Tributes: Baroness Williams of Crosby

Baroness Neuberger Excerpts

Wednesday 14th April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neuberger (CB)]

My Lords, I too rise to pay tribute to Baroness Williams, whom I always knew as Shirley. Others have focused on her political career and I can certainly echo that, but I will pay particular tribute to her for two very distinct but sometimes closely interrelated qualities and achievements.

For me and many women of my generation, Shirley was a profound influence. She encouraged us in the 300 Group, formed to get 300 women into the House of Commons, and encouraged us as individuals. She did that by acknowledging the real problems that women often face in political life, particularly parliamentary life and particularly those trying to combine small children and a parliamentary career. She was very kind to lots of us. Indeed, my noble friend Lady Hayman has just asked me to record her kindness to her. She was kind to us all.

She was unfailingly supportive of women who wanted to make a difference, as she always described it, and she was unflinchingly honest about how hard it would be. I have particular reason to be grateful to her. I had known her slightly as a child, but she was particularly kind to me as a student at Cambridge, as her marriage to Bernard Williams was coming apart. I was then membership secretary of the Labour Club. There was one of the usual internal scandals, and my college room was broken into to collect the membership records for said Labour Club. I was terribly upset by this, but Shirley was immensely comforting. She assured me I was right to make a real fuss about it and egged me on in doing so. I have been making a fuss about things ever since, thanks to Shirley.

Shirley would ask many of us younger women thinking about political interests and careers to work out what we really minded about. She would also always argue that party politics was not the only way we could influence things—though for her it was the main route—and that we should think about academia, as of course she herself did so successfully as a professor at Harvard for 12 years when married to the wonderful Dick Neustadt. She said that we should also think about NGOs.

She influenced many of us. Talking to a group of much younger women yesterday, I heard that many of them, in their 30s, also traced their willingness to enter politics, both local and national, to her straightforward way of talking with them, to her popularity with women voters—“Shirl the Pearl”, if people remember that—and to her immense personal kindness.

Of course, you could not go anywhere with Shirley without lots of people, often women, coming up to her and paying tribute. It was somewhat inconvenient. A group of us would go walking regularly in the Chilterns, and quite often people coming in the other direction would go past us, then realise they had just walked past Shirley Williams, turn back and come and pay tribute. It was wonderful, but slow.

Her obituaries have focused to a considerable extent on her encouragement of women, but they have not really focused on her immense personal kindness. Members of staff in this House have been telling me how kind she was to them, but we as a family have one particular, unforgettable example among many. A friend, Ralph Skilbeck, the former diplomat who became a headhunter, was dying of a very aggressive cancer in his early 40s. He told us how he desperately wanted to meet Shirley but never had. I rang Shirley, and immediately—without hesitation and without knowing him at all—she agreed to come and meet him, which she did a few days later. He was over the moon. He died a few weeks later, talking to the end about how amazing she had been.

I could give this House many other examples of her immense kindness; she was a profoundly good person. I believe her legacy will be memories of her immense strength of character; her inspirational qualities, particularly for younger women; the fact that she became a national treasure; and her legacy of kindness and goodness to so many people. She was a wonderful mother, and particularly grandmother, to her family, and I know they have been amazing to her in these past few years. I officiated with a blessing at her marriage to Dick Neustadt and said a blessing at Dick Neustadt’s funeral. I do feel that I can now say, “May she rest in peace”.