TWO years ago I was e-mailed by a man trying to find a home for a portrait of Viscountess Rhondda.

This email set of a chain of events which ended up with this very famous Newportonian finally taking her place in the House of Lords.

As the only woman MP ever to be elected in Gwent I was very proud on Saturday as part of the Newport Chartist Convention 2012 to be able to do a short talk about how she got there.

I can only claim a small bit part in her journey but her life story is a fascinating one which deserves a much wider audience.

Margaret Haig Mackworth (born 1883) lived for part of her life in Llanwern House, the only child of David Alfred Thomas, Liberal MP first for Merthyr Tydfil followed by Cardiff, then became a hereditary peer as 1st Viscount Rhondda.

She campaigned most of her adult life for women’s rights. As the secretary of the Newport Women’s Social and Political Union campaigning for women’s suffrage she threw herself on Herbert Asquith’s car, blew up a Newport post box and ended up in prison at Sessions House, Usk where she was only released following a hunger strike.

In 1922 on her father’s death she inherited his title (Viscountess Rhondda) and tried to enter the House of Lords.

Rebuffed by the Committee of Privileges, she waged a lifelong campaign for women to be able to take their seats – often furthering her cause through Time and Tide, the magazine she founded. She was headline news in her day, and alongside campaigning for women found the time to be a huge success in business, taking over directorship of some 30 of her father’s businesses and was the first female president of the Institute of Directors in 1926.

One month after her death in 1958 the Life Peerages Act allowed women to enter the Lords for the first time, but of course, this was too late for Margaret.

More than 50 years later I forwarded on the e-mail from the owner of the portrait to Baroness Gale of Blaenrhondda, who sits on the Arts Committee of the House of Lords. It turned out the curators had been looking for a portrait for years and had made various abortive trips to Welsh museums to search their archives.

Last year Viscountess Rhondda finally took her place in the Lords when the portrait was unveiled in the Palace of Westminster accompanied by a fascinating lecture by Welsh historian Professor Angela John. Angela is writing a biography of Viscountess Rhondda which will be published next year just in time for a lecture at the Chartist Convention in 2013.