I was particularly delighted to receive my copy of The House on Hunter Street from David Ebsworth because I’d seen an early draft of the novel and we’d discussed aspects of the women’s suffrage movement. While I don’t believe there’s a “right” or “wrong” way to tell the history, it is more complex than many people realise and there’s often a tendency to cling to simplistic interpretations. For example, the idea that the suffragettes won the vote for women is a very popular way of presenting the campaign, but it’s very far from telling the full story or being the only narrative that deserves to be heard.     The House on Hunter Street brings alive one of those perhaps lesser-known narratives of the suffrage movement by focussing on the perspective of a working-class woman, Cari Maddox, and linking the women’s campaign with the struggles of the labour movement. Cari’s story is told against a backdrop of the 1911 dockers’ strikes in Liverpool, which in its turn brings in racia...

Many suffragettes went on hunger strike in prison and were forcibly fed by prison doctors. A number of the hunger strikers published descriptions of their experiences in horrifying detail: the pain and sickness they endured, the injuries they sustained in struggles with prison staff, the humiliation of the procedure. It’s easy to characterise the men who were willing to inflict such suffering on the women as amongst the villains of suffragette history, particularly when they are viewed in the light of the suffragettes’ powerful testimonies.   Dr Ernest Hasler Helby has the unenviable distinction of being the first prison doctor to forcibly feed suffragettes when the procedure was used on the hunger strikers for the first time in 1909 at Winson Green Prison, Birmingham, where he was medical officer. The suffragettes were in no doubt that he was to blame for the forcible feeding in Winson Green. They protested outside his home while their comrades were still in prison. After thei...

My postcard collection includes this picture of Fanny Fields, a music hall star whose song The Suffragette was one of many music-hall references to the militant suffrage campaign of the 1900s. Fanny Fields found fame playing an American-Dutch girl with a lager-swilling fiancé called Schultz. She entertained her audiences with songs, clog dances, and comic patter. She was one of the most popular stars of her day, and perhaps nowhere was she more loved than in Bristol.  Happy Fanny Fields She was born Fanny Furman in New York on 15 September 1880, and started performing in Vaudeville at the age of thirteen. According to her own account, she went on the stage to help refill the family’s coffers after her parents’ fruit importing business failed. Her brother, who had been an actor, taught her to dance, and her brother-in-law, Joseph Fields, was an actor and encouraged her talent for mimicry. After a year in variety, she spent five years touring with various companies, and then joine...