None given

43

Single

5 Middle Street, Horsham

NUWSS

Complies

Louisa Jane Churchman (1868-1943), eldest daughter of a Horsham grocer and wine merchant, was living in 1911 at 5 Middle Street with her widowed mother, sister Emmeline, and three ‘domestics’. In January 1910 she and her mother were on the platform at a crowded meeting at the King’s Head addressed by Florence Basden and Annette Verrall, chair and treasurer respectively of the Brighton and Hove Women’s Franchise Society. That summer, at a meeting at Horsham Park chaired by Brighton’s (see) Flora de Gaudrion Merrifield, the Horsham Suffrage Society, was formed. As default secretary of the HSS, Louisa resigned from the local Women Liberals Association, of which she was treasurer, because of the Liberal Government’s disdain of the Conciliation Bill offering to enfranchise single women householders and actively supported Florence de Fonblanque’s Horsham-based suffragist Marchers Qui Vive. In 1914 Louisa and Emmeline resigned as secretaries of the local Church of England Temperance Society because of the exclusion of women from the Chichester Diocesan Synod, declaring that they would henceforth devote themselves to women’s suffrage. When the NUWSS subsequently announced its suspension of political work, it was to Louisa Churchman that local offers of personal service were to be made. War work undertaken by HSS ranged from fruit bottling to fund-raising for the NUWSS Scottish Women’s Hospitals. Following the partial granting of the vote to women in February 1918, Louisa formed Horsham branches of the Women Citizen’s Association, affiliated to the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, and of the League of Nations Association. In the 1920s, now a committed Labour Party member, she identified herself with Labour Parliamentary candidates. In 1923 she became Horsham’s first woman JP; in 1934 she was elected a County Councillor. On her death in 1943 tributes filled the front and back pages of the West Sussex County Times. Contributed by: Independent researcher and writer, Frances Stenlake.