I’ve often wondered why owning the signature of someone you admire or are interested in is so appealing. I supposed it is because a signature feels like a part of the person concerned, something produced by their own hand. It can also feel intensely personal if it is dedicated to you, which is why so many people ask authors to write their own names – “to so-and-so” – at a book signing. Cicely Hamilton's Autograph I’ve never collected signatures but I have acquired one or two over the years. Recently I obtained this signature by writer and suffrage campaigner Cicely Hamilton. It was probably sent to someone who had written to her and requested her autograph. Cicely Hamilton (1872-1952) is one of my favourite authors. A novelist, playwright and actress, she found fame with her 1908 play Diana of Dobson’s . She was a member of the Women’s Freedom League, formed after a split within the WSPU in 1907, and the Actresses’ Franchise League. She also worked with both the WSPU and th...

Tyntesfield, near Wraxall, North Somerset   This is the view from our picnic spot when we had a day out at Tyntesfield just outside Bristol recently. Tyntesfield is now a National Trust property , but was once the home of Bristol MP George Abraham Gibbs.  George Abraham Gibbs (1873–1931) was the Conservative MP for Bristol West between 1906 and 1928. That meant he was in Parliament during the women’s suffrage campaign, and one of Bristol’s MPs at the height of suffragette militancy in the city. Gibbs, though, was opposed to women’s suffrage, and in 1910 voted against the Conciliation Bill which would have enfranchised some women. However, unlike his more unfortunate Liberal counterparts, he did not have to endure heckling and interruptions at his meetings, arson attacks on his homes, or thrashings such as the one suffragette Theresa Garnett gave Liberal MP Winston Churchill in Bristol in 1909. This was because the target of WSPU militancy was the government and its min...

I’ve always been interested in the “after life” of the suffrage campaigners in Britain – what they did after the campaign for the vote – especially since so many histories about them stop at the point when their involvement in the campaign came to an end. Because women’s war work during the First World War is associated with (and often cited as a direct cause of) the eventual enfranchisement of British women, these accounts often extend into the war, and sometimes into the Second World War. Thus we hear of women working in munitions, medicine or quasi-military organisations. We might also hear that they joined other women’s organisations, such as the Suffragette Fellowship or the Six Point Group. Often, though, you’d think that most women suffrage campaigners’ lives came to an end when the franchise campaign ended. Unless, of course, they were well known, in which case their lives are better documented. So it was very exciting to discover evidence of one suffragette’s “after life” wh...

In February 1912 the Bristol Liberal MP Charles E H Hobhouse addressed a meeting of the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage in the city’s Colston Hall. During his speech he remarked, “In the present days of cheap and easy railway traffic they [the suffragettes] could always arrange numerous deputations or demonstrations and they could be as noisy as their funds permitted – (laughter)…” ( Western Daily Press , 17 February 1912). Hobhouse was anti-women’s suffrage and remained so even after the passage of the 1918 Representation of the People Act gave the vote to some British women. Although he had no understanding of or sympathy with the suffrage movement, his statement does show that he understood one thing: the importance of the rail network to the suffrage movement. In this three-part article, I’ll be exploring the connections between the railway system and the suffrage campaign, particularly the militant campaign. Both militant and non-militant women’s franchis...