Barbara Anne Castle Quotes

Barbara Anne Castle, Baroness Castle of Blackburn, PC, GCOT was a British Labour Party politician. She was elected to St Pancras Borough Council in 1937, and in 1943 she spoke at the annual Labour Party Conference for the first time. She was a senior administrative officer at the Ministry of Food and an ARP warden during the Blitz. Elected to Parliament in 1945, she rose to become one of the most important Labour Party politicians of the twentieth century. Until her record was broken in 2007 by Gwyneth Dunwoody, Barbara Castle held the record as the female MP with the longest continuous service. She is the first, and to date the only, woman to have held the office of First Secretary of State. Castle died in Chiltern, Buckinghamshire, of pneumonia and chronic lung disease.