Dame Elizabeth Leah Manning DBE (née Perrett; 14 April 1886 – 15 September 1977) was a British educationalist, social reformer, and Labour Member of Parliament (MP) in the 1930s and 1940s. She organised the evacuation of orphaned or at risk Basque children during the Spanish Civil War. Early life Manning was born in Droitwich, Worcestershire, the first of twelve children - only six of which reached maturity. Her parents were Charles William Perrett, a captain in the Salvation Army, and Harriet Margaret (nee Tappin), a teacher from Bethnal Green. Her parents emigrated to the United States when she was 14, but decided that she (alone among her siblings) should remain in Britain, and she was looked after by her maternal grandparents, who were Methodists. Leah was influenced by her grandfather's Liberal, radical politics. Early career She was educated at St John's School in Bridgwater, and at Homerton College, Cambridge, then a teacher training college. She became a teacher in Cambridge where she had met fellow undergraduate Hugh Dalton and joined the Fabian Society and the Independent Labour Party. Her school was in a poor area of the city and she pressed the city authorities to improve the health by providing free milk, using her position on Cambridge Trades Council to raise the issue. Marriage She married William Henry Manning (1883–1952), an astronomer working for the University Solar Physics Laboratory, in 1914. They set up home together in a house on the Cambridge Observatory site. He was a pacifist and a Liberal in politics. Politics Manning welcomed news of the October revolution in Russia, and became a member of the 1917 Club. In peacetime, she became an active speaker on behalf of Labour candidates in elections around the country. She was appointed headmistress of a new experimental Open Air School for undernourished children which Cambridge education authority had established on a farm site, and found this work exceptionally rewarding. In 1929, she served as organising secretary of the National Union of Teachers, becoming its president in 1930. In 1931, she was elected as MP for Islington East in a by-election on 19 February. She did not support Ramsay MacDonald's National Government and stayed in the Labour Party, losing her seat a few months later at the 1931 general election in October. She served on the Labour Party National Executive Committee from 1931 to 1932, and in the 1935 general election unsuccessfully