Central London was Emmeline Pankhurst’s chosen battleground, with ‘rushes’ on Parliament and packed meetings around xx, close the Women’s Social and Political Union’s HQ. But what about the suburbs? Would putting together a walking trail that asked whether the struggle for suffrage was visible in everyday life and caused much tension in the years running up to World War I. It’s an exercise that could be replicated in all cities and many larger towns since the WSPU had branches across the UK.

in A day around Hampstead and Highgate with Suffragettes. Create a trail to show how suffragette activity was part of life pre WW1 - how prevalent it was.

https://richmedia.lse.ac.uk/libraryarchive/20201007_8SUF-B-015.mp3?_gl=1*fuza0c*_gcl_au*MjEwOTkyMzAyMC4xNzUyMTUwNDgw*_ga*NjIyMjc1MDIxLjE3NTIxNTA0NzU.*_ga_LWTEVFESYX*czE3NTIxNTA0NzQkbzEkZzEkdDE3NTIxNTIwNzgkajQ4JGwwJGgw Miss Winnifred Adair Roberts. Delightful oral history (starts at 60mins) with in her words a ‘rabid’ young Suffragette from Hampstead who talks about the suffragettes’ shop on Hampstead High Street. Starts at 60 mins. She was into suffrage before she went to India in 1910. A WSPU member from the start and a steward at Queen Elizabeth Hall. When Mrs Pankhurst was ill she cooked her pigeon, cherries and peas and smuggled it into Lincoln’s Inn where the WSPU office was and where she was being nursed back to health after Holloway. She sold Votes for Women on Finchley Road on Friday mornings opposite John Barnes (I think this is where Waitrose now stands) after receiving letters from her boyfriend in the army in India. Her sister Ethel housed and helped suffragettes on the run. This was after she married Francis Impey. She used to chat up policemen to help women slip away while being sought under the Cat and Mouse. Her sister Muriel went to Holloway and wrote home to say she was ‘perished with the cold’. the vests were like wire netting when she had always had Jaeger combinations. Warm underwear was requested to her in the HoC. It was in Hansard. Her parents were shocked although they were supporters of women’s suffrage. They ‘didn’t think anything like that could happen to us’. She and her mother went to the top room of the lodging house they took opposite the yard (the landlady must have been a supporter') and see them walking about in the yard. They werent allowed to visit. She was in for a month but this was before the force feeding. Neither she nor her sister went to prison. “To be in prison for a month in those days was something terrible.” I think her name was Muriel Roberts. Afterwards she got married soon after and didn’t follow the movement very much. Her husband Alfred Weaver was “a dear but wouldn’t have been in favour of women’s suffrage. He was old-fashioned. The brother of Harriet Weaver. From another site she made this table cloth with suffragettes’ signatures: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lselibrary/43097421712

20 Bisham Gardens, address of Florence Tunks who burned down Great Yarmouth Pier

Postbox

Suffrage meeting at Muswell Hill: https://hornseyhistorical.org.uk/suffragette-leaders-muswell-hill/

Meting in Hornsey - branch here https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/collections/v/object-288624/public-meeting-at-hornsey-may-1-1907-womens-social-and-political-union/ 31 Hornsey High Street. Still there.

Mentioned at https://haringey.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2024-05/hornsey_womens_history_map_legend_and_historical_information_002.pdf Miss F Eggette a suffragette who lived at 30 Lausanne Road N8.

Crouch End Clocktower: Suffragette Political Activity

As Crouch End's meeting place for all sorts of political and community activity, the Clocktower has been witness as a meeting place for suffragette speakers, attracting crowds as well as The Suffragette newspaper being sold on The Broadway. When Christabel Pankhurst spoke here in 1907, she was pelted by a potato thrown by someone in the audience.

Suggested suffragette arson attack

On 7 June 1913, the day of Emily Wilding Davison's death shortly after falling under the King's horse running at the Epsom Derby, the Pavilion of the North Middlesex Cricket and Lawn Tennis Club was almost destroyed by fire. A suffragette meeting had been held close by that evening and so, although not proved, it was suspected this was an act of vandalism by suffragettes. Sports clubs across England had been similarly targeted and burned, as symbols of bastions of male dominance, where women were usually barred from joining such clubs.

However the Hendon & Finchley Times said the club “met with a serious loss on Saturday night, their handsome pavilion which had recently been almost entirely reconstructed being totally destroyed by fire. Great mystery attaches to the origin of the outbreak. It was cat first thought to be due to militant suffragists, colour being given to this supposition by the fact that a meeting in favour of woman suffrage had been held earlier in the evening within two hundred yards of the scene of the conflagration, and that some ladies and gentlemen were seen to leave the pavilion only a short time before the flames broke out. Subsequent inquiries however, showed that the latter were members of the club and their friends and the police state that there is no evidence to connect Suffragists with the outbreak….. A great crowd assembled to watch the conflagration, a large number having returned from the Great Concert at Alexandra Palace.”

Two local men were later find 5 shillings for obstructing the fireman and using bad language (they said they were helping and objected to being told to go away).

Ye China Cup (a temperance tavern) at 59 Park Road was a nearby place that had held a WSPU meeting in 1909 but I think it shut down in 1910? It is where Change of Heart is.

The Spong sisters
Family of four sister suffragettes
The Spong family lived at 34 Princes Avenue in Muswell Hill from 1906 to 1909. All four daughters were involved in the suffragette movement. Dora Spong (1879-1969) and Florence Spong (1873-1944) were the most militant with both imprisoned twice and Florence going on hunger strike and subject to being forcibly fed. You can read more here about the remarkable lives of the Spong sisters and their family.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleasance_Pendred - real name Kate Jackson lived near Jackson’s Lane at 46 Langdon Park Rd. Was in the Hornsey branch of the WSPU .On her early release from prison she received a welcome picnic from the Hornsey branch of the WSPU, as recorded in The Suffragette on 11 July 1913. After her release from prison in 1913 she held a few talks for the North Islington (formerly Hornsey) WSPU branch and is last recorded as a speaker in August 1913. A transcript of the court trial can be found in an issue of The Suffragette (28 Feb 1913). Recounts can also be found in issues of the Leicester Daily Post (22 Feb 1913). She published a defence article named “Why Women Teachers Break Windows” in the Woman’s Press. A full copy of it can be found in an issue of the Daily Herald (25 Feb 1913).

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Theodora_Bonwick - involved in row between WSPU leadership.

Meetings were held on Hampstead Heath. On June 19 1914, the Kilburn Times reports that one Percy Prosse appeared in court charged with insulting behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace. The court heard that around noon on Sunday a suffragette meeting was being held on the Upper Heath. A great crowd of about 2,000 assembled and the suffragettes fled, but three people who were passing by were said to have sympathised with them was threatened with being dunked in the White Stone Pond (Whitestone Pond). “The prisoner was shouting at the top of his voice ‘Duck them,’ and he tried to push past the police to get at them.” Te court heard that the meeting was ‘rushed’ and the stands and speaker Miss Margaret Wright were knocked over. The crowd seized the stands, broke them up and threw the pieces in the pond. Someone rang the police, six mounted police arrived and found two of the victims clinging to a lamppost. It was described as a near riot. Discharged with a caution

The same incident was reported in the London Daily Chronicle on 25 May 1914. “There were exciting scenes in the morning [yesterday] at a meeting arranged by the Hampstead branch of the Women's Social and Political Union, near the White Stone Pond on Hampstead Heath. Speakers were refused a hearing and threatened with personal violence.

“A number of police were present, and when the attitude of the crowd became threatening, reinforcements were telephoned for. They were speedily on the scene, but this time the crowd had got almost out of hand. There were cries of “Duck them,” “Throw them in the pond,” and “We’ll teach them to insult the King.” One man called on the police not to interfere, a request which was greeted with approval on all sides.

“Sub-Divisional Inspector Parker and a number of constables forced their way to the platform and ordered the secretary to bring the meeting to a close. This she did at once, and the seven suffragettes were escorted to Hampstead Tube Station, followed by a shouting crowd. With great difficulty the constables managed to get them into the lift, the doors of which were at once closed, as the crowd made a rush for them.”

In Votes for Women there’s a notice for a meeting at the Flagstaff so this is def the place.

A 1913 report says that a woman speaking near a pond spoke for an hour thanks to police support but hardly a word could be heard and eggs were thrown.

A Lively Meeting at Muswell Hill https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0004661/19080522/041/0004

https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0004661/19131212/038/0002 - anti suffragette letter from 8 Crescent Road in Hornsey Journal