Paid organiser for Nottingham WSPU

39

Single

8 East Circus Street, Nottingham

WSPU

Evades

Nellie was a Women’s Social and Political Union organiser in Nottingham. She was born in Stogumber, Somerset; her father was a Doctor, and she was a cousin of Emmeline and Dorothy Pethick. In 1906, Nellie was a strong Liberal Party supporter, being honorary secretary to the Wellington's Women's Liberal Association, but became disillusioned. In 1907, she left the party of 'a Government which persecutes women' to join the WSPU and spoke at the founding meeting of the WSPU branch in Bath as well as at the Hyde Park rally in 1908. She was appointed as WSPU organiser for Yorkshire, based in Sheffield, and then in 1909 became WSPU organiser in Nottingham until 1912. She was first arrested in 1909, taking up her post in Nottingham directly after a hunger strike. She was next arrested in London on Black Friday in November 1910. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Nellie was an early visitor to Eagle House, Bath, where hunger striking suffragettes went to recover. On 7th February 1911, she planted a tree, an Abies Magnifica in the Suffragette Orchard there. She evaded the 1911 Census and cannot be found anywhere on census night. However, her address in 1910 and 1912 appears to have been 8 East Circus Street which trade directories indicate was where John Wykes, a cab proprietor and his wife, took in boarders. So, it seems likely this was also Nellie’s regular address in 1911 and hence where she is located on the map. An advert in the ‘Votes for Women’ newspaper Oct 27 1911 also has Miss Nellie Crocker at 6 Carlton Street (aka Clinton Chambers where various businesses and offices rented space) selling underclothes for the WSPU Christmas Fair, so this was likely a local WSPU office address she also used. Nellie was involved in the first wave of largescale window smashing in London which led to her being imprisoned in Holloway for 3 months from March 1st – June 4th1912. On 4 March 1912, she attacked a post office in Sloane Square, London, smashing its windows. A policeman had followed her and her two conspirators from the Gardenia restaurant in Covent Garden. This was her eighth arrest. Nellie recalled the hustling and jostling of the Westminster protests and how suffragette Mary Leigh was so skilled in ju-jitsu, that it took six policemen to arrest her. She was involved in seven by-elections, organising WSPU interventions. She recalled a by election in Nottinghamshire where “our good driver armed himself with a large iron rod which he placed under his seat to protect himself.” Nelly left Nottingham and the WSPU in 1912, probably in protest after Pethick relatives (Emmeline and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence) were effectively forced out of the WSPU. Later in life, Nellie wrote an account of her suffragette activities which she presented to Girton College, Cambridge. She was a member of Suffragette Fellowship and left them the residue of her estate. Nellie wrote in her memoirs in 1949 that ‘Modern Young Women seem unaware of the price paid for their political and social emancipation and modern historians have greatly ignored the struggle”. She lived in Maida Vale, London, and died in 1962. Researched and contributed by Nottingham Women's History group www.nottinghamwomenshistory.org.uk. Sources: No Surrender! Women's Suffrage in Nottinghamshire, Rowena Edlin-White (Ed.) Nottingham Women's History Group ISBN:978-1-900074-31-; Elizabeth Crawford, The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide, 1866-1928 (1999).