The Blog of Emma Jolly | Notes inspired by my work as a genealogist in twenty-first century London

Book Review and Author Interview: Secret Missions Of The Suffragettes: Glassbreakers & Safe Houses by Jennifer Godfrey
September 2, 2024

Secret Missions of the Suffragettes: Glassbreakers and Safe Houses by Jennifer Godfrey (P&S History, 2024)

In her latest social history book, Secret Missions of the Suffragettes: Glassbreakers and Safe Houses, Jennifer Godfrey explores the suffragette movement’s clandestine activities during the early 20th century. The narrative focuses on the Women’s Social and Political Union’s (WSPU) window-smashing protest in March 1912, led by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. This protest involved over 250 women who used hammers and stones to smash windows in London as a demonstration against the government’s refusal to include women in their reform bill.

Secret Missions of the Suffragettes details the intricate planning and execution of these missions, highlighting the use of safe houses, rest homes, and the suffragettes’ strategies for evading police surveillance. The narrative also covers the suffragettes’ self-defence training, the use of disguises, and communication through codes and aliases. Throughout Godfrey paints a vivid picture of the suffragettes’ determination and the lengths they went to in their fight for women’s suffrage, while also giving a broad overview of the behind-the-scenes efforts that were crucial to their cause.

This book sheds light on a lesser-known aspect of suffragette history and is essential reading for anyone interested in suffragettes, political movements, or women’s social history.

Interview with Jennifer Godfrey

What was your background before writing this book?
I trained as a buyer and then qualified as a solicitor gaining invaluable research & writing skills that I have transferred to all my subsequent roles including writing books. Most recently I worked for a local district council in their community team working with the voluntary sector and designing, securing funding and delivering projects. This is my second book about the women’s suffrage movement in the UK. My first book, also published by Pen & Sword is called Suffragettes of Kent (published 2017).

Your book explores the “Secret Missions of the Suffragettes.” With so many books, films and documentaries already covering the suffragettes and their cause, how challenging was it to uncover aspects that had stayed hidden or weren’t as well known?
I haven’t found it challenging as I believe there are many untold stories waiting to be discovered and alternative story angles to use. When writing my first book about suffragettes in Kent I came across a young (19-year-old) working-class maid and suffragette called Ethel Violet Baldock. A local newspaper had dedicated a couple of lines to her story of arrest in London. I took this and began searching for more information and as a result was able to contact her granddaughters, great niece and great great niece as well as uncover some limited information in archives. Ethel and her previously untold story have been my inspiration for my books. She was arrested at the 1912 Great Militant Protest as a glass breaker (the mission featured in my second book) and imprisoned in Holloway along with the likes of Emmeline Pankhurst.

It is not just stories of previously unknown suffragettes that are waiting to be told – the opportunity to tell stories about known suffragettes with a different angle or focus is also out there! An example is the approach I chose for conveying the 1912 glass-breaking mission. I wanted to understand how those involved were partnered (i.e. the process including instructions etc.), who they were with and where they went. This opened up a whole new set of questions (i.e. did they know each other before? How experienced at mission activity were they? Who was working behind the scenes pairing suffragettes and giving them stones and hammers? etc.) to attempt to answer which in turn added layers to the known stories whilst identifying some previously untold ones. The Annex in the Secret Missions of the Suffragettes details all those known to have been involved in the 1912 glass breaking and groups them according to when and where they were breaking glass. Interestingly this focus has led to a fantastic opportunity for me to unite the descendants of two partnered glass breakers, Ethel Violet Baldock and Violet Bland. We went to number 1 Northumberland Avenue where Ethel and Violet (known as Annie) had smashed a window 112 years ago.

Left to Right: Patricia Radley (Ethel’s granddaughter); Sandra Radley (Ethel’s great-granddaughter); Eileen Bridges (Ethel’s granddaughter); Eamonn Butler (Violet Bland’s great nephew)

Who was the most memorable glass breaker you encountered in your research?
That’s very difficult to answer. If pushed I would say apart from the inspiration for the book, Ethel Violet Baldock, it would be either Janet Barrowman or Lillian Ball. Glaswegian Clerk, Janet Barrowman was 32 and chief clerk at Scottish soap manufacturer, Joseph Watson & Co., known as ’Soapy Joes’. According to the letter sent in by her manager, David Wilkie, Janet had asked for two days’ holiday to see a demonstration in London. Janet had been arrested and charged for smashing a window at the Local Government Board. Like the other glass breakers she had been given a longer than expected sentence. Janet received a sentence of two months and despite David’s attempt to have this reconsidered and reduced she served the full term. As a result, having exceeded her maximum holiday allowance, she lost her job, one which she was extremely accomplished and respected. It is memorable because of her 11 years service to Soapy Joes at a high level (she was often left in charge of the business in Scotland) and the sacrifice she made in taking part in this mission. Her wage was supporting her widowed mother and younger siblings so it was a huge blow. Also memorable was Lillian Ball, a working-class dressmaker from Tooting in London. She gave evidence against Emmeline Pankhurst in the case of conspiracy to incite others and was even cross-examined by the leader in court! After the court hearing, she had to be moved to Reading prison for her own safety.

What’s next for you?
I am currently writing my third book, also about women’s suffrage and again inspired by the youngest 1912 glass breaker Ethel Violet Baldock.

Jennifer Godfrey lives in West Kent with her husband, two children and dog. She is the author of two non-fiction books, published by Pen & Sword Ltd, the first, Suffragettes Of Kent and the recently released Secret Missions Of The Suffragettes: Glassbreakers & Safe Houses.
Book Review and Author Interview: Angel Meadow by Dean Kirby
November 21, 2023

Angel Meadow: Victorian Britain’s Most Savage Slum by Dean Kirby (P&S History, 2016)

Dean Kirby’s immersive exploration of Manchester’s Angel Meadow slum in the Victorian era is a compelling journey into one of the most notorious and dangerous neighbourhoods of the Industrial Revolution. In his meticulously researched book, Kirby, drawing on his journalistic background, vividly resurrects the scenes and characters that define this grim chapter in history.

The book is thoughtfully structured around real events, offering readers a glimpse into the shocking and colourful stories that unfolded in Angel Meadow. Kirby’s dedication to historical accuracy is evident, as he taps into a diverse range of sources, including newspaper accounts, police reports, teachers, missionaries, and magistrates. This thorough approach results in a comprehensive historical record that becomes an essential resource for anyone interested in the lives of those who inhabited this bleak corner of the northern metropolis.

What sets Kirby’s work apart is not only its historical depth but also its connection. This project is a labour of love for the author, inspired by the experiences of his ancestor, William Kirby, a farm labourer who fled Ireland’s Great Hunger only to face the grim reality of the industrial north.

The narrative is enriched with a glossary of Angel Meadow slang, providing a linguistic window into the past, and supplemented by a bibliography, research notes, and a detailed index. These elements contribute to the book’s value as both an engaging read and a scholarly reference.

In summary, Dean Kirby’s book on Angel Meadow is a masterful blend of historical documentation and personal passion. It not only brings to life a vivid and dangerous Victorian slum but also honours the author’s familial connection to the tumultuous events that unfolded in this dark corner of Manchester’s past.

Interview with Dean Kirby

What was your background before writing this book?

I was born and grew up in Manchester and am very proud of the city and fascinated by its history. Manchester was the first industrial city and played a significant role in the creation of the modern world. My dad has always told me stories about Ancoats, the inner city district where he lived as a young lad, and we would spend hours in Manchester Central Library in the 1980s researching our family history – before genealogy was fashionable – using the old, dimly-lit microfilm readers that genealogists used before records were digitised and which were probably really bad for your eyes. After university, I became a journalist and I’ve spent most of my career working in Manchester – going out into communities and talking to ordinary Mancunians about what was happening in their lives – which has given me an even greater appreciation for my home city and its people. The book happened really because these two things – my family history and my passion for the city and its history – came together quite dramatically in 2016.

Your ancestor William Kirby lived in Angel Meadow. Was it solely the discovery of his residence there that inspired you to write about Victorian Britain’s most challenging slum, or were there other motivating factors?

I had been researching my Irish ancestor William Kirby, my 3 x great-grandfather, on and off since those early days in the library with my dad. William was a farm labourer from County Mayo who arrived in Manchester in the 1860s. Like a lot of poor Irish immigrants at that time, he lived with his family underground in a cellar. Using maps, rate books and other records, I eventually managed to locate the site of his house in a car park in Angel Meadow, where I used to park my car because it was convenient for the Arndale Centre. In Manchester, when slum clearances took place after the Second World War, the houses were simply backfilled into cellar holes and sealed over with concrete. As the city centre is largely flat, a lot of that land was turned into surface car parks which are only just now being redeveloped.
One night in 2016, I was walking past the car park where Williams’ house had been with my wife as we went to a Noel Gallagher gig at Manchester Arena and noticed that, amazingly, there was a fence up and a big sign saying “archaeologists at work”. The next day I went back and told them my story. They invited me inside to look at their finds and later let me bring along my dad to climb down a ladder into the cellar holes and touch the bricks of William’s fireplace. They let me take the brick home and I’ve kept it. It still has soot on it from the fire that would have kept him warm on a winter’s day. A death certificate showed that one of William’s children, also called William, died in that house from a fever aged just two weeks old. It says something about the horrible living conditions there, but it also affected the archaeologists, they said, because that’s how long their dig lasted – the same number of days as baby William’s short life.

Visiting the house was a hugely poignant moment for me. As family historians, we all spend our time searching for pieces of paper that will give us a glimpse of how our ancestors lived, but in that moment, we were able to walk right through the front door. That moment inspired me to write the book about the district where William lived and to go on to do a doctorate in urban history – researching the Victorian housing conditions in the same area of Manchester. It means I’ve been researching that small area of the city for a decade now. I’m still very grateful to the archaeologists who didn’t turn me away when I turned up with what must have seemed a surprising story. Instead, they invited me in and encouraged me, and I’m hoping that my PhD study of Angel Meadow’s housing will give something back to them and help them in their own research going forward.

Did you have concerns about portraying some of the distressing stories you encountered during your research?

I did have concerns about portraying some of the distressing stories in the book and there were some that I left out because they were just too unbearable to write about. It was also quite harrowing at times being immersed in those stories during what was four years of research and writing. One story that played on my mind quite a bit was about a woman named Annie Chapman, who was found dead in a privy in Angel Meadow. It’s only a few paragraphs in the book, but her story was so tragic that I thought about her quite a lot while I was writing. One valid criticism of the book was that I didn’t write about the families who lived good, honest lives and never found themselves in trouble with the police or the pages of a newspaper. I totally agree and there’s also an obvious gap in telling the stories of women who lived in working-class districts in the nineteenth century because their stories are often missing from the historical record, or written by men such as police officers and church missionaries who knew nothing really about women’s lives. All I could do, as I was writing about an era which no one is alive to remember, was to use as many different sources as I could find and try my best to portray people’s lives as accurately and fairly as I could. I also felt it was important to treat the people whose stories I was telling with respect and be a voice for them if I was able, as, like my own family who lived in the district, these were real people and the ancestors of modern-day Mancunians. In a way, the book was my attempt to keep alive the stories of those people and to explain what they went through while living in very difficult circumstances.

Who was the most memorable individual you encountered in your research for the book?

There were a few memorable people I encountered in my research and some had interesting nicknames such as Cabbage Ann, the Badger, One-Armed Kitty and Jemmie the Crawler. One thing I enjoyed doing was using genealogy techniques to try to work out the real identities of the people behind the nicknames and find out a bit more about their lives. The Badger, for example, was a thief named John Currie and it was said that he could climb down coal chutes to break into houses. By looking at his prison record though, I also found that his distinguishing marks included his neck being bloated and badly scarred by scrofula, an infection of the lymph nodes caused by tuberculosis. It’s a horrible nickname to have given to someone with a medical condition, but in the days before mugshots and fingerprinting the name would have been a way for police officers to identify him in the street. Cabbage Ann’s real name was Ann Powell and she ran a grocer’s shop and a lodging house. She was a notorious thief trainer who taught youths how to be “breech buzzers” or pickpockets. The most memorable person in my research though was a violent character named Henry Burgess, who would go around Angel Meadow attacking passers-by and the police with anything he could lay his hands on. He had 40 convictions to his name including killing an opponent by throwing a paraffin lamp at him and setting him on fire. I was very lucky to find a photograph of Henry in the Staffordshire Gaol image archive, which is a useful resource for historians searching for Victorian criminals who were transported from the North of England to jails in the South such as Dartmoor, Pentonville and Parkhurst. They would stop at Stafford Gaol on the way and have their photograph taken. It was fascinating to see Henry’s piercing eyes peering back at me in the photograph and to notice that on his neck he had a huge scar, which may have been a knife wound that would have put his life in danger before he was stitched up by a surgeon.

One of my greatest joys in writing the book is that I have been contacted by lots of people who have found their ancestors in the index and have been in touch to find out more information. I was really lucky to chat with one of Henry Burgess’s descendants recently who wanted help with their genealogy research and I was able to pass on some documents and the photograph. They had been unaware of his past until reading about him in the book and it was a real privilege to chat to them after spending so much time thinking and writing about Henry during my own research.

What’s next? Can we expect more books?

Since writing the book, I have been taking an even deeper dive into Angel Meadow by researching my PhD, which I finished last year. I really enjoyed it but I’m keen now to write another Manchester history book. I am currently doing some research. Beyond that, I’ve started a newsletter telling stories from the streets of Victorian Manchester, which is free to join. I’m also in the process of setting up a genealogy business so I can help more people find their Mancunian ancestors and tell their stories.

Dean Kirby is an award-winning investigative journalist whose nominations include being shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils for his work on the UK’s fuel poverty crisis. His book on Angel Meadow has been in the Amazon best-seller lists. He now writes a weekly newsletter telling stories from the streets of Victorian Manchester, which can be found at www.manchesterhistory.uk.

Book Review and Author Interview: Rural: The Lives of the Working Class Countryside by Rebecca Smith

March 21, 2023

Rural: The Lives of the Working Class Countryside by Rebecca Smith (HarperCollins, 2023)

The publisher’s blurb describes this as “a book for anyone who loves and longs for the countryside, whose family owes something to a bygone trade, or who is interested in the future of rural Britain.” Many of us love the countryside but with 82.9% of England’s population, 83% of Scotland and around 80% of Wales (2019) living in urban areas, Britons may seem more detached than ever from rural life. Those of us with UK ancestors are likely to have at least some forebears living in the countryside in the first half of the 19th century, if not later. And with debates about fuel and food dominating recent headlines, awareness of our rural economies, communities and environment urgently needs to improve.

I was particularly keen to read this book as I grew up in rural Lancashire in the 1980s and ’90s. It was a world that even then felt remote and misunderstood. On my first day of secondary school, for example, I was astonished at how many of my new classmates had never heard of the village where I lived. Sadly, I was equally ignorant of city ways, constantly getting lost trying to find the bus station after school for my long and winding journey home. As the daughter of the forester on the Graythwaite Estate in Cumbria, Rebecca Smith was raised in an even more remote area around 40 miles from me.

Smith’s family had long ties to the land: her ancestry includes foresters in Cumbria, miners in Derbyshire, millworkers in Nottinghamshire, and builders of reservoirs and the Manchester Ship Canal. In Rural, she explores the realities of life in the country, weaving back and forth between her childhood, life now in rural Scotland, her ancestors’ experiences, and those of other lives on estates and farms across the UK.

I’m often frustrated by contemporary media accounts which simplify or glamorise rural life, focusing on Downton Abbey-style worlds, wild swimming, or cooking on the AGA. In fairness, there have been some improvements on television recently, but Smith’s book provides a healthy counterbalance to the twee, shining a light on professions and communities that many know nothing about. She has a healthy curiosity for the variety of rural lives and a rich range of sources – as evinced by the detailed reference section at the end of the book.

I was pleased to read of a world I recognised, both the past of my ancestors and the precarious world of my farming friends who are forever multi-tasking and coming up with creative ways to turn a profit in a challenging economy. Whether you are interested in diving deeper into the everyday lives of your ancestors or are keen to understand more about the rural economy and the importance of caring for the countryside in all our lives, this book is warmly recommended.

Interview with Rebecca Smith

What was your background before writing this book?

I worked in radio for over a decade. After graduating with an English and Media degree from Stirling University, I wanted to write but had no idea how to do it. I had really enjoyed the radio aspect of my degree so managed to get some work experience in local BBC Radio and basically never left. I worked on live programmes, news phone-ins, comedy, features, drama. I was always really keen to tell other people’s stories. To give people a voice who didn’t usually have one. I found different lives fascinating.

Latterly, I worked in Radio 4’s Scotland’s office and really loved working with books and scripts again. At that point, I decided it was time to start writing myself. After I had my second kid, I decided to go freelance and take a Masters in Creative Writing at Glasgow Uni. Then I came up with the book!

Why did you want to write Rural?

I read a lot and love so many genres but I never really came across anything which I thought, yes, that’s me. There were a lot of working-class stories coming out when I started writing but nothing about rural areas. So I started writing about that. Also, I think quite subconsciously, I always wrote about the place I grew up as if it had some kind of tether to me. We lived on a country estate in Cumbria, which immediately makes people think we were posh, but we were anything but. We were given a tied house, which meant the house came with the job. If you lost one, you lost the other. There was a whole community of people living like this who ran the Big House and the land; the farmer, the plumber, the housekeeper, the gamekeeper, and the forester (my dad.) I wanted to tell this story, about belonging to a place when you don’t own any of it. It was only when I started talking to my family I realised that they had all lived in tied houses in rural areas their whole lives, generations of them. No wonder I felt tethered to this kind of place; it was in my blood.

Why did you feel that exploring the lives of the working-class countryside was important?

Originally I was only going to write about country estates and those microcosms of societies. But the more I thought about it, and ultimately spoke to family, the more I realised so many more rural industries had tied housing. Coal mining, slate mining, millwork. My grandad was born in a dam builders hut just above Sheffield. My Great Grandmother had thirteen children and had numerous lodgers come and go to help with the money coming in. I had no idea about this until I spoke to my Uncle Jim. I was very lucky he is a keen family researcher. He sent me lots of information which was just fascinating. I wish I had spoken to my Grandad about it all before he died. Not only was he born on the moors as a dam builder’s son, he went on to be a coal miner during the war, and then worked in a mill.

There is a lot of literature about these industries but I wanted to write about all of them in the same place, because I found the people who work in them are all connected in so many ways. But I also wanted to write about them from a woman’s point of view. I was pregnant while writing some of the book which has the ability to totally change your perspective! When I thought about my Great-Grandmother with her thirteen children, plus lodgers, in a tiny hut miles away from anywhere, it makes you wonder how they did it.

What’s next for you and your writing?

I have an idea for the next one but it’ll take me quite some time to formulate anything worthwhile just yet! The lead up to this first book (plus my there children) will keep me busy enough for now I think.

Rebecca Smith is a writer from Cumbria. She worked in radio for ten years before completing a Masters in Creative Writing at Glasgow University. She lives in Central Scotland with her partner and three children. Rural: The Lives of the Working-Class Countryside is her first book.

Contact Rebecca via her website or follow her on Twitter.

Book Review and Author Interview: After The War by Tom Palmer
February 14, 2023

After The War: From Auschwitz To Ambleside by Tom Palmer (Barrington Stoke, 2020)

Anyone who watched BBC TV’s drama, The Windermere Children, or its accompanying documentary cannot fail to have been moved by the true story of the young survivors of the Holocaust, the care they received in the Lake District, and their eventual (and remarkable) joy, enthusiasm and life-long friendships.

Experienced children’s author, Tom Palmer, was so inspired by the children’s stories that he approached Trevor Avery BEM of the Lake District Holocaust Project to ask if he could write a book about the Jewish children and their time by Windermere. In Trevor’s foreword to the book, he praises Tom for being “utterly dedicated to doing the story justice” and for “being always full of the same compassion as those who helped the children in their early days of recovery”.

Although the story is fiction, it is based on the recollections of some of the survivors, as well as those of Holocaust experts. Tom spoke personally with Arek Hersh, Mala Tribich, and Ike Alterman, three of the Windermere children. He also met with Joyce, whose family were bombed out of Liverpool, moving to the Calgarth Estate by Windermere during the war. Joyce and her dog, along with football coach, Jock Lawrence, are a few of the real people who appear in Tom’s novel. However, Tom makes clear in his acknowledgements that every scene in the book is “based on the recollection of real events”.

After the War centres on three boys out of the three hundred children who arrived in the Lake District at the end of the Second World War in August 1945. The story focuses on Yossi, his friendship with Leo and Mordecai, his memories (told in flashbacks) of his life before and during his time in Nazi concentration camps, and his hopes for a reunion with his missing father.

Tom manages to clearly convey the horrors and realities of the Holocaust in a way that is suitable for young readers. The story is engaging, easy to read and well-paced, using flashbacks in a way that avoids any scene from becoming overwhelming. Overall, the book captures the humanity of the Windermere children, the local people who became their friends, and the special adults who helped them heal and prepare them for an adult life filled with peace and hope.

What was your background before writing this book?

I had written lots of sport fiction and some history stories, most based very closely on the testimony of those involved. Before that, I was a bookseller (Waterstone’s and Dillons) and worked for libraries and The Reading Agency.

Why did you want to write about the “Windermere children”?

I didn’t at first. I didn’t feel like I could do it. But my wife and then a Holocaust historian I came to know encouraged me and gave me the belief. Then I was swept up by the story of how these children came to the UK as refugees having lost everything and everyone and – through friendship with each other – found some hope.

Why did you feel this was an important story to tell?

So that we don’t forget the Holocaust. So that we see such events coming next time and do something about it. So that we can see how refugees can benefit from coming to a safe country and how that safe country can benefit from having refugees come.

What’s next for you and your writing?

Another one set in Cumbria. It’s going to feature water and mountains and a couple of aeroplanes. That’s all I can say at the moment.

Tom Palmer is a children’s author. He writes historical and sports fiction and has been nominated for the Carnegie medal four times. Winner of the UK Children’s Book Award in 2020 and the Ruth Rendell Award for services to literacy in the UK, he has been translated into 13 languages. www.tompalmer.co.uk
Book Review and Author Interview: The Splendid Mrs McCheyne and the East London Federation of Suffragettes by Jane McChrystal
January 31, 2023

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.

writer, historian, genealogist

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