Ada Ridley is mentioned in my book, A Song of their Own, but since completing the book I’ve become aware of other interesting aspects of her life. Ada was born in the 1860s, the second oldest of 4 sisters – in future blogs I’ll write more about her sisters Bessie and Lilian. The family lived […]

The suffragettes were of course individual women who each made their own contribution to the campaign for the vote. However, there are admirable features of them as a group. Here are the first 5 of 10 reasons why I love the suffragettes.  1. The Ipswich suffragettes were ordinary women, who got out there and campaigned to right […]

Hortense Lane was one of the first active suffragettes in Ipswich. As early as 1909, she appeared in court for refusing to pay her ‘Inhabited House Duty’ as a protest at not having the vote. This was before the No Vote, No Tax campaign really took off across the country. At this time, suffrage activity […]

Suffragette Hilda Burkett with her colleague Florence Tunks burnt down the Bath Hotel in Felixstowe as part of the Votes for Women campaign. She was sentenced in May 1914 to two years imprisonment, and was transferred from Ipswich prison, where she had been force-fed throughout the remand period, to Holloway. There are several accounts by […]

The women’s suffrage campaign may not have been the first protest movement to utilise the arts to promote its cause, but it was supremely successful in doing so. Its enormous processions in London in the early years of the twentieth century were made all the more empowering for women by their use of pageantry, intricate […]