Writer

51

Married

Brookside, Ifield, Crawley, West Sussex

MLWS

Complies

Jaakoff Prelooker (1860-1935) a Russian teacher and writer who advocated international peace, women’s rights and religious tolerance, lost his position in a Russian Government school and was excommunicated by the Jewish Assembly in Odessa as a heretic. He fled to London and in 1905 married an Englishwoman. The couple and their daughter moved first from Brixton to Eastbourne. They were living at Brookside, Ifield, Crawley by March 1908 when Prelooker was summoned to Horsham Police Court for withholding his rates and taxes as a protest against the political disqualification of women. On the Saturday that the police were due at 4pm to execute a distress warrant and seize Prelooker’s furniture, two open-air ‘demonstrations’ were arranged: at 3pm in the grounds of Prelooker’s house, and at 5.30pm in the High Street. Edith New and Nancy Lightman of the WSPU arrived from London with a ‘Votes for Women’ banner to attach to the Brookside gates. They and Prelooker delivered speeches to the assembled crowd but the police did not turn up. Their disappointed audience dispersed. The speakers then moved to the High Street to address another large crowd. The police postponed their visit until the Monday when the sums due and Court expenses were fully paid by Prelooker who announced that his object had been achieved: to make a moral protest for the purpose of public enlightenment. Later in 1908, during the four-month WFL caravan tour of Kent, Surrey and Sussex undertaken by Muriel Matters, Prelooker was ‘of great assistance’, and hosted a meeting in Crawley addressed by Edith How Martyn. In December 1912 he chaired a meeting at the town’s Railway Hotel addressed by Goldfinch Bate, of the International Women’s Franchise Club, and Dr Charles Drysdale, fellow member of the MLWS, who had a home in Henfield. In February 1913 Prelooker organised an exhibition in Eastbourne Town Hall on behalf of the MLWS. All the major suffrage societies took part and the event began with a procession round the town led by Prelooker carrying a NUWSS banner. The object of the exhibition was to demonstrate the extent of the women’s suffrage movement and displays included the products of sweated industries. Among the leading activists who made speeches were Edith Zangwill of the WSPU and the Jewish League for Women’s Suffrage, Revd Claude Hinscliff, founder with his wife Gertrude of the Church League for Women’s Suffrage, Margaret Kineton-Parkes of the WTRL, and Dr Charles Drysdale. The exhibition resulted in the formation of a branch of the MLWS in Eastbourne and new members for the NUWSS. In November 1912 Prelooker attended the first Congress of the Men’s International Alliance for Women’s Suffrage, held in London, and in August 1913 he represented this organisation at the 20th Universal Peace Conference at The Hague. Prelooker also continued to participate in local suffrage events. At a rally in Horsham’s Causeway in May 1913 of Florence de Fonblanque’s Marchers qui Vive, the speakers were ‘thanked at some length by a gentleman of markedly un-English appearance and a foreign accent’. Please note: 'Brookside' no longer exists and so its position on the map is approximate. Sources: East Grinstead Observer; Sussex County Herald; West Sussex County Times; Eastbourne Gazette; Suffragette; Women’s Franchise; The Vote. Contributed by independent researcher & writer Frances Stenlake.