Suffrage History Made in Huddersfield

Book launches are seldom such moving encounters with history that the skin prickles on the back of my neck. But in the case of Huddersfield launch party for Jill Liddington's Rebel Girls: their fight for the Vote (Virago 2006), three factors made it a poignant historical occasion: the place, the people and the artefacts on display. The whole event became an embodied homage to women's struggle for the vote and beyond. It was a privilege to be there, commemorating our determined fore-sisters.

Figure 1.

Jill Liddington with the Huddersfield banner.

The place was Huddersfield Town Hall, where exactly 100 years previously Emmeline Pankhurst had arrived to form the local branch of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). We didn't meet in the exact room – Liddington said the WSPU venue was a hall with a balcony, and that it could hold hundreds not scores. Nevertheless, we were only yards away from that historic site. Many of us had walked there from the same station that the WSPU entourage and prospective members would have used – without passing Monsoon and KFC. We had come from the places Liddington mentioned, such as Almondbury, Colne Valley, Bradford, Hebden Bridge, Leeds and Manchester. Suffrage colours were displayed in the flower arrangements, and in our clothes, as came to be the practice in the suffrage campaign.

The people who made the occasion spine-tingling were Molly Walton, a local councillor who described her own classic struggle to manage children and an unsympathetic husband, then the blossoming that began through her education at Northern College. Indeed, for many there Jill Liddington and Jill Norris's classic history of the northern struggle for women’ suffrage, One Hand Tied Behind Us (Virago 1978) had been the seminal book in their lives. It had pushed them into studying women's history, particularly in the north, and valuing themselves as descendents or admirers of such ‘radical suffragists’.

Julia Mitchell spoke of her great grandmother Edith Key (1872–1937), a knotter in nearby Almondbury. Julia grew up in the very same house, above what had been the Keys’ family music shop at 43 West Parade, Huddersfield. Suffragette ‘mice’ had been hidden here by Edith Key, as they evaded prison under the Cat and Mouse Act. Julia well knew all the crannies and tiny attics where they could have hidden.

Another suffrage descendant, Margaret Pinnance, granddaughter of rug-weaver Elizabeth Pinnance (1879–1959), was also there and spoke with pride of the WSPU illuminated testimonial certificate that had been handed down through the women of the family. Signed by Emmeline Pankhurst, it congratulated Pinnance on her contribution to the movement, after her release from jail in 1907. Now framed in glass, the certificate was the centrepiece of the table at which the speakers sat. Margaret carefully read out the exact words. And it was easy to imagine how special Elizabeth Pinnance must have felt at being awarded this testimonial.

The other object on display – which made the whole event feel more like special access to a private museum than a book launch – was the Huddersfield National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies’ (NUWSS) banner. It is not normally available to public view at the Tolson museum. Hand-embroidered by Linthwaite/Colne Valley artist Florence Lockwood (1861–1937) in subtle shades of cotton, the banner showed one of the classic local scenes, the curving canal at Milnsbridge, chimneys and hills in the background curving up the Colne Valley.

Over wine women swapped stories of their own grandmothers’ lives there. The Huddersfield they knew was still connected to that of the suffragettes and suffragists, their families and their workplaces whom the book retrieves from obscurity.

We honoured the women who had won us the vote. And many there – including Liddington herself – had recently stood in local elections, to ensure that the British National Party had no chance to make local minorities into the second-class citizens that women a century earlier had been.