The Splendid Mrs McCheyne and the East London Federation of Suffragettes by Jane McChrystal (The Choir Press, 2020) 

Independent researcher Jane McChrystal presents an engaging introduction to English suffragette Rosaline McCheyne. A lower-middle class wife and mother living in the early twentieth century with her husband in Bow, east London, Rosaline was one of the most active members of the East End branch of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). This branch was set up in 1913 by Sylvia Pankhurst. The text moves from an introduction to an extensive interview with Rosaline’s descendant Anne Padfield, then through seven articles exploring different aspects of her experiences as a suffragette, the socio-cultural world of the East End (including her street, Fairfield Road) at the time, her marriage, her domestic experiences, and her activism as a suffragette.

The book gives an insight into the realities of the suffragette experience. It is particularly useful in highlighting lower-class suffragism, which has tended to be overlooked in popular women’s history.

As McChrystal summarises in her afterword, “Her participation in ELFS formed a brief period in her life and has almost been forgotten, but she is an exemplar of the quiet activist, the sort of woman who ends up as an ‘unsung heroine’.”

As such, The Splendid Mrs McCheyne should inspire all family historians to look deeper into the lives of their own women ancestors. Could they, too, have been ‘quiet activists’, contributing in their own small way to the struggle for equality?

What is your background? 

With a first degree in Modern Languages, I decided to qualify as a chartered librarian and spent six years in the 1980s working in academic, specialist and public libraries. After a spell as a visiting lecturer in Inner London community colleges, I retrained as a registered psychotherapeutic counsellor and gained many years of practice in primary care and higher education. Teaching and training were also important parts of my experience as a mental health professional. The work was extremely rewarding, but also very demanding and increasingly difficult to sustain when challenging life events piled up one after the other in quick succession, as is so often the case in late middle age.

Giving up paid employment in 2015 freed me to devote my time to a lifelong passion for social history and, in particular, women’s history. The skills I had developed as a Librarian and doing research for a PhD in Psychology seemed to transfer very nicely to my new occupation. I feel extremely lucky to have found out what I wanted to do when I finally grew up and was privileged to have the chance of a third act. I also feel honoured to have been elected as a member of the Royal Historical Society in December 2022.

What drew you to writing about the East London Federation of Suffragettes?

Like most people, I was very familiar with the story of Emmeline Pankhurst’s suffragettes, the Women’s Social and Political Union, and the role they played in the struggle for getting women the vote.

It was not until 2018 that I even became aware of the existence of the East London Federation of Suffragettes, founded by Sylvia Pankhurst from their HQ, the Women’s Hall, on Old Ford Road in Bow just before the First World War.

As part of the centenary celebrations of the passing of the Representation of the People Act, Tamsin Bookey, Heritage Manager at Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archive, decided to stage a reimagining of the Women’s Hall, accompanied by an exhibition telling the story of ELFS and the East End of London where they campaigned, in tandem with a programme of related events. All this activity needed a cadre of volunteer researchers and I jumped at the chance to become one of them. 

After a period of induction and training, we were let loose on a wide variety of secondary and primary sources, including Pankhurst’s collected papers, stored with the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, which include the minutes of ELFS’ committee meetings. It was there that I discovered Mrs Rosaline McCheyne, a very active, but rather silent member. Intrigued, I started to delve around into the 1911 census and Kelly’s directories.  One day, on my way home from the library, a chance bus diversion took me past the bottom of the street, Fairfield Road, where McCheyne lived. It seemed like a sign and I went hot foot on her trail. 

Does East London have personal significance to you? 

Most definitely. In 2012 I came to the Isle of Dogs after many years of moving all around North London. At first, the Isle looks like the locus of exclusively modern development, topped off by the towers of Canary Wharf. But you soon become aware of its vast shipping and industrial heritage, like the cranes which still line the edges of the former docks and the remains of the dry dock where Isambard Kingdom Brunel built the SS Great Eastern, partly exposed and partly covered by the flats, where I live.

But this is not my first sojourn in East London. My family lived in Newham, the borough next to Tower Hamlets where I am now, for the first 10 years of my life. I always retained warm, affectionate feelings for its rows and rows of Victorian terraces, my first school, St. Winifreds, and the imposing public library left behind by Andrew Carnegie in Manor Park. I well remember the ruckus my sister, Helen, and I kicked up when my parents announced they would be uprooting us to relocate much further east in Upminster, the very last stop on the District Line, in pursuit of social betterment.

What are the Benefits of Collaborating on a Family History Project?

One of the greatest pleasures I’ve taken in writing and publicising The Splendid Mrs McCheyne has been my collaboration with farmer and family and architectural historian, Anne Padfield.

At around the same time I was beginning my research in Tower Hamlets, Anne was looking for traces of the life of her relative, Rosaline McCheyne in the British Newspaper Archive from her farm in Essex. She’d heard that she’d been a suffragette but there were no shared family memories of her activism. She came across some material about the Women’s Hall Exhibition, which mentioned her relative’s name, got in touch with the library and was sent in my direction.

I conducted a long interview with Anne where we pooled our knowledge and realised we were a perfect match. Anne filled out the story of Rosaline’s life before and after her time as a suffragette, told me all about her children and husband and provided me with fascinating glimpses of the kind of person she was. I was able to tell Anne about her activism and fill out the social and political background.

We work together to this day. Our most recent outing was a presentation about Rosaline and our collaboration with the Institute of Historical Research at Senate House.

What’s next for you? Any more books?

Well, there’s a lot coming down the pike! In the long term, I’d like to produce a substantial piece about progressive Edwardians, like HG Wells, and their obsession with the Eugenicist movement, based on research carried out at LSE’s library.

In 2021 I published “No Girl Left Behind” in the October issue of History Today, a piece about girls, women and menstruation between 1870-1940, based on research I conducted at the Wellcome Collection, another project undertaken as part of the programme of events staged for the Women’s Hall Exhibition, which became “Iron in her Soul”. I have continued to develop this material with particular emphasis on the malign influence of the medical profession on the way girls and women lived their lives during and between their periods and how radically things changed when women started to qualify as doctors. I’d love to turn this into another event with an accompanying monograph.

Later this year I intend to travel to Chawton House in Hampshire to look at Mary Astell’s feminist manifesto “A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest”, in the Library of Early Women’s History. 

Mary Astell (1666-1731), sometimes referred to as England’s first feminist was a Lockean philosopher and a member of a group of learned and philanthropic women in Chelsea, where she founded a free school for girls. 

I discovered the manifesto in the catalogue of the collection of UCL Library, where I participated in Liberating the Collection last summer under the supervision of Jo Baines, Academic Liaison Librarian and Archivist, once again as a member of a team of volunteers. I shall be able to hold a copy of it in my hands at last and hope to find inspiration for another exciting project to get going in 2023.

There is more, but that’s probably enough for now!

Jane McChrystal is an independent researcher, who writes for an audience with wide cultural interests and an appreciation of intelligent, well-informed commentary on social history. Her special interests are women’s history and the lives of the labouring classes in the East End of London.

Immigrant Secrets: The Search for My Grandparents by John Mancini (2022)

That John Mancini is an experienced speaker in his professional life is apparent in the engaging presentation style of his writing. His entertaining introduction, with its references to the TV show The Wonder Years and Kevin Costner’s movie Field of Dreams, indicates his fondness for imaginative storytelling. 

All family historians and memoir writers must choose how best to relate the truth of their or their subjects’ experiences. The main section of the book is fictionalised (in the manner of Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife, for example). As Mancini explains:

“The facts that surround the story of Elizabeth and Frank are true, but the color and texture that surround those facts are my own creations to give them life.”

The imaginative approach used here may not appeal to all, but there is no question about the thoroughness of the genealogical research. Among the documents sourced from archives across the world are census entries, excerpts from church registers, death certificates, hospital records, ships’ passenger lists and immigration records. A selected bibliography is included at the end.

Mancini clearly enjoyed the family history experience, speaking positively of the community:

‘One of the great things of doing genealogy research is that folks are extraordinarily interested in helping each other solve their puzzles.’ 

Overall, the book is an insight into one man’s genealogical journey, and how he was changed by his discoveries, as much as it is a story of his ancestors. Although his Irish and Swedish immigrant forebears are introduced in the early chapters, the main focus is on his Italian grandparents (Elizabeth/Elisabetta and Frank/Francesco), their origins in Itri (a small agricultural centre in Lazio), and their new life in the United States. 

Throughout the fascinating story of immigrant life in mid-century New York, we are mindful of the mystery of Mancini’s grandparents’ deaths. Did they or did they not die in a fire in the 1930s, as family rumour suggested? It is well worth taking this narrative journey through the family’s immigrant history to find out.

What was your background before writing this book?

I spent over 35 years working in three major non-profit associations, 1) the Public Affairs Council, 2) the American Electronics Association, and 3) AIIM International. As the President of AIIM, I spent a lot of time with records managers, archivists, and content and process management executives. Personally, I am the grandfather of three, the father of three, and I have five siblings. I was a history major as an undergraduate, which I think helped create the foundation for my interest in family history and genealogy.

Why did you want to write about your immigrant ancestors? 

The story of the search itself is a rather typical family history journey, albeit one that revealed things I never could have imagined about our family. One thing I have found along this journey is that genealogy people are incredibly helpful. I spent a good portion of the last 20+ years of my career hanging about with records managers and archivists. I will admit that in the rush to embrace the latest and greatest technology shiny gadgets, I didn’t always understand or appreciate them. But I do now. Any errors in genealogy are not intentional. But they’re my fault.

The story of my Italian grandparents is in fact a story. But it is, as they say in movie previews, “based on a true story.” The facts that surround the story of Elizabeth and Frank are true, but obviously, the texture that surrounds those facts and the story incorporating the facts are my own creations to give them life. 

As Rachel Held Evans said, “Origin stories are rarely straightforward history. Over the years, they morph into a colourful amalgam of truth and myth, nostalgia and cautionary tale.”

Did you have any concerns about sharing private aspects of your family’s story?

My brother and I debated whether to raise all this secret history with my mom and ultimately decided that telling the story was the way to keep my father’s story alive. We thought for a while about what to ask my mom about all of this, and what she knew.

My father must have somehow coped with the complete disaster of his childhood by creating an enormous, sealed wall around it, never to be scaled or even discussed. Against a society that viewed – and continues to view – any sort of mental illness through a prism of shame, he and the rest of this extended family of immigrants just shut down the memory of Francesco and Elisabetta and completely erased them from history. Well, not quite.

 And my father kept all of this bottled up so that first HE could survive and protect his brother and then later protect his own family of eight. I imagine that over the years this pressure cooker of secrets ultimately contributed to his premature death. Ultimately we decided the best way to honour his memory was to tell his story.

Do you feel a strong connection to Italy? Has this deepened since working on the book?

I have been to Italy four or five times, and love it. A pre-COVID dream – and one I still hope to realize – was to spend an extended time in my grandparents’ home town. All of this deepened with the book and actually making connections with the Italian side of the family that we never knew existed.

What’s next for you? Any more books?

One of the things I realized after writing the book and talking to people about it is that EVERY family has a story. Many of these origin stories are not what we would have guessed – and many of them are frankly not pleasant – but they are all nonetheless precious.

I am currently researching my maternal grandfather’s story – John Oliver Manson. He was quite a character. He was born in Sweden – but always claimed to have been born in Australia. I believe he stowed away on a ship when he was a teenager. One medical report says he suffered a gunshot wound as a teenager in Rio. He was a leading ship captain in Miami prior to the Depression, lost most of what he had during the Depression, and dabbled in a silver mine in Nevada. And much more, I’ve started documenting his story on my blog – http://www.searchformygrandparents.com – so we’ll see where that goes.

My wife’s family goes all the way back to the 1700s in Virginia, fought on the wrong side in the US Civil War, and has LOTS of untold stories. So many stories, so little time.

John Mancini was the long-time President of AIIM, the world’s leading information management association. He is a well-known author, speaker, and advisor on genealogy, digital transformation, information governance, and intelligent automation. He is the author of Immigrant Secrets, writes about family history topics at http://www.searchformygrandparents.com, and is the author of more than 30 eBooks on a variety of topics. He can be found on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.