Writer

49

Widow

Backsettown, Henfield, West Sussex

WSPU

Resists

Henfield’s best-known suffrage campaigner is American-born actress and writer Elizabeth Robins (1862-1952). Particularly acclaimed for her performances in Ibsen’s feminist plays, she retired from the stage at the age of 40 and joined the London Women’s Suffrage Society. By 1909, when she came to live at Backsettown, Henfield, she had switched to the WSPU. As a member of its committee, she wrote articles for the WSPU newspaper Votes for Women and argued the suffrage case in letters to the Times. Elizabeth’s play ‘Votes for Women’ was commissioned by Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, treasurer of the WSPU, and performed at the Royal Court Theatre in April 1907. Speaking engagements took her all over the country. She shared platforms with the Pankhursts and Emeline Pethick- Lawrence, and sometimes stood in for Emmeline Pankhurst. In June 1909, a major Brighton and Hove WSPU event was a lecture by Elizabeth at Hove Town Hall, advertised by a Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage (MLWS) member displaying a large poster on his boat moored off Palace Pier. Signatures for 29 May 1909 in the Backsettown Visitors Book (see image), include those of Christabel Pankhurst, Emmeline and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, and Mabel Tuke, WSPU secretary. Backsettown is reputed to have welcomed suffragettes evading arrest or recovering from imprisonment and hunger striking. Christabel Pankhurst stayed two nights in March 1910 and in March 1912 the police searched for her there. As well as being a member of the Actresses Franchise League, Elizabeth was President of the Women Writers Suffrage League, and led its contingent in processions such as the Coronation Procession of 17 June 1910 (see our blog ‘A Fragile Unity’). A few weeks later she took part in a meeting in the Henfield Assembly Room addressed by representatives of the NUWSS. In April 1911, Elizabeth refused to provide the required details for the government census survey, instead inscribing her page ‘The occupier of this house will be ready to give the desired information the moment the Government recognises women as responsible citizens’. In December 1911, she chaired the first WSPU meeting to be held in Henfield. She and speaker Isabel Seymour, a WSPU administrator, ‘were listened to with rapt interest’ and several new members joined. Elizabeth’s swansong as a WSPU star speaker was the WSPU ‘mass meeting’ at the Albert Hall on 15 June. She resigned in October 1912, when Emmeline and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence were expelled for expressing misgivings about the WSPU’s escalation of violent and destructive action. They had founded and edited Votes for Women; the last Sussex entry in the final issue of this, dated 18 October 1912, concerns a special late train to Henfield booked for the night of Emmeline Pankhurst’s speech at the Brighton Dome on 22 October. The late train may not have had many takers: Elizabeth led strong support for the Pethick-Lawrences in Henfield. In 1918, with a first measure of women’s suffrage about to be granted, Elizabeth wrote to NUWSS President, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, hoping for her presence at a celebratory suffragist dinner: ‘This moment of Victory is a time to turn from points of difference to the many points of agreement’. Sources: Votes for Women, Suffragette, Common Cause, Brighton Gazette, LSE Women’s Library 7MGF/A/1/135, Henfield Museum website blog by Robert Gordon: Elizabeth Robins - A New Woman. Contributed by Independent writer and researcher Frances Stenlake.