This article is based on research and conversations with Edward Warington Shann’s daughter, Hebe Welbourn. Quotations by Edward Warington Shann are from his letter to his mother dated 22 June 1913 and are used with Hebe Welbourn’s permission. Fire destroys a railway carriage…a hotel burned down…a church vandalised…a country mansion gutted… between 1912 and 1914 British newspapers carried reports almost daily of arson and other attacks on public and private property by the women of the Women’s Social and Political Union – the suffragettes – as part of their militant campaign for votes for women. So familiar do these headlines become that it is easy to forget that behind them were real people whose lives were affected by these incidents. One of them was Edward Warington Shann, a lecturer at St Andrew’s University, for whom an act of arson was nothing less than “a calamity”.   Edward Warington Shann was born in York in 1886. His father was a doctor, and his maternal grandfather ...