Eleanor Rathbone

An independent MP from 1929 to 1946, Rathbone showed what a member without party could achieve through persistence. She forced the coalition to pay family allowances directly to mothers in 1945, campaigned on child marriage in India and the rights of women in the empire, and in the 1930s and 1940s pressed governments relentlessly to admit refugees from Nazism, earning the nickname 'the MP for refugees'. She is a model of how a single backbencher could use questions and parliamentary pressure.