None

44

Married

Peace Cottage, Brendon, North Devon.

WSPU

Evades

Evelina Haverfield (1867-1920) was born Evelina Scarlett in Scotland and was the youngest daughter of the 3rd Baron Abinger. The young Evelina was a keen horsewoman and in 1887 married Major Henry Haverfield, moved to Dorset, and had two sons. After her husband’s death in 1895, she remarried, spending two years with her husband in South Africa founding a retirement camp for abandoned horses while her sister, a qualified doctor, investigated conditions in British concentration camps for a commission headed by Mrs Millicent Fawcett, later leader of the NUWSS. However, her second marriage was not a happy one. Evelina had kept the Haverfield name from her first marriage, and after returning to Dorset, the couple drifted apart. Evelina was likely a member of the local NUWSS branch in Dorset from the 1890s, but in 1908 switched allegiance to the WSPU. She gave generously to the society as well as donating to others and took part in varied suffrage events and activities. For instance, she was involved in the NUWSS caravan campaign in June 1909, where her horsemanship proved invaluable dealing with the caravan carthorses. Later that month, she was arrested after taking part in the WSPU deputation from Caxton Hall to the House of Commons and was defended by (see) Lord Robert Cecil (MLWS). In 1910, she was a mounted marshal for the WSPU processions on the 18th of June and 22nd of July; riding alongside (see) Vera Holme with whom she became romantically involved for the rest of her life. In November, she was arrested and charged with assaulting a policeman during the violent scuffles that broke out at a suffragette protest dubbed ‘Black Friday’. She was reported to have said about striking the policeman: ‘It was not hard enough. Next time I will bring a revolver’. Her fine was paid without her consent so she did not go to prison, but she did serve two weeks imprisonment shortly afterwards for attempting to break through a police cordon during a bout of window smashing following the government’s torpedoing of the Conciliation bill. In 1914, Evelina left the WSPU and joined Sylvia Pankhurst’s breakaway society the East London Federation of the WSPU becoming honorary treasurer, and later joined the United Suffragists. At the outbreak of War, she helped launch the Women’s Emergency Corps; founded the Women’s Volunteer Reserve becoming Commandant; served briefly as Commander-in-chief of the Women’s Reserve Ambulance Corps (forerunner of the WAAC); and in 1915, spent two years in Serbia and Russia in charge of the transport column of the Scottish Women’s Hospital to which Vera Holme belonged as driver and mechanic. In 1918, she co-founded with Flora Sandes a fund for promoting comforts for Serbian soldiers and prisoners and returned to Serbia to found an orphanage, dying shortly afterwards of pneumonia in 1920. Upon her death, Vera Holme became administrator of the fund and home Evelina had founded for Serbian orphans and was granted £50 a year for life in Evelina’s will. In 1929, a new health centre was built in Evelina’s memory in Bajina Bashta, Serbia, where she is buried (see image), and a street has been dedicated to her. Main source: Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide, 1866-1928 (London, 1999).