Not known

45

Single

The Acorn, Spout Hill, Rotherfield, East Sussex.

WSPU

Evades

Maud Roll lived at The Acorn, a house built in the grounds of Oakdene, the home of her friend and fellow campaigner (see) Violet Honnor Morten. Maud appears to have been a member of the WSPU who joined the Women’s Tax Resistance League (WTRL), formed in 1909 of militant and constitutional campaigners. In 1911, she appears to have taken part in the WSPU boycott of the Census. Another Rotherfield resident, Dr Sophia Jex-Blake, had long railed against the taxing of unenfranchised women, and it was just months after her death in January 1912 that the Kent and Sussex Courier reported that Maud Roll would be the district’s first WTRL ‘martyr’. She would be supported by WTRL secretary Mrs Kineton-Parkes, MLWS (Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage) secretary Dr Charles Drysdale, of Heathfield, and Honnor Morten. The following week the Crowborough Weekly called the ‘No Vote, No Taxes Sale’ a unique event in Rotherfield history. Six silver teaspoons belonging to Maud Roll were auctioned and at the meeting held on the spot and chaired by Honnor Morten, Mrs Kineton Parkes’ standard resolution - that women were justified in refusing to pay taxes until the Government granted them the vote on equal terms with men - was seconded by Drysdale and carried with one dissentient. The spoons were returned to Maud Roll that evening by Dr Helen Webb, who lived across the lane from Maud Roll and Honnor Morten and was secretary of the Rotherfield and Mark Cross branch of the NUWSS. The spoons were a present from her committee. The following year in 1913, the supportive Daily Herald carried a notice of a public auction and protest meeting to be held at Mark Cross on 24th May. The Kent and Sussex Courier reported that Maud Roll and Honnor Morten had again refused to pay their taxes and had yielded to the police a silver salver and a gold ring for public auction. These items were sold from a wagonette on the village street where a crowd of more than 150 people assembled. Immediately after this second distraint sale, another protest meeting was held by the WTRL. Maud Roll presided, declaring that she and Honnor Morten would be at Mark Cross crossroads every year until they won the right to vote. The large crowd was also addressed by Anne Cobden Sanderson, founder member of the WTRL, and by Reginald Pott of the MLWS. In June 1914 Maud Roll was the subject of a third distraint sale, when a silver dish was auctioned in the Pantiles Assembly Rooms, Tunbridge Wells. The protest meeting held outside on the Common afterwards, was addressed both by Mrs Kineton-Parkes and by Mrs Cavendish Bentinck of the New Constitutional Society for Women’s Suffrage. The following month Maud Roll, who moved into Oakdene following Honnor Morten’s death, hosted a meeting there of Dr Helen Webb’s NUWSS branch - the speaker being Ada Nield Chew, a former factory worker, now a NUWSS working women’s organizer, who was listened to with great interest by the audience, many of whom were cottagers. From 1924 until 1934 Maud Roll was to serve on the Uckfield Rural Council as one of the three members for Rotherfield, and as a JP from 1931, until she moved to Tunbridge Wells in the early 1940s.
Contributed by Frances Stenlake, Sussex suffrage researcher.