Beatrix Campbell OBE has today
received an honorary degree from Northumbria University, Newcastle, for her
lifelong and outstanding service to equal opportunities.
Beatrix – or Bea as she is known –
was born in Carlisle in 1947. Aged 14 she took part in the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament’s march from Aldermaston to London in protest against nuclear
weapons, and was still a teenager when she joined the Communist Party.
On leaving school, Bea worked as a
reporter at the Morning Star, she recalls being ‘intoxicated’ by the women's
liberation movement and, in 1972, co-founded the influential Red Rag: a
Magazine of Women’s Liberation and Marxism. It defined feminism as “the political
movement which emerges as the women’s response to their own oppression”. It
continued to flourish for the rest of the decade.
In
the early 1980s she was involved in a long occupation and strike at the London
magazine Time Out to defend equal pay and with most of the staff formed the
co-operatively-owned City Limits magazine. She was also a columnist on Marxism Today – the publication that coined
the term ‘Thatcherism’. The feminist publisher Virago commissioned her to
reimagine George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier.
Bea’s career as a writer, feminist,
playwright, broadcaster and social commentator spans nearly five decades and is
broad reaching. Bea stood twice as a Green Party candidate in local elections
in the London Borough of Camden and for Hampstead and Kilburn in the 2010
parliamentary elections.
Bea has received several academic
honours including honorary doctorates conferred by Salford University, Oxford
Brookes, University of Bedfordshire and The Open University for her works on
crime, community, gender and children’s welfare.
In her Fawcett Society Prize-winning
book, The Iron Ladies, she casts a curious eye on the Conservative Party’s
historic base among women voters. In Goliath she dissects Britain’s dangerous
places. And in Agreement! The State, Conflict and Change in Northern
Ireland, she analyses the egalitarian peace treaty that was crafted out of
decades of armed conflict.
Her work has gained several awards,
including the Cheltenham Literature Festival Prize in 1984, the Fawcett Society
Prize in 1987 and the First Time Producers Award in 1990. In 2011 Bea was named
by The Guardian in its list of Britain’s Top 300 Intellectuals and one of the
100 most influential gay people of the year in the 2012 World Pride Power List.
Bea’s latest book, End of Equality
published in 2014, has been hailed as ‘beautiful, heart-swelling prose’, but is
uncompromising in its assertion that the new world order is, in fact, the enemy
of equality.
Speaking of her Honorary Degree, Bea
said: “This is a poignant honour for me, at a time when a government was
prepared to contemplate the restoration of selection and grammar
schools. I failed the 11-plus, and I take this honour as a tribute not
only to me but to all of us - that is, most of my generation - who didn’t go to
grammar schools, who harvested creativity out of humiliation, often supported
by a great commitment in universities such as Northumbria to open and
continuing access to education.”
In 2016, Northumbria staff, students
and graduates received over 100 design and media awards, commendations and
prizes.
The research undertaken in Media and
Communication Design has been extensively published in the most prestigious conferences,
journals, publishing venues and exhibition spaces.
