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
Mervyn Pike, Baroness Pike of Leicestershire and was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 1981 Birthday Honours. She died in 2004, unmarried, aged 85, from natural causes. Mervyn Pike, Baroness Pike Irene Mervyn Parnicott Pike, Baroness Pike, DBE (16 September 1918 – 11 January 2004) was a British Conservative politician. The name by which she came to be known, Mervyn, had been the name of her father's best friend, who was to have been her godfather; when he was killed in action, a few days before she was born, her father decided that the baby would