Artist in silver & enamel

37

Married

21 St Mary Abbotts Terrace, Kensington

WSPU

Complies

Ernestine Mills (1871-1959) was born in Hastings, Sussex, to Major Thomas Evans Bell and his wife Emily. They had two daughters, but Ernestine’s elder sister died aged nine in 1878. Both Ernestine’s parents were supportive of female suffrage. Her father had belonged in 1868 (just after its founding) to the London National Society for Women’s Suffrage; in 1866 her mother had signed the first nationally organised suffrage petition; and both had been members of the Central Committee of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage 1871-2. In the 1890s, Ernestine attended the Slade school of art also taking classes at Finsbury Central Technical School and the South Kensington School of Art where she focussed on enamelling. In 1898, she married medical Dr Herbert Mills and the couple had a daughter Hermia in 1902. Often considered the death knell for women’s artistic careers, marriage and motherhood did not dint Ernestine’s who exhibited widely from 1900 with the Royal Academy; the Royal Miniature Society; and the Society of Women Artists among others. She served her apprenticeship with pre-Raphaelite artist Frederic Shields (he had been a friend to her mother) and later edited a work on his life and letters (1912). By 1909 she was a member of the Fabian Women’s Group and the Women’s Guild of Art. She joined the WSPU in 1907 but does not appear to have participated in its law-breaking activities. She and Herbert did not boycott the 1911 census, one of the more accessible forms of suffragette activism, but instead complied. They were recorded away on holiday in Dorset on the census, their servants filling in the form for their usual address (where they are located on the map) at 21 St Mary Abbotts Terrace, Kensington, in their absence. Ernestine published two suffrage postcards independently: ‘The Anti-Suffragist’ and ‘The New Mrs Partington’. She also produced and sold enamelled jewellery to raise funds for the WSPU. Ernestine made enamelled silver pendants awarded to Louise Eates (secretary of the Kensington WSPU) and Leila Cadiz (pseudonym ‘Margaret Murphy’ an Irish hunger-striking suffragette) and her work continued for the cause after the cause was won. In 1930, she enamelled a portrait of constitutional campaign leader Lady France Balfour and in 1950, made an enamel plaque to commemorate the Brackenbury sisters (see) and their mother’s work during the campaign (commissioned by the Suffragette Fellowship). The plaque still adorns the Brackenburys former Kensington home. Sources: Elizabeth Crawford, Art and Suffrage: A Biographical Dictionary of Suffrage Artists (Francis Boutle 2018); Irene Cockroft, New Dawn Women: Women in the Arts and Crafts and Suffrage Movements at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Watts 2005) & Ernestine Mills: Angel of Hope https://artjewelryforum.org/articles/ernestine-mills-angel-of-hope/. Contributed by Tara Morton (Warwick University) as part of the Mapping British Women Artists 1750-1950 project & Research Group, which is affiliated with The British Art Network (led and supported by Tate and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, with public funding provided by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.