When the Labour Party returned to power in 1929 to form its second minority government, the number of Labour women MPs doubled from four to nine.

In this short newsreel, which would have been shown in cinemas all over the country, Margaret Bondfield introduces her colleagues – four of whom had been re-elected in the general election held on 30 May that year, and five of whom were taking their seats for the first time.

Bondfield herself was the most senior of the Labour women. First elected as MP for Northampton in 1923, she was appointed to a junior ministerial role at the Ministry of Labour, but lost her seat in 1924; she returned to Parliament as MP for Wallsend in 1926, and following the 1929 general election was appointed as the first woman Cabinet Minister and privy councillor, serving as Minister of Labour.

Standing on steps outside the Palace of Westminster, notes in hand, Bondfield begins by thanking people for their good wishes on her appointment before introducing those MPs who had served in the previous parliament. Standing alongside her are: Susan Lawrence (East Ham North), who was to take up a ministerial role at the Ministry of Health; Ellen Wilkinson (Middlesbrough), who had been Labour’s sole woman MP after the 1924 general election; and Jennie Lee (North Lanark), who had first been elected only in the March of 1929 at a by-election and who was, at that point, still too young to vote (the Representation of the People Act 1928 which lowered the voting age for women from 30 to 21 taking effect just in time for the general election).

Bondfield then invites the newly elected MPs to join her, and somewhat self-consciously, they file on to the steps, as she rattles through the introductions: Dr Ethel Bentham (Islington East), who would die just two years later; Mary Hamilton (Blackburn); Lady Cynthia Mosley (Stoke on Trent), who would go on to join her husband Oswald in the New Party before it metamorphosed into the British Union of Fascists; Dr Marion Phillips (Sunderland), Labour’s former Chief Woman Officer; and Edith Picton-Turbervill (Wrekin).

This small set-piece introduction was clearly scripted, with MPs attempting to find their alloted places on the steps; but in an era before media training was a political essential, it appears somewhat amateurish and shambolic: Big Ben sounds just as filming begins; Cynthia Mosley chats to one of her colleagues; Jennie Lee is largely absent from the film clip, having stood too far to one side; and Ellen Wilkinson is distracted by something happening off camera, wandering out of shot before being shepherded back by Bondfield to have her say.

Wilkinson is, in fact, the only other member of the group to be given a speaking role. Addressing the camera as if it were a mass meeting, she declaims: ‘I just want to say how awfully glad we are that we have a woman in our second Labour government; a woman who started life as a shop assistant, and who is today the first woman privy councillor in this country.’

Everything about the film clip shouts 1920s. The women peer out at the camera from beneath cloche hats, faces obscured by their brims, while a cloaked Marion Philips resembles no-one so much as Dame Margaret Rutherford in full Miss Marple mode. And both Bondfield and Wilkinson, born in Somerset and Manchester respectively, have accents now seldom heard outside royal circles. Being able to see and hear these labour movement pioneers from nearly a century ago, however, is something of a rare treat.

The last word should probably go to Bondfield who, before leading the group off camera, declares: ‘And now we must get back to work. Good day’.

Note: the newsreel was posted to YouTube by British MovieTone, and is used here in line with YouTube’s sharing policies.