Organiser

31

Single

68 Manningham Lane, Bradford

WSPU

Evades

Mary Elizabeth Phillips (1880-1969) was daughter to a doctor who worked in Glasgow and encouraged her to join the suffrage campaign. In 1904-1905, she worked as a paid organizer for the Glasgow and West of Scotland Association for Women’s Suffrage, resigning in 1907 as organizing secretary to join the WSPU because of the failure of ‘constitutional agitation’. As a socialist, she also wrote regularly for the Scots Weekly Journal for ‘socialism, trade unionism, and democratic thought’. In March 1908, Mary took part in the ‘pantechnicon’ raid on parliament and was later arrested taking part in a deputation in June. She was sentenced to three months in prison, and on her release was greeted with much fanfare by WSPU members, accompanied by pipers. She subsequently became a paid organizer for the WSPU travelling wherever she was needed the length and breadth of the country, from Cornwall to Scotland. Mary was arrested again in Exeter in 1909 after interrupting a meeting held by Lord Carrington and was imprisoned for seven days by the local magistrate as a third class or criminal category prisoner. She was released after three days following a hunger strike in protest at the failure to recognise her as a political prisoner. WSPU leader Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst wrote to her shortly afterwards: ‘As for you my dear girl, take great care of yourself and do everything in your power to recover your health and strength’. Mary was awarded the WSPU hunger strike medal. For next three years she was based in and worked as organizer for campaigns in the north of England. There she led a suffragette evasion of the government’s 1911 census survey in Bradford at the WSPU shop at 68 Manningham Lane (position on map approximate) where she was based. She harboured about ten evading suffragettes and two reporters who were able to speak to Mary that night, were told the women were ‘having a fine time’. The census schedule said ‘No Vote, No Census’. Mary herself wrote a lengthy justification for the protest: ‘Posterity will know how to judge this government if it persists in bringing about the falsification of national statistics instead of acting on its own principle & making itself truly representative of the people’. The census enumerator guessed the number of women evading with Mary, writing ‘I am unable to obtain more definite information’ adding ‘this is a lock up shop with no sleeping accommodation’. In July 1912, Mary was arrested outside the town hall in Chester attempting to ‘flour’ the Prime Minister though she was unsuccessful. Her fine was paid without her consent, and so she was released. That year she spent time in Falmouth with her father following the death of her mother, where she received a sympathy letter from Christabel Pankhurst which also spoke of suffrage matters. Despite Mary’s service for the WSPU including her imprisonments, the letter was curt in tone and suggested WSPU comrades had called into question Mary’s capabilities as an organizer. This may reveal increasing tensions among WSPU members over the direction of the campaign as Mary promptly joined and began working instead for Sylvia Pankhurst’s break away organisation the East End London Federation of Suffragettes which was rooted in working class communities and socialist in orientation. In 1916, she joined the United Suffragists working as a London organizer and subsequently belonged to several woman and children centred organisations including the Women’s International League and Save the Children Fund. Sources: Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide, 1866-1928 (Routledge, London); Jill Liddington, Vanishing for the Vote: Suffrage, Citizenship, and the Battle for the Census (Manchester Uni Press, Manchester); Votes for Women; The Lakes Herald.