expansion in the provision of part-time adult education through county colleges. In October 1945 she went to Germany to report on how the destroyed German education system could best be reactivated. She was astonished by the speed with which, five months after its defeat, the country's schools and universities were reopening. Other trips included visits to Gibraltar, Malta and Czechoslovakia. In November 1945 she chaired an international conference in London that led to the establishment, a year later, of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In one of her final speeches in parliament, on 22 November 1946, she emphasised that UNESCO stood for "standards of value ... putting aside the idea that only practical things matter". She prophesied that the organisation "will do great things", and urged the government to give it its full backing. Illness and death Wilkinson suffered for most of her life from bronchial asthma, which she aggravated over the years by heavy smoking and overwork. She had often been ill during the war, and had collapsed during a visit to Prague in 1946. On 25 January 1947 she attended the opening of the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. The winter of 1946–47 was exceptionally cold, and the ceremony was held out of doors. Shortly afterward, Wilkinson developed pneumonia; on 3 February she was found in her London flat in a coma, and on 6 February 1947 she died in St Mary's Hospital, Paddington. At the inquest the coroner gave the cause of death as "heart failure following emphysema, with acute bronchitis and bronchial pneumonia, accelerated by barbiturate poisoning". Wilkinson had been taking a combination of drugs for several months, to combat both her asthma and insomnia; the coroner believed she had inadvertently taken an overdose of barbiturates. With no evidence to indicate that the overdose was deliberate, he recorded a verdict of accidental death. Despite this, speculation that Wilkinson had committed suicide has persisted, the reasons cited being the failure of her personal relationship with Herbert Morrison and her likely fate in a rumoured cabinet reshuffle. In their 1973 biography of Morrison, Bernard Donoughue and G. W. Jones suggest that, given Wilkinson's poor health, the burdens of her ministerial office became too much for her. However, the lack of conclusive evidence divides historians about Wilkinson's intention to take her own life. Appraisal and legacy Wilkinson's short stature and distinctive red hair, combined with