“IMPOSSIBLE you say? If it is impossible we must start at once,” was Margaret MacDonald’s response to naysayers, doubting her latest scheme for the advancement of socialism.

Impossible wasn’t really a concept she had much time for. It’s a dull inevitability that today she is remembered mainly as the wife of prime minister Ramsay McDonald; there was a bit more to her than just that.

Margaret Gladstone was born in London in 1870, the daughter of a chemistry professor who was one of the founders of the YMCA.

Growing up motherless, Margaret was raised by her half-sisters, and left school well educated for a girl of that time, ready to pursue the good works that intelligent, energetic young ladies of means often undertook to give their lives purpose in a world where careers were not generally open to them.

But like many middle-class social workers of her generation, she was profoundly changed by her encounters with poverty. Increasingly radicalised by reading the ideas of the Christian socialists, and by seeing the effects of actually existing capitalism with her own eyes, she joined the Independent Labour Party in 1896.

That same year she married Ramsay MacDonald, a young activist. His background was very different to hers. Born in Lossiemouth, Scotland, in 1866, he was the son of a housemaid and a ploughman.

He was illegitimate, though he didn’t find out that fact until 1915, when he read it in a far-right newspaper while sitting on a train. A fellow passenger had kindly pointed the item out to him. The revelation that this had been kept from him all his life, he wrote in his diary, brought him “hours of the most terrible mental pain.”

The marriage was a love match, but it was also of great significance to the whole course of British politics in the first third of the 20th century.

Margaret had a private income of a few hundred pounds a year, and this meant that when Ramsay became secretary of the nascent Labour Party in 1900 it did not need to pay him a salary.

It wasn’t only her money that propelled her husband’s political career: she was a skilled organiser, with a good understanding of political and strategic matters. Their London home was used as the party’s first central office.

By that time he was one of the most exciting and charismatic socialist politicians in all of Europe. A handsome man with a marvellous speaking voice he was often described as “a born leader.”

It was no surprise to anyone when he became Labour’s first prime minister in 1924 — in contrast to the shock and astonishment that convulsed the socialist movement when in 1931 MacDonald abandoned his comrades to become the socialist figurehead of a Tory-dominated “national” government.

Margaret herself, meanwhile, was especially active in support of female industrial workers, both employed and unemployed.

She became a recognised expert in the field, by the state as well as by the labour movement, and her quietly efficient achievements changed life for the better for many working women. In 1906 she was a founder of the Women’s Labour League, designed to get more women involved in socialist politics.

Some of her views, alongside such work, would seem a bit odd today; she believed that a woman’s most important role in society was as a wife and mother, and thought the employment of married women was an undesirable feature of industrial capitalism which socialism would render unnecessary.

She campaigned against the existence of barmaids, on moral grounds. (That she herself had six children, and never stopped working, presumably didn’t count because she wasn’t paid for her labour.)

Her home life was predictably chaotic given the busyness of the MacDonalds’ world. Margaret cared nothing for her appearance, or for conventional respectability.

Her manner of dress — not so much unconventional as random — caused much comment, and she once shocked some of her female Labour Party comrades by turning up to a Downing Street do with her blouse on back to front.

One weekend in July 1911, Margaret wasn’t feeling very well and showed Ramsay her swollen ring finger. He was alarmed, but she laughed it off.

Her illness worsened, though, and was diagnosed as blood poisoning caused by an internal ulcer. She died at home in London on September 8, aged 41. Ramsay never got over her death and never remarried, although the main acts of his parliamentary career were all still to come.

On her deathbed, she asked each of her children to visit her separately. What she said to her daughters is not recorded, but she told her sons: “I wish you only to remember one wish of your mother’s — never marry except for love.”

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