None given

30

Single

The Vicarage, Park Road, Burgess Hill, West Sussex

NUWSS

Complies

Dorothy Bonavia Hunt came to live in Burgess Hill in 1905 when her father, Revd Henry Bonavia Hunt, took over as Vicar of St John the Evangelist after 30 years at St Paul’s, Kilburn. The family was musical and literary: Dorothy’s father had founded the Trinity College of Music; her mother, Madeline, was a much-published author. By 1905 Dorothy’s pianist sister Ethel, her elder by 10 years, was teaching music in India. Dorothy herself performed at local events as a soprano and violinist. In 1909 Dorothy organised a WSPU meeting held on 1 June in the Parish Hall. This was addressed by ‘polished platform speaker’ Helen Ogston who had begun work a few months earlier as the first WSPU paid organiser in Brighton after achieving notoriety in December 1908 for wielding a dog whip against stewards who tried to eject her from the Albert Hall for interrupting a speech to Women Liberals by Lloyd George. A report in Votes for Women of the Burgess Hill meeting claimed that copies of this paper were sold out. Three months later the Mid Sussex Times reported that Helen Ogston, having ‘made out so good a case for votes for women in such a brilliant speech’, had been invited to return to Burgess Hill, and delivered ‘another fine exposition of the subject’. This second meeting was chaired by Revd Baldwin Pinney, senior curate at St John’s. By August 1910, however, Dorothy had allied herself to the non-militants, and a Central Sussex Women’s Suffrage Society garden party hosted by Mrs Carey of Lea Copse, Burgess Hill, concluded with a display of Morris dancing by schoolgirls under Dorothy’s direction. In July 1913, when the Brighton Road contingent of the Great Suffrage Pilgrimage stopped for a meeting under the Reformers Tree in the centre of Burgess Hill, Mrs Bonavia Hunt was ’one of the numerous prominent Burgess Hillians present’. Dorothy ‘was among the cyclists who bore the suffragist colours’ and was also named in the report of the Pilgrims setting off from Cuckfield the next morning. By September 1913 Dorothy had become secretary of a new Burgess Hill branch of the Central Sussex Women’s Suffrage Society and had also joined the Mid Sussex branch of the Church League for Women’s Suffrage. In February 1914, she and her father attended a large meeting in the St John’s Institute addressed by ‘one of the foremost women speakers in the country’, Maude Royden, editor of Common Cause and a leading figure in the Church League for Women’s Suffrage. The annual report delivered at the Central Sussex Women’s Suffrage Society AGM in Cuckfield’s Queen’s Hall, in July 1914, where the guest speaker was Millicent Garrett Fawcett, made special mention of the first year’s activity of the Burgess Hill branch ‘under the able leadership of Miss Bonavia Hunt’. Dorothy is known now as the author of Pemberley Shades, a sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, first published in 1949 while she was living with one of her two brothers, a vicar in Bedfordshire. Sources: Mid Sussex Times; Votes for Women; Common Cause. Contributed by independent writer and researcher Frances Stenlake.