Barbara Castle Barbara Castle Barbara Anne Castle, Baroness Castle of Blackburn, PC, GCOT ("née" Betts; 6 October 1910 – 3 May 2002) was a British Labour Party politician who was the Member of Parliament for Blackburn from 1945 to 1979, making her the longest-serving female MP in the history of the House of Commons until that record was broken in 2007 by Gwyneth Dunwoody. She later became the Member of the European Parliament for Greater Manchester from 1979 to 1989 and subsequently a member of the House of Lords, having been granted a life peerage in 1990. One of the most significant
Jack Blackburn fought the Barbados-born boxer Panama Joe Gans, who had boxed extensively in Panama where he lived prior to 1917. Panama Joe held the World Colored Middleweight Championship from 1920 to 1924, and held a Panamanian Lightweight Title in his youth. On July 24, 1922, Blackburn lost one of his last bouts to Gans in Indianapolis, Indiana, in a fourth-round technical knockout of a scheduled ten round bout. Panama Joe was a formidable boxer and fourteen years younger than Blackburn when they met, though Blackburn had a three-inch advantage in height and reach. Boxing at forty, Blackburn probably should not have