In honour of International Women’s Day yesterday, and the fact that 2008 marks 90 years since UK women won the vote, I thought I’d post a little bit about Sylvia Pankhurst and the suffragettes of East London. There is suffragettery all over the place around here. As you walk out of the station you’ll see a fairly unremarkable-looking corner shop on the other side of the road opposite you. There are in fact two special things here:
- They have racks of fruit and veg outside which they light up with strange, appetite-killing blue and violet light at night.
- Above the shop is a box-shaped clock attached to the building by some spindly bits of metal.
The clock is a memorial to one of the East London suffragettes, Minnie Lansbury, who was elected to Poplar’s first Labour council in 1919. Minnie, along with other council members, spent 6 weeks in prison for failing to collect the full rates owed by the people of Poplar (Poplarians?) Bow police station is a little way down the road, where lots of the suffragettes were held after being arrested at demonstrations for breaching the peace, often in nearby Victoria Park. At one protest in 1914, Sylvia Pankhurst and 20 other women were marching to the park, linked to each other with chains, when they were ambushed by police who dragged them to the boating enclosure and smashed the padlocks, twisting the arms and tearing the hair of any women who tried to stop them.
Sylvia Pankhurst was dispatched to Canning Town by her formidable mother, Emmeline Pankhurst, in 1906, to win the support of the working women in the East. She set up the East London Federation of the Suffragettes, working from No. 400 Old Ford Road. The group didn’t just campaign and protest (and support pro-women’s suffrage MP George Lansbury, Minnie’s father-in-law and grandfather of Angela, yes, that Angela, a.k.a Jessica Fletcher) they also ran a hall for meetings and lectures, a cost-price restaurant, a mother and baby clinic, a day nursery, and a toy factory, as an early sort of fairtrade initiative. I find this tremendously impressive.
Emmeline (and her other daughter, Christabel) eventually became estranged from Sylvia, her East London suffragettes and her socialist, pacifist ideals. She stayed in the East, moving to Essex where she continued to campaign on a number of issues for the rest of her long life, much to the discomfort of the rest of Woodford. My grandparents lived in Woodford, and I can imagine them disapproving thoroughly. But then, they were terribly good at it.
Here’s a bit more Sylvia-lore for interested folks. You can also read some excerpts from her own record of her time in Bow on Home Made Jam. I also recommend Rosemary Taylor’s book Walks Through History: Exploring the East End (Amazon) which has a walk dedicated to the suffragettes. The wonderful Women’s Library in Aldgate also has a lot of walks featuring many of the kickass women of East London.
And finally, if you feel like thanking the women that fought so hard to win the vote, you can join the Fawcett Society, which was founded by suffragist Millicent Fawcett, and has been working for women and equality since 1866.