Peerless secretarial skills

Former Cabinet minister and Labour Party stalwart Barbara Castle, who died last year aged 91, has left the original transcript of her Cabinet diaries from the 1960s to the University of Bradford.

Baroness Castle, who grew up in Bradford, was elected MP for Blackburn in 1945 and retained the seat for 34 years. She began to keep political diaries soon after she became a Cabinet minister in 1964 and continued throughout her periods in office.

She typed the volumes she later published from her shorthand notes. It is the typed notes that she has left to the university. In 1990, she entered the House of Lords as Baroness Castle of Blackburn.