Struggle and Suffrage in Leatherhead: Women's Lives and the Fight for Equality

By Lorraine Spindler

The road to suffrage for the women of Leatherhead was often bumpy and unwelcomed by men and women alike. The Women’s Suffrage Caravan rolled into Leatherhead on Saturday, 16 May 1908, its presence inciting riots amongst many of the menfolk. The town’s Unionist Club in December 1908 passed the motion that it was ‘unpropitious’ for legislation on the question of women’s suffrage and yet, from behind the closed door of her home in Belmont Road, women’s rights campaigner Marie Stopes had begun to pen Married Love; suffrage campaigner Dame Millicent Fawcett would fascinate her audience at Victoria Hall in 1910; and Emmeline Pankhurst’s arrest and detention at Leatherhead police station would capture the interest of the nation, placing Leatherhead centre stage of the push towards revolution in women’s rights.By the arrival of the First World War, middle-class girls were not allowed out without a chaperone, few married women had a job and no woman was allowed the vote. It was the general view that politics and work were only suitable for men. By the arrival of the Second World War Leatherhead’s women were still expected to live up to the typical housewife persona, where their main role in life was to bring up the children and do the housework. The husband was usually the head of the house, and his word was law to both his children and his wife, the one expected to look after the children.Using numerous primary sources, this fully illustrated book tells the story of numerous famous and ordinary women who lived and visited Leatherhead between 1850 and 1950; Ella Neate, born into a family of local grocers, who discovered a talent for operetta; Pearl Kew, one of the first women in the town to own a car, enabling her to drive to work as a teacher in Guildford; the charity work of Cherkley Court’s Letitia Dixon; Emily Moore the Swan Innkeeper, these many more fascinating stories of local women whose lives have hidden in the shadows of Leatherhead’s menfolk.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Nov 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781526712448

Lorraine Spindler

Lorraine Spindler has studied European history, genealogy and military history. She began her career with Reed Business Publishing, before becoming a founder director of the academic distribution company, Boffin Books. She is the curator of Leatherhead Museum and author of Leatherhead in the Great War. She currently lectures at the Guildford Institute, runs regular battlefield tours to Ypres and the Somme, weekly classes in local history and genealogy, and is currently researching those involved with the theatrical arts in the Leatherhead district.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

The Forgotten Women of Leatherhead

It is an inconvenient truth that women have always been around 50 per cent of the population, but occupy only a tiny percentage of recorded history. Leatherhead’s archives and newspapers between 1850 and 1950 are crammed with details of the achievements and activities of men, but women are only mentioned in passing. Even a woman’s name became overshadowed by her husband’s name as soon as she married, making research difficult. This book is an attempt to redress the balance and focus on the forgotten struggles and achievements of Leatherhead’s women during this period.

Leatherhead, from across the River Mole c.1796 by J.M.W Turner (1775–1851).

Great Britain was at the pinnacle of its imperial power in 1850. It had committed to free trade, causing an increase in market competitiveness, decrease in prices, and increased availability of resources. It controlled 90 per cent of Europe’s steam shipping along with half of the world’s iron and two-thirds of its coal production. As the first country to experience the benefits and ills of the industrial revolution, there was a striking discrepancy between the nation’s power and wealth, compared to the appalling social conditions experienced by many of its inhabitants.

Located in the centre of Surrey and at a junction of North-South and East-West transport network, the town became a focus for passenger transport which remains to this day, especially aided by the construction of the bridge over the River Mole in the early medieval period. The Swan Inn, located in the High Street, provided essential services for horse-driven coaches and travellers, while the railway arrived in 1859 improving access to and from London.

View from the Knightsbridge Road of The Crystal Palace in Hyde Park for Grand International Exhibition of 1851. The Great Exhibition, opened in Hyde Park between 1 May and 15 October 1851 and invited countries from around the world to display products that would celebrate modern industrial technology and design. British exhibits dominated almost every field from iron and steel to machinery and textiles. Residents from Leatherhead travelled by train to join the 6 million visitors to the Crystal Palace, paying between three guineas to one shilling for their tickets.

At the end of the nineteenth century, there were unprecedented demographic changes as the population of England and Wales almost doubled from 16.8 million in 1851 to 30.5 million in 1901. By 1851 more than half the country’s population lived in towns. Leatherhead shared the rapid population growth between 1850 and 1901, increasingly from around 2,000 residents to 4,691 in 1901. Upper- and middle-class residents lived in substantial homes with domestic staff, including Cherkley Court, home of the Dixon family and later the Aitkins; Downside, home of the Tates, and Vale Lodge, home to the Budd family. Middle-class families usually had at least one servant, while working-class families, who made up the vast majority of Leatherhead’s residents, were often overcrowded in small houses with outside toilets and no running water. Until the First World War, Leatherhead can be described as a self-sufficient, relatively small country town, with most of its own tradesmen providing for all its needs.

Terrace cottages in Church Walk similar to the one lived in by Amelia Scragg.

Trying to discover the occupations of women between 1850 and 1950 is particularly difficult. The censuses taken throughout the Victorian period tend not to mention their working roles; this was because the enumerators only enquired about the waged occupations of male residents. The working class made up over 80 per cent of Leatherhead’s population in the 1850s and many women from these families needed to work to survive. Those women who did work pursued traditionally female employment; principally through manual labour, their tasks included raising children, shopping, cooking, cleaning, working in the homes of others, bringing paid work into their own homes such as laundry, and working for wages outside the home such as nursing. One such woman was Amelia Scragg; born in Dorking in 1851, she lived with her five siblings and parents in Falklands Road. Amelia then married George Hankins, a sawyer, in 1869, when she was 18 years old. Amelia moved with her husband to a cottage in Church Walk by 1881, which the couple shared with their six children and a boarder. The 1911 census tells us Amelia went on to have eleven children.

Middle-class women also contributed to their families’ income without being recognised as workers. Manual work was seen as unfeminine but often the family business relied heavily upon the input of its female members. Middle-class women threw themselves into support roles by attending functions, hosting dinner parties and doing clerical work. Numerous women found themselves in charge of the family business when their husbands were ill, fighting during wartime, or had died.

The Swan Inn located at the bottom right of the High Street, 1920. When her husband died in 1865 Emily Moore became the innkeeper until her death in 1888, succeeded by her daughter, Emily.

The Victorian governess. The lady of the house employed servants to clean her house and paid another woman to raise her children. Hiring a governess was a status symbol.

The wives of shopkeepers were especially engaged in feeding, and acting as surrogate mothers to, apprentices and shop assistants. A wife’s inheritance could keep their husband in credit and a woman’s social life provided a network of business contacts. At the time, none of these activities were seen as employment, but part of the duty of a wife.

Single women and widows had to earn their own keep, potentially a serious problem as few positions were available to middle-class women during the nineteenth century, restricted by the social attitudes of the time. Ultimately single women could find work as governesses, teachers or seamstresses but this would drastically reduce their social status. The most respectable role was that of a governess, but this involved living like a servant and became the iconic image of a middle-class spinster.

Early nineteenth-century England and Wales was ruled by an elite. Only a small minority of men were allowed to vote. The situation began to change, as a result of public pressure and in 1832 the vote was given to more men through the Representation of the People Act (known as the Reform Act). The government’s qualifying criteria for the vote varied greatly among boroughs, from land ownership, to merely living in a house with a hearth sufficient to boil a pot.

The 1832 Reform Act granted seats in the House of Commons to the large cities that had sprung up during the Industrial Revolution, and removed seats from the ‘rotten boroughs’. One of the worst rotten boroughs was Gatton, located nine miles to the south-east of Leatherhead, with its electorate of only seven qualified voters in 1831.

In theory, women could vote in parliamentary elections before 1832 as county, and many borough franchises were based on property ownership. The Reform Act of 1832, could be seen to be a backward step for women, as it specified for the first time, that the right to vote was restricted to ‘male persons’. The Municipal Corporations Act 1835 also excluded women, disenfranchising many who had previously voted for town councils. Overall in England and Wales, the Reform Act 1832 increased the electorate from about 500,000 to 800,000, enabling about one in five adult males allowed to vote.

The franchise was extended twice in 1867 and 1884, with the secret ballot introduced in 1872. Once most men could vote movements began to secure women the right to vote as well. By the close of the nineteenth century, women were participating in the paid workforce in increasing numbers, feminist ideas spread among the educated middle classes, discriminatory laws were repealed and the women’s suffrage movement had gained momentum. Nevertheless, when Queen Victoria died on 22 January 1901, women still did not have the right to vote, sue, or own property.

The Elections for the School Boards, canvassing a Lady Voter. The Illustrated London News, 3 December 1870. F Barnard.

During the Edwardian period the Votes for Women campaign filtered into every town, street and home; Leatherhead was no exception. Across kitchen and dining-room tables, daughters argued with mothers and fathers, and wives with their husbands and sons, regarding the future of women in society. With often only a scattered handful of newspaper articles, the story of Leatherhead residents who fought for female equality, have often disappeared without trace.

The Suffragists and the Suffragettes were two very different, and often very divided, movements. The Suffragists were supporters of suffrage for women, particularly members of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), formed in 1897 and led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett. The Suffragettes, a term coined by the Daily Mail, were those who supported Emmeline Pankhurst. Emmeline, frustrated at the lack of progress made in getting women the vote, established the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903. The WSPU aimed to employ more militant, public, and illegal tactics including hunger strikes, window breaking and nighttime arson attacks, although particularly after 1905 when it was clear media interest in the fight for suffrage was waning. Their motto was ‘Deeds not Words’, and, unlike the majority of other groups in support of women’s suffrage, they refused to join NUWSS.

On 4 August 1914, when Great Britain declared war on Germany, only 60 per cent of male householders over the age of 21 had the right to vote. Young men who went off to fight in the First World War were still not entitled to vote upon their return. In 1914, the women’s suffrage campaign had been active for over fifty years. Historians debate how close they were to achieving their aims and yet it is irrefutable that their crusade was radically, but understandably, interrupted by the onset of the war.

Poster issued in 1915 by the British Parliamentary Recruiting Committee. Until the institution of conscription in 1916, recruiting propaganda relied heavily on women as the reason men went off to war. These images reinforced the woman’s traditional domestic and maternal role.

Emmeline Pankhurst ordered that all activities relating to women’s suffrage should cease to enable everyone to concentrate on the war effort. The WSPU became directly involved with the recruitment of the armed forces and consequently became closely involved with the government, who in turn, released the suffragettes from prison. Controversially for many of its members, even the funds raised by the WSPU for women’s suffrage was used for the war effort. Ultimately, internal battles led to the WSPU being disbanded in 1917, with the birth of a new organisation called the Women’s Party in November 1917.

Under Millicent Fawcett, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) refused to take part in militant activities and was much larger than Pankhurst’s WSPU. The NUWSS preferred to hold meetings, campaign, parade with banners, write letters and sign petitions to try to persuade parliament to give women the vote. Indeed, The Times commented that the NUWSS Hyde Park march in July 1913 was undertaken by, ‘the law-abiding advocates of votes for women’ which the newspaper interpreted as ‘as much a demonstration against militancy as one in favour of women’s suffrage’.

Up until a month before the war began, the NUWSS had been arguing for mediation attempts to prevent the war, but Fawcett changed direction and adopted the position of supporting the war effort. This was partly as an attempt to gain more support for the cause of women’s suffrage because one of the popular arguments against women’s suffrage was that women could not be trusted to vote, as they were pacifists. Fawcett’s change of mind led to divisions and a split in the organisation.

Millicent Garrett Fawcett addressing the crowds in Hyde Park on 26 July 1913.

As men left their jobs and went overseas to fight, suffragist and suffragette leaders volunteered their members to take their place. Initially their offers were met with contempt but in 1915, as the war forced Britain to recruit more and more soldiers, the women’s willingness to volunteer could no longer be ignored. Hundreds of thousands of women were employed in industries key to the war effort, from munition manufacturing, clerical work, to conducting buses, nursing or labouring on farms. The women proved that even during the lowest times of the war, through their labour, the buses still ran and the mail was delivered. The contribution of women during the war has often been given as a reason for women finally being granted the vote in 1918 with the Representation of the People’s Act. However, only partial women’s suffrage was achieved in 1918, as women under the age of 30 could still not vote. Around 22 per cent of women over the age of 30 were exempt from voting because they did not meet the £5 property qualification. The fight for women’s suffrage would not be achieved until 1928, when women received equal voting rights with men. When the soldiers returned from war, the women of Leatherhead were expected to go back to their roles from before the conflict. Even though they had proven themselves in their new-found employment, women were expected to be housewives or return to so-called ‘women’s jobs’. When the Second World War broke out, just over 5 million women were in work, rising to 7 million by 1943. At first, only single women aged 20–30 were conscripted to serve as part of the government’s war effort, but by mid-1943, almost 90 per cent of single women and 80 per cent of married women were working in factories, on the land or in the armed forces. Women joined the military services, even though it was not compulsory, including 640,000 in the armed forces, 55,000 serving with guns and providing essential air defence, 80,000 in the Land Army; plus many more who flew unarmed aircraft, drove ambulances, worked as nurses or worked behind enemy lines in the European resistance. Within two years of the outbreak of the Second World War, one in ten women had set aside their own lives to volunteer and help others as members of the Women’s Volunteer Service (WVS).

Never before had the boundaries between home front and front line been so blurred. More than 40,000 civilians were killed as enemy bombs dropped on Britain’s towns and cities. From housewives and mothers to factory workers and farm hands, women in Leatherhead were central to the local and national war effort.

In 1945, again women were praised for their wartime work, but expected to make way for the returning troops. As after the First World War, there was an assumption their temporary roles had been specifically linked to wartime. By 1951, the number of working women had returned almost to pre-war levels and a bar on married women working continued in many