Letters from a Preston suffragette

Two letters from a Preston suffragette, Grace Alderman, to Ronald Towler, the son of a fellow suffragette, are held at Lancashire Archives (DDX575/4). Grace, who was chair of the Preston Women’s Social and Political Union, wrote them in 1964 when she was near the end of her life. They contain a great deal of information about the suffragette movement in Preston some fifty years earlier.

Margaret Keane, of the Preston Friends of Edith Rigby group, and I came across them independently in the archives recently. Margaret asked me to post them here. Included below are a pdf of the letters (reproduced with permission of Lancashire Archives). If viewing on a mobile device, download the file to read. The first letter is lengthy and contains the most information; the second is much shorter, the writing covering just a sheet and a half.

The intention of this short introduction is not to tease out all the interesting references in the letters (and there are many), but to give a taste of what it contains. More information on the Preston suffragettes, including the ones mentioned in the letters, is being gathered by members of the Friends of Edith Rigby group. The group is building a Preston suffragettes database that will be put online and should become the go-to place for anyone studying the suffragettes’ rich and fascinating history.

The Friends of Edith Rigby have a website and a Facebook page.

Eighteen Preston suffragettes are mentioned in the letters. Some, such as Edith Rigby who the Friends are named after, are already well known, but others are now long forgotten (hopefully, the research team at the Friends will provide their biographies).

A preliminary reading suggests that most of the suffragettes were middle class (unlike the Preston Word War One conscientious objectors, who followed the suffragettes in suffering for their beliefs). For example, census returns show that Grace and her mother, the widow of a solicitor, lived on their private means and employed a servant. Another example is the artist Patti Mayor, mentioned by Grace in her letter, who along with her mother and sister, was one of the suffragettes. They lived in the new the middle-class estate in Ashton.

There were working-class suffragettes in Preston such as the Mrs Burke, a charlady who cleaned for Grace and her mother and for another Preston suffragette. It was Mrs Burke who told Grace and her mother about Edith Rigby. Grace tells us a bit about Mrs Burke’s life in her first letter:

‘Mother and I didn’t even know Mrs Rigby by sight – we came to live in Preston in 1898 – total strangers but we had heard about Mrs Rigby – through Mrs Burke, she used to be on Fishergate on Wednesday mornings selling flowers.
Mrs Burke went out charring and washing – she had had a bad husband and he knocked her about so before her youngest child Johnny was born that this child was mentally deficient.
Mrs Burke came to us Mondays to wash and Fridays to help with the housework well Johny would be about 9 and was a big boy and becoming un-manageable and Mrs Rigby helped Mrs Burke to get him into a Home either at Lancaster or between Preston and there and we knew from Mrs Burke what a really kind and efficient person Mrs Rigby was.’

The political leanings of those Preston suffragettes can perhaps be gauged from the naming of the children of one of their number, a Mrs Worthington: Kier (for Hardy) and Christabel (for Pankhurst).

Notes:
One sheet is missing from the first letter.
Full transcript of the letters