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...

Back in 2016 when I first started researching the life of Welsh suffragist Winifred Coombe Tennant (1874-1956) I visited the West Glamorgan archives in Swansea to look at the Coombe Tennant papers held there. These included a diary, in the form of loose papers, that Winifred had kept during a visit to Whittinghame, Prestonkirk, Scotland in 1923.   Whittinghame was the family estate of the Balfour family. Winifred was there at the invitation of Gerald William Balfour (1853-1945) and his wife, Lady Betty (1867-1942). Balfour was a Conservative politician, brother to prime minister Arthur Balfour ( 1848–1930 ), and a psychic researcher. Lady Betty was a suffragist, sister of the militant Lady Constance Lytton, and was also interested in spiritualism. I found Winifred’s handwriting quite hard to read, but I did manage to decipher a description of a walk she took on the estate with Gerald Balfour. There she saw yew trees, which she loved. Balfour, she recorded, cut a sprig from one ...

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...

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 ...