None

43

Married

Gale, Chelwood Gate, Danehill, Sussex.

CUWFA & NUWSS

Complies

Lady Eleanor Lambton, a daughter of the Earl of Durham, married Lord Robert Cecil, a son of the Marquess of Salisbury, in 1899. When the formation of the Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Association (CUWFA) was announced in November 1908, ‘Lady Robert Cecil’ was one of its titled Vice-Presidents. A few weeks later, she was among the ‘influential ladies’ who signed a protest, published widely in the Press, against the WSPU disruption of the Women Liberals Federation meeting in the Albert Hall on 5th December at which Chancellor Lloyd George was to make a statement about women’s suffrage. In London, Eleanor as chair of the committee of the Marylebone and Paddington branch of the CUWFA, introduced a scheme to canvass municipal women voters in the interests of women’s suffrage and induce those who were Conservative to join the CUWFA. On 17th June 1911 Eleanor marched under the CUWFA banner in the ‘Coronation’ suffrage procession from the Embankment to the Albert Hall. In the autumn of 1911, to promote the formation of a Hitchin, Stevenage and District branch of the CUWFA, she addressed a meeting in Hitchin, where her husband would soon be elected MP. She also became a Vice-President of the Letchworth and District Women’s Suffrage Society. Chelwood Gate, Danehill, was the Cecils’ Sussex home from 1899, and in May 1911 and November 1912 Eleanor led Central Sussex Women’s Suffrage Society deputations to the East Grinstead constituency Conservative MP Henry Cautley. She chaired NUWSS branch meetings at Crowborough and Heathfield, was one of the patrons of the Sweated Industries Exhibition staged in Haywards Heath by the Central Sussex Women’s Suffrage Society in February 1912, and opened the corresponding East Grinstead Women’s Suffrage Society exhibition a few months later. The Cecils took part in the inauguration of the North Sussex branch of the CUWFA in Lindfield in April 1913. Eleanor continued to appear on Central Sussex Women’s Suffrage Society platforms however, presiding over the historic visit of NUWSS President Millicent Garrett Fawcett, to Cuckfield’s Queen’s Hall on 20th July 1914, and chairing the East Grinstead Women’s Suffrage Society AGM in January 1915. The welfare of women being of paramount interest, in 1916 Eleanor and other leading suffragists formed the Women’s Local Government Society to promote the appointment of women to committees and sub-committees concerned with the care of mothers and young children. Active in the National Council of Women, she was on the committee that organised its four-day conference at the Brighton Dome in 1924. After the War she resumed her travels to Canada and other ‘British dominions’ to study the living conditions of girls brought out by the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women. Eleanor wrote regularly for the monthly CUWFA Review and other periodicals. In an article in the Quarterly Review of January 1913 on the training of the notoriously anti-suffrage Queen Victoria, she concluded, ‘How the Queen herself reconciled her active exercise of authority with her views about feminine duty is a problem before which curiosity must remain unsatisfied.’ Sources: Mid Sussex Times; Kent and Sussex Courier; West Sussex Gazette; Worthing Herald; Worthing Gazette; Conservative Women’s Franchise Association Review; Votes for Women; Common Cause; Women’s Franchise; Marylebone Mercury; The Queen; Illustrated London News. Researched & contributed by independent writer and researcher Frances Stenlake.