Mildred Gordon obituary

Mildred Gordon, who has died aged 92, was raised in the heart of the old East End of London with a first-hand understanding of the impact of poverty on the lives of the underprivileged and the power of politics as an instrument of change. On retiring after 40 years as a classroom teacher in her own neighbourhood and adjacent London boroughs, she was chosen as the Labour candidate for Bow and Poplar and subsequently elected to the House of Commons in 1987 at the age of 63.

In her maiden speech as MP for one of the poorest and most ethnically diverse constituencies in the UK, Gordon spoke of the “warmth and compassion and the companionship that enables poor people to survive harsh conditions”. A fluent and powerful orator, she told MPs the basis of her political credo. “The mark of a civilised society is that it is one in which people can expect to be decently housed and clothed, to have enough to eat and to have access to healthcare and to education for their children.”

She was born in Stepney, one of two daughters of Dora and Judah Fellerman, both of Dutch Jewish ancestry. Her mother came from a family of 12 children and her father from a family of nine. As a child, Mildred lived on the Highway, the arterial street of the area. When she was four years old, her entire large family turned out for the Battle of Cable Street, a stone’s throw from the family home, to resist Oswald Mosley’s attempt to lead a fascist march through the area.

Her father became an East End Labour councillor. She witnessed him break down in tears, after weeks of unsuccessfully seeking work in the harsh years of the 1930s depression, and committed herself to a lifetime’s fight to try to improve the lives of the poor. Etched on her memory, too, was the experience of being given a list of potential donors to whom she might write begging letters to seek money for the dental treatment she needed as a girl. She refused to write and it took her mother eight years to save the necessary money.

Mildred went to Raines Foundation school and Pitman’s secretarial college. During the second world war, she was a secretary in a law firm, from which she was unable to secure release to join the army. She signed up as an air raid warden. She used to joke that working in an office all day and staying up all night looking out for the enemy and putting out fires was an excellent experience for a future MP. She trained as a teacher at the end of the war.

She had joined the Labour party aged 16 and remained a member all her life, apart from brief periods when she lived abroad in France and the US. She was an unapologetic member of the left of the party and her private life was as political as her public one. Her first husband was Sam Gordon, an American merchant seaman when they met, who was also a trade unionist and political organiser and became a member of the secretariat of the Trotskyist Fourth International. They were married in Reno, Nevada, in 1948, with CLR James, the African Trinidadian socialist theorist (and, briefly, cricket correspondent for the Guardian) among the witnesses. They lived in New York until 1952, when Sam’s passport was revoked at the height of McCarthyism and they returned to live in Britain. He died in 1982.

Three years later Mildred married Nils Kaare Dahl, another distinguished leftwing activist. A member of the Norwegian military, Dahl had been charged with helping protect Trotsky from possible Stalinist assassins during the former’s exile in Norway in 1934. In consequence the entire Trotsky family joined Dahl and his first wife on honeymoon in the northern mountains and Dahl was credited with saving Trotsky’s life – from a blizzard.

She joined the executive of the London Labour party in 1983, having stood unsuccessfully in the first round of elections for the European parliament in 1979 and for the Greater London council byelection in 1983. She was chosen in 1985 to succeed Ian Mikardo as candidate for Bow and Poplar, defeating among others the current shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, in the selection contest.

During her 10 years as an MP, before the seat was subject to boundary changes, she established herself as a doughty campaigner who was difficult to discipline. The issues she espoused included children’s rights, the need to recognise domestic carers, the extension of the law against rape in marriage to cover both men and women, the prevention of obscene and nuisance phone calls, public speaking in schools and recognition for civilian casualties in the second world war. She was a sponsor for a bill seeking the rehabilitation of Trotsky and tried to defend her beloved East End from the rampages of development at the expense of its residents.

At the opening of the Docklands Light Railway shortly after her election in 1987 she told the Queen, who had asked how she liked the new job, that she felt she had little power to help her constituents. The Queen replied understandingly: “Once they find out you lot can’t help them, they all write to me.”

In retirement Gordon was active in a number of pensions organisations. She was made a freeman of Tower Hamlets in 1999.

Dahl died in 1996. Gordon is survived by a son, David, from her first marriage, and a grandchild.

• Mildred Gordon, teacher and politician, born 24 August 1923; died 8 April 2016