Medical doctor

48

Single

3 Osborne Terrace, Newcastle

NUWSS

Evades

Ethel Mary Nucella Williams (1863-1948) was born in Cromer, Norfolk. Her father was a country squire and a friend of author Lewis Carroll. Her mother’s family had included William Harvey, the seventeenth-century physician famous for describing the circulation of the blood. Ethel was educated at Norwich High School and Newnham Cambridge, although she did not take a degree as women were not then permitted. She eventually took an MB in 1891, achieved an MD in 1895 at the London School of Medicine for Women, and returned to Cambridge securing a diploma in Public Health in 1899. She spent some time working in London at Clapham Maternity Hospital as a Medical Officer and at a dispensary for women and children in Blackfriars. She returned to Newcastle in 1906 as the city’s first woman doctor forming a joint practice with Ethel Bentham. That year, she was also the first woman to drive a car in Newcastle which would come in handy during her suffrage campaigning (see image). Like most women doctors of her generation, Ethel was concerned with the health needs of women and children and provided milk for infants at her own expense to try and reduce Newcastle’s appalling infant mortality rate. In 1909, she was appointed to the senate of Durham University and later became a member of the Newcastle Education Committee and Justice of the Peace. In 1917, Ethel co-founded the Northern Women’s Hospital (now the Nuffield Health Clinic on Osborne Road) and helped initiate residential care for boys with learning disabilities. She was also one of the earliest members of the Medical Women’s Federation founded in 1917 to further the interests of women doctors and patients. Ethel had a long association with campaign for female suffrage, signing the Declaration in Favour of Women’s Suffrage in 1889 and later became president to the Newcastle and District Women’s Suffrage Society (NUWSS). She took part in the NUWSS ‘mud march’ in 1907 and was also involved in suffrage processions and marches in Newcastle. The suffragist marching banner she may have carried in 1907 (see images) and possible on other marches is part of Newcastle University Library’s Special Collections and has been restored by the People's History Museum, Manchester. Despite belonging to the law abiding NUWSS, Ethel illegally evaded the government census survey in 1911 being deliberately absent from her address at 3 Osborne Terrace which she shared with (see) Frances Hardcastle, her lifelong companion. In the end, the census return (see image) was signed on her behalf in her absence by Helen Moss a locum doctor. Also present was Clementina Gordon, an organizing secretary for the NUWSS. This form of passive resistance suited Ethel and she also became a tax resistor. She began withholding her taxes while the highly anticipated Conciliation Bill was undergoing final readings in parliament. The bill, originated by a group of cross-party MPs, promised the vote to some women householders. When the bill was torpedoed by Asquith in 1912, Ethel refused to pay the taxes. In June 1913, she was one of 100 NUWSS members who left Newcastle, banners aloft, to join the great and arduous NUWSS Pilgrimage down to London. By 1915, she was chair of the North Eastern Federation of the NUWSS. When war broke out in 1914, Ethel severed her ties with the Liberal Party for their inaction on female suffrage and became more closely aligned with the programme of the Labour Party – though it is unlikely she joined it. She did join the Union of Democratic Control which campaigned for greater accountability in the making of British foreign policy and was secretary of the Newcastle Workers and Soldiers Council modeled on the Russian ‘soviets’ established after the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II, and in which Special Branch took a keen interest, preventing many meetings from taking place. Ethel was also a founding member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (she was secretary of the Newcastle branch in 1934). In 1924 Ethel retired from medicine but remained actively involved in the peace movement. Sources: Special thanks to Mick Sharp for the digitized images from 'Ethel Williams', Special Collection Library, Newcastle University; Elizabeth Crawford, The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide, 1866-1928 (London: 1999); 'Votes for Women: Newcastle's Own Radical Suffragist' at https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/speccoll/tag/ethel-williams/ ;
Ornella Moscucci ‘Ethel Williams’ https://womenvotepeace.com/women/ethel-williams-bio/