Mary Knight

Knight was a leading Communist Party and Labour Party member in Rusholme in Manchester, where she was a councillor up to the 1920s.

She had been a member of the long established Socialist Club in Openshaw with Willie Paul (see separate entry), with whom she did business in connection with his Manchester market stall-holdings, which were an outcrop of his Derby activities. It may be this connection that drew Paul more strongly to Manchester. Although a Communist Party member, Paul was adopted a Labour candidate in 1923 – only eight members out of over four hundred present voted against .

She was eventually expelled for her Communist Party membership from the Labour Party.

Her son Lester Hutchinson became Labour MP for Rusholme in 1945 but was expelled for being a "crypto-communist" at the height of the cold war in July 1949.