“Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire”

Despite engendering mixed feelings in many who have studied her, Sylvia Pankhurst was undeniably a woman who got things done. Perhaps most well remembered for her hugely significant role in helping to win UK women the vote, Sylvia was also a dominant campaigner against oppression and injustice further afield.

As part of Pluto Books’ Revolutionary Lives series, Katherine Connelly has produced a fantastically readable and informative biography and study of Sylvia – which refreshingly doesn’t simply focus on her suffrage activities, but also devotes a lot of time to her less well-known activism. And for all the reading around the Pankhursts that I’ve done in recent years, Connelly’s book - Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire - taught me plenty of things I didn’t previously know. Confirming that there is still more to be said on the fascinating and important character of Sylvia Pankhurst.

Most people are acquainted with Sylvia’s role as a suffragette. As the middle daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst (Christabel was elder, and Adela was younger), Sylvia for a long time lived in the shadow of the much adored Christabel. Ultimately, this was to be in Sylvia’s favour as she was more free to go in her own direction without such a close watch from her mother.

When the suffrage campaign simmered down during wartime, Sylvia became separated from her family as she disagreed with their support for the war. Instead, Sylvia opposed the war and set to work to support the women left behind and help those who found themselves in poverty because of the war – particularly fighting for the rights of soldiers’ wives.

In later years. Sylvia became involved with communism and soon evolved into an important figure in the movement, speaking at events worldwide. Finally, Sylvia moved to Ethiopia, where she adopted an anti-British attitude, which led her to be under surveillance by MI5.

Even Sylvia’s son Professor Richard Pankhurst has given this new book his seal of approval, stating: “Katherine Connelly has written an important work on my mother.”

Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire is neatly arranged in hugely informative chapters covering Sylvia’s various different campaigns, and the whole package is gripping and compulsive. It’s an absolute must for anybody looking to find out more about this significant lefty campaigner.

You can listen online to a fascinating talk with Connelly, which she gave at the Bishopsgate Institute about the book. Follow this link. 

Click here for more information on the excellent Revolutionary Lives series, which covers some truly remarkable people. One to particularly watch out for is the publication of Ellen Wilkinson’s biography next February. 

March, Women, March – Lucinda Hawksley

Published to coincide with the centenary of Emily Wilding Davison’s death under the hooves of the king’s horse at the Epsom Derby in 1913, March, Women, March is a truly impressive collection of suffrage memories.

The subtitle Voices of the Women’s Movement from the First Feminist to Votes for Women succinctly sums up the contents of Lucinda Hawksley’s book, which is a thorough and authoritative anthology of quotes from important early feminist figures, many of whom have been sadly forgotten in the wake of their headlining grabbing 20^th Century suffragette sisters.

The suffragettes were the militant women who only rose to prominence in the very final years of the suffrage campaign, before the First World War saw Emmeline Pankhurst call her army of women to stand down. But the suffragists far out-numbered the suffragettes – being the peaceful campaigners who had tirelessly worked for decades previously to overturn not only marriage acts, but also health bills and working rights for women, alongside campaigning for the vote. The right to vote being just one of the key demands of what is now called the first wave of feminism.

Lucinda’s beautiful book (with two large sections of fascinating photos) quite rightly pays great respect to the many, many forgotten women who campaigned for decades before the suffragettes arrived on the scene. Meaning that we begin with Mary Wollstonecraft in the 1790s, and follow through the decades via legendary and reforming nurse Florence Nightingale, and the poet Caroline Norton – whose story particularly sung out to me.

Caroline was obliged to marry an older man who she didn’t love in order to ensure financial security for her family – only for her husband to violently abuse her, kidnap their children and steal all the money she earned as a successful poet. However, after leaving her abusive husband, Caroline threw herself into studying law and was ultimately successful in bringing about the Custody of Infants Acts 1839, which finally saw mothers recognised as joint parent of her children (previously, in the event of a marriage break up, children automatically went to the father). It’s shocking that Caroline isn’t better known today.

Through the following chapters we learn of so many other, equally amazing and astonishing women who achieved so much in such stiflingly oppressive times. And while a large part of the book is occupied with the women who helped us win the vote, Lucinda doesn’t focus too heavily on the better known figures.

What we are left with in March, Women, March is a very accessibly and compulsive book, which is a testament to a great deal of library research and archival work. Lucinda supports the many quotes and excerpts with very readable historical background information – and the volume of these facts that relate back to Charles Dickens are clearly a nod to her very well known great, great, great grandfather.

Suffragettes – Frank Meeres

As the name of Frank Meeres’ new book Suffragettes (published by Amberley) suggests, he is focussing on the militant aspect of the votes for women campaign. And he does so very thoroughly.

Beginning with a short introduction to the lengthy suffrage campaign until the WSPU’s militancy began to dominate around 1907, Frank inevitably also includes a long-ish mention of Emily Wilding Davison’s death at the Epsom Derby in 1913.

However, the body of the book is a chronological guide through the main stages of the campaign between 1907 and 1914, when the First World War broke out and Emmeline Pankhurst suspended the campaign for women’s votes. Frank includes plenty of hefty quotes from newspapers and suffragette autobiographies, giving his volume weight and authority. (Although, I felt a little piqued that Christabel Pankhurst is incorrectly called ‘Charlotte’ in one instance towards the end – a typo that marred an otherwise factually clean book.)

There is also a substantial selection of images in the centre of Suffragettes, including one or two photos I hadn’t seen before – such as a photo of women sleeping in an unoccupied house to avoid the 1911 census, and one or two photos from the author’s collection of suffragette activity in his home area of Norfolk.

While Suffragettes may not add much to those already familiar with the campaign for the vote, it is a good starting place for those without much existing knowledge of the subject. And the photos in the middle are a bonus.

Bring Out The Banners

This is a suffragette novel aimed at children – I’m guessing around the 10-12 years age range.

Geoffrey Trease’s novel Bring Out The Banners was originally published in 1994, and has recently been resurrected by Bloomsbury imprint Flash Backs. While it’s not breaking any new ground in the suffragette-novel-for-kids territory (working class girl befriends privileged aristocrat girl, they unfurl Votes For Women banners at a theatre, they improbably meet Mrs Pankhurst, they go on a number of marches and end up arrested where they are force fed) this is one of the better books I’ve read that covers this territory.

Trease brings in lots of accurate historical information to illustrate the plot, he peppers his cast with a few real characters (Mrs Pankhurst, Annie Kenney, Grace Roe), and explains the facts in a very easy-to-understand (but not patronising) way.

If you’re looking for a good book to introduce your kids to the suffrage movement, then Bring Out The Banners is a good place to turn.  It is well written, has an engaging plot and is historically accurate.

Suffrage Plays – edited by Naomi Paxton

As regular readers will know, there’s nothing I like more than a book about the suffragettes. And the latest such book to land on my desk is a particularly exciting one because it is looking at an aspect of the movement that is rarely covered – and even more rarely covered in such depth.

The Methuen Drama Book of Suffrage Plays has been carefully edited by Naomi Paxton, and alongside the scripts for eight short plays written during the suffrage campaign, is a considerate and detailed introductory essay by Naomi about the origins of the plays, plus introductions and photos to each play about the authors. It’s a compact little tome at just 136 pages, but there’s still a heck of a lot crammed into those pages.

Perhaps the most well known of suffrage plays is How The Vote Was Won, which was written by Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St John in 1909. It’s a wry little vignette set in a well-to-do drawing room of an ‘anti’, who is suddenly invaded by various female relatives who seek sanctuary with him because (according to the government) they have no independent rights.

And alongside a few other short plays of a similar nature, there are also a handful of monologues. The Mother’s Meeting by Mrs Harlow Phibbs, from 1913, sees Mrs Puckle dressed in the suffrage colours of green, whit and purple, and talking enthusiastically about the hard work she does in order to even be recognised as the mother of her children. On the other side of the coin is the monologue An Anti-Suffragist by HM Paull from 1910, which features an ‘anti’ setting out her stall about why votes for women are an abominable idea – while, of course, actually selling the idea to her audience.

What’s most notable from these plays as a whole is the wit, warmth and humour within them. Even though the writers were all so passionate about securing votes for women (and many endured prison and force feeding along the way), they manage to keep their senses of humour to help spread the message about how important the franchise is. Such an attitude also flies in the face of the commonly touted idea by the ‘antis’ that suffrage campaigners were a bunch of frumpy, lumpy old witches with no sense of joy.

This book of Suffrage Plays is a very important one, and Naomi has carefully unearthed a huge treasure trove of valuable material that is crucial to helping historians understand better the work of our foremothers in the campaign for the vote. What’s even better is that now eight of these plays are available in this book, it means theatre groups now have the script to be able to perform these plays again and ensure the message is never forgotten.

Dreadnought South West

In June 1913, eight groups of suffragists set off from starting points across the country, including Cornwall, to walk to Hyde Park in London. There they held a large rally on 26 July 1913 in support of votes for women.

Now four South West women are planning a centenary celebration of what became known as the Great 1913 Suffrage Pilgrimage.

Dreadnought South West (named after Sylvia Pankhurst’s suffragette newspaper) will comprise an original theatre piece performed at key stopping places along the South West route with associated waymarker projects promoted by schools and community groups.

Playwright Natalie McGrath and director Josie Sutcliffe, supported by cultural managers Sue Kay and Mary Schwarz, have received an Arts Council England grant to research the route, find suffrage stories and develop partnerships with venues and organisations in the towns and cities through which the Pilgrimage passed.

“Seven women started at Land’s End and made it all the way to Hyde Park,” explains Natalie. “They were joined for periods of time by many supporters as well as encountering much resistance along the way. They held open-air meetings where they were allowed. We’re really interested in exploring people’s experiences of the suffrage campaign in relation to the contemporary social, economic and political position of women today – as well as current modes of, and attitudes to, public protest.”

(Story above adapted from the Dreadnought press release.)

Anti-Suffrage Postcards

Probably due to the recent American election, but recently there have been quite a few online articles rounding up various anti-suffrage postcards from the early 20th Century. I've blogged about this previously here, but am also rounding up links to some of the other recent articles to try and collect them in one place. If you know of any more, please let me know in the Comments section and I'll add them to this post.

The Society Pages – Vintage Anti-Suffrage Postcards

Collectors Weekly – War on Women, Waged in Postcards

Man Boobz – Anti-Suffrage Postcard Saturday

Ms Magazine – UK Suffrage Postcards

Ms Magazine – Suffragist Postcards

Ms Magazine – Live Blogging Women's History

Edwardian Promenade – Women's Suffrage Through Postcards

Suffragette Postcards

Alice Suffragette – Postcards

The Pankhurst Centre – Postcards

‘Votes For Ladies’

Recently, I’ve come across the Bristol Radical History Group, which formed in 2006 to stage talks, walks, gigs and more, as well as publishing an impressive catalogue of pamphlets, all celebrating different aspects of Bristol’s radical past.

So I visited HydraBookshop on Old Market (which grew out of the BRHG) and bought quite a few pamphlets, including Votes For Ladies: The Suffrage Movement 1867-1918 by Sheila McNeil (which I’m told is a pseudonym). 

As the title suggests, McNeil is not backwards in coming forwards in suggesting that the suffrage movement was aimed at middle-class women only, and was alienating to working-class women. These facts can’t be denied – meetings were generally held during day times meaning working-class women couldn’t attend; if meetings were held in the evenings, working-class women had little free time to attend between child-care and domestic tasks etc; middle-class women had servants and nannies to keep the home in order if they were sent to prison, while working-class women had no such luxury; and so on. These are plain facts.

What’s interesting in McNeil’s pamphlet is that she chooses deliberate and firm language to make plain her belief that this exclusivity was wrong and detrimental to the cause. In fact, the pamphlet’s title comes from a quote by Dora Montefiore (who set up a branch of the WSPU in a working-class area of East London, but who campaigned for ‘adult suffrage’ rather than ‘women’s suffrage’), who said the WSPU was not interested in votes for women but in “votes for ladies”. Implying the Pankhursts saw a clear line between themselves and their less fortunate sisters.

Since much literature about the suffrage movement only briefly mentions the exclusion of working-class women, it’s important that it’s highlighted here in McNeil’s pamphlet. I’ve now ordered a copy of One Hand Tied Behind Us by Jill Liddington and Jill Norris, which is one of very few historical suffrage books to focus on this aspect. (You can expect a review of that in due course!)

Votes For Ladies takes an interesting angle on the suffrage movement, and acknowledges that there is a key area that has been often overlooked in most writings about the campaign. And it’s good to know that there is a diligent bunch of people locally who are committed to keeping the socialist past of our female history alive. In 2009, the BRHG even staged a dramatic re-enactment of Theresa Garnett’s attack on Winston Churchill at Temple Meads Station (watch the film clip here).

Park Lane – by Frances Osborne

Presented as the interweaving stories of Grace-the-maid and Lady-Beatrice-the-reluctant-and privileged-daughter, on face value Park Lane looks like it's jumping on the back of the revived popularity for 1910s pomp, as exemplified by the recent TV hits Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs.

That’s fine, but there were two other factors that drew my attention to this book. First, it is written by Frances Osborne (wife of George Osborne, and author of The Bolter: a 2008 biography of her great-grandmother Idina Sackville, who ‘bolted’ to Kenya with other women’s husbands), and second, it appears to be about the fight for women’s suffrage.

I say ‘appears to be’ because Park Lane is very much a book of two halves, which seemingly bear little resemblance to each other, save for a recurrence of the main characters; although they themselves bear little resemblance to their earlier versions. But perhaps that’s what enduring a world war will do to you.

The first half of Park Lane is a frustrating read. It’s a slow trudge through the pages, despite what should be a fascinating read. Lady Beatrice becomes wrapped up in the forefront of the militant suffragettes with extraordinary speed, thanks to her rebellious aunt Celeste. Lady Bea keeps this secret from her family, most of all her mother, who also wants women to win the vote – but not at any cost. Downstairs, new maid Grace has ideas of becoming a secretary and instead pretends to her family in Scotland that she is one, while secretly carrying on as a lowly maid… albeit one who steals a Friedrich Engels book for her socialist brother.

All of that could have been an exciting page turner, but instead it feels like a clumsy trawl through disjointed sentences and clunky speech. And, in the exact opposite of what I’d expect from a page turner, I found myself physically wanting to read it, but mentally desperate to do anything but read it. Strange.

But I ploughed on and got to the second half, at which point war had broken out and the characters had undergone a dramatic reinvention. As had Osborne’s writing, which now picked up pace, became engaging and absorbing, and finally I got the page turning story I’d been after 200 pages previously. Although it remains hard to reconcile the characters in the second half with their first half versions – Grace loses her vim, Lady Bea fades into a wet fart, and what of the campaign for suffrage? Never far from the pages of the first half, the fight for female emancipation has vanished from the second half of Park Lane. While I know that Mrs Pankhurst asked her troops to call a halt to activity during the war, it still struck me as strange that the feistiest of her army would suddenly never mention the campaign again… not even in the 1918 chapter: the year that women over 30 were granted the vote.

The chapters following Lady Bea into the secret suffragette offices of Lauderdale Mansions are among the most exhilarating for me – conjuring up what the smell, noise, pace and atmosphere of the place must have been, and the majesty surrounding Mrs Pankhurst. But, inexplicably, the suffrage story vanishes from the pages of Park Lane as quickly as Lady Bea manages to rise to a position of suffragette respectability. Most infuriating.

But not as infuriating as the conveniently neat way in which the lose ends are all tied up at the end of the book. Which takes away from any vague credibility the plot had. 

While Park Lane was an enjoyable enough read once I’d pushed through the first 200 pages, I struggled with the implausibility of the two main characters throughout, and the treacly writing, which at times was a joyless trudge. After the unmitigated pleasure of reading The Bolter, I’d hoped for better from a suffrage novel by Frances Osborne.

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Here’s a link to the inimitable John Crace and his digested read of Park Lane.

Although, even more fun can be had by having a read of Julie Birchill’s review of ParkLane, which is a hoot. “Seriously, I've come across paper dolls with more depth than this crew.”

Bristol’s Other Women – IWD 2012

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Architects, Angels, Activists and the City of Bath

Hot off the press is Canadian academic Cynthia Hammond’s respectful appreciation of the unacknowledged work of women over the past centuries in creating the city of Bath as we know it - Architects, Angels, Activists and the City of Bath 1765-1965: Engaging with Women’s Spatial Interventions in Buildings and Landscape (Ashgate, £65). 

Divided into three sections, the book covers the lesser known female architects who are largely forgotten in the wake of men like John Wood the Elder and John Wood the Younger; a section on the representation of angels in the city, remarking on the relative absence of female angels at the famous Abbey and affecting to remedy this with a performance piece; and lastly a beautifully detailed section about the trampled Suffragettes’ Wood at Batheaston (see also this post from a few weeks ago).

While the whole book is fascinating, my main interest is the third section. I’d vaguely known of a Suffragettes’ Wood in Somerset for some time, but it was only after making contact with Dan Brown in early January that I gained access to his book (compiled with Hammond last year), and found long-lost books by Victoria Nimmo (Women of Violence, 1985) and Beatrice Dobbie (A Nest of Suffragettes in Somerset, 1979) in Bristol and Bath Libraries.

For those who don’t know about the Suffragettes’ Wood, please have a quick read of my previous post. And once you’re up to speed, revel in the fact that Hammond uses this book to take the research a step further and bring it up to date. Brown and Hammond’s previous book is more of a historical analysis and document, stating what happened and cataloguing as many of Colonel Blathwayt’s photographs as possible. 

What Hammond now does is retrace the steps of the suffragettes around Batheaston and Eagle House, and in the process she finds two (now elderly) women who used to play in the Suffragettes’ Wood as children, which enables Hammond to construct a detailed map locating where all the bushes and trees would have stood, and the location of each of the photographs.

What struck me the most was the amazing task Hammond undertook in attempting to rebuild the arboretum as far as humanly possible, given the fact the site is now a housing estate. She bought trees and conifers, and delivered them to all the residents of Eagle Park, inviting them to plant and care for the trees, and letting them know about the history of the site upon which they now live. 

Hammond’s respect for this task was extremely moving, and showed through as an intensely powerful gesture of support for the history of women in the United Kingdom. However, is it not shameful that we needed a Canadian woman to do this for us – was there really no one in England for cared enough to ensure the memory of the arboretum never died?

Hammond is rightly recognised as an authority on this subject: she has given papers about this at Bath Spa University, and written elsewhere about the arboretum. I hope her work never ceases, and that she continues to turn over more stones to unearth yet more amazing stories about this trampled site. Although, with it being 113 years since the first trees were planted at Eagle House, and about 40 years since the bulldozers demolished history, there cannot be many people alive who still have living memories of the arboretum. Which makes it all the more wonderful that Hammond managed to find two women who could share their memories with her. I can only image how her spine must have tingled as Hammond listened to these women speak – because my spine tingled when I read what they had to say.

HG Wells and the suffrage novel

First published in 1909, Ann Veronica is HG Wells’ novel addressing his support of women winning the right to vote and thereby gain their independence from men. And it’s a strange one.

Our heroine Vee is a 21-year-old, middle-class science scholar who lives with her widowed father and spinster aunt in Suburbia. She dreams of escaping her father’s overbearing control over her, and of taking up with her Bohemian friends… who have introduced her to the idea of women’s suffrage.

Ann Veronica is a book in two parts. In the first half of the novel, Vee is painted as a naïve but impassioned young woman who is determined to get what she wants by any means. HG Wells creates her as a malleable vehicle for demonstrating to his readers how suffocated women are without the vote, and the subsequent right to live independently of fathers or husbands.

Yet the second half of the novel, as has been widely agreed in reviews, descends into a tedious romance bearing little relation to the first half, and causing the reader to care little for what scrape Vee has now found herself in, and whether she can win yet more people round to her manipulative way of thinking.

This was a curious book to read as I work my way through as many suffrage novels as I can manage, but I’m not sure HG Wells put as much time and thought into this as he did with his better known books. There’s every cynical possibility that Ann Veronica was simply an outing for him to express his (supportive) views about the enfranchisement of women.

For fun, here’s John Crace’s suitably barbed digested read of Ann Veronica.

And here's another blogger's piece about Ann Veronica, which I enjoyed very much.

Iron Jawed Angels – a film about US suffrage

There are many oddities about this 2004 HBO film, which looks like it was made for TV. The most glaring of which is the jarring music, which at best can be described as sub-standard ‘90s trip hop: whatever you call it, it’s achingly out of place on a period film set in the late 1910s that focuses on the American fight for suffrage.

Iron Jawed Angels manages a double casting whammy with both Hilary Swank and Angelica Houston in strong roles, supported well by Frances O’Connor and Julia Ormond. The film is a biopic of Alice Paul (played by Swank), who led the campaign in America to ensure all women were granted the vote, and not just women in certain states.

While the story is fascinating, Iron Jawed Angels is by no means a good film! It is an extremely strangely constructed and produced film.

Hilary Swank is a fantastic actress, but she seems oddly cast as Alice Paul – her face and voice are too contemporary for the role. Similarly, the other suffragettes in her party look like 21^st Century women playing dress-up in 19^th Century costumes – which, in essence, they are.

And then there is the bizarre use of editing techniques: cross fades and jump cuts are painfully out of step in a period film, but they’re used ad nauseum here. And the mise-en-scene of the costumes is nothing more than grating – the actresses are dressed in glamorous 1910s outfits that seem far removed from clothes that women of their class and income would have worn. And the screen time and narrative pressure placed on Alice Paul’s blinkin’ pink hat are so over emphasised that it becomes excruciating. It’s certainly not subtle, as mise-en-scene should be.

And the sound? I found it hard to detach from the music, which was comical in its inappropriateness, and extremely distracting from the rest of the film. About half way through, I contemplated muting the DVD and switching the subtitles on in order to simply make the noise stop.

In short – as a film about the American suffrage movement, Iron Jawed Angels is (mostly) well acted and extremely interesting. But as a film in its own right, it is poorly directed, unsympathetically edited and horrifically soundtracked. I can’t think what would ever make me watch it again.

(As a footnote: I’ve heard rumours that the team behind Made In Dagenham are currently in the early stages of producing a film about the British suffrage campaign, which will be written by Abi Morgan – who scripted The Iron Lady and The Hour. More news on this as and when I hear it.)

Suffragette postcards

It’s hardly a secret, but the cultural evolution of the suffragettes is a topic that I’m constantly reading around, researching and evolving. There are never fewer than three suffrage novels and non-fiction books by my desk, and my review library of books is growing really quite huge now. But that’s not to say that I don’t want to know of more suggestions (please let me know in the comments section) – I far from have them all!

But I’m taking a detour into suffrage postcards at the moment. The imagery of the suffragettes was famously the most successful ever deployment of colour for a political cause. The purple, white and green colour scheme of the suffragettes was iconic and legendary. And this translated into the many postcards issued both by the WSPU and the anti-suffrage movement. Today, I’ve ordered a copy of Ian McDonald’s 1989 book Vindication: A Postcard History of the Women’s Movement, and can promise that a review will be posted soon.

Another important factor was the ubiquity of postcards in the early 1900s. With same-day postal deliveries, writing a short message on the back of a picture postcard made these highly collectible cards the emails of their day. Many suffragettes also used postcards to share coded information about meetings and protests with each other in ingenious ways.

This is still something I’m only in the early stages of researching, but I wanted to share three particularly interesting images that I found today.

A postcard from 1916

 The first postcard is a cartoon of a girl from 1916, and shows the fun side of the suffrage movement, and the way it looks to the future, reminding people that they are fighting for the vote not only for themselves, but also for future generations.

A postcard from 1908

 The second is a really striking and emotive card from 1908, showing two women with a beautiful banner outside the Houses of Parliament and the message:

“This is THE HOUSE that man built,

And this is the Flag of the Women’s Franchise,

Which is making our Ministers open their eyes:

Fighting with grit, to the front bit by bit:

Determined in Parliament one day to sit,

The bold Suffragette who is sure to get yet

Into THE HOUSE that man built.”

US Suffrage programme cover from 1913

Finally, I’ve included an image (not strictly a postcard) of the front cover of the programme for the Women’s Suffrage Procession in Washington DC on March 3, 1913. Interesting not only because most of my research has been centered on the UK, but also because the artwork is so beautiful, and full of hope, promise and a grand future.

Genuine suffrage postcards now command a small fortune second hand (anywhere between £9.99 and £100), so I fear that unless I get lucky at a second hand stall, I’m unlikely to get my hands on the real deal. Thankfully, many images have been uploaded to various websites, and here are a few links (if you have other suggestions, please let me know in the comments section).

By far the best site I have found (so far) is Alice Hawkins Suffragette – A Sister of Freedom, which includes a page with photographic postcards. The beautifully put together site is a tribute to Alice by her surviving family members, and I strongly advise you to check it out if you are at all interested in the suffrage movement. The home page is here.

There are also two (of several) articles on the excellent blog site for Ms Magazine. I particularly recommend this one and this one.

The Suffragettes’ Wood

Adela Pankurst and Annie Kenney in the arboretum, 1910 - photo from bathintime.co.uk

Inevitably, the combined ordeals of prison and forcible feeding would take its toll on Britain’s suffragettes, and when they were released from the jails they would need time to recover. And many of these women would go to Eagle House in Batheaston, Somerset, to recuperate as guests of the supportive Blathwayt family.

In addition to offering rest and respite, Linley and Emily Blathwayt created a three-acre arboretum on their land in tribute to their political guests – most notably Yorkshire-woman Annie Kenney (who eventually made her home just a few streets away from where I am currently typing this in Clifton, Bristol). This fascinating and unique project was developed between 1909 and 1912 and saw more than 60 women plant a tree in the specially cultivated plot. Those who had undergone hunger strike and forced feeding were invited to plant a conifer, and non-militant suffragettes planted holly bushes. And the planting of each was accompanied by a special ceremony in which the suffragette in question would dress in her finest clothes and her awarded suffrage jewellery.

Annie and Kitty Kenney, Florence Haig, Mary Blathwayt and Marion Wallace-Dunlop
- photo from bathintime.co.uk

The ceremonies and the development of the arboretum were documented on camera by Colonel Blathwayt, who also ordered iron plaques for each plant to record the date of planting, type of species, and name of the woman being honoured. Long forgotten after the arboretum fell to ruin in the middle of the last century, these photographs and many of the plaques were recovered in the attic of Eagle House when it was being prepared for sale. In 2002, Bath historian Dan Brown archived the photos (there are around 250 available to view here), and in 2011 – with Canadian academic Cynthia Hammond – he curated an exhibition celebrating the centenary of the Suffragettes’ Wood (for International Women’s Week, held at Bath Central Library). The exhibition catalogue – Suffragettes in Bath: Activism in an Edwardian Arboretum – is still for sale through Brown’s website, and I strongly advise getting a copy.

Brown and Hammond’s catalogue is liberally illustrated with glossy, black and white photos, all meticulously referenced in the accompanying essays, and together the book builds a vivid picture of the creation (and destruction) of this extraordinary political project of the last century. That the arboretum was allowed to become overgrown and abandoned is sad enough, but it is particularly tragic that there was seemingly no objection to the arboretum being bulldozed by property developers in the 1960s.

The suffragettes fought a crucial fight for women and men the world over, and it is vital that we never forget what those strong women did on our behalf. The decision to commemorate these women with an arboretum was a grand and beautiful gesture by the Blathwayts, and should have been a lasting memorial for centuries to come. In the end, the arboretum survived only a few decades before the actions of these remarkable women was brushed aside and bulldozed. This is very sad.

Those interested in the history of women’s activism in the South West may also be interested to know that Hammond has a book published next month on this: Architects, Angels, Activists and the City of Bath, 1765-1965 (Ashgate).

Overview of 'Annie's Arboretum' in 1909 - photo from bathintime.co.uk