Dorothy Crisp

Dorothy Crisp (1906–1987) was a right-wing English political figure, writer and publisher.

Born in Leeds on 17 May 1906, the only daughter of Albert Edward Crisp (an examiner) and Annie Beckwith, she was baptised at the Anglican church of St Saviour Richmond Hill, Leeds in June the same year.

She became a public speaker and writer on nationalism, contributing to the National Review in the 1920s. Among her books were The Rebirth of Conservatism (1931) and Why we Lost Singapore (1944). She was a British political commentator with contacts in high places at the Foreign Office.

By the mid-1940s she was famous as the belligerent and outspoken champion of the right-wing British Housewives' League, whose meetings frequently descended into boos, catcalls and physical tussling for control of the microphones. Hecklers once got so out of hand at the Royal Albert Hall that police were called, though she was later cheered for threatening to throw Aneurin Bevan (then Minister of Health in the Attlee Labour government) over Westminster Bridge if he brought in the National Health Service Act. The police were summoned twice to maintain order at an uproarious meeting in which she expelled several executive members amid shouted accusations of "dictatorship". She resigned her chairmanship in 1948 on personal grounds, after that the League went into decline.

She was a regular contributor of provocative articles for the Sunday Dispatch; one edition in 1943 was banned in Eire because it contained her criticisms of the de Valera’s government. Crisp fought the Acton by-election, 1943 as an Independent but secured only 707 out of the 8,315 votes cast.

She married John Noel Becker in Westminster, London, during the spring of 1945, but retained her maiden name. Moving to the village of Smarden near Ashford in Kent, she gave birth to a daughter (Elizabeth) in 1946, to whom the Conservative MP Ida Copeland was godmother.

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