Christopher Howse: Do Claudia Jones and Marie Stopes deserve the stamp of distinction?
Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1st Class) and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (48p) were certainly distinguished. So, in her way, was dear old Barbara Castle, celebrated on the 81p stamp for "equal pay".
But who do we have on the 72p stamp? Claudia Jones – a Communist and, almost as bad, a journalist, becoming "negro affairs" editor of the Daily Worker. Her devotion to international socialism makes her life read like an invention of the late Michael Wharton. She lived for most of her life in the United States, but in her last years, in London, she helped establish the Notting Hill Carnival, not an unmixed blessing.
Worse is the 50p stamp, which celebrates the absurd Marie Stopes, under the banner of "family planning". It is hard to think the postage stamp committee was fully aware of the craziness of Miss Stopes's life and ideas. She believed that coal fires gave off beneficial rays and so she would sit naked before the fire, a practice she enjoined on the nation.
She "imagined conspiracies everywhere" according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, "even in the court order to destroy her beloved chow, Wuffles, for attacking other dogs".
As for family planning, when her only son Harry announced his engagement to the daughter of the inventor Barnes Wallis, Marie Stopes reacted furiously, claiming that because the girl was short-sighted and had to wear spectacles, she must suffer from a hereditary defect....
Read entire article at Telegraph
But who do we have on the 72p stamp? Claudia Jones – a Communist and, almost as bad, a journalist, becoming "negro affairs" editor of the Daily Worker. Her devotion to international socialism makes her life read like an invention of the late Michael Wharton. She lived for most of her life in the United States, but in her last years, in London, she helped establish the Notting Hill Carnival, not an unmixed blessing.
Worse is the 50p stamp, which celebrates the absurd Marie Stopes, under the banner of "family planning". It is hard to think the postage stamp committee was fully aware of the craziness of Miss Stopes's life and ideas. She believed that coal fires gave off beneficial rays and so she would sit naked before the fire, a practice she enjoined on the nation.
She "imagined conspiracies everywhere" according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, "even in the court order to destroy her beloved chow, Wuffles, for attacking other dogs".
As for family planning, when her only son Harry announced his engagement to the daughter of the inventor Barnes Wallis, Marie Stopes reacted furiously, claiming that because the girl was short-sighted and had to wear spectacles, she must suffer from a hereditary defect....