Nurse and author lecturing on health and nutrition

34

Single

15 High Street, Southover, Lewes

WSPU

Evades

Born in 1869 in India of Irish parents, Greta Allen, a member of the Irish Women’s Franchise League, lived at 15 Southover High Street, Lewes and became a paid organiser of the WSPU in Brighton. As an authority on public health, she had been lecturing in Ireland and in England since the early 1890s, and was in the Lewes area by 1908. By 1910, Greta was speaking at Brighton and Hove WSPU meetings and was arrested with WSPU treasurer Beatrice Sanders outside Nos.10 and 11 Downing Street in November that year. Greta’s one-month prison sentence for willful damage qualified her in January 1912, to wear prison uniform to the annual Fancy Dress Ball held by the Mayor of Lewes, and, at the British Medical Association Conference on crime and punishment in Brighton in July 1913, to describe the prison conditions endured by suffragettes.

Greta took over as WSPU organiser in Brighton after the death of Mary Clarke on Christmas Day 1910, and at a meeting at the YMCA hall on the Steine in April 1911, she advocated the WSPU policy of evading the Government’s 1911 Census as the only dignified attitude for women who, without the vote, were classed with lunatics and imbeciles. Beyond Brighton, she addressed meetings across the south from Plymouth to Hastings, and in September 1912 spoke at Phoenix Park, Dublin with the WSPU’s ‘General’ Flora Drummond.
In June 1913, Greta required police rescue when her attempt to rally local support for Beatrice Sanders, then briefly imprisoned in Lewes, met with dangerously aggressive opposition. Later that summer, she was the WSPU ‘English Riviera organiser’, sending her reports to the WSPU newspaper Suffragette from Torquay. When she resigned as WSPU organiser in Brighton at the end of 1913, it was to resume work as a health lecturer in Sussex until at least 1916. Contributed by Dr. Diana Wilkins, freelance art historian and curator. For more see Frances Stenlake ' The Lady Fired Splendidly: Lewes and the Women's Suffrage Campaign' Sussex Archaeological Collections 152 (2014) 139-152. Available for free via https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/