None given

43

Separated

Vann Bridge, Fernhurst, Haslemere, Sussex.

NUWSS

Complies

American-born Alys Russell followed her mother as a campaigner. When Hannah Whitall Smith died in 1911, the Common Cause honoured ‘an evangelical speaker of passion and repute, an ardent Suffragist and a leader of the British Women’s Temperance Association’. After separating from Bertrand Russell in 1911, Alys took up residence at Ford Place, Arundel, West Sussex. In June 1912, she joined (see) Lady Maud Parry on the platform at a NUWSS meeting in Arundel Town Hall addressed by Sir Harry Johnston and Cicely Corbett. In January 1913 she presided at a Littlehampton Women’s Suffrage Society meeting. In May 1913, as a newly elected Vice-President of the Worthing Women’s Franchise Society, she chaired a lantern lecture about women factory workers, speaking about her own brief experience as a factory worker in 1903. On Saturday 19 July 1913, Alys and Lady Maud Parry led Littlehampton ‘Pilgrims’ to walk to Angmering before catching the train to Brighton. On Monday 21 July they headed the Brighton Road contingent of the Great Suffragist Pilgrimage as it set off for London. Alys addressed meetings on the way at Burgess Hill, Crawley, and Lowfield Heath. In October, opening the new premises of the Worthing Women’s Franchise Society, she urged members to follow up the impression made by the Pilgrimage in country districts by carrying the message out to villages during the winter. During that autumn, Alys talked to the Brighton and Hove Women’s Franchise Society and to the Worthing Women’s Franchise Society about schools for mothers such as she had established at St Pancras in 1907 as chair of the St Pancras Mothers and Infants Society. She addressed the Petersfield Women’s Suffrage Society on ‘Temperance, Women and the Vote’, and held an impromptu outdoor meeting in Chichester, having been crowded out of a debate in the Corn Exchange between Lady Selborne and Gladys Pott of the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage. By the end of 1913 speaking engagements were taking Alys all over the Southeast. Following the passing of the White Slave Traffic Act in December, she arranged for Mrs Bonwick, of the Liberal Women’s Suffrage Union, to address Littlehampton’s Women’s Temperance Association and the Littlehampton Women’s Suffrage Society in January 1914. She spoke herself in Littlehampton’s Congregational Church on women’s place in the community and presided over a Littlehampton Women’s Suffrage Society public meeting addressed by Israel Zangwill and Sir Harry Johnston. In the spring of 1914, with writer Rosalind Travers, of Tortington House, Arundel, Alys held weekly social gatherings for the ‘laundry girls’ of Littlehampton. In July she hosted a garden meeting at Ford Place to promote the NUWSS ‘Coast Campaign’ but in August was organising local war relief work. She had to leave Ford Place soon after this as the Ford Estate was put up for sale. Two of her last public engagements in the area were, appropriately, to talk in October 1914 to both the Horsham Temperance Association and Horsham Suffrage Society on ‘The War and Infant Welfare’. Until early 1916 Alys talked across the country on this subject. In June 1915 she was elected to the NUWSS Executive Committee and in early 1916 undertook a two-month fund-raising lecture tour of the United States and Canada to publicise NUWSS refugee aid and suffragist patriotic effort in general. She was back in time for the Patriotic Housekeeping Exhibition staged by the Brighton and Hove Women’s Franchise Society, where, in the Infant Welfare Room, she spoke on the need for more Health Centres and Health Visitors. As secretary of the Millicent Garrett Fawcett Hospitals for Refugees in Russia, Alys continued to drum up support for these. She organised jumble sales in Southampton, her new summer home, and in Chelsea where she lived at 11 St Leonard’s Terrace. As President now of the Portsmouth Women’s Suffrage Society, she returned in January 1917 to speak to the Worthing Women’s Franchise Society, whose former secretary, Mrs Elborough, was now administrator of the NUWSS hospitals in Russia. Alys became treasurer of the NUWSS in 1918, and with her niece Ray Strachey, and Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Margaret Jones, sent a letter to the June 1918 Imperial War Conference, urging the adoption throughout the British Empire of the principle of women’s suffrage. Sources: Bognor Regis Observer; Worthing Gazette; Brighton Gazette; Mid Sussex Times; Portsmouth Evening News; Hants and Sussex News; Kent and Sussex Courier; West Sussex County Times; West Sussex Gazette; Sussex Advertiser; Common Cause; International Women’s Suffrage News. Contributed by Frances Stenlake an independent researcher and writer.