I recently re-read Helen Margaret Nightingale’s suffrage play, A Change of Tenant . The play was often performed at meetings and fund raisers by suffrage societies, and was also produced by professional members of the Actresses’ Franchise League. Little seemed to be known about Helen Margaret Nightingale, as Susan Croft notes in Votes for Women and Other Plays (Auroro Metro Press, 2009), which includes the text of the play. However, from the few details Susan Croft provided I was able to discover more about Helen’s life. Helen Margaret Nightingale was born in 1883 in Banbury, Oxfordshire. Her father, Charles Frederick Nightingale (1846-1904) was the minister of the Wesleyan chapel in Marlborough Road (still in use as a Methodist church today). Charles Nightingale, who was born in Manchester, began his career in the church in 1865. He had worked in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Bradford, Sheffield, Leamington, Bolton and Torquay before moving to Banbury in 1881. In 1884 he moved to Wolverham...

Usually referred to as Mrs W C H Cross, she was born Mabel Harriette Duncan in Bristol in 1872. Her mother was Adelaide, and her father, Edward Duncan, was a tea wholesaler. In the 1880s the family were living in Westbury-on-Trym near Bristol. By the time of the 1901 Census the family had moved to Clifton. Mabel does not appear with them on the Census however, and it is possible that at this time she was training or working as a nurse. A Mabel Duncan is recorded on the 1901 Census as a “sick nurse” in Weston-Super-Mare. At some point Mabel was a district nurse in London. She was back in Bristol in the early 1900s when she was honorary secretary of the Women’s Reform Union (WRU). The WRU had been formed by Quaker sisters and suffragists Anna Maria and Mary Priestman. In 1908 Mabel Duncan and Sarah Jane Tanner organised a Bristol WRU contingent to join the NUWSS procession on 13 June which culminated in a meeting in the Albert Hall in London.  Mrs Millicent Garrett Fawcett (second wo...