Solicitors clerk

23

Single

6 Carlton Street, Nottingham

WSPU

Evades

Fanny Gladys was born in Bradford. She is sometimes referred to as Fanny, sometimes Gladys, and sometimes as Miss F G Roberts. She was a former solicitor’s clerk who had taken a typing course in Bradford and was the Secretary of Bradford WSPU in 1908 where she chalked caricatures and rhymes on blackboards placed on the street following the Bradford Corporation’s forbidding of pavement chalking to advertise meetings. In the summer of 1909, she was helping Helen Watts in Nottingham and was based at 6 Carlton Street – an address also given by Nelly Crocker in an advert for underwear to be sold at a WSPU Christmas Fair. Fanny was imprisoned in 1909 and 1911 for breaking Post Office windows and her name is on an embroidered suffragette handkerchief held in the Sussex Museum. She cannot be traced on the 1911 census so may have been an evader. She and Nellie Crocker took over at the Nottingham WSPU office in about mid-1911. In 1912, Nelly Crocker and Fanny were both imprisoned for three months in Holloway Prison for breaking windows with hammers at the Post Office on the King’s Road Chelsea, London. They went on hunger strike and were forcibly fed. The two returned to Nottingham in June 1912 and were given a celebratory supper. Fanny then disappears until 1939 when she is recorded as secretary to an Orthopaedic Surgeon, Professor Garthorne Robert Girdlestone, in Oxfordshire. By then Fanny was living in Oxfordshire with Dorothy Vincent Carey. She died in 1975. Source: No Surrender :Women's Suffrage in Nottinghamshire - NWHG. Researched and contributed by Nottingham Women's History Group www.nottinghamwomenshistory.org.uk.