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

By Frances Bevan

An in-depth history of women’s activism and achievements in one English town, with photos included.
 
As the industrial revolution and the coming of the railways transformed the Wiltshire countryside, Swindon women were on the front line of change, shaping the new industrial town and transforming the old market one. Newcomers arrived from the great railway centers across the country to create a welcoming, tolerant and creative community with women’s contribution at its heart.
 
Following the incorporation of Old and New Swindon in 1900, innovative women stepped up to the plate: women like Swindon-born suffragette Edith New, who challenged political conventions, and Emma Noble, Swindon’s first female councilor, who campaigned to improve living conditions in the town. During two world wars, Swindon women worked in the railway factory in jobs once considered beyond their strength and endurance. Women supported the war effort on the home front, volunteering in what little spare time they had.
 
Struggle and Suffrage in Swindon tells the stories of women like Mary Slade and Kate Handley, two teachers who during WWI headed the Prisoners of War Committee, which sent food parcels to soldiers held in German POW camps. The story of Swindon women includes artists and actresses, political activists and social reformers—and the ordinary women who worked in the factories, raised their children, and made a difference.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526718235

Book preview

Steve.

Introduction

The story of Swindon in 1850 was a tale of two towns. The settlement on the hill had a road-plan dating back to the fourteenth century and archaeological finds from the Neolithic period. In the seventeenth century it was a small market town considered to be of little importance, with a population of just 791 in 1697. Among those considered worthy of recording were fourteen yeomen, a lay rector, male members of the Vilett family and several clergymen, but no women.

In 1841 Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the inspirational chief engineer at the Great Western Railway Company was looking for somewhere on the London to Bristol line to situate a repair and maintenance depot. His second in command, Daniel Gooch, suggested Swindon. The Wilts & Berks canal had been completed in 1810 and would prove useful in the construction of the railway factory. By 1848 the railway factory employed 1,800 men – but no women.

The rows of redbrick terrace houses that crept up the hill from the new industrial town at the bottom were named in honour of the great and the good of Swindon; the men who had sold their land to make the expansion possible and those who held positions of authority within the railway works, but where were the women?

This was the question historian Dr Rosa Matheson asked when she began a research project to study the role of women in the railway industry: ‘I wanted to write women into history because basically they have been written out.’ Dr Matheson’s research led to the publication of her book The Fair Sex – Women and the Great Western Railway, published in 2007.

So where did the women work before the railway works opened their doors to them?

One of the recurring themes of this history of women in Swindon was the lack of employment, especially for married women.

As early as 1870, Joseph Armstrong, Locomotive, Carriage and Wagon Superintendent, at the GWR Works acknowledged the dearth of employment opportunities for the daughters of the skilled railway men he was trying to attract to New Swindon.

The notion of ‘the angel in the house’, the woman who devoted all her time and energies to her husband, children and home, was largely a middle-class construct; for the working-class woman it was a quite a different reality. Yet throughout the 1850–1950 period women’s work continued to be structured around domestic responsibilities, was gender specific, generally low status and low paid, and was frequently omitted from census returns.

The reason for this is attributable to the inconsistent datagathering instructions issued for each census. In 1851, for example, only those women who were regularly employed had their occupation recorded. The occupation of homeworkers and those women employed in a family business was often not recorded on the census returns; neither were those whose work was part-time, seasonal or casual. Census data relating to women’s work is therefore largely unreliable.

The Victorian period is often referred to as the Age of Reform and change was on its way. The Married Women’s Property Act 1870 gave married women control over the money they earned and any inherited property they had brought to the marriage. The 1882 Act went further and allowed married women to own and control property in their own right. These Acts benefited women who enjoyed a private income and wealth and who were brave and bold enough to take their husband to court if the occasion demanded. For poor and working-class married women, it had scant relevance and did little to bridge the inequality divide.

After the Representation of the People Act 1918, which extended the franchise to some women over the age of 30 with property qualifications, came the Sex Disqualification Removal Act 1919.

It might seem that this Act of Parliament which stated:

A person shall not be disqualified by sex or marriage from the exercise of any public function, or from being appointed to or holding any civil or judicial office or post, or from entering or assuming or carrying on any civil profession or vocation, or for admission to any incorporated society (whether incorporated by Royal Charter or otherwise), [and a person shall not be exempted by sex or marriage from the liability to serve as a juror]

would pave the way for equal opportunities across the board, but in fact it only addressed three specific areas: the Civil Service, the courts and the universities.

The Matrimonial Causes Amendment Act of 1923 gave equal grounds for divorce between husband and wife and the Guardianship of Infants Act 1925 gave equal rights to both male and female guardians but the marriage bar continued to restrict the employment of married women in various occupations, particularly teaching and clerical positions. Although the marriage bar was relaxed during the two world wars, it still existed in some occupations and professions up to the 1970s.

In late nineteenth-century Swindon an unusually large percentage of the population were homeowners; the majority, however, continued to rent their homes and in 1895 the average rent for a typical two-up two-down terrace house in Rodbourne, was 5s.

Throughout the period of this study the lives of the women of Swindon were dominated by the railway works. In 1905 there were 14,196 men employed in the railway factory with mothers, wives, sisters and daughters all dependent on their employment in the Works.

The 1908 ‘Board of Trade Enquiry into the Cost of Living of the Working Classes’ estimated that nearly eighty per cent of the occupied men of Swindon were employed by the GWR, an extreme example of a one industry town. The proportion of employed women was 7.2%.

Ladies with pram on Rodbourne Road. Courtesy of P.A. Williams

While jobs in the GWR Works were higher paid than those in agricultural work they were subject to downturns in the industry and men were frequently laid off or put on short time. It is surprising, therefore, that in the 1930s, during a time of economic pressure and unemployment, a large number of Swindonians lived in homes they either owned or were buying through a building society or friendly society. The average price of a small, terrace house was £200 – £300. However, the low-paid worker was faced with high rents and priced out of the home ownership market. The financial contribution made by a working wife was crucial to the average family.

In 1908 a four-roomed house, the archetypal ‘two-up two-down’ with a scullery and toilet extension at the back, was available to rent at five to six shillings and was the most common type of house in Swindon. In the 1931 census the four-roomed house still predominated.

As unemployment rose during the 1920s and 1930s, industrial employment for women stood at between 2,500 and 3,000 – at least two-thirds of these were unmarried girls. In 1934 the Bristol-based W. D. & H. O. Wills, the cigarette and tobacco factory, employed 500 women and girls, while clothing factories such as Compton employed 600 staff, mainly women and girls, Cellular Clothing – 200 women and girls, and Nicholson’s, the raincoat factory, had 240 women and girls on their staff. Garrard employed 600 workers, mostly women, and there were 500 jobs available to women in the railway works.

Lamp Repairs (GWR). Courtesy of the Swindon Society

In 1928 the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act extended the vote to women on equal terms to men. The property qualification of the 1918 act was removed and now all women over the age of 21 could vote. At the General Election the following year the Wiltshire electorate showed an increase of 39,000, and across the county there was a majority of 6,000 women voters. In the Swindon Division the female majority was less marked; an electorate of 45,250 comprised 22,492 men and 22,758 women.

In August 1934, 400 men were discharged from the Works with a predicted 900 more to lose their jobs within six months. The cause of the mass redundancies was the introduction of a ‘belt system’ which would see a locomotive under construction pass through the various workshops in twelve days compared to thirty under the old system.

In 1938 another 1,140 men were dismissed, the reasons given were falling receipts and increased cost of materials. The heyday of the railway was apparently over and the writing was on the wall for the mighty GWR (God’s Wonderful Railway as it was known colloquially).

In 1948 the railways were nationalised, and the vast complex at Swindon came under the control of the new British Transport Commission and the Works became the British Railway Western Region later BREL.

Ironically, job opportunities for women in Swindon in the 1950s were plentiful, especially in the clothing industry although approximately one in five women worked part time, fitting their work around domestic obligations and childcare.

In 1952 the borough boundary was further extended to the north and at the same time the Town Development Act was adopted and Swindon became a London overspill town.

This is the story of the women of Swindon who raised their families and worked on the land and in the factories in a town that straddled industrial development and agriculture. The women who nailed their political colours to the mast and stood up for what they believed in. The women who took their place in the campaign for women’s suffrage and served a prison sentence for their actions.

Here are the women.

CHAPTER ONE

Top Marks In Education

The coming of the railways stimulated change and development in Swindon, from employment to medical care and education. For those parents who could afford to pay, there were a number of small private schools in Old Swindon but at the beginning of the nineteenth century the majority of children, especially those from poor families, received only a basic education at Sunday School.

The first free school opened in Newport Street, Old Swindon in around 1764, with twenty boys and a few girls who were taught religion and arithmetic only. By 1819 there were thirty-seven boys and eleven girls on the register. Today a blue plaque marks the site:

Near here stood Swindon’s first free school, opened circa 1764. In 1836 it was replaced on the same site by the National School, itself closed in 1870 and demolished in 1962.

When the National School closed in 1870 the children moved to the newly built King William Street School.

Small privately run schools existed in Old Swindon including Miss Cowell’s School for Young Ladies in Devizes Road, opened in 1858 and Miss Murdoch’s Ladies School at 2 Taunton Street, New Swindon, opened in 1865. In 1870 the National School in Newport Street accommodated 120 girls.

In New Swindon the GWR built its first school in Bristol Street where a plaque marks the spot:

This building was erected in about 1870 by the Great Western Railway Co and maintained by the company as a school for the children of New Swindon until 1881. It was an extension of the original GWR School which was erected in 1844 on a site some 50 yds to the north.

In 1859 the GWR Bristol Street school rulebook lists fees as 4d a week for ‘juveniles’ and 2d for infants. The costs were raised sometime after 1859, to 4d, 5d or 6d for boys and 4d or 5d for girls, depending on their class in school, and 3d for infants. If there were more than four children from the same family in school at the same time the fifth and any subsequent children were admitted free of charge. The curriculum consisted of lessons in reading, writing and arithmetic as core subjects, geography, history and scripture and needlework for the girls.

Between the years 1870 and 1901 the population of Swindon increased from 11,720 to almost 50,000. It soon became evident that overcrowding in the original GWR school was so acute that in 1871 the girls and infants were moved to temporary accommodation in the Drill Hall in Church Place, before moving to a school built especially for them in College Street in 1873. In 1881, when the Swindon School Board assumed responsibility, more than 1,600 children were being taught in the GWR Schools.

While New Swindon grappled with the problem of educating an increasing number of school-aged children, a glimpse of life at a private school at Morden House, Rodbourne Cheney in the 1860s is given by former pupil, Fanny Catherine Hall, who had a very famous local connection.

Fanny Catherine Hall

Fanny Catherine Hall was the eldest of