In 1915 the best-selling novelist Mrs Mary Humphrey Ward published Delia Blanchflower . In many ways it’s typical romantic fare: a stern guardian to a wilful young heiress must save her from bad influences before their love can blossom. Much of the plot revolves around a beautiful old mansion called Monk Lawrence. It belongs to an anti-suffrage Government minister. A militant suffragette called Gertrude Marvell has her eye on the old place. Gertrude is a harsh, ruthless woman who is unmoved by Delia’s pleas to spare the “beautiful and historic” house. The inevitable happens: the house goes up in smoke and with it the “beauty of four centuries”. A crippled child also dies in the fire, as does Gertrude herself. Behind the melodrama is a very real sense of loss, and although Monk Lawrence is fictitious, Delia Blanchflower expresses something of people’s actual experiences of suffragette militancy. Begbrook Mansion in Frenchay, near Bristol was a fine old house until it was dest...

I was delighted to be at Bristol Cineworld cinema in Hengrove for the screening of Suffragette on Monday 12 October 2015, when the film went on general release, to give two pre-screening talks about the suffragette movement.  With the lovely cinema staff at Bristol Cineworld, Hengrove before the event.  We also set up a display in the foyer.  Part of the display about the suffragette movement in Bristol and the west country.   Suffragette : The Time is Now! Suffragette is the first feature film to tell the story of women’s fight for the vote. Starring Carey Mulligan and Helena Bonham Carter as early footsoldiers of the feminist movement, it tells the story of the working-class British women who, inspired by the suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst (played by Meryl Streep), took their fight for enfranchisement to Westminster.   The film has already made headlines for being the first time a commercial crew has been allowed to shoot i...

I’m an inveterate English Heritage blue-plaque spotter – and if I’d missed this one in Panton Street, Haymarket, London, the pub sign would have been enough to tell me that I was standing outside the home of Bristol pugilistic champion Tom Cribb (1781-1848).  Cribb was born in Hanham but moved to London when he was a boy. He went on to work as a bellhanger, then a coal porter – which job earned him the nickname The Black Diamond. He later joined the Navy. His first fight was a seventy-six round bout against George Maddox in 1805. His only defeat was against George Nicholls in the same year. Cribb then trained under the famous sportsman and pedestrianist Captain Barclay, who prepared him for his 1807 fight against the reigning champion of England, Bristolian Jem Belcher. After his defeat, Belcher demanded a rematch, which took place in 1809 with the same result. (You can read more about Jem Belcher and other pugilists who are mentioned in Bloodie Bones: A Dan Foster...

When Winston Churchill came to Bristol in 1909, a number of women came to the city to help Bristol organiser Annie Kenney organise protests during his visit. Actions included window breaking, heckling, and Leeds suffragette Theresa Garnett’s assault of Churchill at Temple Meads Railway station. Among the women who came to help was Dorothy Pethick, younger sister of Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence. Dorothy Pethick was educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, and then worked in a Women’s University Settlement in Blackfriars Road in London. She had been working with Annie in Bristol and the west country since at least 1908. When Annie went to speak in Weston-super-Mare in August 1908, Dorothy went on ahead to make arrangements for the meeting and advertised it by chalking the pavements. Dorothy was one of many suffragettes who sometimes stayed with the Blathwayt family in Batheaston; Mrs Blathwayt described her as “an educated lady”. In 1911 Dorothy planted a fir tree in the Blathwa...

When men campaigning for parliamentary reform in the eighteenth century planned to hold public meetings in defiance of government attempts to silence them, they were warned that they would be responsible for any bloodshed that resulted. When the suffragettes fought back against the government’s refusal to grant women the vote, they were blamed for antagonising the opposition and bringing their brutal treatment on themselves. And when Jay “The Sport” Jackson, the protagonist of The Royale , steps into the boxing ring to fight the white heavyweight champion of the world, it is with his sister’s warning ringing in his ears: if he wins, he’s going to get African-American people killed.  In Marco Ramirez’s brilliant play, we see Jackson struggle to balance his personal desire to beat the fighter known as “the great White Hope” against the threat of widespread reprisals. For this is America in the age of Jim Crow – racial segregation – and it’s been a struggle to even get the reig...