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 Part 1 of these three articles about how the rail network influenced the suffrage campaign, I looked at how trains were instrumental in facilitating suffrage campaigns, including militant activism, as well as enabling suffrage organisations to set up and run their national networks. I also explored the way that trains became arenas for sometimes violent encounters between suffragettes and politicians. You can read Part 1: "Cheap and easy railway traffic": Suffragettes and the Railways here.   In Part 2, I tell a tale of suffragette derring-do with the story of the struggles to free Mrs Pankhurst on the train between Glasgow and London in 1914.           By 1914, Mrs Pankhurst was protected by a suffragette bodyguard armed with clubs who tried to prevent the police arresting her whenever she appeared in public. On 9 March 1914 she was due to speak at St Andrew’s Hall in Glasgow. Heavily cloaked, she got into the hall with the audience, ap...