My friend Beryl Skelly, who has died aged 101, was a secretary to two Labour party leaders, Clement Attlee and Hugh Gaitskell, in the 1950s and 60s. Taken on by Attlee shortly after his defeat in the 1951 general election, she remained as his secretary until his resignation in 1955, and was appointed MBE. When Gaitskell was elected to take over as party leader, he asked Beryl to be his secretary, and over the following eight years the pair developed a close working relationship until Gaitskell’s sudden death at the age of 56 in 1963.
Born in Llanelli, south Wales, Beryl went straight into the civil service from school, at first working in Wales and then Doncaster. After the second world war she moved to London. A staunch supporter of the Labour party, she successfully applied to be secretary to Manny Shinwell, who served as a cabinet minister in Attlee’s postwar government.
After Gaitskell’s death, Beryl turned down the offer to become secretary to the future prime minister Harold Wilson, opting instead to work as a secretary for the journalist Hugh Cudlipp when he was chair first of the Mirror Group (1963-67) and then of the IPC publishing group (1967-73). Cudlipp became a Labour peer in 1974 and Beryl continued to work for him until her retirement in 1976.
For many years Beryl and her husband, John Skelly, a professional singer turned accountant, whom she married in 1947, lived in Streatham in south London, where they were keen members of Telford Park lawn tennis club and would cruise the Thames estuary and beyond in their wooden yacht, Bird Alone, often with the Cudlipp family on board. Later Beryl and John moved to the Dorset village of Stourpaine, where Beryl is remembered for her prizewinning baking.
John died in 1996; Beryl continued to live independently into her 90s before moving to a nursing home. She remained a member of the Labour party until her death.
