Untold lives blog

The funeral of Emily Wilding Davison took place in London on 14 June 1913, six days after she died from injuries sustained at the Epsom Derby. There was a procession with 5000 suffragettes and a service at St George’s Church in Bloomsbury.  Emily's body was then taken by train for burial at Morpeth in Northumberland, her mother Margaret’s birthplace and home.  Today’s story is about Maud Arncliffe Sennett and how her scrapbooks reveal the part she played in Emily’s funeral.


Christmas crackers and women’s suffrage might seem an unusual combination of preoccupations – but they combine in the person of Alice Maud Mary Arncliffe Sennett (1862-1936). The daughter of an Italian confectioner, she carried on the family ornamental confectionery and cracker manufacturing business, with her husband Henry, and advertisements for their crackers often appear in programmes for suffrage fairs and similar events.   

  Images Online Fourteen reasons for supporting women's Suffrage'. Arncliffe Sennett Collection C.121.g.1 volume 1 
 

Her interest in women’s suffrage began in 1906 when she read a letter by Millicent Fawcett in the newspaper, and she was subsequently active in various organisations within the suffrage movement until about 1918. A former actress (under the name Mary Kingsley), she was much in demand as a speaker at meetings across the country. She provided several thousand red and white rosettes for the Mud March in February 1907 – so called because of the inclement weather on the day - and was briefly imprisoned in Holloway in November 1911 for breaking the windows at the Daily Mail offices*. In later life, she founded the Midhurst and Haslemere Anti-Vivisection Society.

'The dignity of the franchise'. A cartoon reproduced from 'Punch', showing a man telling a woman to leave voting to the men. Arncliffe Sennett Collection C.121.g.1 volume 1  Images Online

At the British Library we have over 30 volumes, primarily scrapbooks arranged chronologically, crammed with news-cuttings, correspondence, leaflets, pamphlets, programmes and other ephemeral material which she collected, some of which you can see here. In volume 23, amid the newspaper-cuttings, is Maud Arncliffe Sennett’s ticket to the memorial service for Emily Wilding Davison at St. George’s, Bloomsbury on Saturday 14 June 1913, annotated on the back to indicate that she was representing the Actresses’ Franchise League. Related material includes a leaflet ‘In Memoriam’ of Emily and the hymn sheet from the memorial service.

In an apparently unplanned gesture, Maud Arncliffe Sennett joined the train taking Emily Wilding Davison’s body north at King’s Cross, and volume 23 also includes a “piece of the yew tree that lined her [Emily’s] grave” in Morpeth. During her stay there she met Alexander Orr, a businessman from Edinburgh, and this meeting led to the creation of the Northern Men’s Federation for Women’s Suffrage, a group initially gathered to form a deputation to the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, but which continued until 1919 with Maud Arncliffe Sennett as President.

Alison Bailey
Curator, Printed Historical Sources

*The “Bills for the impedimenta with which I broke Lord Northcliffe’s windows” (in vol. 15 of the collection) can currently be seen in the Historical Documents cases in the Sir John Ritblat Gallery.

Further reading:

More information about the Arncliffe Sennett Collection.

Maud Arncliffe Sennett, The Child. London: C.W. Daniel Co., [1938]. 010821.i.23. [Autobiography].

Previous post by Penelope Tuson referring to Maud Arncliffe Sennett and the anti-suffrage movement.

Campaign for Women’s Suffrage

Although the struggle to enable women to vote was put on hold during the First World War, this doesn’t mean that activists were idle. The legal right to vote in 1918 was class-based, covering only those who owned property or had graduated from a British university. So there was still much to do, to achieve parity with men, regardless of one’s educational or economic status, which finally happened in 1928. 

Alongside the Suffragettes’ movement as we think of it, women were cutting more pieces of the social cake for themselves. Women’s organisations in Britain began advocating for better social conditions in the nineteenth century, and have launched many reform movements since then. As you’d expect, many of the groups were concerned with traditional women’s issues such as family planning, child welfare, state-funded and religious education, public safety, health care, recreation, and of course the right to vote.

    From Votes and Wages: How women's suffrage will improve the economic position of women (National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, 1912).   Images Online   


The Women’s Co-operative Guild (WCG) sprang from the British co-op system of commerce in the 1880s and gradually became self-governing. By the 1920s its working class base allied itself with the Labour Party, despite the latter defeating their advocacy of birth control.  Allies are never perfect. 

The Guild persevered, maintaining in its core agenda of women’s rights and resolute pacifism. This last unrelenting political platform began to crumble as the Second World War was waged against European fascism. In 1940-1941, the group lost almost half its membership to the Women’s Voluntary Service. 

But back in the Suffragists’ day, the WCG enabled many working class women to represent themselves in workers’ movements. And a major documenter of this scene was Margaret Llewellyn Davies. She published pamphlets such as The Three Wheels of a Store’s Machinery (1901), and books including Maternity:  Letters from Working-Women Collected by the Women's Co-operative Guild (G. Bell, 1915).  A collection of Co-op women’s testimonies were collected as Life as We have Known it, and published by Leonard & Virginia Woolf in 1931. The feminist publisher Virago re-published it as a classic in 1977 and in 2012.

The Co-op has not shirked from documenting its own history. A year before universal suffrage was extended to women, the association published Catherine Webb’s The Woman with the Basket: The History of the Women’s Co-operative Guild, 1883-1927, and a half-century later they distributed Jean Gaffin & David Thomas’ Caring and Sharing: The Centenary History of the Women’s Co-operative Guild, which went to several editions. The Guild published numerous tracts, reports and monographs to do with employment economics and public health, issues that worked their way into bills submitted in the Houses of Parliament.

Andy Simons
Curator, Printed Historical Sources 

We continue our series of stories on campaigns for women's rights with a post by guest blogger Elizabeth Crawford about Emily Wilding Davison and her friends.

Emily Wilding Davison’s funeral procession approaching St George’s, Bloomsbury, where a memorial service was held on 14 June 1913. The Emily Davison Club was later housed very close by, at 144 High Holborn.  Picture supplied by Elizabeth Crawford.

Emily Wilding Davison died on 8 June 1913, four days after attempting to bring the ‘Votes for Women’ message before the public - and the King - on the Derby racecourse. On 14 June 1913 the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), of which she was an active, unpaid supporter, organized a magnificently solemn procession that accompanied her coffin through London.

We now recognise that, although Emily Wilding Davison’s action resulted in her death, nothing else in the long history of the suffrage movement has brought such spectacular publicity to the campaign. This was not, however, a foregone conclusion, for, with the outbreak of war in August 1914, everything changed. Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, the leaders of the WSPU, announced that they would be supporting the government’s war effort and that the ‘votes for women’ campaign was suspended. However, a year later, in October 1915, some former members of the WSPU resisted this dictat. Holding a protest meeting, they formed themselves into a new group, the Suffragettes of the WSPU.

The instigator was Mrs Rose Lamartine Yates, the dynamic leader of the Wimbledon branch of the WSPU, who declared that ‘only by the attainment of the aims for which the women of the WSPU have striven and suffered can the uplifting of the human race be achieved’.  She had long been a friend of Emily Davison and had rushed to Emily’s bedside as she lay dying. The Suffragettes of the WSPU were not prepared to allow the sacrifice, as they saw it, that Emily Davison and others had made to be cast aside at the whim of the Pankhursts.

Brooch owned by Mary Leigh, encloses photographic portrait of Emily Wilding Davison. Picture supplied by Elizabeth Crawford.

 Also in 1915, motivated by similar sentiments, Mary Leigh, who had been one of the most militant members of the WSPU and a woman whom Emily Davison had called ‘comrade’, founded the Emily Davison Lodge (later renamed the Emily Davison Club). Both the Suffragettes of the WSPU and the Emily Davison Club were based at 144 High Holborn, the headquarters of the Women’s Freedom League. The Club, whose first secretary was Mrs Alice Green, with whom it is thought Emily Davison had been staying on the night before the Derby, was the scene of some memorable gatherings. The Emily Davison Club, with associated café, was still in existence in 1940.

Rose Lamartine Yates, unwilling to leave the shaping of the history of the suffragette movement to the vagaries of time, was in 1939 the driving force behind the setting up of the Suffragette Record Room in which to showcase suffragette memorabilia. This method of perpetuating the suffragette story has been highly successful in that the collection now forms the heart of the Suffragette Fellowship Collection held by the Museum of London.

Reverse of the brooch, with Mary Leigh’s defiant annotation. Picture supplied by Elizabeth Crawford.

For her part, until the late 1970s Mary Leigh continued into impoverished old age to travel north to lay flowers on Emily Davison’s Morpeth grave on the anniversary of the Derby. Her papers, which include her yearly correspondence with a sympathetic Morpeth florist, make touching reading. Held at the Women’s Library @ LSE, they complement iconic items associated with Emily Wilding Davison, including the purse that was in her pocket when she was struck by the King’s horse and many of her manuscripts. Kept by Rose Lamartine Yates, these were donated in the 1980s by her daughter-in-law. As, in this centenary year of her death, Emily Wilding Davison is now being honoured, we should also remember the friends who did so much to preserve a record of her ideals and of her life.

Elizabeth Crawford

Further reading :

Biographies of Emily Wilding Davison, Mary Leigh and Rose Lamartine Yates may be found in Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement 1866-1928: a reference guide, London, 1999.
Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain and Ireland: a regional survey, London, 2005
Elizabeth Crawford, Enterprising Women: the Garretts and their circle, London, 2002
Elizabeth Crawford, Campaigning for the Vote: Kate Parry Frye’s Suffrage Diary, London, 2013

LSE Emily Wilding Davison Centenary online exhibition

Woman and her sphere

One hundred years ago, suffragette Emily Wilding Davison went onto Epsom race course during the Derby and was struck by the King's horse Anmer. Emily suffered a fractured skull and she died four days later. As part of the centenary commemorations, Untold Lives will be posting a number of stories related to Emily and the campaigns for women's rights. We start today with a story by guest blogger Penelope Tuson about Lord Curzon's opposition to women's suffrage.


Lord George Curzon was Viceroy of India from 1898 to 1905 and a fervent champion
of British imperial interests. He was also hostile to the idea of women's suffrage which he believed might 'lead to the disruption and even to the ruin of the Empire'.

Photo 556/3(62) Lord and Lady Curzon in camp near Nedonda, Hyderabad 1902.  Images Online

In 1910, together with the Earl of Cromer, former British Consul-General in Egypt, Curzon published an Appeal in The Times on behalf of the ‘Men’s Committee for Opposing Female Suffrage’, asking for political support and money. Curzon's personal papers include several volumes of letters responding to his Appeal which shed a fascinating light on the range of views and depth of feeling within the suffrage debate at the time.

Many of the responses from Establishment figures were predictably supportive, although occasionally half-hearted. Lord Lambton sent a cheque for £500, adding that the 'male portion of the Lambton family' could be relied on 'to give very candid opinions about women'; Viscount Astor promised 'full sympathy' but thought the socialist movement was 'a more imminent danger'; Arthur Sassoon replied that he had no decided opinion but added that his wife would not allow him to subscribe.

The responses from suffragettes and their sympathizers were more closely argued and more heartfelt. Maud Arncliffe Sennett was the daughter of an Italian immigrant and the employer of over a hundred workers in the family confectionary firm, G.Sparagnapane & Company. She thought the anti-suffrage movement was based on class-prejudice and she spoke out loyally about the vulnerability of women workers who were unprotected, either by hereditary wealth and position or by the democratic power of the Vote.

An anonymous male writer from the Baltic Shipping Exchange was the most outraged. ‘Surrounded as you are by despicable flatterers’, he wrote, ‘I am afraid it is very seldom indeed that you hear the truth, but I would just tell you that in connection with the women’s movement, more men than you perhaps guess have nothing but pity left for the rubbish you talk! ...one wonders how you ever managed to be Viceroy of India. What you say is absolutely childish...you ought to have been born a hundred years ago when people believed in the divine right of Kings – that is all gone – so is the divine right of men to overlord women! ... I have always considered you a conceited man – but up till recently I did not know that you were also cracked.’

At the end of the First World War Curzon admitted defeat. He went through his ‘sad correspondence’ on the anti-suffrage campaign and decided that there was no point in keeping it since it would never interest any one and ‘the cause had been lost.’ Fortunately for the history of the Women’s Suffrage movement, much of this correspondence is still available for research and enjoyment, in the British Library.
 
Penelope Tuson
Former Curator, India Office Records

Further reading:
Curzon Papers: correspondence concerning women’s suffrage, 1910-1914, IOPP/MSS Eur F112/32-39.
Brian Harrison, Separate Spheres: the Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, London 1978.
Julia Bush, Women Against the Vote: Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain, Oxford 2007.

Today's story continues the themes of the new exhibition at the British Library: Propaganda and Persuasion.

The Government of India, in common with most governments, was concerned with the health and welfare of its citizens, and explored many avenues for addressing the health problems associated with poverty and food shortages. One method adopted was campaigns to disseminate information about the importance of a healthy diet.

The India Office Records contains many files on food production and the problems of food shortages. One such file on food is in the records of the Information Department of the India Office, which contains two attractively designed booklets produced by the Government of India’s Department of Food. Entitled “Nutrition”, the booklets contain articles giving information on such subjects as food deficiency diseases, cabbage & cauliflowers, foods as sources of vitamin A, the value of shark liver oil, nutrition training and propaganda, and food facts on vegetables and milk.

Women grinding flour WD 315 no.72  Images Online      

There is also a section on recipes headed ‘On the Kitchen Front’ and showing an illustration of an Indian woman happily cooking. There follows recipes for such Indian dishes as ragi satu, dahi rice, madras curry, jawar dosai, besan-ki-puri, and mixed wheat chappatis. The August 1945 issue gives the following recipe for bhajiyas:

Ingredients: jawar flour ¼ lb. (2 chatak), Bengal gram flour ¾ lb. (6 chataks), onions ½ lb. (4 chataks), tumeric (Haldi) 2 mashas, salt 1½ ozs. (4 tolas), chilli powder 1 oz. (2½ tolas), sweet oil ½ lb. (4 chataks), water 1 lb. (8 chataks).

Method: mix the flour well in water. Add the salt and spices. Knead well into a paste. Shape into flattened cakes of equal size and fry in pure oil or butter. If desired, vegetable, like potatoes, spinach may be placed in the flattened cakes and then fried.

On the back cover of the June 1945 booklet is a food chart showing which foods help in three areas of activity:

• building and repairing muscles (milk, cheese, eggs, fish, meat, pulses, nuts and beans)
• protection against ill health (for vitamin A milk, cheese, oily fish, etc; for vitamin B peas, beans, lentils; and for vitamin C green leafy vegetables, sprouted pulses, and root vegetables)
• foods for energy (fats such as milk fats and vegetable oil; for sugar jam, honey, dried fruits, and for starches cereals)

These booklets are an interesting example of the type of publications the Government produced in an attempt to address food shortages. I'm not sure who the intended audience was for them, certainly they were for internal government use, but as they were published with illustrations they may have been more widely available. The August 1945 issues states that the brochure was only published in English, but that anyone could publish any of the articles in any Indian language, which suggests the information they contain was intended for wide distribution to the public. Perhaps one of our Indian readers of this blog has come across them in the past?

John O’Brien
Post 1858 India Office Records   


Further reading:

India Office Information Department, File 462/102 Food (general), 1944-1945 [IOR/L/I/1/1103]

The British Library's new exhibition opens today: Propaganda: Power and Persuasion.  To mark this we have a story about political propaganda used by the Government of India to attack Gandhi's policy.

In June 1942, with the Second World War raging, and the Japanese occupying Burma, the Government of India was aware that Gandhi was planning a new civil disobedience movement. The India Office Records has a file from this period which contains a telegram that gives a fascinating insight into the planning of a propaganda campaign by Government. The telegram is from the Government of India, Home Department, to the Secretary of State for India, dated 7 June 1942, regarding Gandhi’s motivations and what action should be taken by Government in preparation for any possible mass protest movement.

Anti-British poster, c.1942, entitled ‘Britain’s Second Front’. IOPP/Mss Eur C659

The writer of the telegram admits that the Government of India has no definite information on what form the movement would take or what support Gandhi will get. It was also admitted that any early Government intervention would risk stiffening Gandhi’s resolve and rally waverers to his cause. Yet it was advised that Government should be prepared: “… we must have our plans ready and one matter that we consider of prime importance is that public opinion in England and even more in America should be prepared well in advance for any strong action we may eventually decide to take. We suggest that Press in England and important American correspondents should be taken into our confidence with object of exposing Gandhi and the Indian National Congress”.

The telegram outlines a possible campaign to counter any protest movement:

• An official paper on Congress policy based on published and secret documents should be supplied to the American Government
• A popular pamphlet based on published material should be prepared
• Development of the theme of Congress using the War opportunistically to attempt to obtain political concessions, and their opposition to the War and willingness to obtain their long term object through Japan if it could not be obtained from England.

Gandhi standing beside Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Secretary of State for India, 1946. Photo 134/2(19)

The point is made in the telegram that Gandhi should not be personally attacked, only his policy. Emphasis was to be made on the danger to American war efforts and to the safety of American troops in India which could result from Gandhi’s plans. Efforts were also to be made to dispel any American suggestion that an Indian protest movement would compel the British Government to make fresh political concessions.

On 8 August 1942, the mass protest campaign known as the Quit India Movement was launched. The Government did indeed take strong action, moving swiftly to make mass arrests, including Gandhi and the Congress leadership who would be imprisoned for the rest of the War, and employing British troops to suppress the resulting outbreaks of violence.

John O’Brien
Post 1858 India Office Records   


Further reading:
India Office Political Department, File 4983/1942 Congress and the War, July-September 1942 [IOR/L/PJ/7/5405]