None given

64

Widow

The Shrubbery, Broadwater, Worthing, Sussex

NUWSS

Complies

Ellen Chapman was born Ellen Preston in 1847 in Clerkenwell where her father was a wholesale druggist. The 1911 Census lists her as Ellen Chapman, widow, living at The Shrubbery, Broadwater, Worthing, with four servants. The Shrubbery since demolished, stood on the site of the current fire station in Ardsheal Road. A member of the Conservative Women’s Franchise Association, the Catholic Women’s Suffrage Society, and the NUWSS, Ellen became President of the Worthing Women’s Franchise Society, formed at a meeting she arranged in November 1909, chaired by Brighton’s (see) Flora de Gaudrion Merrifield. The number of members enrolled enabled affiliation to the NUWSS and in June 1910 Worthing joined the Brighton and Cuckfield branches in the Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire NUWSS Federation. Ellen chaired meetings, took part in deputations, debates and suffragist theatrical entertainments, held fund-raising fetes in her garden, and repeatedly sent repudiations of militancy to the local press. She attended the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance Congress in Budapest in July 1913. Thanks to her, the WWFS was able to rent town centre premises, first at 31 Warwick Street, then at 1 Warwick Street, opposite the Town Hall. In 1911 Ellen became Broadwater Town Councillor, elected unopposed. Four years later she was appointed Mayor, but the Council subsequently decided that while the country was at war a woman should not hold such a high office. Towards the end of 1918, as President of the Worthing branch of the National Council of Women, she chaired the meeting announcing the formation, under the auspices of the NCW, of a Worthing branch of the Women’s Citizens Association, then chaired the inaugural meeting of the Worthing WCA. In 1919 she became one of the first two women West Sussex County Councillors. When Ellen did become the first woman Mayor in Sussex in 1920, she was reappointed for a second year, and, under the League of Help scheme to aid areas of France devastated by the War, instigated the town’s adoption of Richebourg L’Avoue, where so many Sussex soldiers had died. Championed by the Worthing Gazette as having ‘contributed such conspicuous sanity towards the feminist question in particular’, she sadly died too soon to see women granted equal franchise in 1928. Contributed by: independent researcher & writer, Frances Stenlake.