Lecturer on Suffrage Politics

28

Married

22 Langside Avenue, Putney, London SW15 5QT

NUWSS

Complies

Margery Corbett Ashby (1882-1981) was the elder daughter of leading Liberal suffrage campaigners (see) Marie and Charles Corbett of Woodgate, Danehill, Sussex. In 1904 she and sister Cicely accompanied Marie to Berlin for the first International Women’s Suffrage Congress. With a BA from Newnham, Cambridge, Margery became secretary of the NUWSS, then joined the executive committee and was soon addressing public meetings in London and in Sussex: at Brighton Dome in October 1910 she was the principal speaker at the biggest event yet organised by the Brighton and Hove Women’s Franchise Society. While their father was briefly Liberal MP for East Grinstead and had a flat in London, she and Cicely formed the ‘Younger Suffragists’ there. This non-party, non-militant society’s inaugural meeting in December 1909 was chaired by Margery and addressed by Lady Betty Balfour of the Conservative Women’s Franchise Society.
County Liberals and eminent suffrage campaigners gathered for Margery’s wedding to Brian Ashby in Danehill Church in December 1910. The couple subsequently lived in Langside Avenue in Putney, where we find them on the 1911 census and where Margery is described as a lecturer on suffrage and politics. Margery became a Poor Law Guardian in Wandsworth and chair of the Barnes, Mortlake and East Sheen branch of the London Society for Women’s Suffrage in 1914, the year her son was born. Yet she continued to speak for women’s suffrage in Danehill as well as in London: at a ‘drawing room’ meeting hosted by Mrs Firebrace of Danehurst in November 1912, as well as on a platform at the Hyde Park mass rally at the culmination of the Great Suffrage Pilgrimage in July 1913. When 1918 Representation of the People Act allowed women to stand for Parliament, Margery stood for the Liberals at several General Elections just to further the cause. At Ladywood, Birmingham, in December 1918, she was, as the sympathetic Mid Sussex Times reported, ‘snowed under’ by votes for Neville Chamberlain who then entered the House of Commons for the first time. Three years later she ‘made a splendid fight for Liberalism at Richmond’, supported by fellow Sussex Liberal, Lord Denman of Balcombe Place. The Mid Sussex Times took pride in announcing the achievements of ‘Charles Corbett’s clever daughter’ (sic), repeatedly reminding readers of her election in 1923 as President of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance, and in 1927 as President of the Women’s National Liberal Federation. In 1929, as President of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, the successor to the NUWSS, Margery attended a meeting at Balcombe Place to promote the formation of Townswomen’s Guilds in Sussex. Women having been granted equal voting rights with men in 1928, the NUSEC was, in 1933, succeeded by the National Union of Townswomen’s Guilds, with Margery as President. As a member of the British delegation to the disappointing 1932-4 League of Nations World Disarmament Conference in Geneva, Margery worked with Lord Robert Cecil, of nearby Chelwood Gate, a founder member, with her father, of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage in 1907. In February 1935, these two luminaries of the women’s rights and peace movements emphasized to a packed audience in Danehill Memorial Hall the need to persevere with League of Nations peace efforts. Margery referring to having worked in 30 countries, spoke of ‘the feeling of the world for peace’. ‘It is our business to let the Government know what we want.’ She continued to live in the Putney area of London during much of her working life, later moving to back to Sussex. Margery Corbett Ashby was made a DBE in 1967. For more information see Margery Corbett Ashby in Elizabeth Crawford: The Women’s Suffrage Movement: a reference guide,1866-1928 (London: Routledge, 2001) and her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The original entry has been added to and updated by independent researcher and writer Frances Stenlake using sources: Common Cause; Mid Sussex Times; Brighton Gazette; Danehill Parish Historical Society, Woodgate July 2010; Margery Corbett Ashby reminiscences recorded by J Bakewell 1972, Women' Library, LSE.