Britain has lost and Northern Ireland says "Goodbye" to its fearless May Blood, who fought in a male-dominated world to gain rights and improve the lives of its women

May, who has died at the age of eighty-four, was born the daughter of Mary and William and into a family of seven children, before the outbreak of the Second World War in Belfast, in the Spring of 1938. She was brought up in a two-up two-down terraced house in Magnetic Street, West Belfast. She left school at the age of fourteen and without any secondary education, she started work in a Belfast linen mill at the age of fourteen and in the thirty-eight years she was there, she rose in the ranks of and was educated by the Transport and General Worker’s Union. When she was made redundant in 1989, she switched to community work and played a major role and success of the Belfast's 'Women’s Coalition' contribution to the Good Friday Agreement. On the recommendation of Mo Mowlam she was offered and accepted a place in the House of Lords, where she worked for unstintingly for nineteen years and used her position to promote the cause of integrated education in Northern Ireland. 

In 2007 May published her autobiography and explained the origin of its title stemmed from her treatment as a woman, while serving on a trade union committee. She said : "When I spoke, it was if somebody had opened a window and let the wind in and everybody looked around. I was the only woman on the committee, and I'm done. And I can remember one day I really lost my temper, thumping the desk and said : "Watch my lips. I'm speaking".(link)

The book contained other examples : 'Mr Paisley came in and had a few words with whoever was organising the meeting before saying : "Right, we'll get down to business". Then he turned to me and said : "You go and make some tea love". In a meeting in 1993, where she was the only woman, Sir Patrick Mayhew, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, had asked the fourteen men around the table for their opinion and omitted May. When his secretary whispered in his ear he said : "Oh. I'm very sorry. I just assumed you were somebody's secretary. Have you a comment you'd like to make ?"

May said to women who went to see her to ask her advice : 

"Dream your dreams, because a dream is only thing without action and so if you want to do things, do it. If it feels, it feels. But if you don't do it, you'll never know if its failed or succeeded". 

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In her early years, for the most part, May had only known her mother and a sister. Her father had worked in the Harland & Wolff shipyard and her mother worked as a cook at Mackies Foundry on the Springfield Road and in 1939 he was conscripted into the Army to fight in the War and was away from home for the next six years. Not only was she separated from her father, but had been separated by the evacuation of her older brothers and sisters, from the City to the safety of the Northern Ireland countryside, when Belfast's industry became a target for German aircraft bombers in 1940.

She later said : "My first memory was the Blitz. I remember going into the coal house which was under the stairs when there was a raid and we lived quite close to the Blackstaff River and the place crowded with cockroaches". May said : "When the war was over my Dad came home, I had never seen my Dad and then my brothers and sisters came back. I wondered who all these strange people were. All of a sudden instead of having a bedroom of my own I was squashed up against the wall along with two others. It was quite a learning curve".

May's family of nine lived in four main rooms in a two-up, two-down terraced house with an outside toilet, coal fires, no hot running water and no bathroom. Living in a community which was mixed between Protestants and Catholics in religion, they were all united in being poor working class. It meant that May grew up with a sense of cooperative spirit where she said everybody "Chipped in" and : “Community was everything because we had nothing else”. She said that she : "Wasn’t aware of any discrimination" because : "Catholics, living beside me, lived in the same conditions as I did"."If there was a death, everybody piled in. If there was a birth everybody piled in. and even the time we were flooded, the people just came all together to help one another". (link)

From the age of five she attended Donegall Road Methodist Church Primary School and said : "We called it 'Tin Top' because it had a tin roof and it was great in the winter. You couldn't hear the teacher. It was brilliant in the rain". She then moved to Linfield Junior School on Sandy Row where she passed the eleven plus examination and earned a place at a grammar school. 

Apparently, she was always in detention but said : "I wanted to be a schoolteacher. I don't know why, because I hated school with a passion unless I'd seen the teacher had some power and said : "That's for me". She would later explain this with a compulsion she felt and said : "I suppose at a very early age, I wanted to save the world and I never knew where that came from".

Her father chose the nearby Grosvenor Grammar School where they taught languages, which he thought would give her an advantage in a career, but May said : "I wanted to go to Methody (Methodist College) and then to Stranmillis College" for teacher training, but was rejected because her father had already accepted her place at Grosvenor. "I just said : "That's it. I'm not going anywhere and I just stayed in the wee school in Sandy Row and left school at the age of fourteen".When she left, the Vice-Principal said to her : "You're a hussy and you'll never be anything else only a hussy" and I ran all the way home. I thought it was a compliment. I'd no idea what a hussy was". (link)

She began work as a 'hooker' in the cutting room of Blackstaff Linen Mill, with the intention of only staying for two weeks, but loved it so much that she stayed until the mill closed down in 1989. Her job was to place lengths of linen cloth on hooks on the wall and then lift them off to be hand cut into lengths to be made into bed sheets and pillowcases. 

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May would later say the mill workers : “Were a community within a community” and “I was proud to be a millie for 38 years”. Nearly sixty years after becoming a millie, in 2010, as 'Baroness May Blood', she would be given the honour of unveiling the bronze statue on the Crumlin Road in North Belfast, 'The Mill Worker', by Northern Irish sculptor Ross Wilson. (link)

Within half an hour of being at the mill she was approached and told that everyone was in the Transport and General Worker’s Union and despite her father having reservations about women joining trade unions, she said she : "Wasn’t gonna be the different one" and signed up. At the age of nineteen, she was approached to fill a temporary shop steward vacancy. As a shop steward, she would be the union member elected as the representative of a department in any dealings with management and when her boss laid down an extensive list of what she could and could not do as 'Acting Shop Steward', she decided : “Well if you’re that angry about it, … that’s for me”. (link)

In the years that followed she attended Union funded training courses, which she said was : "Where I got my education”. She learnt about employment law, wage negotiation, health and safety and put theory into practice fighting for members’ compensation claims. She progressed to the position of 'Senior Shop Steward' and later 'Convener' and began to work together with trade unionists in the other six mills in the area. Other campaigns within Blackstaff Mill included fighting to reduce working hours, negotiating for holiday pay and Saturday overtime rates, and campaigning for a minimum wage for the women working in the mill offices. When she was ready, she applied for, and got elected to, the Regional Committee of the TGWU. She later reflected that : "This was totally unheard of. Women did not apply for those positions. We had to fight for our place there and gain the respect for the other guys on the Committee". (link)

With the outbreak of 'The Troubles' when May was thirty-one in 1969, her work in the linen mill became more difficult. She said : "Overnight Catholics had suddenly become the enemy. With some women, their men had been interned; other women their men had joined the U.D.A. These women were sitting beside one another. It was strained. It wasn’t easy, because all of a sudden, we started to view each other differently. There was always the underlying feeling that we were friends, but for the first couple of years of the Troubles it really was very dicey because it put things into people’s minds that they had never thought of before".(link)

At home in the Magnetic Street community, she said : "When people came one night to "Put the neighbours next door, out", May's father came to their defence and argued that : "This woman’s not doing any harm". A little while later, the Blood family were burnt out of their home by Protestants and according to May : "That was a definite message" for their earlier defence of their Catholic neighbours. The family struggled to find a new house, but eventually relocated to a newly developed 'Springmartin Estate' where a peace wall had been erected. (link)

During the 1970s, May actively supported the 1970 Equal Pay Act and the 1976 Sex Discrimination (Northern Ireland) Order. In addition, these were the years where, for the first time, she found herself getting involved in voluntary community work with other women living on the Springmartin Estate. She said : "There was a big risk in doing cross community work. You were threatened but when you get a group of very strong women together who have a real aim in life, there’s very little that stops them, even a threat". 

At a remarkable meeting of both the Catholic and Protestant residents of the estate in the Europa Hotel in the mid-1980s, they decided to leave the constitutional issues to the side. They found that they all faced the same uphill battle with the likes of poor housing, low education attainment and high rates of teen pregnancy and from this point forward they decided to pool their resources. (link)

The threats against May in these years were real. She said : "I’ve been threatened a number of times, I’ve had my car destroyed twice and if people thought that it would put me off, they were wrong. I remember I went to one of the commanders and said to him : "I don’t know what I’m doing wrong here", and he told me privately : "Whatever you’re doing keep it up. If you weren’t doing good, people wouldn’t be interested in you". (link)

In 1989, when May was made redundant from the mill and was left unemployed for eight months. Her next job, as a paid community worker, came in the form of a project for long-term unemployed men. At the same time, she became involved with the 'Great Shankill Early Years Project' as Information Officer and helped to set up three community centres in the Shankill area of Belfast to help over 1,300 families and, as she said : "We gave local people the jobs. We trained them”.

In the 1990s with the prospect of ceasefires and peace talks in Northern Ireland, May and a handful of other women asked if there would be women present at such talks and were told that there would be, should they be elected. She later said, that as a woman : "I found that if I wanted to change the system I had to be part of that change". The next six weeks : "Were the most hairy and the most scary" of her life as she and her women colleagues quickly tried to organise their newly formed : 'Women’s Coalition'. (link)

As its 'Campaign Manager', May took full advantage of the media attention the Coalition was attracting and took every opportunity to get in front of the camera to plead its case and achieve its main goal : "To get women where decisions were being made". Winning one per cent of the vote, they gained two seats at the negotiating table and with Monica McWilliams and Pearl Sager representing the Coalition, they successfully introduced amendments to the Good Friday Agreement dealing with the inclusion of women in public life, mixed housing and integrated education.

May had met Mo Mowlam, the Minister of State for Northern Ireland, back in May's trade union days and said "Mo Mowlam was a great personal friend and Mo and I did a lot of work, as most of the Women's Coalition did, in the background. Mo asked me to go into prisons and ask the Loyalist prisoners, to make sure they were staying on board with the Peace Process. We'd done all that quietly". In May's opinion it was Mo who had done the lion's share of the ground work for the Good Friday Agreement, a woman who called everyone, including Martin McGuinness, "Babe" and in the years that followed up to her death in 2005, May thought the importance her role was airbrushed out of the story to give more prominence to Tony Blair.

May was now in demand as a speaker and recalled : "I can remember being asked by Ambassador Hunt, Swanee Hunt, I remember being approached by her secretary that the Ambassador would like me to do a 'Harvard Tour' " May accepted and made a speech at five US colleges on the theme of her experience of 'social cohesion'

In 1995, at the age of fifty-seven, May was awarded an MBE by the Queen for her work in 'Labour Relations' and in her sixties she served as both the Chair of the 'Early Years Belfast' and the 'Barnardo's Northern Ireland Committee'. Referring to the year 1997, may said : "I was given a peace prize by some Americans in Boston, the 'Global Citizen's Circle Award' and I was really honoured to get it because Nelson Mandela had been given it, Desmond Tutu had been given it, Hilary Clinton had been given it and I said to Hilary Clinton, who I know quite well, I said : "I understand you got the Global Citizen's Award last year"."Yes" "Well I'm getting it this year".(link)

Then in 1999 she became the first woman in Northern Ireland to be given a life peerage as 'Baroness Blood of Blackwatertown'. In her initial response she declined the offer, for to her the House of Lords was a place where rich old men sat around and slept all day, a place far removed from the everyday realities of working-class Belfast. She said : "It was another world I wasn't familiar with and I wondered exactly what I could achieve in the House of Lords. I was so busy at home and I was looking forward to retiring and this would have meant a whole change of lifestyle". To help her make a decision she turned to he religion : "I have a very strong Christian faith, personal faith and I prayed about it and always found that God has opened doors for me and I'd come to realise that this was another door". 

She phoned and reversed her decision and in addition said : “All my life I fought to get women to take these opportunities and I thought it would be churlish to turn it down”. She took her seat, hoping that, as 'Baroness May Blood', she could advance the causes she held so dear. Initially she was extremely lonely, but after a year began to gain recognition as she, with her usual energy threw herself into things. 

She said : "I made up my mind I would try to represent Northern Ireland as best I could". She also thought it was an opportunity to show that Northern Irish women could actually hold a position like this. "I watched what people were doing. I went to all the training I could get. I learned how to use a computer, which is very valuable in the work. So you can do it, but you have to convince yourself of that. It's not easy for any woman to break into the system, but it can be done. I'm proof of that".

In her nineteen years in the House, she never missed a session and although she initially served as a cross-bencher, she then became affliliated to the Labour Party. She served on 'Social Mobility Committee' and retired from the House when she was eighty in 2018. She said : "I remember speaking to a leading female politician in Westminster and she told me the difference between a man and a woman was that when a man has to do something he says "Yes" and goes home to think about it. When a woman's asked she says : "Can I go home and think about it ?" And then talks herself out of it. And I think one of the downfalls we have as females. We try to analyse everything. We try to see : how will this intervene with me family life ? What more time will I have to give to it ? So we talk ourselves out of the proposition. And I think in many cases, that's been the downfall of women".

In 2013, when she was seventy-five she was awarded the 'Grassroot Diplomat Initiative Award' under the 'Social Driver' category for her tireless campaign for education and was also heavily involved with the 'Integrated Education Fund' in Northern Ireland, with the group describing her as a : “Great friend and champion” who had helped to raise over £15 million for the Fund. May, however, openly expressed her disappointment that, as of June 2018, there were only 65 integrated schools in Northern Ireland. 

She herself said : “My passion in life is integrated education. The Troubles split communities and I think if you get kids mixing from an early age, they learn about one another’s culture, it doesn’t become a big fear factor that then people can use to drive people apart".

May said : "The most important thing to say to women when they hear of my experience is to start from the fact that I don't know it all I'm not one of these women who has broken through this glass ceiling we hear about. I'm a woman, just an ordinary woman, whose had extraordinary opportunities and it is about grasping those opportunities, because an opportunity happens and it's gone".

May said :

"Failure is only the first rung on the ladder to success".