p. 102
“On Monday 4 February (1907) two of the striking weavers appeared in the magistrates’ court, accused of unlawful violence. The weighty Lancashire textiles trade unionist, David Shackleton MP, alarmed at suffragette incitement of his members, arrived in Hebden Bridge and condemned the violence. Letters critical of the suffragettes began to appear in the local press. Nonetheless, even on the eve of their trial, Adela Pankhurst and Jennie Baines continued to address open air meetings.
On Thursday 7 February, Jennie Baines and Laura Wilson appeared before Todmorden magistrates. Both denied the charges” and refused to pay fines or sureties. Laura retaliated: ‘I shall not find sureties to keep the peace… I shall not pay any fines or costs imposed on me by men who do not allow me to have a woman in Court to plead with me. I refuse to be bound over. That afternoon, both women were taken by trains to Leeds’ forbidding Armley gaol, the first suffragettes to be incarcerated in a |Yorkshire prison. They were seen off at the station by a handful of sympathisers. That night in Hebden Bridge, Adela plus Laura’s husband George Wilson justified what had occurred: the only way to settle strikes was by labour representation in parliament. (However, while still defiant, there was no longer the fill-the-gaols incitement: two imprisonments were sobering enough.) Even though their son was only five years old, George’s loyalty to Laura during her imprisonment contrasts with Hannah Mitchell’s experience: ‘Most of us who were married found that ‘Votes for Women’ were of less interest to our husbands than their own dinners. George Wilson’s commitment vividly illustrates how suffragette militancy within local West Riding communities sprang from labour movement solidarities which the WSPU could conveniently tap into.”
p. 103 “Nationally, early 1907 was a time of tremendous WSPU optimism and growth. The leadership exhorted supporters that ‘The help of every woman in the country is needed now if the fetters are to be struck off that keep women a subject race.’ It was indeed about this time that a Hebden Bridge WSPU branch was formed. On the night of Saturday 9 February, just two days after Jennie Baines and Laura Wilson were carted off to Armley, a local mass indignation meeting was held. The joint Hebden Bridge branch secretaries were Edith Berkley, another experienced fustian clothing machinist, and Louie Cobbe, Lilian’s younger sister. Within a few weeks, WSPU branches sprang up like mushrooms along the Calder Valley: not only in Hebden Bridge and Halifax, but in smaller communities like Elland too.”
p. 103 Lavena (Saltonstall) even found herself at the sharp end of the local anti-suffragette backlash. She was certainly keenly aware of how a single woman, out earning her living independently of her family and speaking her own mind, was viewed by the local community. Later she recalled with vehement passion: ‘Should any girls show a tendency to politics, or to ideas of her own, she is looked upon by the vast majority of women as a person who neglects doorsteps and home matters, and is therefore not fit to associate with their respectable daughters and sisters. If girls develop any craving for a different life or wider ideas, their mothers fear that they are going to become Socialists or Suffragettes – a Socialist being a person with lax views about other people’s watches and purses, and other people’s husbands or wives, and a Suffragette a person whose house is always untidy… Who is going to tell these mothers that daughters were not given to them merely to dress and domesticate. Who is going to tell them that they have a higher duty to perform to them than merely teaching them housework? Who is going to tell them that it is as cruel to discourage a child from making use of its own talent or individuality as it would be to discourage a child from using its limbs?”
p. 107 Over 500 ILP women signed the Manifesto to the Women’s Social and Political Union published at New Year 1907. Of these, 136 came from the West Riding of Yorkshire and a further 146 from Lancashire: together they added up to well over half of all signatories. And of the 58 WSPU branches now sprung up across the country, almost a quarter lay in Yorkshire, most in the West Riding textile towns. For such Pennine textile communities in northern England were the heartland of early WSPU support. Their very names – Halifax and Hebden Bridge, Bradford and Keighley, Leeds and Dewsbury – conjured up countless bales of wool, the racket of looms, the whirr of sewing machines.”
p.302 The Third rebel girl who left Britain, Dora Thewlis, also emigrated to Australia … like so many other Edwardians, was primarily an economic migrant. Some time before 1914, along with her elder sister and about 20 other Huddersfield girls, she left in search of a better life than that offered by the long hours in the Yorkshire textile mills. Dora went to Warnambool in the Melbourne region, where she worked in blanket-weaving. .. in 1918, she married Jack Dow, a second-generation Australian, and they had two children.”
p. 303 “Lavena Saltonstall – last hear of springing to defend the broad WEA curriculum against attacks about ‘cloroforming the workers’ – remained active in the Halifax WEA until 1916. Then, in June 1917, in Halifax Unitarian Chapel, 34-year-old Lavena, now working as an electrical engineer’s clerk, married George Naket of Bradford, a 40-year-old private in the Duke of Wellington’s regiment. But after the War, this talented self-taught feminist journalist, happy to take on anti-suffragists, sadly disappears from view.”
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