ABSTRACT
Rackham is re-elected unopposed to represent Romsey as a councillor. She chairs the Cambridgeshire County Council Education committee from 1945 to 1957 but she does not support the Labour Party’s commitment to comprehensive education believing that grammar schools benefit working-class children. She joins the Humanist Association. She resigns as a magistrate in 1950 and is made an Alderman by the borough council and the county council. She develops an interest in post-war housing policy and the New Towns. Rackham supports the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and leads the Cambridge demonstrations against the government during the Suez Crisis and against the naval blockade of Cuba by the United States in 1962. She struggles with hearing loss that forces her to relinquish all her public duties in 1957. Rackham donates Arthur Rackham’s paintings to the Pictures in Schools schemes run by the county art adviser Nan Youngman and becomes friends with Youngman and her partner the sculptor, Betty Rea. She is a supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and walks on the Aldermaston March in her eighties. She invites her sister Margaret to live with her and after Margaret’s death leaves Park Terrace for residential accommodation in Langdon House and Meadowcroft. She speaks at the Golden Jubilee of the National Council of Women and attends the gala opening of the heated swimming pool in Cambridge for which she has long campaigned. The chapter ends with Rackham’s 90th birthday celebrations and her death two weeks before the second government of Harold Wilson is elected in 1966 (238).
