can give other young girls that determination and self-confidence.