Senior teacher

56

Widowed

33 Melbourne Street, York

WSPU

Evades

Annie Coultate posted a notice in Votes for Women on 18th February 1910, announcing that: ‘A group of women has undertaken to organise a women’s meeting on March 2nd. All interested are invited to write to Mrs Coultate as above. Hon. Sec. Mrs Coultate, 68 Nunthorpe Road.’ A year later when the 1911 census enumerator called at 33 Melbourne Street in Fishergate, York, he discovered that then resident Annie Coultate had signed the census form, but she had not made an entry for herself and described her son Henry as the head of the household. The enumerator scratched out ‘Head’ and wrote ‘Son’ and added a terse note diagonally across the form saying: ‘The signature is that of a well-known suffragette. She was away from her home during the night of the census but was most probably enumerated amongst a number of suffragettes who passed the night in a room in Coney Street, York, with the object of evading the census’. Annie was secretary of York WSPU and had spent census night in a room adjacent to their offices in Coney Street, where an enumerator counted the 18 women and 3 men as they left the building. After the event, Votes for Women reported that ‘a large upper room was furnished with comfortable chairs and the evaders settled themselves in for the night…The most thrilling moments were when policemen ascended the stairs and the room ‘lay low’… Supper was served and amid much merriment and a most enjoyable night was spent.’ As secretary, she was at the centre of the campaign and Votes for Women records her regularly selling large numbers of the newspaper from door to door and on the street in York. She also organised events and social gatherings and occasionally spoke at public meetings in York and other towns. There were few examples of militant action in York, but Annie actively supported those who took part in the campaign. When Lilian Lenton was released under the Cat and Mouse Act, she escaped from house arrest in York by acting as a nanny and pushing Annie’s daughter Florence’s baby, Stephen, in a pram. Annie was born Annie de Lacy in 1856, the daughter of Henry, a wholesale druggist traveller. She became a pupil-teacher at the age of 15 and was 55 years old when she set up the York WSPU. By then she was a highly respected senior teacher at Fishergate Elementary School, where her work for women’s suffrage was admired by the headmaster, George Barker. She was one of very few women included in a municipal poster of photographs of key figures working for York Corporation in 1910, the only known photograph of her. Annie married Frank Coultate in 1881. He was also a schoolteacher, but he died aged 41 and Annie brought up Henry and Florence on her own. Florence followed Annie into teaching and married William Mountain Holmes, headteacher of Poppleton Road School in York, and both were involved in the suffrage movement. Henry was a grocer’s assistant and also worked for the cause. Annie died in 1931 at her daughter’s house in Acomb, York, aged 75. Contributed by Christopher Rainger for the Fishergate, Fulford & Heslington Local History Society. For more information about Annie Coultate and other women involved in the suffrage campaign in York, visit: www.ffhyork.weebly.com