Dirprwy Lywydd, as we mark the centenary of partial women's suffrage this week with the Representation of the People Act 1918 on 6 February 1918, today we'd like to pay tribute, I know, to women from Barry who played their part in the suffrage movement, including Annie Gwen Vaughan-Jones, who was the Secretary of the Cardiff and District Women's Suffrage Society. Annie was a student at the university college in Aberystwyth and a governess in Russia before world war one. She was also a magistrate sitting in tribunals, sympathetically hearing cases of female conscientious objectors. In addition to this historical figure, Eirene Lloyd White—Baroness White—who was a Labour peer with a successful political career, attended primary school in Barry, and, when Eirene was a little girl, Mrs Pankhurst came to visit Eirene's parents in their home in Park Road. Eirene remembered being dressed up in a white dress and a green, purple and white suffragette sash.When Emmeline Pankhurst came to Barry, she spoke at the co-operative hall and said,

'a free man could not be born of a slave mother.'

At the age of 10, Eirene White moved to London, where her father worked with David Lloyd George. She became a determined anti-racist after she was unable to eat in the same restaurant as Paul Robeson. She was a political journalist with the Manchester Evening News, the first woman to hold such a post. In 1950, she was elected MP for Flintshire East, and persuaded the Labour Party to vote for equal pay for women in the public sector. In the 1960s, she was Under-Secretary of State in the Colonial Office, later Minister of State at the Foreign Office and at the Welsh Office. Her ashes were scattered in Barry, where she spent a very happy childhood. In May, the Barry women's trail, which marks the lives of both Annie Vaughan-Jones and Eirene White, and 15 other exceptional Barry women, will be featured in the Valeways walking festival, and this will be a fitting tribute to these women in the centenary year of women's suffrage.