Suffrage Lecturer

25

Single

Woodgate, Danehill, Sussex

NUWSS

Complies

Cicely Corbett (later Corbett Fisher, 1885-1959) was the younger daughter of suffrage campaigners Marie and Charles Corbett, of Woodgate, Danehill, Sussex, and sister of (see) Margery Corbett Ashby. She became a practised stage performer through contributing songs to concerts at the Congregational Hall, built by veteran suffragist Louisa Martindale, in nearby Horsted Keynes. After graduating from Somerville College, Oxford, in 1907, and as secretary of her mother’s Forward Suffrage Union in the Women’s Liberal Association, Cicely became much in demand as a speaker all over the country, both to explain the Forward Suffrage Union to WLA branches and to talk on behalf of the NUWSS. In 1909, she took the stage in Cardiff while friend (see) Helga Gill, a Norwegian suffragist, was spending a month as NUWSS organiser there, and joined in the NUWSS Scottish Highlands Campaign, chairing a meeting at Kingussie. In Sussex that year she spoke to the Haywards Heath and Lindfield Women Liberals Association and to the Brighton and Hove Women’s Franchise Society. Cicely participated in Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage (MLWS) rallies in Trafalgar Square and was regularly paired with a MLWS speaker, for example Laurence Housman, to speak at open-air meetings throughout Greater London. In 1909, the International Women’s Franchise Club was formed, under the auspices of the/MLWS, with Cicely its ‘indefatigable’ secretary. Cicely also spoke in company with Millicent Garrett Fawcett, on one occasion singing the suffrage version of Hope and Glory. Speaking tours took her to Ireland in 1911 and again, with Helga Gill, in 1912. She describes her occupation on the 1911 census as (see) ‘Suffrage lecturer’. Having first gone to Hungary in 1910 to help organise suffrage groups there, she returned, as the recently-married Cecily Corbett Fisher, for the IWSA Congress in Budapest in June 1913 where, as ‘a great favourite’, she drew huge audiences. In London, Cicely was a member of the executive committee of the East St Pancras NUWSS, and on the general committee of the Actresses’ Franchise League. She did not neglect Sussex, however, speaking at meetings at Arundel, the tiny village of Slaugham, Rotherfield, and Uckfield, as well as at Horsted Keynes and Danehill. Reflecting the Corbett family’s commitment to disarmament, Cicely reported on the first Peace Study Conference, in Amsterdam, held following the decision taken at the 1926 Conference of the International Alliance for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship to study ‘Peace questions’. She departed from family tradition in becoming ‘an ardent supporter of the Labour movement’: in November 1928, as secretary of the Advisory Committee on Finance and Commerce for the National Labour Party, she addressed a Cuckfield Labour Party meeting in the Queen’s Hall on ‘Disarmament and Peace’. In September 1933, at an East Grinstead Labour Party Fete and Rally in Elm Hall garden, she chaired a talk by ‘Manny’ Shinwell. The subject of a talk by Cicely at the Danehill Women’s Institute in March 1935 was ‘Current Events’, and in 1936 she urged both the Danehill and the Horsted Keynes WI to join the League of Nations Union. ‘As responsible citizens they should not only look upon the light and pleasant side of life.’ Contributed by independent researcher and writer, Frances Stenlake. Sources: Mid Sussex Times; Uckfield Weekly; Irish Citizen; Women’s Franchise; Common Cause.