Florence Horsbrugh, Baroness Horsbrugh

Florence Gertrude Horsbrugh, Baroness Horsbrugh, GBE, PC (13 October 1889 – 6 December 1969) was a Scottish Unionist Party and Conservative Party politician.

She was educated at Lansdowne House, Edinburgh, St Hilda’s, Folkestone, and Mills College, California.

During the First World War, Horsbrugh pioneered a travelling kitchen scheme in Chelsea, London, which gained sufficient renown as to warrant an invitation to bring the kitchen to Buckingham Palace one lunch hour to entertain Queen Mary, who approved particularly of the sweets.^[1]

Horsbrugh was a Member of Parliament (MP) for Dundee from 1931 until her defeat in 1945. She was the first woman to move the Address in reply to the King's Speech. She unsuccessfully contested Midlothian and Peebles in 1950 and was elected in the delayed poll at Manchester Moss Side, sitting from 1950 until her retirement in 1959. On retirement she was elevated to the House of Lords, as a life peer with the title Baroness Horsbrugh, of Horsbrugh in the County of Peebles, where she sat until her death.

She held ministerial office in the wartime coalition governments as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health (1939–45), and Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food (1945). As Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health,1939–45, she was responsible for arranging the evacuation of schoolchildren from major cities during the war. Following her return to the House of Commons she was the first woman to hold a Cabinet post in a Conservative government, and only the third woman, after Bondfield and Wilkinson to be appointed Cabinet minister in Britain's history (1953-1954), having been appointed Minister of Education in 1951. She also served as a delegate to the Council of Europe and Western European Union from 1955 until 1960.

As part of her lifelong championing of social welfare issues, Horsbrugh took a marked interest in child welfare and introduced, as a private member, the bill which became the Adoption of Children (Regulation) Act 1939. Horsbrugh also carried out a great deal of preparatory work on the scheme which eventually became the National Health Service.

She was appointed MBE in 1920, promoted to CBE in 1939, and to GBE in 1954. She was appointed a Privy Counsellor in 1945.

Notes

References

• Leigh Rayment's Peerage Pages
• Leigh Rayment's Historical List of MPs
• Pugh, Martin (2004). "Horsbrugh, Florence Gertrude, Baroness Horsbrugh (1889–1969)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/33997. Retrieved 2009-05-24.  (subscription or UK public library membership required)

External links

• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Florence Horsbrugh
• The Papers of Florence Horsbrugh, Baroness Horsbrugh are held at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge and are accessible to the public.